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before him, have done with the school system in chicago was nothing short of saving this city. it's a long story.
but i will reply now just to the link you posted.
first i will say this is my town. i love it ferociously. and yes, i love my mayor. that puts me in a small class of people that believe the best about people. :shrug: i have 5 kids, the youngest of which is a high school senior. between them i have navigated this system pretty extensively.
the reason that the list even exists has to do with the fact that there has been an explosion in choice in chicago schools.
my oldest is 34. at that time, with few exceptions, you went to the school where you lived, period. when she was in 1st grade i already knew she was an extremely smart kid. (not a brag, just a fact.) she tested at stanine 8+9. there were, iirc, 2 gifted elementary magnets in the whole city, and one high school. for those you had to be all 9s. there were also 2 classical schools, which took 8+9. i sent her to one of those, and she had 1 hour plus commute each way.
the purpose of these choices didn't really have much to do with education. they were part of a consent decree to desegregate the schools. the enrollment process was as serious as a heart attack.
in the 80's, the city was experiencing serious white flight. this is a complicated phenomena, but one of the core forces behind it was that anyone with means moved to the suburbs when the kids turned 5. in neighborhoods with a strong catholic parish, it was not so strong, as they had their own schools. other than that, people did indeed fly.
they left behind neighborhoods that rotted. several mayors before daley did their best to stop this, but it was daley who saw that it was the schools that were the motivation. now, there were many fine public schools. but for the most part, they were severely neglected. just a look at the physical shape of the buildings told you what you needed to know. leaking roofs, peeling paint and broken windows were common. schools were run by a 17 member board, pretty much all of which benefited financially from their position, selling the latest reading curriculum, paper towels, or frozen french fries. (sadly, the teachers union had fallen into the kind of adversarial stance that makes progress very difficult. they too were stuck in a rotting system. this did not help the situation.)
so, enter richard m daley. he went to springfield, argued that he had to be the one in charge of the schools, twisted arms (he is a former state legislator) and got control. iirc he tried to get proper funding, at which he failed. but capital funding is always a little easier to get, and he set about the business of repairing buildings and building additions as well as new schools. what he knew families wanted was choice.
although charter schools were starting to be pushed, they were a raygun plan and did not fly here. first there were expanded gifted offerings. these were the kids whose potential was enough to make their parents move. so, in addition to the one gifted high school, they added a math and science college prep selective enrollment high school in each of the city's 5 districts. there was a lot of outcry about the fact that the middle class neighborhoods got them first, but those were the people who were leaving, and to daley schools were about economic development first and foremost. these were followed by gifted elementary schools, which were selective enrollment, and a whole slew of programs that were offered in the bigger schools, which opened up their attendance boundaries. for instance, our neighborhood school is a school of international studies. there are math and science schools, language immersion schools, not enough arts schools. those with more demand than supply have lotteries. fairer than fair.
daley hit the nail on the head. parents wanted choices. not only did fewer families leave the city, the diocese of chicago schools have pretty much folded.
so, about that list.
i am sure i am in the majority here when i say that high stakes testing is just plain wrong. the selective enrollment schools do lean heavily on test scores, but do have a formula that includes other things, like grades, etc. (they did use attendance until this year. this turned out to have an economic factor. if you could take your kid to the doctor, you would have a medically excused absence. yeah, not fair.) a lot of the other types of schools had lotteries. because of the origin of this process as a federally overseen process, it is pretty hard to game the system. like i said, serious as a heart attack.
in part by design, and in part as a function of the fact that there are often a few empty seats in these schools, as kids are asked to apply to 3, there are a few seats that are at the discretion of the principle to fill. these spots are for kids who, for whatever reason, do not make the numerical target, but really need and deserve the spot. my own youngest kid got one of these seats. due to a clerical error her scores were too low, and she was rejected by all the schools that she applied to. the attendance clerk misplaced a decimal point, and instead of 4.5 days absent, she had 45. we figured this out one day before the deadline for acceptance. the principal at the local school was horrified, got on the phone, and got her accepted at her choice. this is exactly the sort of thing that these seats are intended for.
so, there are, of course, movers and shakers who would like to try to help a kid and get them into those seats. and i mean that part sincerely, that they are trying to help a kid. in order to try to keep influence out of the process, these people have to go through the superintendents office. that is why the list is there. now, if this was a case of arne helping his buddies kids, he wouldn't need a list and would be a fool to create one. the list was there to keep it open and above board. and the process of making them go through arne's office was to take the pressure off the principals. the story that you link to, where the existence of the list made such a splash, failed to follow up by checking how many of those kids got where they wanted to go. the answer, it turns out, is a few. but you know the old saying of the lie traveling around the world while the truth is still getting it's boots on.
and just a disclaimer here. i am a long time chicagoan. i am a parent in the chicago system. i pay attention to these things, i care about this system. i spent time on parent boards. my kids have been in all parts of the system, including a special needs kid who went to a contract school. that is all i claim. this is all my opinion, and how things look to me. people are free to check my facts. i wish i had time to really document this whole situation. i really, really wish i had time to do a photo essay of the new schools and libraries that have been built under daley, as well as a lot of other things he has done. lots of people hate him. i love him. he has done a superb job of growing and improving a city that was starting to circle the drain when he took over. even now, although we are scrimping and saving here, we are in much better shape than a whole lot of places in this country. because we do things the democratic way. in spite of what you might here to the contrary. unfortunately, a well run city is a crappy headline.
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