Like most parents, Dr. Rae K. Watkins struggled to find the best school for her child.
The choices seemed simple, but the more Watkins researched schools in Chicago, the more difficult her decision became.
“I'm afraid she will not be able to attend a school that I felt was diverse and really healthy for her development,” Watkins said.
Born and raised in Chicago, she has seen the city continue to become more segregated. Watkins' parents grew up in housing projects, formerly Cabrini Green and Robert Taylor. She would often hear stories of how they once were — and how they became impoverished. Watkins grew up in Lincoln Park; she now resides in Irving Park.
Watkins wanted to send her daughter to the same school she attended, which has since changed from a public to magnet school. Watkins said the school demographics have changed too.
“It's no longer a diverse school. The school is predominantly white,” Watkins said.
Chicago schools are extremely segregated. The Chicago metro area ranked third in the top ten most segregated metropolitan areas in the nation, according to The Century Foundation. School segregation plagues the city mostly because the neighborhoods in which schools are located are highly segregated.
“It feels like that the gap has widened, the gap for resources, and income gaps have just widened, as opposed to decreasing, which is what we should want to see in society,” Watkins said.
This change is not an anomaly. Schools across the country are becoming less diverse. In 1970, the typical African American student attended a school in which 32% of students were white. By 2010, this exposure had fallen to 29%. It is because of neighborhood segregation and racist redlining practices that students are more segregated in Chicago.
“Redlining is a real estate and mortgage lending practice by which certain races are concentrated in neighborhoods,” explained Teresa Cordova, Director of the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois Chicago.
The term “redlining” refers to the intentional exclusion of potential property owners and renters from certain parts of the city. Government maps would outline areas and deem them “risky investments” — and this continually happened in areas where Black people lived. This practice has set up the condition for segregated communities resulting in impoverished neighborhoods. Decades later, the city remains segregated and so does the accessibility to resources.
Today, there are over 90% more Black Chicagoans in redlined zones than in the surrounding area. Experts say this is by design — and it’s getting worse.
“It's important to understand how redlining helped set into motion other dynamics that then play out in various ways. And one of those impacts is on the resource funding and the enrollment of those schools,” Cordova said.
The effects of redlining have created a lack of investment and shifts in economies in certain areas of Chicago, forcing many parents to leave in order to find better schools for their children. Funding for each school ultimately will depend on the performance level and neighborhood of that school. Underperforming public schools are often located in historically redlined areas.
Thousands of families have moved their children out of CPS schools. Enrollment in CPS this fall dropped by 8,000 students. Enrollment in CPS is down 81,000 students over the last decade.
How redlining closed CPS schools
Over the last decade, many CPS schools have closed. Under Mayor Richard Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan, Chicago closed 49 schools, and dozens more were closed under his successor, Rahm Emmanuel. Under the same plan, CPS closed these schools because they had been designated as “failing.” The closures affected 88% of Black students, and 71% of the schools had a largely Black teaching staff.
“There was an active strategy in place to target schools in Black communities as ‘failing,’ but not do anything to address the factors that contributed to the failure,” said Pedro Noguera, Dean of the University of Southern California's Rossier School of Education.
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The Chicago Teachers Union agreed the closures were targeted. Earlier this year, the CTU filed a lawsuit and won. More than 400 Black Chicago Public Schools teachers and other personnel are now set to receive a cut of a $9.25 million settlement that would end lawsuits over the allegedly racially discriminatory layoffs that have continued in court for the past decade.
“Plans that don't acknowledge the history of racial segregation often fail to improve schools because what they don't do is to address the ways in which opportunities have historically been denied to certain communities,” Noguera said.
The federal government attempted to fix issues within Chicago Public Schools with a desegregation consent decree in 1980. In 1980, 82% of Black students in CPS attended highly segregated schools where at least 90% of the students were Black. CPS had a court-mandated desegregation plan, and an added level of federal court oversight was put over the system’s initiatives and policies. In 1989, 75% of Black students attended highly segregated schools. The consent decree was lifted by a federal judge in 2009. In 2012, 70% of Black students attended highly segregated schools.
Is the student-based budgeting system the ‘new version’ of redlining?
Mayor Lori Lightfoot campaigned promising an elected school board in Chicago, but she opposed giving up the control after she got into office. The Illinois House and Senate has since passed a bill phasing in an all-elected school board for Chicago by 2027. The CTU explained that Lightfoot has not followed up on past promises to fill schools with more resources, including more librarians. CPS has around 90 schools with full-time librarians, according to the Chicago Sun-Times. That leaves more than 400 schools without one.The CTU also mentioned CPS has turned a blind eye to their demands for change, emphasizing the importance of dismantling the student-based budgeting system.
“Student-based budgeting is something that we've spent a lot of time criticizing because it's a system that in a way, it's like the new version of redlining where it creates these inequities across the city,” said Pavlyn Jankov, Research Director, CTU.
Student-based budgeting was introduced in 2014, one year after CPS closed 50 schools in 2013 — the largest mass school closure in the country's modern history.
“Student-based budgeting means that a school isn't funded based on a standard that says every school should have arts, music, libraries, and an adequate student-to-teacher ratio,” Jankov said.
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Jankov said the student-based budgeting system creates a “death spiral” for the schools losing students, resulting in a loss of programming that is impossible to return. CPS stated, “Student-Based Budgeting allocates funds to schools on a per–pupil basis, which helps ensure that funding is fair and equitable, as dollars follow students.”
The pandemic has highlighted the holes within the student-based budgeting system. The Chicago Board of Education received roughly $1.8 billion in assistance through the passage of the American Recovery Plan. These funds followed the $900 million that Chicago Public Schools received from CARES Act support.
“They've never paused it; they've never gotten rid of it. So even as they got an influx of resources to maintain the level of support, if you're a school that lost students during the pandemic, you're going to lose funding,” Jankov said.
Clusters of low budget schools are confined to the majority-Black neighborhoods of the South and West sides, while high-budget school clusters are on the North and Southwest sides.
Redlining today
It’s difficult to deconstruct the effects of decades of racist housing policies. It’s also difficult to create an equal school system while the largest share of local revenue comes from the Chicago Board of Education’s ability to tax residents on the value of their property.
According to the CPS website, the stability of local revenue sources is vital to the financial health and viability of the District. Property taxes are the most general and unrestricted funds allocated to CPS schools and departments.
A system that relies on the value of property taxes and a student-based budget within a city that is highly segregated due to historical redlining practices ultimately creates a continuation of redlining — and fails to help students.
Clusters of low budget schools remain in majority-Black neighborhoods of the South and West sides, while high-budget school clusters are on the North and Southwest sides.
“From growing up in Chicago, what I’ve seen is that the impoverished neighborhoods just seemed to have not changed,” Watkins said.
As she continues to look for a school for her daughter, she’s noticed more conversations about the inequalities in the city. Watkins emphasized her hopes for an evolution of conversations into action.
”I think that with COVID, and with a lot of the protests, equity became a hot topic. And what I'm afraid of is that it will just go away, and these disparities will continue,” Watkins said.
This story came from our community journalism initiative: Can you tell me more? An audience member asked us to cover CPS schools and we went digging. Have questions about Chicago you want us to answer? Submit them here.
Map explained
The map included in this story is from Mapping Inequality. The federal government's Home Owners' Loan Corporation created thousands of these maps, assigning grades to residential neighborhoods that reflected their "mortgage security" that would then be visualized on color-coded maps.
Neighborhoods receiving the highest grade of "A"— colored green on the maps — were deemed minimal risks for banks and other mortgage lenders when they were determining who should receive loans and which areas in the city were safe investments. Those receiving the lowest grade of "D," colored red, were considered "hazardous."
According to Mapping Inequality, these grades were a tool for redlining: making it difficult or impossible for people in certain areas to access mortgage financing and thus become homeowners. As homeownership was arguably the most significant means of intergenerational wealth building in the United States in the 20th century, these redlining practices from 80 years ago had long-term effects in creating wealth inequalities that we still see today.