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Public Affairs coverage from our award-winning staff |
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Parents Weigh In on Selective Enrollment in Chicago Schools
Produced by Julia McEvoy on Thursday, July 23, 2009
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Northside College Prep |
Parents and students at one selective enrollment high school are absorbing the news today that Chicago Public Schools is investigating the enrollment process for top schools in the city. CPS head Ron Huberman directed the Inspector General's office Wednesday to look into whether the enrollment policies are being properly followed.
Calvin Gang is an incoming freshman at Northside College Prep High school on the city's northside. He's knows he's lucky to have gotten his letter of acceptance.
GANG: I'm happy! I'm in Northside best school in the city. I got the letter and opened it and saw that I got in. Then I called my parents to tell them.
There are just a couple hundred freshmen spots at Northside and thousands of applicants. Gang says it's human nature if parents are using their connections and whatever else they can to get their kids in.
GANG: Everybody who has connections will try and use it in anyway they want, like a business deal or college. If they have a connection they’ll use it. I think that's kind of keeping the little man down and that's really bad, but I also feel life is survival of the fittest.
One mom picking up her kids from swim lessons at Northside said the pressure to get a child into a top Chicago public school starts in kindergarten. Maria Kapp has been through it.
KAPP: It's like waiting for a benign or cancerous results and it's painful. You can do great and still not be where you need to be because there just aren't enough schools. Would it surprise you if people were pulling strings to get in? Not at all. It's Chicago.
Kapp says when one kid gets in and another doesn't, eye-brows are raised.
KAPP: I think there's resentment, it's very buried but there definitely is you know you made the lifeboat and someone else didn't and they look at you wondering what did you do, what prep did you take?
Last year the Chicago School Board voted to give principals of selective high schools some discretion in selecting their students. They have some discretion over 5 percent of those admitted. One Northside parent, who preferred not to use his name says that's a good thing. There are particular rules to this which he thinks the principal's selection more transparent.
DAD: They created a form this year that clearly stated what the occasions might be to allow someone in. We qualified for one of them being a sibling. So we applied for discretionary pick on that basis and still didn't get in.
This parent says he has faith Northside's principal handles the process fairly. He believes the real crime here is that this competition to get in exists in the first place. Parent Lydia Falconnier agrees.
FALCONNIER: Sometimes I'm frustrated with this whole focus on the unfair process about selective enrollments it's a distorted focus. The situation exists because there aren't enough good schools. And there should be enough good schools for every kid in the system.
Quality and quantity of schools may be a subject for another day.
In a short statement released yesterday schools chief Ron Huberman said quote "We are carefully reviewing the existing selective enrollment policies and guidelines, and we will be implementing additional controls in the near future."
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