Report: Kids in poorer areas less likely to go to top schools
In Chicago, children from wealthier and whiter neighborhoods are more likely to enroll in higher-rated public schools, attributable in part to access and choice, according to research released Thursday looking at potential barriers along a student’s path to a top-performing high school.
More than three-fourths of Chicago Public Schools students who entered ninth grade in fall 2018 went to a school other than their default neighborhood school, and 65% went to a school that had one of the district’s top two performance ratings, according to the report. Additional data compiled by CPS shows a decrease in the percentage of all high school students attending schools with those top ratings, from 65% in fall 2016 to 53% in fall 2019.
“Our analysis of applications data finds that Black students are less likely to apply to a high-performance high school compared to their non-Black peers, and this ultimately translates into different rates of enrollment in high-performance schools by student race/ethnicity,” according to the report, which notes similar but smaller differences between students living in neighborhoods with different socioeconomic statuses.
CPS places each student into one of four socioeconomic tiers — determined by factors such as median income, percentage of single- parent homes and achievement scores in the area where a student lives— in an attempt to make its application process more equitable, reserving a portion of seats at selective and magnet schools for students in each tier.
Black students and students living in neighborhoods with low socioeconomic status are also the least likely to have a toprated school as their zoned neighborhood school and to rank a high-performance programas their first choice during the high school application process, according to the report by Lauren S ar tainan assistant professor University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Education and an affiliated researcher at the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research, and Lisa Barrow, a senior economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago. Both have also published previous work on the CPS high school application process.
“We find that Black students are much less likely than other students to be assigned to a neighborhood high school with a high accountability rating,” according to the report. “They are also less likely to meet pre-application eligibility requirements for programs with strong academic reputations (e.g ., selective schools and IB programs) due to lower academic performance in elementary school. Further, Black students tend to live in census tracts with lower levels of financial resources and attend lower-performing elementary schools than other students.”
The CPS School Quality Rating Policy gives each school one of five performance ratings: Levels 1+, 1, and 2+ indicate good standing, while a Level 2 means a school needs provisional support, and Level 3 denotes schools need intensive support.
The district’s annual regional analysis shows how school ratings vary by location:
During the last year, 88% of high school seats in the Central Area, which includes downtown and adjacent neighborhoods, were Level 1 or 1+, compared with only 10% in the South Side region, which includes neighborhoods around Englewood, Ashburn and Chatham. Less than one third of Level 1 and 1+ high school seats were open enrollment, meaning they didn’t have admissions criteria, according to the CPS.
In fall 2018, of ninth grade students in CPS who enrolled in a high school with a Level 1 or 1+ rating, about53% were Latino, 26% Black and 21% students of other races, according to the report.
In contrast, the student population is about 47% Hispanic or Latino, 36% Black, 11% white, 4% Asian, and less than 3% multiracial or another race. In all, fewer than half of Black ninth graders enrolled in a highly rated school in 2018, compared with 70% of Latino students and 90% of white and Asian students, according to the research.
Among all grades, district data shows 41% of Black students, 66% of Hispanic or Latino students and 90% of white students attend a Level 1 or 1+ school. Each student in CPS defaults to a zoned school in their attendance boundary. Among ninth graders in 2018, just 9% of Black students and 21% of Latino students were assigned to a Level 1 or 1+ high school. By socioeconomic status, 5% of students in the lowest tier were zoned to attend the toprated schools, while that figure was 21% for the middle two tier sand 51% for the highest tier, according to the report.
About 91% of students in the lowest socioeconomic tier and 85% of students in the highest-tier neighborhoods live within 2.5 miles of a high-performing high school, according to the report.
Yet the difference flips in terms of students who are offered seats and ultimately enroll in those schools, with 52% of students in the lowest tier and 86% of students in the highest-tier neighborhoods enrolling. Based on just household income for their census tract, 87% of all students in the highest income areas and 31% of students in the lowest income areas go to Level 1 or 1+ schools, according to CPS data.
In response to the report, a CPS spokesman said that since the launch of GoCPS, the platform that manages the high school application process, “the overwhelming majority of students have consistently gained acceptance to one of their top three high school choices.”
“Still,” the CPS statement continued, “many families bear the burden of long standing, systemic inequities in our city, andwe strive to create a more equitable district where all students have access to a high-quality school option intheir neighborhood. We remain fully committed to making highquality school options more equitable and accessible through sustained investments, especially in highneeds communities, and we will continue to evaluate our admissions practices.”
The report’s authors suggest school districts consider looking at the locations of high-quality programs and making sure they’ re accessible to students of all racial and economic backgrounds.
“This may mean opening newhigh-quality options, or reallocating programs, but it could also mean exploring ways to alleviate transportation issues particularly in urban areas where districts could rely on robust public transportation systems,” according to the report. “Districts may also want to reconsider the academic prerequisites that affect eligibility and the probability of admission. For example, any program with minimum GPA requirements will disproportionately disqualify Black boys who have the lowest grades, on average, in the district.”
The paper continues by saying that “eliminating GPA eligibility requirements may help close enrollment gaps by race. Or instead of admitting students in order of points determined by grades and test scores, programs could hold a lottery for all students who meet the prerequisites.”
Some families may lack complete information about high school options, and differences in factors related to access can explain most of the gaps in enrollment at top performing high schools between students of different races or socioeconomic tiers, according to the report.
Analysis including eligibility, distance and elementary school rating “suggests that if Black and Latinx students had the same distribution of eligibility factors, distances from schools and CTA transportation, and elementary school and community resources, the gap in enrolling in a highperformance high school would close by 77%,” according to the report.