Chicago’s progressive agenda has been destructive for black communities – Wirepoints

By: Matt Rosenberg

Politico says the Chicago mayor’s race highlights the importance of the “progressive” agenda for Chicago and the focus will be on crime. There are grumbles that incumbent Mayor Lori Lightfoot isn’t “progressive” enough. But the urban progressive agenda under her – with its emphasis on “social justice,” managed outcomes, and performative politics – has hardened the city’s horrible results for blacks around crime and K-12 public education. 

Black-on-black crime, a phrase at which progressives sharply bridle, is a violent scourge in “progressive” Chicago. Blacks are the primary victims of every type of violent crime here by a wide margin. Meanwhile, the city’s K-12 public schools fail black students horribly. One 1 in 10 rate proficient in reading, and just 1 in 20 for math.

The progressive ethos girds destructive social, political, and economic values. Like: police are inherently racist and brutal; criminal defendants – many with prior felony convictions – are actually victims; and disparate outcomes prove “systemic racism.” Progressivism holds that achievement tests which reveal chronic academic failure of black and Latino students are racist, unfair and emblematic of “whiteness.” 

Modern-day urban progressivism in Chicago is a political fun-house mirror in which strident nonsense passes for exalted truth. “Who’s more progressive” is key, says Politico, and then rates candidates accordingly. But to cast one of the most pivotal mayoral contests in recent history as a contest to see which candidate can be more progressive is to voice a death wish for the city. 

To support this argument, we’ll outline signposts of Chicago’s breakdowns in law and order, and K-12 public education, along with clear and convincing evidence of outcomes showing that blacks bear the brunt of the damage. 

Six signposts of Chicago’s “progressive” law and order breakdown

Here are six clear indications that progressive apologetics have undermined public safety, with the toxic effects most deeply felt in Chicago’s black communities.

• Police have been effectively banned from stop-and-frisk, foot chases and car chases. 
• It is open season on the police. A new state law mandates local police misconduct complaints can now be made anonymously. Police face growing violent hostility, including killings and attacks on police cars. As a result, Police decide to de-police – and to depart. District patrol manpower has shrunk in Chicago.
• The streets have been confiscated by miscreants. Chicago enjoys near-record high carjackings, plus trigger-happy “takeover” crews who appropriate the city’s streets for stunt driving events but rarely suffer any consequences. 
• Vehicle-borne armed robbery crews victimize pedestrians in organized sweeps, and catalytic converter thieves protected by gunmen make the rounds as well. Chicago’s streets are increasingly dystopian.
• Courts have surrendered. In Cook County they have become a revolving door. Alleged criminals awaiting trial are freed on low-cash or no-cash bail, but at least 15,000 times since late 2017 have then been charged with new crimes. The number is dramatically low-balled for myriad reasons. Here are just two. One is the vast extent of unreported crime nationally. Some 60 percent of non-murder violent victimizations are unreported as are two-thirds of property crimes. Another is that for those few crimes that are reported, Chicago has a negligible arrest rate.
• Emergency response has been maimed. More than half of high-priority 911 calls languished without a timely response last year, and the problem continued this year as top Chicago Police Department (CPD) supervisors now “code out” so-called “backlogged” 911 calls to hide the problem. At such times and without a reported physical injury, officers may not show up to take a report. Voila, crime is down. It is “Defund The Police” without the defunding. 
• The rhetoric is fierce, and destructive. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Chicago chapter – representing six Chicago aldermen – calls Chicago Police a “white supremacist” organization. A DSA alderman’s aide refers to CPD officers as “pigs” and draws concerns from local residents who say they need protection. Local activists encourage looting. And Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle describes murders like that of hard-working hairdresser and mother of six Tamiko Talbert, a black woman, as due to Covid plus “historic disinvestment and marginalization.” Official Chicago’s progressive tropes on race are a doubling-down of disinformation riven with the arrogance of unfettered power and callous indifference to wrenching daily tragedies in the city’s black communities.

Outcomes of progressivism: violence disproportionately plagues Black Chicago

The signposts of Chicago’s public safety breakdown are many. But what about the actual impact of the city’s declining safety, specifically on black Chicagoans who are the main intended beneficiaries of progressive governance?

The ugly truth is this: black Chicagoans suffer the lion’s share of Chicago’s violent crime. Though they make up just 29 percent of the population, they made up nearly 80 percent of the homicide victims from 2018 through November 15 this year. 

Murder perpetrators have been mostly black, too. From 1991 through 2011, blacks were more than 70 percent of known murder perps in each of those years except one, according to the CPD report “Chicago Murder Analysis” (p. 38).

Black Chicagoans also make up the vast majority of other violent crime victims according to the city’s “violence reduction” dashboard. Annual results vary little. In 2022, through November 15, blacks in Chicago – again, just 29 percent of the population – represented 76 percent of non-fatal shooting victims, 66 percent of aggravated battery victims, 60 percent of aggravated assault victims, and almost 50 percent of the victims of criminal sexual assault and vehicular hijacking.

Criminality visited disproportionately upon black Chicagoans is just one of two especially striking impacts of “progressivism” here. The city’s public K-12 schools are equally disastrous for black and Latino Chicagoans.

Cast a gimlet eye upon Chicago Public Schools

Anyone interested in a truly progressive agenda for Chicago must cast a gimlet eye at Chicago Public Schools (CPS). Again, there are both the signposts of decay and the actual outcomes. 

• Spending is at record levels while results are at rock-bottom. For hideous academic results, 2022 per-pupil spending based on the district’s total budget was $28,000. CPS is to spend a staggering $29,000 per pupil based on the district’s 2023 total budget. If more money were the answer, we’d already see it in results.
• Facilities are being abandoned by families who know the score. As its budget grows, CPS enrollment continues to drop, and its school buildings continue to empty out – far past the district’s own standard for possible closure. Wirepoints reported that in the 2021-2022 school year, 55 percent of CPS traditional (non-charter, non-contract) schools were under the 70 percent capacity threshold that’s the district’s measure of consideration for closing. Worse, about one-third of those traditional schools in CPS were half-empty or less. 
• Unions are in denial, and yet run the show. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) won a school closure moratorium from state lawmakers until 2025. The tail is firmly wagging the dog. The aim is to preserve salaries and benefits for teachers even in schools that are just 5 to 24 percent full and have abysmal academic proficiency rates.
• Administrators are in denial as well. CPS proudly pushes a cynical social promotion scheme in which nearly everyone graduates from high school though most lack basic math and reading skills.
• Finally there is the radical political agenda embraced by CPS to distract from its rock-bottom academic outcomes, plummeting enrollment, hollowed-out schools, and escalating spending. Racial victimology and class resentments are elevated on the CPS website in a shocking video which advocates hopelessness and looting for blacks and falsely claims police are regularly and widely killing blacks. Another CPS video posits the real academic equity issue is dishonesty around “whiteness” – that whites can’t come to terms with the oppressiveness inherent in their pigmentation. 
• On toxic racial rhetoric, CTU teachers pick up where CPS leaves off. Closing schools in a black neighborhood, a teacher claimed in 2020, is “a hate crime.” Never mind that the three targeted schools were at the time just 20 to 30 percent full and two were academically low-performing. In December 2020 it was clear remote learning was destroying any semblance of education for black and Latino CPS students, and schools began to aim for a 2021 re-opening. CTU tweeted that “was rooted in sexism, racism, and misogyny.” 

CPS is a mess of failure and excuses. If this is “progressivism” then Chicago needs a new iteration of it – one that puts human capital development first in our city’s K-12 public schools. 

Education outcomes of rampant “progressivism” are damning

We’ve considered some key signposts of the progressive education breakdown in Chicago. But what is the data demonstrating that breakdown? The outcomes of progressivism for K-12 public education in Chicago are damning.

In 2022 across all grades of the K-12 CPS system only 11 percent of black students reached proficiency in reading on the state standardized test for the Illinois Report Card. Just 17 percent of Hispanic CPS students were proficient in reading. In math, the results were even worse. Proficiency for black CPS students in math was 6 percent, versus 12 percent for Hispanic CPS students. 

Lest you counter that was due to learning losses during Covid, the pre-Covid 2019 results were somewhat better but still dismal. Little more than one quarter of all CPS students and CPS Hispanic students could read at grade level in 2019, as could only 17 percent of CPS black students. Results were similar for math proficiency.

A Fraught Time, Altogether, For Progressivism

It is a fraught time for progressivism despite Democrats outperforming the projections of Republicans and the pundit class in midterm elections last week. Our cities are still burning. Chicago’s black and white populations are each down a third from 1980 to 2020 while Latinos in the city nearly doubled. Vast swaths of the black South Side and West Side are studded with empty lots. There is no there, there. This is progressivism, Chicago-style.

And yet. Still sadly wedded to old tribal politics, the Chicago City Council had a knock-down drag-out procedural fight about carving out “black wards” and “Latino wards” on a new map – though all the evidence argues against the crude assumption that voting for one’s race improves material conditions. It appears to be rather the opposite.

Old habits die hard. Politico says a key challenge for 2023 mayoral contenders in Chicago is how to articulate a modern day progressive agenda while dancing neatly around incumbent Lori Lightfoot’s status as a black and as a lesbian. The not-so-hidden meaning: favored-group membership today is assumed to exempt officials, students, criminal defendants – anybody, really – from any honest accounting of their record. Progressivism is shot through with identitarianism.

But if Chicago is to embrace real progressivism it must go deeper than skin-deep. My suggestion is to turn to the Chicago address of August, 1912 by Thedore Roosevelt to the National Progressive Party Convention.

Teddy proclaimed there, “We propose boldly to face the real and great questions of the day, and not skillfully to evade them as do the old parties. We propose to raise aloft a standard to which all honest men can repair, and under which all can fight, no matter what their past political differences, if they are content to face the future and no longer to dwell among the dead issues of the past.”

Be “anti-racist” – teach black kids to read

Roosevelt went on to assert “a great economic evolution” of that time required a concentrated effort to improve working conditions and opportunity for all men. He said, “The first charge on the statesmanship of the day is to prevent human waste” because “the dead weight” of it poses great “strains upon the National structure.” 

Resonate much?

That is exactly the predicament today in the failing cities of the progressive North. Human capital development, so crucial to violence prevention and personal and economic growth, is tragically squandered. 

Faltering public education is the place to start. 

Let’s start small. And with a progressive thought. To be an “anti-racist,” actually teach black kids to read.

Read more from Wirepoints:

• 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.
• Chicago’s Coming Mayoral Race Is Opportunity For Overdue, Focused Debate On Crises Strangling Major US Cities
• Chicago Transit Authority violent crime aims for five-year high in 2022; Red Line stuck in “Wild West”
• No police available for shootings, robberies, assaults, and more: Ongoing 911 response failures heighten risk for Chicagoans