When 10-year-old Cadence Silas says she’s bored in class and that her teacher spends too much time trying to control the kids, her father’s jaw tightens.
Charles Silas says he remembers feeling the same way when he was in school and that he wants something better for his children.
“They get straight A's, but they are not being challenged,” Silas says of his daughter and his 12-year-old son Daniel.
Cadence and Daniel go to Johnnie Colemon Elementary in West Pullman on the Far South Side. Silas' youngest son is disabled and goes to a school with a special program.
Colemon is a solid neighborhood school, but student performance levels range widely. Silas says teachers try to keep his bubbly girl and quieter son engaged, but it often feels like they are juggling too much.
“It is close to 30 kids in the class, and they don’t get enough attention,” he says. “All the attention goes to the kids who need more assistance.”
Silas and his wife want to get Cadence and Daniel into a gifted or classical elementary school. These schools offer accelerated classes and enrichment. They also set up students to get in to Chicago’s elite test-in high schools, which are among the top performers in the city and among the best in the state. So far, they’ve yet to land a coveted spot.
Last year, the Chicago Board of Education announced plans to reexamine the admissions process that determines who gets in to the Chicago Public Schools’ test-in schools and to prioritize neighborhood schools over so-called schools of choice, like selective enrollment test-in schools and charter schools.
That's prompted a great deal of attention about how this might affect prestigious high schools such as Walter Payton College Preparatory High School and Northside College Preparatory High School.
But not as much attention has focused on the schools that often feed those high schools — CPS' gifted elementary schools and programs. CPS has 15 regional gifted centers and seven "classical" schools, which together enroll 4% of the public school system's total enrollment of about 323,000 students.
Students admitted to an elementary school with a gifted program are three times more likely to get in to one of the the city's 11 test-in high schools than students who go to non-selective neighborhood elementary schools, a WBEZ analysis of CPS data has found. These students not only get an advanced education, but they are also set up for a more advanced high school experience.
And it starts with an admissions process that gives a high-stakes test to 4-year-olds.
CPS officials won't release data that would show how many students can access these gifted programs nor show their racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. But, using demographic and admission data, the WBEZ analysis found that only 3% of CPS’ low-income elementary school students were enrolled last year in these gifted programs. Three percent of Latino students and 5% of Black elementary school students were in these classes. That compares with 12% of white students and nearly 14% of Asian American elementary school students in these gifted programs.
Writing in 2018 about these disparities, Lillian Lowery, the late vice president of the Education Trust, said in the education news website The 74, that, if these aren’t eliminated, “We will continue to squander the powerful potential of too many truly gifted students of color and students from low-income families — not because they couldn’t handle the challenge, but because we never gave them the opportunity to even try."
Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, a think tank that is an advocate of school choice, sees such disparities in gifted programs across the United States.
“We need to do a much better job of building a wider, more diverse pipeline of advanced learners starting as early as possible,” Petrilli says. “If all you do is wait until it's time for the admissions process in eighth grade to decide who gets in to these high schools, it's too late.”
Silas lives in West Pullman in an area that's mostly low-income but has pockets of middle-income families. He works two jobs. His wife also works. But Silas says he makes every assembly at school and all sports games.
When Silas’ son was ready for kindergarten, he and his wife knew he was bright. They didn’t want him at the school down their block because it had low test scores.
As someone who attended CPS schools, he knew about gifted programs. But he didn’t know children could get tested at 4 — nearly a year before starting school.
“That information should be somewhere big on CPS’ website,” Silas says. “If I would have known, I would have definitely had them tested.”
One reason for the disparities in access to CPS’ gifted programs stands out: Performance on just one test determines whether a child will get a spot — and few students ever take the exam.
That’s because the onus is on parents to take their child to a single testing site in the fall prior to the school year in which they are seeking admission. The greatest number of seats are available for kindergarten.
This is the worst way to assess students for gifted education, according to Scott Peters, director of research for NWEA, which creates student assessments.
“A single data point in time, especially if it requires any kind of family initiative, where I have to go out of my way to sign my kid up or take him or her to a testing center on a testing date, was a really common and really bad practice,” Peters says, noting that most school districts, including New York City's, no longer do that.
Testing nearly a year before a child enters kindergarten is especially unfair because it requires parents to know and understand the school system before being part of it, Peters says.
“It's hard to design a practice that was going to be more inequitable in its outcomes,” he says, calling the outcome “completely predictable.”
Just 9% of incoming kindergartners get tested. And 4-year-olds in Chicago's poorest, majority-Black and Latino ZIP codes rarely get tested.
Only 1% of incoming kindergartners were tested in the ZIP code that includes most of West Englewood on the South Side. The same percentage were tested in the West Side ZIP code that includes West Garfield Park and parts of East Garfield Park, Humboldt Park and North Lawndale.
But one-quarter of incoming kindergartners in the more affluent and more heavily white North Side ZIP code that includes Lincoln Park were tested. And nearly half were tested in a ZIP code that includes part of the affluent South Loop.
Even some parents who have gotten their children tested question it. Melissa Trini Alvarado de Leon says it took a lot of coaxing to get her 4-year-old son to go with a stranger to take the oral exam.
“It is not a very long test, so they have to shine right away, or else they will not get in,” Alvarado de Leon says. “It is a lot to ask of a 4-year-old.”
Alvarado de Leon grew up in Chicago and knew about the gifted programs. But she says a lot of the immigrants who live in her Logan Square neighborhood don’t know.
The Illinois Association for Gifted Children and experts urge school districts to use multiple measures to identify students for gifted education. They also say school districts should consider universal testing. When one unidentified district described by researchers as one of the country’s largest and most diverse tested all second graders — rather than only those recommended by parents or teachers — the number of students identified as gifted increased and the newly identified students were disproportionately low-income and Black or Latino, according to a 2015 study.
Some CPS parents who defend selective schools worry that their bright children will get lost in neighborhood schools that often are juggling students with many needs.
One girl, flanked by her father, told a Board of Ed meeting she attended her neighborhood school for a time but was so unhappy there that her parents allowed her to transfer back to a gifted school even though it meant driving her three hours a day.
Students and parents also point out that these schools aren't only among the most highly ranked schools in the city but also are among the relatively few islands of racial integration in an otherwise highly segregated school system.
Silas says he's skeptical that even strong neighborhood schools will be able to support above-average students. He says his family generally likes Colemon School, that it has a lot going for it — low student mobility, low teacher absences and a principal who's been there for more than six years.
Still, Silas had Daniel tested for a gifted program in third grade, but he didn’t get a spot. Now, he's hoping to send him to an accelerated seventh grade and eighth grade program.
Silas says he gave CPS a grade of C for a recent poll overseen by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan organization focused on researching challenges facing democracy that collaborated with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ for the survey.
He says he doesn’t think his children are being failed completely. But he also doesn’t think they're being given access to the best education possible.
Charese Munoz says she eels lucky her son goes to Whitney Young Magnet High School, one of Chicago’s top test-in high schools. But it frustrates her that so few of the students she teaches at her neighborhood elementary school in Austin get in to high schools like Whitney Young.
Marc C. Monaghan / WBEZ
