The downstream impacts of school choice on Chicago’s Black communities

In the last two decades, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has gone through a massive expansion of the city’s high school portfolio. In 2002, there were only 76 high schools; in 2018–19, there were 154, and only about one-quarter of ninth-graders attended their assigned neighborhood school.

This expansion has impacted different communities in different ways. In particular, Chicago’s Black communities experienced more dispersion — students going to different high schools — and more charter school enrollment than majority White, Latinx, Asian-American/Pacific-Islander, and mixed-race communities...