Not surprising. More white students are walking the halls at Chicago’s top 4 public high schools. At Walter Payton College Prep on the Near North Side, more than 41 percent of freshmen admitted the past four years have been white, compared with 29 percent in 2009... At Jones College Prep in the South Loop, 38 percent of this year’s freshman class is white, compared to 29 percent four years ago. In 2010 — the first year race was no longer used to determine the makeup of Chicago schools — the percentage of white freshmen at Northside College Prep in North Park rose from 37 percent to 48 percent. And at Whitney Young College Prep on the Near West Side, the percentage of black freshmen has steadily declined in the past three years, while the percentage of whites has risen. The increase in the number of white students fulfills the predictions of education observers that minority students would be edged out of slots at the city’s top schools as a result of a 2009 ruling by U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras lifting a 1980 consent decree that had required Chicago’s schools to be desegregated, with no school being more than 35 percent white... Since Kocoras lifted the desegregation order, CPS has built a new, bigger campus for Jones, allowing the school to increase its freshmen class by more than 100 students this year. And Mayor Rahm Emanuel has announced plans to expand Payton and to build a new selective-enrollment high school on the North Side, to be named for President Barack Obama, that’s set to open in 2017 and eventually will have 1,200 students — all in an effort to keep middle-class families in Chicago. Isn’t it interesting that, when the system was based on race, there weren’t as many slots, said Julie Woestehoff, executive director of the group Parents United for Responsible Education. I think it would be really great to see these North Side institutions provide more opportunities for black and Hispanic kids. The Chicago school system now has 10 selective-enrollment high schools. Students are admitted to these based on their standardized test results, admissions test scores and grades, as well as on socioeconomic criteria...
Posted on: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 15:05:00 +0000
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