Desegregation and Chicago Public Schools
Saturday's Sept. 18th piece by Tracy Dell' Angela, "Schools may drop race policy" should be commended, in particular in my view, for allowing for attorney Alonso Rivas's comment, that more Potentially English Proficient students should be included in attempts to integrate magnate schools in a just way. On the other hand wouldn't all schools, even in the most poverty stricken communities benefit for their schools being integrated.
Students in Dual Language programs eventually outperform their monolingual English only speaking counterparts, though test scores should not be used to the extent that they are being used in the public schools in Chicago and across the nation. Even on the instruments themselves it suggests on the instructions that the use of test results should be limited. The use of test scores and even grades need to make a paradigm shift, and get away from sorting our students, teachers, and schools on the basis of test scores.
I don't want my child to be taught to become only a good test taker, but I am just a parent of three who have gone through this public school system, and have dedicated over 20 years of my life to teaching inner city youth here in the windy city.
I was very content with my daughter graduating from Morgan Park High School already Bilingual in English (allowed to get bilingual attention through 8th grade) and Spanish, taking 4 years of French on top of that, she was able to take the CLEP test, and got 12 hours of college credit. Morgan Park at last note has made valiant attempts to integrate their student body. My daughter, while at Morgan Park was also able to take a trip to Costa Rica, a nonviolent society, that has no military. The large number of ROTC programs in places like inner city Chicago, as pointed out in Newsweek magazine years ago, is clearly a class issue, given the war in Iraq being on pace with the early Viet Nam years, lest we forget the high percentages of people of color that perished in Viet Nam, not to mention the millions of Vietnamese. So why not revisit Gary Orfield's suggestions on desegregating the Chicago Public Schools. He was the University of Chicago sociologist, that is now a Harvard professor. Read Orfield's report, though outdated, on the CPS system. Why not take a look at busing across to the suburbs as he suggests. Maybe some of our neighborhoods would eventually become more integrated. That would surely be beneficial in integrating our schools.
We have schools that are over 90% Latino (Spanish speaking & bilingual youth) in the immediate vicinity of schools that are over 90% African American, some with few or no Anglos.