By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
Chicago’s education establishment is working hard to make Chicagoans believe there wasn’t a “crisis” at CPS before covid. Don’t buy it.
Take a look at the first paragraph of a recent City Club of Chicago invitation to a Chicago Public Schools event. We don’t know whether CPS or the City Club wrote it, but jointly they’re promoting that narrative:
“The once-a-century public health crisis of the pandemic has also created a once-a-century crisis for public education. In Chicago, math proficiency for 8th graders dropped by 40%, with the largest declines in test scores for Black and Latino students and those from low-income households. These short-term declines in test scores will – if unremediated – harm the long-term life outcomes of a whole generation of children…” (emphasis added)
It’s nonsense. Covid didn’t created a “once-a-century crisis for public education,” CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union were harming “the long-term life outcomes of a whole generation of children” long before covid hit.
The stark fact is, in 2019 just 13% of CPS 8th-grade black students could do math at grade level. Those outcomes were already tragic enough.
Yes, those proficiency results did collapse in 2022 down to 5.3%. But there’s not a big difference between 5.3% and 13%…either way the system was failing more than 87% of its black students. And yet officials act as if getting results back to 2019 levels constitutes some kind of real win.
The results for Hispanic students are similar – if only slightly better. Just 23% of Hispanic 8th-graders could do math at grade level in 2019.
Another take on the event description is that the pandemic itself caused the learning loss in Chicago – that education leaders were helpless, passive observers.
That ignores everything state and local officials did during the pandemic to damage student’s ability to learn. CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union kept schools closed longer than many other big districts in the nation – NYC and LA reopened schools in Sept. 2021, CPS took until Jan. 2022 – and long after the prevailing wisdom said it was safe to reopen. They kept the disruptive mitigation measures – like masking children – in place for even longer.
And as publications like the Atlantic have come to realize, school districts’ draconian overreactions caused students’ learning loss, not covid.
CPS and state officials should be held accountable for their failed decisions. But that’s never happened and likely never will.
More falsehoods
The kind of messaging for the City Club event falls right in line with the other falsehoods that consistently come out of CPS and state educational leadership.
Like celebrating record graduation rates for black and Hispanic students when the system leaves the overwhelming number of those students neither reading nor math proficient.
Like telling Chicagoans that more money will improve things at CPS, hiding the fact that the district already spends more than $29,000 per student.
Like saying the district needs billions more when it continues to run nearly empty schools where few kids can read at grade level. One third of CPS traditional schools run at less than 50% capacity.
And like naming many schools “commendable” – the state board of education’s second best rating for schools – even though in many of those schools the overwhelming share of kids aren’t proficient in reading or math. Some schools don’t have even one single kid that can read at grade level.
No more excuses
What’s perhaps the worst language in the invite comes at the very end: “The good news is that if we act with urgency, there is something we can do about it. Join…to discuss what can be done to ensure Chicago students thrive.”
Officials apparently felt no “urgency” when just 13% of black students could read at grade level in 2019. And if there is “something we can do about” the city’s dismal student outcomes, why haven’t officials done it already?
The reality is Illinois and Chicago’s education system has been failing students and covering it up for years by using social promotion to pass students along, promoting hyper-inflated teacher evaluations and using misleading “accountability” designations. Wirepoints covered that in our report: Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system.
The pandemic has become officials’ latest excuse for students’ dismal outcomes.
Chicagoans – and Illinois parents as a whole – shouldn’t fall for it.
Appendix
Read more from Wirepoints:
- Education fail: Not a single child tested proficient in math in 67 Illinois schools. For reading, it’s 32 schools.
- Catholic Schools in Cicero and Berwyn are closing. Students’ only local alternatives are failing public schools.
- Chicago Public Schools’ twisted goal: End selective enrollment schools while keeping nearly empty, failing schools open
- Chicago Public Schools: Hundreds of new sexual abuse allegations, not stolen laptops, should get all the attention
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
Hell, lets just send all the money. All the money we have and earn and save. Send it all to them for education…it still isn’t enough. There is no…enough…it is a bottomless pit of indifference, inefficiency and greed. There are some teachers actually trying…but their work has no impact. This cannot change until there are performance requirements and real results measured by outside reviewers. Non-teachers. Non-educators. The results or lack there of, need a cold look at the return on the enormous spend public education seems to require. Then consequences for the results…what is the motivation of a teacher who… Read more »
It’s been circling the drain for a loong time. If anything positive came out of the lockdowns, it was the exposure of the shell game being passed off as education in public schools. Additionally, the lockdowns so lovingly managed to exacerbate and accelerate the death spiral. Current 2nd, 3rd and 4th graders did „remote learning” in SY 20-21 for Pre-K, Kindergarten and 1st grade respectively, followed by a masked SY 21-22 (through March). Their lack of basic academic skills is just the tip of the iceberg. They were never properly socialized, have poor fine and gross motor skills, and zero… Read more »
Don’t forget that kids were forced to wear masks all day every day for a year after they were finally back in school. The cruelty of what was done to children is hearbreaking.
Yep. I noted that … „followed by a masked SY21-22”. I can still remember that it was March 8, 2022 when we were finally permitted by our overseers to go maskless, though I still had the pleasure of weekly covid testing for the sin of being unvaxxed.
At what point is this criminal negligence? 1) They are misrepresenting the truth – truth which comes at a huge impact in the use OF TAXPAYER money… 2) They are FAILING at their job… With no consequence…
Nutty that the parents of the run-of-the-mill CPS school stands for this…
I probably couldn’t think straight either after 70 shots over an 18 year period.
I don’t understand your comment, Frank.
I don’t either. I was thinking “gun shots,” but if they are hearing gun shots at school, they are undoubtedly hearing more gun shots at home.
I pretty sure I know what you are referring to. I believe it is just over 70 including the new ones by age 18 and more in the pipeline.
Oh But parents were assured that E-Learning was just as good as in person learning. They “patted themselves on the back about it”. While a number of them posted photo’s of themselves on vacation destinations while they were supposed to be teaching the students. They could not teach in person because of Covid, but they could travel and take pictures of themselves at pools and beaches. A bunch of frauds.
Wasn’t there a group that went to Venezuela for R&R? Now all of a sudden hundreds of thousands are coming from there to the U.S. and then Chicago. Coincidence?
It was a CTU solidarity mission that went.
Also facilitated by Mayorkas with the extension of temporary protected status.
Center for Immigration Studies is a good source if you’re looking for info about Venezuela.
Once again folks; don’t confuse the Democratic Party’s slush fund source with education.
Obviously the main reason for blaming abysmal CPS performance on COVID is so CTU can extract even more $gigantic$ hard earned taxpayer equity in upcoming contract (with themselves) and dopey taxpayers will keep quite. And once again the only outlet Chicagoans have for the abysmal CPS performance at astronomical costs can only be found at WP or IPI???….beyond sickening, a complete moral failing by press to do their job
Most people in Chicago especially in the inner city do not have a clue what the costs per pupil are or if some know they don’t care. When it says public K-12 education “Shall be free” as in the constitution does it really matter to them what it costs? Therein lies the problem. Anything that has a rebate or free item attached to it like an appliance or whatever you must first buy the product then fill out the paperwork to get some or all of the money back. What if people were required to pay the $29K per child… Read more »
Clearly that’s a major reason why kids in private schools do much better academically on average; their parents are directly paying for it in an obvious check-writing way. Therefore, in general they care enough to monitor their kids’ progress with some ongoing frequency, I’ll bet. That suggests all the difference in the world to make those children and the schools themselves accountable for their academic progress, don’t you think?
Do Chicago parents even care? Wouldn’t those that do care have already left?
They say they do but they don’t. They are convinced, they are victims of the system and can’t do anything about it until the system is completely torn down and rebuilt