- Chris Sweda/Sun-Times
- More whites and fewer blacks are getting into Chicago’s elite public high schools, including Payton College Prep.
When the City Council holds hearings on Chicago’s selective enrollment high schools this summer, I hope aldermen consider the larger questions about racial and economic segregation as well as the particular ones that prompted their interest in the subject.
Equal access to the “pipeline” is a worthy concern. But the selective enrollment schools are intended to do more than help high achievers. They’re supposed to be part of a larger strategy aimed at reducing the socioeconomic and racial isolation that has beset the Chicago Public Schools for decades. That strategy—a near total failure for more than 30 years—is what most desperately needs a hearing.
Even with the “special little programs,” the proportion of white students citywide kept declining; today the enrollment is only 9 percent white. And access for white students to the elite selective enrollment high schools has become even more disproportionate: the combined enrollment of Payton, Jones, Northside, and Young is now about 33 percent white.
But while tweaking the formula might get a few more high-achieving black students into the top selective high schools, it would do nothing to help the vast majority of black and Hispanic CPS students. They remain stuck in schools that face long odds because of their high-poverty enrollments. Just under 40 percent of students at Payton, Jones, Northside, and Whitney Young are from low-income families, but 85 percent of the citywide enrollment is low-income, and many CPS students are in schools whose enrollments are virtually all low-income.
