Segragated Schools: CPS

http://www.radicalcartography.net/index.html?chicagodots

      In American Apartheid, Massey and Denton discuss how race is an important factor when it comes to poverty or impoverished communities. In both Chapters 1 and 2, they discuss how the deliberate role of segregation led to the conditions many communities of color, primarily black communities face today. In American Apartheid, Massey and Denton quote Gunnar Myrdal saying
 
  Residential segregation...becomes reflected in uni-racial schools, hospitals, and other
  institutions" and creates "an artificial city... that permits any prejudice on the part of
  public officials to be freely vented on Negroes without hurting whites

      Kenneth B. Clark’s work Dark Ghetto is also quoted by saying that “the dark ghettos are social, political, educational, and --above all -- economic colonies. Their inhabitants are subject peoples, victims of the greed, cruelty, insensitivity, guilt, and fear of their masters.”  Their work reflects the effects that segregation has on communities and how that can be connected to Wilson’s work when discussing issues like social isolation and concentration effects. The effects that segregation has on communities include isolating them from not only specific resources but also lowers the quality of certain resources or institutions available which can then perpetuate poverty in these communities.
 
      Massey and Denton’s work made me think about the role that segregation plays in a city like Chicago. I will be honest, though, I am not completely familiar with everything there is to know about Chicago and its history - but a couple things that I do know is that not only is it one of the most racially segregated cities in America but that due to this it is very clear which areas have higher levels of poverty. 

      To the right, you will see this map that was generated in 2013 that shows how segregated Chicago is. You can follow the link which will lead you to the actual website and you can therefore enlarge for your viewing. Primarily, I want to focus this blog on schools and how schools look differently across the map. This definitely comes up after the conversation we had in class about how public schools within Chicago have different levels of “quality” all based on the types of resources that they have available to them in those areas.

      When we think about segregated schools we tend to think back to the era of Jim Crow but we do not really think about what it means today. In a school like Benito Juarez Community Academy, the makeup is 94% Latino with 97% of the student population being low-income students. Then there’s a school like Youth Connections Charter School that’s makeup is 73% black students with 95% of the students being low-income.
      A report done by the Civil Rights Project found that highly segregated schools, of blacks and Latinos “frequently offer a lower quality of education” and “tend to have fewer resources; tend to have teachers with less experience; tend to have people who are teaching outside of their area of specialty.”
      In a 2012 radio segment that was done on school segregation students recall their schools as:

  JESSENIA: It was really bad, like horrible, like beyond believable. The rooms were all run down and my parents were a little bit concerned because they didn’t  have the same materials as other schools. But as the years moved along our school started to move up, little by little—with just all Hispanics.

  DERRELL: It was this one time, I was at a track meet. And we had to drop Walter Payton students off because their bus hadn’t come. And when we pulled in front of their school, it was flat screens, the school was clean, and everything just looked so perfect there, and I thought to myself, ‘This is somewhere I should be. This is where I want to go.’ What I saw in their school, we had nothing even close to what they had. And it was just something that I just had to accept.

akepart.com/article/2013/07/10/chicagos-school-district-boycott-segregation  

      With many CPS school closures and now recent conversations about budget cuts being done, it is important to look at the way that certain schools and areas will take a bigger impact by these decisions than others. It is also important to think about the implications it will have for the community and the quality of education that these students will have. Most importantly, what are some the steps that can be taken, such as policy, to desegregate schools or increase resources across the map.