South Side Weekly

The City of Chicago and its Board of Education have a long history of perpetuating segregation, starting with an 1863 City ordinance that required Black and White students to attend separate schools. Segregation in Chicago’s public schools only intensified when Chicago’s Black population boomed due to the influx of Black Americans from the South in the first half of the twentieth century, and it has been reinforced in the twenty-first century through strategic policy decisions, privatization, and neglect.

In 2013, the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed the most schools ever closed at one time in United States history to combat a deficit in the City’s budget. The fifty school closures meant that more than 11,000 students were displaced and given the option to transfer schools. Former CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett claimed that the district was able to keep track of where all but seven students landed after their schools closed, but it was later revealed that CPS and the Illinois State Board of Education were actually unsure of the whereabouts of more than 400 students—there was no record for these students of a successful transition to a new school...