Chicago Public Schools fails its Hispanic students: Only 17 of every 100 read at grade level. – Wirepoints Special Report

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By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

Only 17 of every 100 Hispanic students can read at grade level.

Chicago’s future depends in large part upon the success of today’s Hispanic students. Hispanics make up almost half of Chicago Public Schools’ enrollment and they’re the city’s fastest growing demographic.

But the city’s school system is failing them. Only 17 of every 100 Hispanic students can read at grade level. And just 12 of every 100 are proficient in math.*

Instead of addressing this crisis, union, district and state officials are covering up CPS’ failures with policies, data and “accountability standards” that create a façade of success. We are told Chicago’s children are learning even though most graduate from the system without the skills they need.

Below are several key examples of how district and state education officials give Hispanic parents and Chicago communities a false sense of progress:

• CPS automatically advanced its 2021 3rd-grade Hispanic students to the 4th grade even though just 12% could read at grade level. “Social promotion” happens all the way through high school. 
• CPS told parents last year that 85% of their Hispanic freshmen were “on track” to graduate, even though just 16% of those freshmen were proficient in math the year before. The Illinois State Board of Education (ISBE) says the “on track” designation is a “key predictor of high school success.”
• CPS graduated a record 84% of Hispanic students in 2022 even though their reading and math scores were at recent lows. Just 19% of those students were proficient on the SAT the year before.
• 98% of CPS teachers were rated “proficient or excellent” in 2020; 100% of teachers got the same rating in 2021. And in 2022, 84% of all evaluated CPS teachers were rated either “proficient or excellent.” There is a major disconnect between those hyper-inflated teacher evaluations and actual student outcomes. 
• State school board officials rated 101 of the 148 majority-Hispanic (80%-plus) CPS schools as “commendable” – meaning deserving praise – even though only 15% of students in those schools, on average, could read at grade level. 

The data presented in this report represents a clear dereliction of duty by those who run Chicago’s Public Schools and the state officials who oversee them. Those in charge offer a number of rationalizations for their failures, including the tired excuse of a lack of funding. But money is not the problem. The system itself is to blame.

It’s hard enough for today’s graduates to succeed in a competitive work environment that becomes increasingly more technical. For those with little-to-no reading and math skills, it will become a near impossibility.

Hispanic parents and their children in Chicago’s public schools are being shortchanged. Yes, parents deserve a share of the blame – they’re responsible, too. But the school system is paid billions of dollars and given great powers to ensure all students gain the skills to launch successful lives. To become electricians, carpenters, teachers, lawyers or doctors, students must be able to master reading and math.

The ongoing education failures in Chicago deserve far more attention. The media should be investigating why results are so low. Parents should be demanding answers from school officials. District administrators should be in a crisis-intervention mode to improve outcomes. But too few seem to care.

Wirepoints focuses on Hispanic students in this report to bring special attention to the city’s fastest growing demographic group. The outcomes of all students and major demographics were covered in detail in the Wirepoints articles listed below. 

• Six facts about Illinois’ 2022 Report Card
• 50 years of failure: Norman Lear’s ‘Good Times’ first criticized Chicago’s policy of automatically passing students in 1974. It’s still happening today.
• Illinois’ 2021 student outcomes collapsed during school shutdowns, Covid mitigations
• Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system

Students are passed to the next grade, ready or not.

CPS sets up students for failure by automatically passing children onto the next grade, whether or not they can read.

The failure begins in the 3rd grade when Hispanic students are moved on to the 4th grade regardless of how they perform. Currently, only 13 of every 100 Hispanic 3rd-graders can read at grade level.

Most of those kids are destined for failure because if they can’t read in 3rd grade, they’ll struggle to understand their science homework in 5th grade or their history lessons in 6th grade. 

Students’ lack of improvement is proof of that failure. Hispanic reading proficiencies grade by grade are stuck between 13% and 21% all the way through high school. Students never fully learn to read at grade level and yet the district just passes them on. Nobody cares.

Florida has taken a different approach. Lawmakers there passed a law that outlaws passing 3rd-grade students to the 4th grade if they can’t read at grade level. The law requires students to remain in the 3rd grade until they have the skills needed to move up. 

Students graduate regardless of proficiency.

84% of Hispanics graduated from CPS in 2022 – a record number that district officials publicly celebrated. 

But what those officials failed to mention is how ill-prepared those students are for life after graduation. Only 19% of Hispanic high school students scored proficient in reading and only 17% proficient in math on the SAT the year before.

The graphic below reveals a disturbing trend. The district’s graduation rates have grown from 78.2% to 84.0% even as Hispanic high school reading levels have fallen from 24.5% to just 16.1%.

CPS schools are praised regardless of student performance.

In Hubbard High School, a heavily Hispanic school in West Lawn, only 9% of the school’s 1,800 students are reading proficient and only 8% are proficient in math. That means over 1,650 students can’t read or do math at grade level. And yet the Illinois State Board of Education says Hubbard High is “commendable” – the 2nd-highest school “accountability” designation out of four.

ISBE says those designations are supposed to “help families and communities understand how well schools are serving all students,” but they’re entirely misleading.

Most CPS schools labeled “commendable” don’t deserve a positive title like that. The accompanying graphic, which includes Chicago’s 20 largest majority-Hispanic (80%-plus) schools, has some clear examples.

Washington G. High School is another school rated “commendable” even though just 8% of students can read and only 7% can do math at grade level. That’s just 119 and 108 students out of an enrollment of 1,500.

Juarez Community High School’s results are even worse. There, just 70 of the school’s 1,700 students could read at grade level last year and only 46 students could do math. But, yet again, the school is rated “commendable.”

Of the 148 schools in CPS that are 80% or more Hispanic, 101 are labeled “commendable.” And yet in those schools, an average of only 15% of students can read proficiently and only 11% are proficient in math.

Teachers are overwhelmingly evaluated as “excellent or proficient.”

98% of CPS teachers were rated “excellent or proficient” by supervisors or district evaluators in 2020. In 2021, it was 100% of teachers. That same year, however, only 17% of Hispanic students could read at grade level.

And 84% of teachers were rated “excellent or proficient” in 2022. Yet only 20% of CPS students were proficient in reading and just 16% in math.

CPS isn’t the only district to give its teachers high ratings that don’t match with student outcomes. Over 97% of teachers statewide were rated “excellent or proficient” in 2022. Illinois’ teacher evaluation process is at best broken, at worst deceptive. Either way, it provides no useful information for parents on the quality of their children’s educators.

The list of failing, largely Hispanic schools is long.

There are 148 Chicago schools where Hispanics make up 80% or more of enrollment. Many of those schools have proficiency at less than 10%. At CPS’ School of Social Justice, for example, just 4 students out of every 100 could read at grade level. At Stowe Elem School, it was just 6 students out of every 100.

Only 14% of students, on average, are proficient in reading and only 10% are proficient in math across the district’s 148 mostly-Hispanic schools.

Chicago’s zero proficiency schools are the worst of all. Not a single student who attended Spry Community Links High School or Pantoja Alternative High School could read or do math at grade level.

That’s not to say every single school has entirely dismal results. The top performers, Hancock College Prep, Everett Elementary, Sor Juana Ines Elementary and Orozco Elementary all had 40% or more of their students able to read at grade level. That’s far from acceptable, but better compared to most CPS schools.

And it’s not all bad news. There are a number of non-Hispanic-majority CPS schools where 75% or more of Hispanic students can read at grade level.

That includes Payton College Prep, where nearly 85% of the school’s 270 Hispanic students can read at grade level. And of the more than 1,500 Hispanic students attending Lane Tech High School, 79% are reading proficient.

It’s not about spending more.

Any discussion about the failures of CPS inevitably turns into an argument about money. Teachers, union leaders, administrators and lawmakers all complain that the district simply isn’t spending enough to achieve decent results.

But the district’s finances tell a different story. Chicago is already spending more per student than most big districts nationwide. CPS spent $17,041 per student on operations in 2020. That’s the 2nd-most per student out of the top 50 largest school districts, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Chicago outspent other big cities like Los Angeles, Milwaukee, Denver and Dallas by hundreds or thousands of dollars. Only New York City was a bigger spender per student.

The full spending numbers including money spent on debt and capital expenditures show an even bigger per student spend on an annual basis at CPS. During pre-Covid 2019 the district’s total expenditures were $7.6 billion, or nearly $21,000 per student.

Fast forward to today and CPS is projected to spend a record $29,200 per student in 2023 – a 40% increase in just four years. That number is the result of taking the district’s full $9.4 billion budget and dividing it by a total enrollment of 322,000 students.

Most of that money goes to pay for the salaries and benefits of Chicago’s teachers.

Chicago pays its teachers an average of $86,500 annually. That’s more than double the annual median earnings of Hispanic Chicagoans ($32,100) and 30% more than the city’s median household income ($66,576).

CPS teacher salaries aren’t just generous compared to the incomes of ordinary Chicagoans. The district’s pay ranks between 1st and 4th-highest of all of its big-district peers. 

Wirepoints’ analyzed teacher salaries using teacher contract data from the 148 biggest school districts across the 50 states compiled by the National Council on Teacher Quality. The data comprises “information on salaries for teachers throughout their careers, including starting, mid-career, and maximum salaries for teachers with a variety of education levels.”

The data shows that a newly-hired Chicago teacher with a bachelor’s degree will receive an annual salary of over $63,000 after adjusting for cost of living. That’s the highest starting salary of any big district in the nation.

By comparison, New York City pays new teachers $55,700 after factoring in the cost to live there. And Los Angeles pays its new teachers just $50,186.

Career Chicago teachers are also very well paid relative to their peers. A teacher with a master’s degree and 10 years of service is paid $91,051 – the nation’s 2nd highest salary.

The highest possible salary Chicago teachers can receive under the current contract is $120,715 – the 4th-highest maximum among the nation’s 148 biggest districts.

Conclusion.

The consequence of CPS’ failures is clear for all to see: a steady exodus of students. CPS’ enrollment has fallen by 25%, or more than 100,000 students, since 2000, driven largely by a 50 percent collapse in blacks – some 111,000. Betrayed by decades of poor education, tens of thousands of black families over the years have moved out of the city to seek better opportunities for their children.

The district’s decline would be even more severe if not for the stability provided by Chicago’s Hispanic community. White students are increasingly less relevant – just 35,000 remain. Now more than ever, CPS’ future depends upon Hispanics.

But if CPS continues to fail, those families will look for education opportunities outside of Chicago – just like black and white families have done for decades.

*Illinois Assessment of Readiness testing measures five levels of preparedness in both English Language Arts and Math:

• Level 1 – did not yet meet expectations
• Level 2 – partially met expectations
• Level 3 – approached expectations
• Level 4 – met expectations
• Level 5 – exceeded expectations

According to the ISBE’s Score Guide for Parents, “Students performing at levels 4 and 5 met or exceeded expectations, have demonstrated readiness for the next grade level (or course) and, ultimately, are likely on track for college and careers.”

Appendix.