School choice divides Chicagoans, poll shows

Jim Vondruska/For the Sun-Times

Frustrated with the lack of programs at the public school down her block, Candace Lampkin could be a prime candidate for sending her children to a magnet or charter school. Instead, the Chicago mom questions why there are so many options and wishes all the resources could be funneled into her neighborhood school.

“When you let people choose, it has been proven that they will go to select schools that will get all this funding and all the rest because it is supposed to be this new, hip school,” the South Side mom said. “But what happens to the quality of the education of the children at the other facilities? Don't all of the schools deserve the same thing?”

Lampkin is not alone in her skepticism over school choice, which is now the norm in Chicago, with the majority of families opting against a neighborhood school. A new survey released Tuesday shows Chicago residents are divided over whether parents should be able to choose a school other than the one in their neighborhood, and two-thirds think the school district should prioritize funding local schools.

There were not big differences in opinions between races and ethnicities, though parents were more supportive of school choice than nonparents.

The poll was overseen by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan research organization focused on researching challenges facing democracy and uncovering solutions. WBEZ and the Chicago Sun-Times collaborated with Public Agenda and the Joyce Foundation, which funded the project. The poll, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, surveyed 2,127 residents who represent a cross section of the city.

The debate over school choice reached a crescendo this winter when the school board announced its intent to focus on neighborhood schools and away from a “model that emphasizes school choice.”

Once embraced by officials as a way to improve the prospects for low-income students, the hype around school choice in Chicago has waned. Like Lampkin, Mayor Brandon Johnson and his appointed school board question whether students should have to win the lottery to get a good education.

Pro-school choice advocates responded with a poll they commissioned in which 82% of parents favored choice.

The Public Agenda poll shows residents understand some of the nuance of the debate — that choice has consequences, especially in a school system grappling with declining enrollment and limited resources. David Schleifer, vice president of research at Public Agenda, said parents clearly value neighborhood schools, but a slight majority said they favor having choice, even if it means hurting neighborhood schools.

“I think it has to do with what it's like to be a parent and to have some values about the importance of neighborhood schools and the way that that can kind of run up against people thinking, ‘I can't really wait for those neighborhood schools to improve because my kid needs the best education they can get right now,’ ” Schleifer said. “So I do think it's a question that parents are torn about.”

About 15% of CPS students attend charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately run, and another 20% go to magnet or selective schools. Those schools admit students citywide.

Barbara Barron Kelly, who lives in Beverly on the far Southwest Side, never considered her neighborhood school because she didn’t think it could offer the diversity she was looking for.

She sent her older children, who are now in their 20s and 30s, to a magnet school. When that didn’t work out, she sent them to Catholic school.

But Lenart Regional Gifted Center in Auburn Gresham on the South Side was a godsend for her youngest daughter. Kelly said her daughter was challenged, Lenart worked hard to compensate for her disability and it was a “beautiful school” with Black, Asian, white and Latino students.

“Her blinders were thrown off the minute she went into Lenart,” Kelly said. “She didn't see color, she didn't see genders. It was just, ‘We're here to learn.’ Nobody was better than somebody else.”

But after decades of school choice, more parents see the downside.

Lampkin says she loves Harold Washington Elementary School in Burnside on the South Side. With only 250 students, the teachers know the names of all the students and “their brothers and sisters and their cousins and their moms and dads.”

But Lampkin says she wishes it had a stronger music program and doesn’t like that she has to take her kids out of the school if she wants something extra or special.

“If I want my child to go to a school with language classes, I will have to send my child to Murray Language Academy. If I wanted to send my child somewhere where I know that they would academically excel,” she would have to move to a school like Whitney Young, which has an accelerated middle school program, she said.

To her, that is backwards. Specialty programs need to be available to kids in neighborhoods.

“If you know that [an] area is depressed or they're struggling, they need more support, not less because how are the kids ever supposed to get out of that situation?” Lampkin said. “If they are never exposed to anything else or don't have the opportunities, then how would they know the difference to even achieve or strive for those things?”

Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ.