When neighborhood schools won’t cut it, Black families opt out

One of my most anxious moments as a parent came while waiting for my middle daughter to complete an assessment to determine if she qualified for a kindergarten seat in one of Chicago’s most celebrated elementary schools.

It wasn’t a written exam. Instead, an evaluator tested her on a range of basic reading and math skills until they reached the limits of her knowledge. I sat in a large waiting room with two to three dozen parents who were also waiting for their children. Essentially, the longer the child remained with an evaluator, the better he or she performed. The assessments typically lasted 15 to 45 minutes, parents were told.

Our neighborhood elementary school had struggled for years, and private schools were too expensive. So it felt like my 5-year-old daughter’s academic future was riding on how long it was before she emerged from the assessment.

Those thoughts ran through my mind as I waited, and fidgeted, and sweated, and bit my fingernails.

I breathed a sigh of relief when a few children emerged after 15 minutes. I grew even calmer when more children emerged after 20 minutes. When the evaluator returned with my daughter after a little more than 30 minutes, I was feeling pretty good. Surely, she’d performed well enough to get in a good school somewhere.

Weeks later, when the results came back, she had been accepted at just one school, a well-regarded classical elementary school. But she was on the waiting list, and a seat wasn’t likely to materialize by the time classes started. Ultimately, she was enrolled in a charter elementary school a couple of miles away — the best option available.

Years later, she tested well enough to earn a seat at a selective enrollment high school. We were lucky. 

Far too many other Black families are not so fortunate. Just ask the Black community activists who last week called on Chicago Public Schools to take more steps to close the Black achievement gap.

Leaving the city, for better schools elsewhere

CPS may have a variety of programs and curricula, but the system is shamefully lacking in what many parents consider viable academic options, especially for low-income children and many students of color. Too often, under-resourced neighborhood schools post low test scores and are considered schools of last resort.

Children’s educational fortunes often rest on how much their parents can pay or how well a child performs on a test.

Long before school choice became a buzzword, tens of thousands of Chicago parents — most of them white — employed their own system of choice, if they could afford to, by opting out of public schools and sending their children to parochial or private schools.

The percentage of white Chicago children enrolled in private schools is far higher — more than 40% — than for their Black and Latino peers, at about 11% and 9% respectively, according to American Community Survey data from 2017 to 2021.

The flight of white residents to the suburbs also depleted the public schools: The number of white students fell from roughly 270,000 in 1960 to about 95,000 in 1980, according to census data prepared by the University of Minnesota. By the 1999-2000 school year, just 43,000 white students were enrolled in CPS, district data show. Now, it’s about 36,000.

For those families who fled to the suburbs, public schools were, and are, the system of choice. Regardless of race, ethnicity or income, roughly 80% to 90% of suburban school children are enrolled in public schools, ACS data shows.

Most parents aren’t willing to gamble with their children. They will make the best choices they can among the available options. And if they can’t find or afford suitable options, they’ll simply opt out.

And Black parents are now divesting from CPS and the city altogether.

Black enrollment in CPS this year, about 113,000, is slightly less than half what it was in the 1999-2000 school year, roughly 227,000, district data show. And over the past two decades, children have been overrepresented in the city’s massive Black population decline: The number of Black children, age 17 and younger, fell by 49% from 2000 to 2020 — a much steeper decline than the 14% decline in Black adults.

It’s great that Chicago’s selective enrollment high schools are among the nation’s highest-rated. It’s laudable that public schools now offer more of the highly regarded International Baccalaureate programs.

Yes, there are choices. But what parents, Black parents in particular, really need is more overall quality. That means investing in neighborhood schools, whose students didn’t win an admissions lottery, didn’t score high on a test, and don’t have the same advantages as their peers from wealthier families.

Alden Loury is the data projects editor for WBEZ. He writes a monthly column for the Sun-Times.

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