The Chicago Public School system is a case of institutionalized child neglect.
Instead of working to nurture productive citizens, the guardians of the system divert themselves with a game of politics, risking the futures of hundreds of thousands of children.
They get away with it because these are the children of the poor and powerless, parents isolated from the economic and political clout they need to make the system work for them.
School administrators and board members, aldermen, mayors, legislators and teachers have programmed the system so that it responds to their needs but betrays generations of children in the process.
Not all of the 595 Chicago public schools are failures, not all of the 28,675 teachers or 419,537 students. There are flashes of excellence, teachers who care and children who learn.
But success is the exception. The truth is that most of the children, mired in poverty and trapped in the politics of neglect, aren`t taught to read or do arithmetic well enough to make it in the workplace.
Hardly anyone expects them to do anything but fail.
At Robeson High School, 6835 S. Normal Ave., freshmen were gathered for an assembly and asked about the future.
”We`ll do what everyone expects us to do,” one boy shouted out. ”We`ll go on welfare and abuse our children.”
This is the way the lives and expectations of too many of Chicago`s children are being shaped. And the consequences are grave.
The schools have the potential to break the cycle of urban poverty and despair. But nearly half the students drop out before finishing high school. A fourth of those who do graduate enter the job market at a 6th-grade reading level. The cycle goes unbroken.
A seven-month examination of the Chicago Public Schools by The Tribune found a desperate tangle of problems.
It begins with the extraordinary needs of the children, but it does not end there. Two-thirds of them live in poverty, and many come to school with a background of deprivation that would make learning difficult under the best of circumstances.
They encounter teachers from an ingrown, aging and protected work force of uneven ability, qualification and motivation.
Pupils and teachers alike are trapped in a system inadequately administered by political appointees and career bureaucrats whose concern for comfort, survival and status quo strangle the system.
If innovative administrative ideas ever did surface, they would meet the opposition of a union that has dominated the educational agenda for two decades.
There is not enough money to go around, and the children always seem to have the last claim.
The only people who could help don`t. Neither Chicago`s City Council, nor the city`s delegation to the General Assembly, nor other local and state officeholders care enough about these children`s future to take a political risk.
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”Right now, most children are merely being warehoused in school buildings,” Greta Carl, the mother of a high school student, testified at a legislative hearing. ”I am frightened when I think about the future.”
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As the Chicago Board of Education has scrounged over the years for money to pay employees and end recurring strikes, the city`s neighborhood school system has withered.
The best of the students are drawn to elite magnet schools, where teachers are selectively chosen, classes are challenging and books and equipment are ample and up to date.
The rest of the children-three-fourths of them-are relegated to neighborhood schools.
In middle-class neighborhoods, some of these schools still function well, thanks to the efforts of parents.
But in many of the impoverished, crime-torn neighborhoods whose children have the greatest needs, education takes place in a chaotic, dehumanizing environment-crumbling buildings scarred by graffiti, battered equipment and scattered trash.
At some schools, officials refuse to put toilet paper in the student lavatories, saying the children misuse it.
A school day might consist only of hour after hour of mind-numbing rote, drilled from tattered and out-of-date texts-when there are enough to go around.
At some schools, children are penned inside all day, denied recess and deprived of the mind-stretching stimulus of music, art or extracurricular activities.
”It`s a facade,” says Fred Shudnow, who is struggling to teach a split 5th-6th-grade class at Bethune Elementary School, 3030 W. Arthington St.
”They say to these kids, `You`ve got the teachers and a school like anybody else.` But these kids are behind. They need extra help. I`ve got the slowest kids, and I`ve got 35 of them. It should be more like 20, but the board doesn`t see that. These kids need tutors, more help.
”They should do something to get them off welfare, not guarantee that they`ll stay on it.”
In a combined 7th-8th grade classroom at Bethune, a 14-year-old girl is pregnant for the third time. A 15-year-old boy was the neighborhood`s busiest drug pusher, his teacher says, until his best friend was shot and killed over drugs last year-right across the street from the school.
Another student sleeps with five other children on three piled-up mattresses in an unheated apartment. During the winter, the boy often came to school smelling of urine because it was too cold for the smaller kids to get up and go to the bathroom at night.
Asks teacher Corla Hawkins, ”How can you learn when people tell you that you smell of piss, and you do?”
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The results of the neglect and despair are readily evident in the numbers that measure student achievement in Chicago:
– Forty percent of Chicago high school students flunk at least two major courses each year. That`s the average, for 111,891 teenagers. At Crane High School, the failure rate reaches 65 percent; for freshmen at Marshall High, it hits 76 percent.
– Half of the city`s 65 high schools place in the bottom 1 percent of U.S. schools in the ranking of how their students scored last year on the American College Test (ACT).
– Barely half of Chicago`s high school students graduate. The rest drop out. At some schools, such as Austin and Roosevelt, fewer than 15 percent of the students graduate with their class.
– The average Chicago high school graduate looking for a job reads about as well as the average American 8th grader. One of every four such graduates reads only as well as the average 6th grader.
These children do learn some things in Chicago Public Schools. They learn that many adults can go through the motions of their teaching jobs with little or no skill and still be well paid-an average of $31,000 a year, with summers off.
They learn that many people don`t care about them-about whether they go to school, or whether they learn anything while there. They learn that their education is less important than the battles between the school board and the teachers` union that have resulted in nine strikes in 18 years.
They learn that, for society at large, their parents don`t count for very much-and neither do they.
School Supt. Manford Byrd Jr. says the ultimate responsibility for failure rests with the children.
”The overarching goal of my administration,” Byrd wrote in the program budget for the 1986-87 school year, ”is continual and measured program improvement to make certain that every child has a chance for a quality education.”
Asked about his use of the word ”chance,” Byrd said: ”The challenge is to make a connection, to get where the kid is. But, when you`re all done, the learner must learn for himself or herself. In the end, the learner must undergo the immersion, the exercises.
”I don`t think we can excuse the learner. There`s a certain amount of motivation necessary, a certain amount of want-to.”
But it`s difficult for children to motivate themselves when many teachers, administrators and parents have given up. An attitude of
hopelessness pervades the school system, often expressed with a shrug.
”We`re a general high school,” says Elaine Thigpen, head of counseling at Calumet High School, 8131 S. May St. ”We have 2d- and 3d-grade readers. We must educate the mass.
”We hope to do better, but we won`t die if we don`t.”
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The Chicago schools have been a political playground since the first public school opened in the city in 1834.
As Chicago developed into a city of factories, stockyards and segregated ethnic neighborhoods, the public schools served the children of immigrants and the patronage needs of the political machine. The city`s rich sent their children to elite private academies, and the political leadership, all white and largely Roman Catholic, sent theirs to parochial schools.
Although Chicago`s political structure has shifted to black control, one thing hasn`t changed: The power structure still has little personal involvement in the public schools.
School Board President Frank Gardner, although a public school teacher and administrator for 35 years, and his wife, Elaine, also a public school teacher, sent their three children to parochial schools.
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Mayor Eugene Sawyer`s three children went to a private elementary school, and two also went to private high schools.
The children of Mayors Richard J. Daley and Jane M. Byrne went to parochial schools. State Rep. John P. Daley (D., Chicago) and Cook County State`s Atty. Richard M. Daley have continued the tradition.
Only 15 of the city`s 50 aldermen sent their children solely to public schools, a Tribune survey found. Thirteen aldermen-of whom 12 are white-sent their children exclusively to private schools. The remainder enrolled their children in a mix of public and private schools, or have no children who have reached school age.
”We`re Catholic, and we want the religious instruction,” said Ald. Edward Burke (14th), explaining why his four children attend parochial schools.
Burke paused, then added: ”Nobody in his right mind would send kids to public school.”
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The most blatant use of Chicago public schools as an instrument of racial politics and social isolation came in the late 1950s, when the school board erected mobile classrooms and scheduled double shifts at crowded black schools rather than transfer black children to primarily white schools.
White children were a majority in the public schools then. But amid the racial tensions of the 1960s and 1970s, the parents of tens of thousands of children, fearful of busing proposals, transferred them to private schools or packed up and moved to the suburbs.
It has often been called white flight.
But a more apt term might be bright flight. A similar exodus of middle-class black children has taken place, leaving the public schools with the toughest children to teach.
The exodus, along with a drop in the birth rate, resulted in a public school enrollment decline of nearly 28 percent over 18 years-to 419,537 in 1987 from 580,292 in 1969.
Today, blacks make up 60 percent of the enrollment, Hispanics 24 percent and whites 12.9 percent; the other 3.1 percent are mostly Asians and American Indians.
This is out of whack with the overall city population-about 42 percent black, 41 percent white and 17 percent Hispanic.
It is even more out of whack with the people who hold the ultimate political power, those registered to vote: 49 percent white, 42 percent black and 7 percent Hispanic.
The disparity is so pronounced that some state legislators from city districts have hardly any constituents with an immediate interest in the schools.
In Democratic State Rep. Douglas Huff`s impoverished West Side district, 25,375 children go to public schools. In the largely white, Southwest Side district of House Speaker Michael Madigan (D., Chicago), only 3,327 children do.
In that respect, Madigan is representative of his community. He didn`t attend public schools, and his two school-aged children go to parochial schools.
Madigan, who controls the Democratic House majority, has a stock response to questions about any increase in school taxes: ”I`m not convinced it`s necessary.”
Says Patricia O`Hern, a white Board of Education member from the Southwest Side: ”As whites left the city, people started to assume the school system was all black or minority, so therefore they lost interest and stopped caring.
”That`s when they should have been most interested, because these are the kids who need it the most. This is important to every person who lives in this city. This is their school system. This is their future.”