A new University of Illinois Chicago study finds that Chicago schools remain sharply divided, with policy decisions and funding gaps shaping students’ access to quality education.
More than 70 years after the Supreme Court ruled segregation in school unconstitutional, Chicago schools remain racially divided, according to an August report from the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC).
Researchers at UIC’s Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy (IRRPP) analyzed data on racial disparities from Chicago Public Schools and the Illinois Report Card to evaluate how past policy decisions have influenced issues like enrollment, discipline and achievement scores.
Findings revealed that Black and Latine students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) primarily attend schools with their respective racial groups. The study found racial disparities in achievement scores and financial investment across suburban school districts.
Authors attributed racial disparities to a history of racist school zoning and discriminatory housing policies that have made educational institutions “mechanisms of inequality in the United States since the country’s founding.”
A lasting legacy of segregation
Segregation in schools is disproportionately high compared with segregation at a neighborhood level, which means that “housing segregation cannot completely explain educational segregation,” the report states. The report also shows a high percentage of Black and Latine students are in racially homogeneous schools.
The authors traced this pattern to decades-old policies, such as those adopted at Englewood’s Yale Elementary School in the 1960s.
In 1963, CPS Superintendent Benjamin WIllis received numerous complaints of overcrowding in predominantly Black schools in Chicago’s South and West Sides.
Instead of transferring Black students to nearby under‐enrolled white schools, Willis’s administration placed aluminum trailers on the playgrounds and lots of the already overcrowded schools. When the trailers failed to solve the overenrollment problem, Willis suggested that students attend schools in “double shifts,” refusing to admit that the decision to keep Black students out of majority white schools was related to race.
The study also highlights the ongoing consequences of the rising popularity of charter schools, which use public funds for privately managed schools. These alternatives to public schools were created in the 1990s to lend more control over schools for Black communities.
Charter schools use practices like “creaming” (or “cream skimming”) to “filter out” students who struggle to perform academically, and are not subject to the same accountability as public schools.
For critics, they represent an attack on public institutions, displacing neighborhood schools.
“The neighborhood schools, they’re a symbol for everything,” Kasey Henricks, the lead author of the report, told TCR. “It’s a space for communities to come together, and charter schools have a way of undoing a lot of that.”
Addressing the “input gap”
Iván Arenas, an Associate Director at IRRPP and one of the report’s coauthors, told TCR that the goal of the study was to explore a different approach to existing frameworks on achievement, school discipline and funding.
“The most important thing about the report is its framing,” Arenas said. “If we think about the structural imbalances and the structural differences and the inputs to our public education, then that really shifts the focus, or shifts the possibility for understanding why we have inequalities and outcomes between different racial groups.”
The idea was to turn the focus from an “achievement gap,” focused on metrics like math scores or reading levels, to an “input gap” that is related to what educational institutions do to shape the schooling experience of students by race.
The report highlights funding disparities between CPS schools and New Tier schools in wealthy suburban areas, attributing these differences to an overreliance on property taxes that ultimately benefits areas that already have resources. One data point from the Illinois Report Card shows that during the 2022-2023 school year, CPS spent $18,287 per student, while New Trier schools spent $30,883 per student.
Even so, the report’s authors found that racially differentiated outcomes persisted outside of Chicago in wealthier suburban communities.
In sampling ten suburban districts for the 2023-2024 school year they found that white students outpaced their Black and Latine peers in six districts. In one district, Oak Park-River Forest, the percentage of white students deemed academically on track was 20 percentage points above Black students.
Cynthia Brito, a parent of two former Oak Park students, told TCR that she has noticed patterns of isolation among Latine and Black students and a harsher disciplinary approach towards them.
Brito, who is Latina, has been a board member of the Berwyn School District since March. She previously worked for six years as an advisor at a social justice organization that sought to address issues like disciplinary policies and the lack of teachers of color in Oak Park.
“I have always believed that Oak Park is a place for the benefit of white families so that they can be exposed to children of color at the expense of children of color,” she said. “It doesn’t go the other way around.”
Investing in schools to break patterns
Even though the report doesn’t focus on specific strategies or solutions for racial segregation in Chicagoland schools, it does mention a few initiatives by local organizations aimed at smaller class sizes, more staff support and teacher salary raises.
Beatriz Diaz-Pollack, Director of Education Equity at the Chicago Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights, told TCR that one way to improve segregation is to increase the amount of overall school funding from the state of Illinois.
“We would like to think that, if we have the opportunity to expand available state revenue, then all of these important things could be funded at a higher level,” Diaz-Pollack said. “Rather than trying to divide up a smaller amount of revenue into all the important priorities that a large city like Chicago has.”