Before Rebecca Labowitz even had children, neighbors in her gentrifying North Side community exhorted her to start researching where she’d send them to school. Labowitz scoffed, comfortable with the notion she’d never be that obsessive.
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But a few years later, when her son turned 2, Labowitz was cornering people at parties and quizzing them on schools. She used up her vacation touring dozens of Chicago public schools. She even started a blog called cpsobsessed.com to connect with other parents.
Many parents don’t take the school search to such extremes, but Labowitz’s desperation is common in Chicago, where finding a high-performing school can be practically a full-time job for young families.
While politicians and school officials wring their hands over whether clout played a role in admissions to top city schools, it’s easy to lose sight of this fact: Despite Mayor Daley’s high-profile attempts to improve the city’s public school system, many Chicago schools are failing to properly educate children.
And the dearth of good schools has left parents scratching and clawing their way into the few good ones.
“It takes over your life,” said Labowitz, whose son eventually tested into the gifted program at Coonley Elementary School. “Having a good, safe school for your child is a basic right. It’s not something that should be rationed.”
Parents in Chicago say they’ve tried just about everything — from donating large sums of money to volunteering to run the PTA — simply to earn a spot in one of the city’s top-notch public schools. They’ve even gone so far as to lie on their applications, claiming they live within the school boundaries or have other children at the school — which increase odds of getting in.
So few were surprised when it surfaced last week that former schools chief Arne Duncan’s office kept a list of people — mostly politicians and influential business leaders, though some were parents — who dialed up the main office seeking favors in landing a seat at a top school.
Over the next few days, parents across the city will learn whether their efforts have paid off, as the elite magnet elementary schools send home acceptance letters.
“Sometimes, I just want to leave work early so I can rush home and check the mailbox — it’s so crazy,” said Debra Berth-Mallek, whose son was already rejected from his top kindergarten choice, Disney Magnet School, but awaits word on the others. “I’ve spent more time on trying to get my son into a good school than I did applying to college.”
For the current school year, 10,300 students applied for seats in magnet schools, where students get in by random lottery. About 30 percent got in. Of the more than 16,000 students who applied to the city’s premier selective enrollment high schools, only 20 percent landed a spot.
Some of the best city schools have acceptance rates on par with Ivy League colleges.
This has caused parents, especially those in middle-class neighborhoods, to complain that the district has not done enough to keep up with the demand.
Given that the district is mainly low-income and most of those students attend low-achieving schools, Daley and Duncan, now the U.S. secretary of education, have spent much of their efforts on boosting the performance of the worst schools. Renaissance 2010, Duncan’s signature initiative, focused squarely on transforming failing schools.
There have been quieter attempts to open classroom seats and transform schools in wealthier communities. District officials, for example, created gifted and Montessori programs in gentrifying neighborhood schools, hoping to attract children who live in those communities.
But those initiatives have been sporadic and did not have the support of an entire city political system and business community behind them.
This has left parents to do much of the work on their own.
In some schools, such as Nettelhorst Elementary in Lakeview, a group of parents worked with the principal to transform their neighborhood school. Now, it’s so popular among middle-class parents, it turns children away. Similar efforts are under way in at least a dozen schools across the city.
Jacqueline Edelberg, a mom who spearheaded the Nettelhorst transformation, said that instead of adding more magnet slots, the city should fix neighborhood schools. Edelberg said that she initially thought of enrolling her son and daughter in a magnet, but figured the chances of getting them in were very slim. So she poured her heart and time into reshaping Nettelhorst.
“I’m not trying to knock magnet schools, but every time one opens its doors, it blows away the neighborhood school,” said Edelberg, who co-authored a book about the Nettelhorst transformation. “A great neighborhood school is essential to having a healthy neighborhood.”
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