By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
There’s a good reason why Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis-Gates sends her son to a private school instead of the public one in her community. At Harlan Community Academy, the school Davis-Gates’s son would have attended, only 5 of every 100 students were proficient in reading in 2022. The Roseland community is a dangerous place, too – 28 people were killed there last year.
Roseland is one of the 20 worst communities in Chicago where violence and a dismal education intersect, creating a toxic environment for families. Many of those communities experience dozens of murders yearly and have schools where the percentage of children that can read or do math at grade level is in single digits.
That leaves most parents with only three options: Suffer in the current system, hope for school choice before it’s too late or flee the city entirely.
Option one is intolerable, but sadly unavoidable for a majority of parents. Option two is unlikely given Gov. J.B. Pritzker and his supermajority allies are likely to kill the state’s only school choice program in the next month. So expect more parents to do what they’ve been doing for years: flee. CPS’ student population has declined 25 percent in the last two decades – a drop driven overwhelmingly by disappearing black families.
Wirepoints’ list of worst-off communities is, unsurprisingly, highly concentrated on the South and West sides. We first ranked the communities by their total number of homicides and then calculated average reading and math proficiencies across each community’s schools. The data comes from the Chicago Police Department and the Illinois Report Card.
Mayor Brandon Johnson’s home neighborhood of Austin was the city’s #1 homicide hub last year, with a total of 48 murders. As for student outcomes, only 7 in 100 students last year could read at grade level on average in Austin-area schools. In math, it was just 3 in 100.
The community of South Shore, with 42 murders, was the 2nd-worst homicide hub. The educational results were just as bad as in Austin.
And West Garfield, rank #7, is notable for suffering 28 murders among only 17,000 residents. That’s a sky-high homicide rate of 161 per 100,000 residents, second highest among the city’s 77 communities. That’s far higher than the 74.3 per 100,000 homicide rate in New Orleans, the nation’s homicide capital. (Homicide rates are often shown per 100,000 in population to allow for apples-to-apples city comparisons across the country.)
What should be clear is that there’s very little hope for the families living in these communities. Tens of thousands of children – if not a hundred thousand – are being left behind each year.
Choice for every student
A partial answer to the problem above was given recently by Stacy Davis-Gates herself when she took her son out of CPS and put him into a private school. Here’s how she explained her move after having previously called private schools “segregation academies” and “racist.”
“If you are a Black family living in a Black community, high-quality neighborhood schools have been the dream, not the reality. Unlike some white counterparts on the North Side or in the suburbs, we aren’t blessed with quality options blocks away from our home, neatly placed near a grocery store, doctor’s office or a safe public park. Our schools are usually stranded in food and healthcare deserts…
“…For my husband and me, it forced us to send our son, after years of attending a public school, to a private high school so he could live out his dream of being a soccer player while also having a curriculum that can meet his social and emotional needs…”
What Davis-Gates did was exercise educational choice. Fortunately for her, she has the financial means to do it.
It’s the same choice that every parent in those communities should have, but most don’t have the resources Davis-Gates does. That’s why they should have school choice, where the public money dedicated to their kids’ education can follow them to private schools that best fit their needs.
It’s that kind of choice that Iowa is now offering every single child in that state: a $7,600 Education Savings Account. And Indiana, too, where nearly all kids in the state now have access to school vouchers worth as much as $6,000.
Unfortunately, Davis-Gates and the rest of the city and state leadership are doing everything they can to stop parents from having that choice here in Illinois. If they get their way in the next month or so, they will kill the state’s only school choice program, a tiny program that grants just 9,700 scholarships to students across the entire state.
That’s cruel, considering that about 86,000 kids in the 20 violence-torn communities can’t read at grade level.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- While Illinois set to kill school choice, North Carolina passes school choice for all
- Chicago Public Schools fails its Hispanic students: Only 17 of every 100 read at grade level. – Wirepoints Special Report
- Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system – Wirepoints Special Report
- While Illinois set to kill school choice, North Carolina passes school choice for all
- Covering up Chicago’s literacy problem
- CTU Pres. Stacy Davis-Gates, hater of private schools and school choice, sends child to private school
Appendix
Gov. J.B. Pritzker recently promised electric car maker Rivian $827 million in taxpayer subsidies when he shouldn’t have given the company a penny. The question is, was it negligence or something more?
Details emerging about Chicago Teachers Union’s upcoming contract show just how divorced its demands, both extreme and expensive, are from the reality at Chicago schools. It’s not just about massive salary increases, but also about money for migrant students, climate initiatives, abortions and gender-affirming care. About blocking parental notification. Count on CTU’s demands to veer further from reality until the public finally says no.
What’s Gates’ official statement on choice? Looks like Iowa is doing well in more ways than Il.
Another sobering article on true realities about the schools in the hood. I can see blacks and Hispanics leaving Illinois behind just on the basis of not having their kids go to a school in a shooting gallery. Unsafe, poor records and data showing dismal results. Harlan and Fenger ain’t happening if I have the means to get out. I’m going to hypothesize that when all the numbers are counted, minorities may have left in larger numbers than whites. This leaves the Catholic schools and the suburbs as options which may not be affordable due to higher home prices in… Read more »
Where’d you go?
Holy Cow! If you live in Garfield Park for 80 years, you have a 1/8th chance of being shot to death. Scary.
Great article Ted & John!!
There is choice at CPS. The majority of CPS no longer attend thier neighborhood assigned school. It’s the neighborhood CPS schools in low income Black communities that are a disaster but most parents with a clue have figured it out…that’s why they’re empty
Take notice , as we are seeing a hidden result of the POOR QUALITY CPS. THE KIDS ARE SKIPPING OUT, left to roam the streets, create crimeas they are bored! The CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOL SYSTEM DID NOT HOKD THEIR ATTENTION EITHER
I’m pretty sure Stacy moved into her neighborhood within the past 5 years or so, AFTER the Rahm school closings. She knew the neighborhood schools before she moved yet she made the choice to purchase a home there. I’d wager she planned to send her kid to private school long ago.
What’s missed in all of this is that many of these hyper-violent communities are actually just loosely defined large clans or tribes of inter-related families, much like it is in the middle east. Everybody knows everybody and no one is more than a few degrees separation from each other. Someone’s daughter might a baby daddy with the guy down the block who is the half-brother of the father of their cousin’s baby daddy, and so on, and so on. The family trees are a mess. Often, entire generations of families live in these communities, with a grandmother or great grandmother… Read more »
Irrelevant, it’s lack of education, cultural values and opportunity to blame.
For more than 75 years people of color lived in substandard housing and poorly funded public schools. A permanent underclass was created. Many left the inner city to live in better communities. Hit pieces like this avoid talking about the underlying condition that has existed for decades in the Windy City. Unskilled labor market made Chicago a dream destination for those seeking the American dream . Those jobs no longer exist. Now there are hiigh concentrationsof poor people living in substandard communities
Violence is what happens to people without hope
People who resort to violence to solve their problems will always live in substandard communities. If they want to improve their lot in life, they will stop choosing violence. Nobody is forcing them to shoot each other on a regular basis.
“Unskilled labor market made Chicago a dream destination…[the] jobs no longer exist.” Can we thank Bill Clinton for signing NAFTA for those jobs leaving or the loyal Democrats that Chicago is full of for voting for him? Regardless the jobs left but the people that voted for their jobs to leave are still there. They created their own problems and continue to do so to this day as job leaving parade marches on thanks to the usual Democrat party policies.
“What should be clear is that there’s very little hope for families living in these communities.”
Every time family is referred to in articles such as this it should be carefully defined. The traditional family; mother, father and THEIR children is sadly a rarity in poorer areas and the schools available.
Her actions regarding her children are understandable but her hypocrisy is monumental.
It more than hypocrisy – it’s total and complete malevolence. I got mine, and to bad for you suckers.
Another reason she sends her kid to a better school in a different district is because she’s an overpaid CTU honcho and therefore untouchable.
Of course there is a correlation. The real question is, “Does anyone in authority even care?” (I think regular WP readers all know the answer.)
When you tell me how many CPS students are not reading at grade level, I wonder if that this score is as good as it gets.
BLM BJ isn’t going to do anything because the teachers gave him his campaign money, and the criminals are his “buthas” that voted for him.
You won’t see anything out of Fat Fredo and the rest of the Democrats in Springfield. They’re doing what Democrats have been doing since before the Civil War, enslaving blacks with their policies all the while lying to them that they’re here to help.
Once again, Chicagoans voted for this mess. Let them wallow in it.
AZ long as MAGA people are willing to follow a man who only uses people for his advantage they cannot see the forest for the trees I have always wanted to ask the minions, could you please state the period or years MAGA folks are alluding to? Most were not born, so what’ period can they reference? Please respond– the late 1880s? post WWII? The roaring 20s? Certainly not after the great depression?
Irrelevant but so you know many poor blacks support Maga. Have you not seen black white photos of Americans and how well folks, even poor blacks dressed, spoke, and acted compared to today? Back before democratic neo liberalism took root removing conservative values.
Highest costs, so someone must be very happy. Follow the money, where is it??
Becoming like the movie ‘Escape from NY’ – local media and mayor are ho hum:
https://www.breitbart.com/crime/2023/10/16/video-chicago-teens-attack-tesla-during-street-takeover-while-police-watch/
Jack, that’s another example of how the news is rigged. We missed that piece, no doubt because Google blacks out Breitbart, even though that story is really just a link to video that doesn’t lie. We are posting it. Thanks.