WBEZ | public schools

Chicago's best high schools: Who gets in, who doesn't

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 02:31:00 -0600

Chicago has four elite public high schools. They’re the highest scoring schools in the state, better than top suburban schools. Competition to get is fierce, and ratcheted up again this year. WBEZ looks at who gets into Chicago’s best schools, and who does not.

Even if you don’t live in the city you can probably name at least one of Chicago’s top high schools: Whitney Young, Northside College Prep, Walter Payton, Jones.

Now, take a guess: what percent of freshmen sitting in those schools today graduated from private grammar schools?

LABOWITZ: I mean, that Payton number blows my mind. That just seems so high. That one-third of the kids entering that school are from private school.

That’s Rebecca Labowitz, who runs a blog called CPS Obsessed.

There’s a lot of anxiety this time of year—kids getting acceptance letters, or not. WBEZ analyzed the current freshman classes at Chicago’s top four high schools for some idea of what’s happening.

We found that 29 percent of current freshmen at Walter Payton College Prep graduated from private grammar schools. At the other elite high schools, the number is right around 20 percent.

% of Students from Private Grammar Schools Enrolled in Current Freshman Class
Payton	29.10%
Northside	20.40%
Young	20.70%
Jones	18.70%
TOTAL	22.10%

And private school kids make up only around 12 percent of those testing to get into these schools.

School	Percentage of Private School Applicants
Payton	13%
Northside	12%
Young	11%
Jones	11%
Lane	9%
Brooks	7%
King	6%
Lindblom	6%
Westinghouse	5%
TOTAL	10%
* Figures are for students who applied in the 2010-11 school year for enrollment as freshmen in the 2011-12 school year. Source: CPS

Labowitz says this sort of thing sends sparks flying on her web site, where parents share horror stories of the grueling admissions process, and debate whether to leave the city.

LABOWITZ: Some of the CPS parents get frustrated because it almost feels unfair to have these private school families swoop in and take these few good seats.

But that is not the view of many Payton students.

BOYS: We came from private school, but I think it’s a good ratio. I think that’s a proper amount, considering this is a public school and it’s open to people from any background at any school.

These two freshmen graduated from a $19,000-a-year grammar school. But Payton students insist: Everybody here earned their spot through hard work.

ASIA: I know I couldn’t afford to go to a private school. I didn’t have the money to go to a private school, so I had to do testing for classical schools and for gifted centers.

Junior Asia Sumerlin went to Keller Regional Gifted Center for grammar school. That’s one of a tiny group of elite CPS elementary schools that feed the elite college preps in big numbers. They’re mostly gifted and magnet schools. They make up fewer than 1 percent of schools in the system. But together with the private schools, their students win more than half the seats in Chicago’s top four high schools.

Top Feeder Schools to Chicago's 'Elite Four' Selective Enrollment High Schools
Feeder School	Jones	Northside	Payton	Young	Total
PRIVATE GRAMMAR SCHOOLS	37	57	72	87	253
William Howard Taft High School Academic Center	*	21	*	12	39
Alexander Graham Bell Elementary School	*	13	11	*	36
Abraham Lincoln Elementary School	*	*	15	*	30
Hawthorne Elementary Scholastic Academy	*	*	*	11	28
Ogden International High School	*	*	*	11	26
Robert Healy Elementary School	*	*	*	*	21
Thomas A Edison Regional Gifted Center ES	*	10	*	*	19
LaSalle Elementary Language Academy	*	*	*	*	19
Andrew Jackson Elementary Language Academy	*	*	*	11	19
Ole A Thorp Elementary Scholastic Academy		*	*	*	17
Mark Skinner Elementary School			*	*	17
Lenart Elementary Regional Gifted Center	*		*	*	17
Walt Disney Magnet Elementary School	*	*	*	*	15
Augustus H Burley Elementary School	*	*	*	*	12
Annie Keller Elementary Gifted Magnet School	*			*	12
Jean Baptiste Beaubien Elementary School	*	*	*	*	11
Chicago Intl Charter - Bucktown	*	*	*	*	11

Table shows number of graduates from each grammar school currently enrolled as freshmen in Chicago's top selective enrollment high schools.
* indicates fewer than 10 students. WBEZ has advocated for CPS to release numbers less than 10. The school district argues that would violate FERPA, a federal law intended to protect the privacy of student educational records.
WBEZ requested a breakdown, with school names, of private schools feeding into top CPS high schools. CPS denied that request. The district says compiling that data would be too onerous.

CAMMON: That really doesn’t seem fair to me. I think, it’s like you’ll have to pay for them to go to a good elementary school for them to get in a good high school.

Lisa Cammon has a son at Brown Elementary, a CPS school in the neighborhood near the United Center, around the old Henry Horner Homes.

WBEZ’s analysis of feeder schools shows a trend nobody is talking about: Half of Chicago grammar schools send no one to the top four high schools. Not their valedictorians. Not their straight-A students. Not the kids who’ve worked hard their entire grammar school career.

View Which CPS schools send students to the 'Elite 4'? in a full screen map

Brown is one of those schools. Kenya Sadler is the principal there.

SADLER: Our top performing student last year scored in the 825 range—

(That’s out of 900 total.)

SADLER: and no, unfortunately it was not enough.

Sadler is determined to get her students into these top schools. Some do get into the city’s less selective schools and military academies.

But Sadler’s up against a disturbing shift in American education—a widening achievement gap between rich and poor children.

SADLER: I’m not going to say that it’s not fair. For me, I’m just going to accept the challenge.

Chicago has a whole formula to try to give kids from less advantaged neighborhoods a leg up when it comes to getting into these top schools. But WBEZ found in spite of algorithms and formulas, if you walk into the city’s best high schools, freshmen from the wealthiest parts of town outnumber freshmen from the poorest areas by a ratio of two to one.

Percent of Students in Each Socioeconomic Tier at Selective Enrollment High Schools
School Name	Tier 1 %	Tier 2 %	Tier 3 %	Tier 4 %
NORTHSIDE PREP HS	16.5%	18.0%	24.8%	40.6%
PAYTON HS	20.2%	20.6%	25.1%	34.2%
YOUNG HS	20.2%	20.5%	20.7%	38.5%
JONES HS	16.3%	18.9%	25.8%	38.9%
LANE HS	19.0%	18.6%	23.9%	38.5%
LINDBLOM HS	18.6%	20.3%	32.6%	28.5%
GEORGE WESTINGHOUSE HS	33.9%	33.0%	20.9%	12.2%
KING HS	27.3%	22.9%	34.6%	15.1%
BROOKS HS	17.5%	16.9%	36.6%	29.0%
TOTAL	19.9%	19.9%	25.7%	34.5%

CPS divides the city into four socioeconomic tiers based on such factors as income, homeownership rates, and quality of nearby schools. Tier 1 is the most disadvantaged. Tier 4 is the most advantaged.
Data is for freshman class, the most recent class for which complete data is available.

That's despite the fact that students from all tiers apply to selective enrollment high schools in roughly equal numbers.

Applications by Socioeconomic Tier for Selective Enrollment High Schools
School Name	Tier 1 %	Tier 2 %	Tier 3 %	Tier 4 %
Northside	18.9%	24.0%	28.3%	28.8%
Payton	20.5%	23.5%	28.7%	27.3%
Young	22.0%	24.6%	28.2%	25.2%
Jones	21.9%	24.5%	29.5%	24.1%
Lane	21.2%	24.8%	27.9%	26.1%
Lindblom	25.6%	28.0%	29.8%	16.4%
Westinghouse	29.1%	32.5%	25.2%	13.2%
King	30.2%	27.2%	29.6%	12.9%
Brooks	22.6%	25.2%	35.0%	17.2%
Grand Total	22.6%	25.4%	28.8%	23.2%

While students from all tiers applied to selective enrollment high schools at about the same rate, students from the most advantaged areas of the city were accepted at much higher rates.
Data is for the application period that took place during the 2010-11 school year. Students would currently be freshmen (see above chart).

Texas had a situation a little bit like Chicago’s. Its public universities admitted kids every year based mostly on test scores and grades. Students from good schools and bad schools competed against each other for limited seats. In the late 1990s, that changed. University of Texas spokesman Matt Flores:

FLORES: Lawmakers came up with this Top 10 Percent Rule, which effectively says if you graduate in the top 10 percent of your high school class, you would be guaranteed admission to the school of your choice—to the public institution of your choice.

Flores says kids don’t control what zip code they live in, and the new system rewards them for doing well at whatever school they attend.

FLORES: There were actually some high schools in the far reaches of Texas that in their histories had never sent a single student to UT-Austin. And I know that since that time, many of those high schools—if not all—have now sent at least somebody to UT.

Chicago Public Schools enrollment chief Katie Ellis says Chicago considered a system like that when it switched admissions criteria two years ago.

ELLIS: The challenge becomes, these students still are going to have to compete at very, very challenging environments....We try to come up with a careful balance between letting in the top scoring students in the city but also having socio-economic diversity, and those are sometimes contradictory.

Sadler, the principal from Brown Elementary near the Horner Homes, says she’d love a system that gave her hardest working students an equal opportunity to go to Chicago’s best high schools.

Until then, she says, Brown will just have to get better faster than more privileged schools.

Source for data in all tables is Chicago Public Schools. More extensive feeder school information is available in the Excel file below, under EXTRAs.

State of Indiana to take over troubled schools

Fri, 26 Aug 2011 02:53:00 -0500

Indiana's top education official proposed Thursday that the state assume control of four troubled high schools and a middle school in what would be the state's first takeover of underperforming public schools under a 1999 law.

Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Bennett said he had mixed emotions in asking the State Board of Education to approve the takeover of a Gary high school and three Indianapolis high schools and a middle school. But he said the step is necessary for the students' sake. The schools have been on academic probation for five years due to poor test scores.

The State Board of Education is scheduled to vote Monday on Bennett's proposals.

Bennett’s first stop was in Gary, Indiana, to announce a proposed takeover of Roosevelt Career and Technical Academy, a high school with about 1,600 students.

“It’s a difficult decision. But I can be very sad and forlorn; you can be very sad and forlorn or we can look at this as how I can begin the conversation,” Bennett said. “My interest is a new beginning for this school.”

Bennett said he just wants to make the schools better. Closing them, as the law allows, isn’t something he wanted to do.

"This is not about blame, this is about the future," Bennett said. "Our intent is to use everything we have in this state to restore these schools to what they should be for the students in these communities."

Bennett said he’s proposing Roosevelt be operated by a private firm from New York City called Edison Learning. The company operates schools on the East Coast and in Chicago.

Gary schools superintendent Myrtle Campbell expressed shock and sadness over the takeover, especially in light of ongoing changes at Roosevelt. At a special meeting of the Gary School Board on Thursday evening, Campbell wondered if Edison Learning can do a better job with Roosevelt than the district.

“We are doing our research to see where they are located. We know of some places, Chicago, and we know they have not always been successful,” Campbell said. “So, there has to be some guarantee from that company that they can actually bring about the change that we would like to see in the district."

Dr. Eugene G. White, superintendent of Indianapolis Public Schools, has threatened to sue the state if it moves to take over schools in his district. He urged the corporation's commissioners in an email Wednesday to begin legal action against the Department of Education.

"It is truly time to stand up for our children," White said in the email. The commissioners are scheduled to meet Friday night.

Under Bennett's proposal, the four Indianapolis schools and the Gary school would be run by school management firms that will evaluate each school's performance for the remainder of the current academic year. Starting in the 2012-2013 academic year, those companies would take over full operation of each school and receive the state's per-pupil aid for each school. Bennett said that if the Board of Education agrees, the companies would receive a one-year "transitional" contract followed by a four-year operations contract to run each school, with benchmarks to chart school improvement still to be determined.

Charter Schools USA and EdPower are the two school-management companies Bennett wants to run the four Indianapolis schools. He recommended that school management company Edison Learning operate the Gary school.

Indiana's schools are placed on probation based on the percentage of students who pass statewide tests. A 1999 law allows the state to intervene if a school has not improved its test scores after five years on probation.
Bennett said Thursday he considers that five-year time frame too long and that lawmakers need to put more pressure on underperforming schools to improve.

Indianapolis Mayor Greg Ballard said he supports Bennett's recommendations for the six IPS schools, calling them a "bold step."

"These schools have been failing for many years," Ballard said in a statement.

Jim Larson, the Department of Education's director of school turnaround and improvement, said the five schools that would be taken over by the state would undergo a careful year-long review by their chosen operators.

"This is much more than just 'Go in there collect some data, write a report, tell us what you're going to do better,'" Larson said. "All these schools are at different places."

Louder Than a Bomb: High school training ground

Fri, 15 Apr 2011 22:53:00 -0500

When poet Malcolm X. London spits that “the educated aren’t necessarily the educated,” he’s referring to the inequalities of the public school system. The18-year-old Lincoln Park High School senior argues that our “failing” schools are actually succeeding at what he says is their real purpose: Preparing young people for a future that mimics the problems and contradictions of society as a whole. “My high school is Chicago,” he recites. “Diverse and segregated on purpose.”

London’s poem, High School Training Ground, was one of several pieces that helped him win impressive accolades at this year’s Louder Than a Bomb competition. London was the top individual performer in 2011, selected from over 700 competitors. His piece is also the second in our month-long series of young poets performing their work on location.

In honor of National Poetry Month you can check out London’s understated but powerful performance in the video above. And if you missed last week’s homage to Cabrini Green you can watch it here.

WBEZ is a presenting partner of Young Chicago Authors' Louder Than a Bomb Teen Poetry Slam Competition and Festival. Click here for more information. Thanks to Alltown Bus Service for letting us film on their Chicago lot.

Interim CPS CEO discusses future of city's schools

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 14:47:00 -0600

If you were given six months to improve Chicago’s public schools, what would you do? That’s the big question facing the interim leader of Chicago Public Schools Terry Mazany. Mazany stepped in when former CEO Ron Huberman resigned last November. But he says the move to CPS is temporary and he has no plans to leave his regular post as president of the Chicago Community Trust.

Chicago’s next mayor will appoint a new CEO to run CPS, the nation’s third-largest school system. So what can Mazany accomplish in the meantime?
To find out "Eight Forty-Eight" talked to the man himself. Terry Mazany also took listeners' questions and comments.

Music Button: Robert Miles, "Miniature World", from the CD Thirteen, (Salt records)

Diverse neighborhoods, segregated schools

Fri, 17 Dec 2010 10:58:00 -0600

In neighborhoods across Chicago where development and gentrification have taken hold, middle-income families are staying in the city and raising children. But there’s one aspect of city life many have been slow to embrace: their nearby public school. WBEZ looks at the dynamics that come into play when higher income neighbors don’t feel the neighborhood school is good enough for their kids.

Jeff Rosen thinks he lives in one of the best neighborhoods in Chicago, the area around the University of Illinois.

ROSEN: We’re a vibrant university community, a very racially and socioeconomically diverse community. We’re really a microcosm of the entire city.

And every morning, all the middle-class public schoolkids in the community scatter across the city, to more than a dozen magnet and gifted schools where they’ve won seats in the district’s lottery.

Last year, Rosen applied to all those schools for his kindergartener. He says you don’t realize how difficult the Chicago schooling situation is until you’re in it. Pretty soon, Rosen had a stack of rejection letters.

ROSEN: You know, your greatest fear takes hold, and you think to yourself, ‘My gosh. I don’t have any option for the fall.’ Other than the neighborhood school, which you don’t consider to be an acceptable environment for your child.

Ambi: Smyth school kindergarteners and first graders read details they’ve written about toads

More than 600 kids attend Rosen’s neighborhood school, Smyth. Rosen’s daughter has a guaranteed seat here, no lottery needed. But nearly all Smyth students are black, and nearly all are poor, many from public housing.

It’s essentially a segregated school, one of dozens that exist in otherwise diverse Chicago neighborhoods.

And Smyth is struggling. It posts some of the worst test scores in the city. In fact, scores here are 20 points below the district’s average for both African-American and poor students. Rosen never even considered sending his daughter here.

That stirs up a lot of emotion in Delora Scott-Wimberly, a Smyth parent who’s had to explain to her seventh grader why white people won’t send their kids to her school.

SCOTT-WIMBERLY: If you come inside and get an actual visit of the school, then maybe they’ll change their perception of the actual school and the people that’s inside of it.

Classroom ambi, 6^th grade

Inside Smyth, the spacious, 100-year-old classrooms are bright and welcoming, floors polished until they gleam. Smyth’s main hallway features fish tanks and flags from around the world. Every kid here studies Mandarin and is part of the highly touted International Baccalaureate program.

Principal Ronald Whitmore was an award-winning teacher and oversaw early childhood education for the entire school district before coming to Smyth. But just about every other year since Whitmore arrived, CPS has closed a low-performing school nearby, and assigned those kids to him. Whitmore says his attention is on improving Smyth.

WHITMORE: I can only welcome people that come. I can’t make people come that don’t want to. So we’re focusing on how to make Smyth a better place for the students that choose to come here.

O’NEILL: Smyth— I think the principal is doing a very good job there. It is not yet seen, however, as an acceptable alternative.

That’s Dennis O’Neill, speaking to the Chicago Board of Education. O’Neill directs the well-connected University Village Association. He’s met privately with top CPS officials and twice with the mayor about getting what he calls an acceptable school option for the neighborhood.

Demands from O’Neill’s group are probably the main reason CPS is thinking about adding magnet school seats to this area—O’Neill says fixing Smyth is a long-term project. He says people’s property values are on the line—and so is a plan to build 2,000 more market-rate homes here.

A segregated school is something nobody wants.

MURPHY: They say, ‘Oh, it’s not socio-economically or racially diverse.’ Someone has to start that trend.

Tamara Murphy has a second grader at Smyth.

MURPHY: They were willing to move into this area knowing it’s not racially diverse. If they were willing to take that step in the real estate market, then why not be willing to go all the way and diversify the school system?

ORFIELD: Most people who move into a neighborhood like this are not racist. They’re perfectly willing to be in a diverse setting—but they don’t want to be the only one.

Gary Orfield is a national expert on racial integration in schools. He says integration leads to equity—and it brings connections and resources that middle-income families possess to kids who need them.

Orfield says few urban school districts have figured out how to promote integration in schools like Smyth. Chicago has a tiny bag of tricks to lure higher-income parents into neighborhood schools—things like gifted programs, and preschools that charge tuition.

But while CPSspends lots of time and money promoting diversity in magnet schools—it has nooverarching strategy for supporting integration in dozens of neighborhood schools where that would be possible.

That leaves a lot up to parents.

EDELBERG: So here’s our lunchroom. We turned it into Bistro Louis

Jacqueline Edelberg is showing me around Nettelhorst School in Lakeview. It’s become the textbook example of a local school that middle-class parents finally bought into. Today, every inch of Nettelhorst is covered with painted murals. There is a new science lab and a jaw-dropping kitchen …

EDELBERG: All of this is the work of people in this neighborhood who wrapped their arms around the school and said, ‘We want this school to be the heart of the community.’

In her book, How to Walk to School, Edelberg describes how she and a small group of parents took nine months to get the school to a point where their friends would enroll their children. Scores were still dismal, but parents signed on. Looking back, Edelberg says the transformation was both maddeningly difficult and “shockingly easy.”

KAHLENBERG: It’s not as if the school has to overnight has to turn to 50-50. If the kindergarten class is economically mixed, that’s the key variable.

Richard Kahlenberg says as few as 10 or 15 kids can meaningfully integrate a classroom. Kahlenberg helped design Chicago’s new magnet school admissions policy, which mixes kids up by income.

He says high-poverty schools aren’t good for anyone—not for poor kids, and not for middle-income kids either. At Nettelhorst, integration has meant higher test scores for minority and low-income students. But every year there are fewer of those students represented at the school… that is a whole other story.

There’s been an interesting side effect to the debate over schools near UIC: people are looking more closely at Smyth.

Leslie Thomas lives four blocks away. She’s applying to magnet schools for her five-year-old—the deadline is today. But she’s also visited Smyth, and is considering it, even if her son would be the only white kid. He wouldn’t be the only kid, she points out.

THOMAS: I didn’t move here so that we could drive across town and go to school in another neighborhood. I moved here so that we could contribute to this neighborhood. We’re torn and we’re really trying to think about what the best thing for our son and our community is right now.

Thomas has hung flyers up near her loft development…to try to find other families who might be interested in looking at Smyth. She says no one has called her back yet.

Maybe they will when rejection letters go out from the city’s magnet schools.

Michelle Rhee compares D.C. and Chicago public schools

Wed, 08 Dec 2010 15:03:00 -0600

Updated at 12:00 p.m. on 12/08/2010

Former Washington, D.C. public schools chancellor Michelle Rhee is taking her reform agenda on the road this week. Before resigning from her chancellor position in October, Rhee closed underperforming schools, instituted a performance pay system for teachers and advocated for charter schools—measures Chicago Public Schools have also recently seen. Rhee visited ""Eight Forty-Eight" on Wednesday to talk with host Alison Cuddy about the lessons she learned and how they might apply to Chicago.

Noting that both Chicago and D.C. have mayoral control over public schools, Rhee emphasized the importance of a strong relationship between the mayor and the city’s head of public schools. “I knew that part of the reason why we had been so successful for three and a half years, was because [outgoing D.C. mayor Adrian Fenty and I] were in lock-step,” Rhee said. That contributed to her decision to leave after Fenty lost his re-election bid. Similarly, former Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman recently resigned after learning that Mayor Richard M. Daley would not be running for re-election.

Despite the turnover of school leaders in Chicago and D.C., Rhee believes that mayoral control, rather than school board control, actually leads to more stable schools. “Arne Duncan was here for…about eight years…which far exceeds the average tenure of a superintendent who works for a school board structure, which is… a little over two years.”

But administrative leaders may not be the biggest factor in change. Rhee said personal experience—as a parent and as a former teacher—drives her belief that teachers are central to school reform. Rhee taught in an inner-city classroom in one of the lowest performing schools in Baltimore with Teach for America. She said that over her second and third years of teaching, she took a group of kids from the lowest performing on standardized tests to the top. “The environment that these kids were living in didn’t change; who their parents were didn’t change, their diets, the violence in the community, none of those things changed. What changed was the adults who were in front of them every day and that made every bit of difference in their academic outcomes.”

Rhee said it’s not just in the classroom where teachers are important, but also at the negotiating table. “I don’t think that reformers individually can go into districts—or even states—and have as big an impact as they could unless we change the political landscape and the entire dynamic in which we’re operating.,” she said. Teachers’ unions are doing a good job representing their members, she added, but students also need an advocate and she hopes her new school reform organization Students First will fill that role.

How many students leave charter schools, and why do they go?

Tue, 09 Nov 2010 14:48:00 -0600

To talk more about students who leave Chicago's charters, Eight Forty-Eight talked with WBEZ's Linda Lutton and Sarah Karp, deputy editor of school reform magazine Catalyst.

The two worked together to examine transfer-out rates at Chicago charter schools. They talk about the dearth of data around the issue. Karp and Lutton also discuss the impact transferring out has on students and their families.

You can listen to Lutton's report, "Chicago charter school struggle to hold onto weakest students," and read the Catalyst report, "One in 10 charter school students transfers out."