Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has some of the top-ranked schools in the nation. Seven of the top ten high schools in Illinois are in CPS. The top schools have the most experienced teachers, top-notch resources, and state-of-the art facilities. And, of course, they enroll the top students from across the city. To get in, students must score high on the high school entrance exam given every fall to eighth graders both inside and outside CPS. They also must have high, if not perfect, seventh-grade grade point averages. 

While the high school entrance process is straightforward, to understand its affect requires experiencing it. Teachers cringe, parents agonize, and students live in constant anxiety during testing season. For the most advantaged students, it begins a year early with test prep courses and tutoring. By the time they take the test, these students will have completed enough practice tests to know exactly what to expect—nothing will look new or surprising. Of course, these are the students from homes that can afford thousands of dollars of test prep. Add that to their already built-in advantage of having had abundant resources and opportunities to succeed since birth. What’s surprising is when they don’t get into the school of choice. 

Ultimately, though, the vast majority Chicago adolescents end up in neighborhood schools or less-than-stellar academic programs, again by bent of seventh grade grades and test scores but rooted, in actuality, in everything that happened or didn’t happen in their lives before seventh grade. Like with those with every advantage, test season ends predictably for those who have not had the same opportunities in test prep, school, and life. They are assigned to some of the most struggling schools in the state, where resources are limited, teacher experience and sometimes even licensure lacking, and frustrations high.

Having witnessed all this both from near and afar, as a teacher, teacher educator, and a parent, I want to suggest an experiment on how test results might be used differently. For a year or maybe a few years, let’s take the lowest scoring students and send them to the elite schools. That is, those with the worst scores go to the best resourced and staffed schools because these students’ needs are higher. Once these students are placed, use grades and test scores to continue to inversely place students in schools and academic programs by school and program ranking.

 Here are my hypotheses:

1.     Low scoring students will perform better in high resourced and staffed schools than they will in poorly resourced and staffed schools. I’d go as far as to say I’d expect a vast majority of these students to be exceling by graduation.

2.     High scoring student will perform well in poorly resourced and staffed schools because (a) they have the requisite academic foundation and family support to do well in any school setting and (b) the schools will experience an influx of resources driven by parents, that is, if the parents don’t abandon the district (which, I know, many are likely to do).

Of course, this experiment is a no-go, and I hear those laughing or sneering at the suggestion. The powers that be will make sure it’s a no-go. It’s because of those powers we have the system we have. 

I get why those with resources would rebel. Many rebelled a couple of years ago when CPS changed its funding formula to put more resources in neighborhoods with underserved schools. I had a daughter in a neighborhood school that lost resources. She’s in eighth grade now and, yes, presently in the middle of test prep season. We signed her up for a few weeks of online prep, which only served to elevate her already high level of anxiety. Because we have resources, notably teaching experience, we decided to do the test prep ourselves. We rebelled against paying for test prep because we could. We have the resources or experience to do so.  

So, to some extent, my daughter is a posterchild of a specific type of privilege: educated parents who hate the system but want the best for their kids and, therefore, will use what resources available to get the best or at least better than a lot of Chicago kids. There are a lot of parents like us out there.

So, yes, my daughter has advantages most Chicago kids do not. And, no, we don’t want her to go to a poorly resourced school with no science labs, a library in a closet, burned out and overwhelmed teachers, and an evolving door of teachers and administrators (This is hyperbolic, I know, but the disparities between the top and most struggling schools in Chicago are real.). 

There are times when one’s children should not be pawns to a parent’s principles. This is one of those times. So, yes, I get how parents of means might feel. So here’s another option. Instead of turning the whole test thing on its head, let’s break the bank on education for four years. Let’s pay teachers based on where they teach. If you teach in a struggling school, well how about twice, no, maybe three times, more pay as those in elite schools. This doesn’t mean lowering the pay of those in elite schools or changing anything about those schools; it means jacking up the pay of everyone else based on need: the highest need schools have the highest paid teachers.

Once these teachers are in these schools, give them cart blanche over what needs to be done. Put them in classrooms with top-of-the-line resources and well-trained classroom aids and let them plan and do their thing. As an add-on in the school building, provide students the same social, emotional, and health supports all kids need to excel and those with the requisite family resources already get: counselors, psychologists, health professionals, and so on. 

Yeah, I know, this will cost a lot of money. I, like many people, already pay high real estate taxes, of which nearly half go to schools. But if I were told for an additional thousand, two thousand, and even three thousand bucks the city will try this option for, say, four years, I’d say do it. Either option is fine with me. Just give it time and the resources need. If after that time, my hypotheses are disproven, well, blame me. If, however, they bear out and the outcomes make Chicago Public Schools an exemplar of high school educational equity, a thank you is all I’ll need…and maybe a school named after me.

A caveat: I know educational equity should begin in pre-school. If it did and if it were real equity, all that’s written in this post would be moot, and I would be mute.