Chicago students' achievement gap
At Hyde Park Academy, a neighborhood high school serving black, mostly low-income students, reading scores have dropped dramatically over the last five years.
At the same time, at Payton, a selective public high school that is 40 percent white and 30 percent poor, scores have gone through the roof.
(Rich Hein/Sun-Times)
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The gulf between these two schools — and others like them — is fueling a growing achievement gap among students in Chicago.
Over the last five years, minority and low-income public high school students have fallen even farther behind their white and more affluent classmates on state tests and the ACT, a Chicago Sun-Times analysis has found.
The backward slide shows up on reading and math scores on the eleventh grade Prairie State Achievement Exams (PSAE) and on ACT composite scores, test data released today show.
For students shut out of the selective college preps like Payton, it can be like a “death sentence,” one activist said.
“Either you get into those schools or you’re in schools where you’re more likely to end up in prison than in college,” said Madeline Talbott, head organizer for Illinois ACORN.
The news of the growing achievement gap comes six years after passage of the federal No Child Left Behind law, which explicitly aims to narrow this gap. The law is up for re-authorization.
The achievement gap widened because scores for white and wealthier kids increased more than for blacks, Hispanics and poor students, especially on the PSAE. In reading, minority and poor student scores are lower than in 2003. Hispanics improved their math scores.
On the ACT, minority students made more gains, outpacing the growth of black and Hispanic peers statewide and nationally. Still, their gains lagged behind white gains.
In Chicago elementary schools, the gap has narrowed significantly, but changes to state tests in 2006 make long-term comparisons questionable, experts say. There were no changes to the high school tests.
Outside Chicago, the gap between Downstate and suburban whites and blacks also grew but not as severely as in Chicago. That’s because non-Chicago whites didn’t improve much. Scores for non-Chicago blacks dropped since 2003, even more than in Chicago. The gap stayed the same for Hispanics.
Critics blame Chicago’s high school achievement gap on its neighborhood schools, which serve most low-income and minority students.
This “reflect[s] the lack of effort by the Chicago Board to correct the deplorable conditions under which many low-income and disabled African American and Hispanic eleventh graders have to learn,” said researcher Don Moore, director of the reform group Designs for Change. He cited overcrowding, violence and lousy facilities.
But the growing gap also is clearly fueled by an increase over the last five years in the caliber of white students enrolling in CPS. Bewteen 2003 and 2007, scores for Chicago whites improved significantly more than they did for suburban and Downstate whites, the Sun-Times found.
White Chicago students are clustered in the city’s selective college preps and the competition to get in has skyrocketed since 2003, increasing the ability of such schools to take top students. Scores for incoming freshmen are significantly higher than they were five years ago.
Chicago's white students are also better off financially than they were five ago. The percent of low-income CPS whites has dropped from 47 to 42 percent since 2003.
At the same time, CPS’ dropout rate has declined. This likely means more low-scoring kids are still around to take eleventh grade tests, Schools CEO Arne Duncan argued.
Those demographic trends highlight a hard truth, Duncan and several principals and experts said.
“The traditional large high school, particularly in inner city neighborhoods, doesn’t work for students,” Duncan said.
Since 2003, minority student scores have gone up at some neighborhood schools but the biggest gains came at the selective enrollments and two charter schools that accept kids by lottery. These include North Lawndale College Prep, Noble Street Charter School, Brooks, Payton and Lincoln Park, a neighborhood school with three programs for advanced students.
Critics view those trends as evidence of a tier-tied education system. Duncan says CPS is already working to improve its neighborhood schools.
Last year, he began revamping curriculums at low-scoring schools. By 2011, up to 75 schools will undergo an instructional overhaul including new curriculum, materials, tests, teacher training and coaching. It’s in place at 25 schools.
Duncan also pointed to Renaissance 2010, which closes failing schools and re-opens them as new ones.
Chicago’s Noble Street Charter School, which has dramatically boosted Hispanic student scores since 2003, is being cloned as part of Renaissance 2010. It started with one campus. By next fall it will have seven in Chicago. As a public charter school, Noble has more freedom to hire staff and has lengthened its day and year by 15 percent.
“There are some things that work better for some ethnic groups, but by and large what makes the difference is good instruction, strong discipline and more time on task,” said Michael Milkie, who started the first Noble Street campus and now oversees all of them.
Critics of Renaissance 2010, including Don Moore, believe the effort actually hurts minority students. The high schools that have re-opened so far are much smaller than the schools they replaced. And the closures send students to schools outside their neighborhood, often crossing gang lines, leading to increased violence and discipline problems.
Violence at Hyde Park Academy, a neighborhood school, spiked after it took in students from closed schools, though school officials say those kids weren’t the biggest discipline problems. A new principal is trying to turn the school around with new test prep courses and more attention to freshman.
Contributing: Maudlyne Ihejirika, Rosalind Rossi