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Fascinating article from WBEZ’s Curious City by Sarah Karp: https://www.wbez.org/stories/whats-the-history-of-selective-enrollment-in-chicago-public-schools/83b23a16-dbe4-43db-a690-111c3e698be2
Be sure to click on the “Listen” link to hear the Curious City segment.
From the space race to a consent decree: the history of selective enrollment in Chicago schools
Selective admissions started out as a way to integrate Chicago’s schools. It became a highly competitive program the school board wants to deemphasize.
By Sarah Karp
Joe Gondolfi, a high school teacher for Chicago Public Schools, said he’s long been puzzled by the students and parents who seem obsessed with selective enrollment high schools.
These public schools offer accelerated programs and accept students based on grades and scores on an admissions exam.
Over the years, the admission process has become so competitive that the Chicago Board of Education compared it to the “hunger games.” As a result, board members now want to de-emphasize the program and instead invest in excellence across all school types, including neighborhood schools.
With all the hubbub over the future of selective enrollment — for which no plan is yet in place — Gondolfi asked Curious City how selective enrollment schools started in Chicago.
Before selective enrollment became the highly competitive program it is today, its main goal was to create islands of integrated schools in an otherwise segregated school system (though at least one school became selective for a completely different reason). Education and civil rights leaders looked to specialty schools as a way to get families to voluntarily integrate the public school system. But when CPS faced shrinking enrollment through the 1990s, a new era of selective enrollment was ushered in. This timeline explores major points in the history of selective enrollment in Chicago.
(Click on the link to continue the story and see the timeline and photos)
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