Chicago Valedictorians Struggle to Stay Competitive

Chicago Reporter, The, May, 2001 by Sarah Karp

Vallas hopes that baccalaureate programs will eventually be operating in racially isolated schools such as Austin Community Academy High School, at 231 N. Pine Ave. on the West Side, where 99 percent of the students are black. Last year, 50 of 1,069 students took the ACT; their average score was 14.8.

"These were remedial schools," Vallas said. "We are trying to break that mold."

Northwestern University education professor and longtime researcher G. Alfred Hess Jr. said the AP classes, regional magnet schools and baccalaureate programs are good first steps toward keeping the best students in their neighborhood schools.

But engaging the brightest students will be a challenge unto itself, he added, because it is tougher to reform high schools than elementary schools. "High schools are big bureaucracies that are hard to move," Hess said.

On Target

One morning in late March, Alam, a thin, unassuming young woman in khaki pants and a zip-up gray sweatshirt, recalled how she got on the path to becoming a valedictorian.

In eighth grade, she enrolled in a special accelerated science program, she said. That qualified her to take an advanced biology class in her freshman year that most students typically take in their junior year, if at all. An "A" put her in the running to be valedictorian because it was weighted more heavily toward her grade point average. "The teacher of the biology class told me I could become valedictorian," Alam said. "She gave me confidence."

Alam's experience is no surprise to Tammy Johnson, program director of the Oakland, Calif.-based ERASE Initiative, a national public policy program that works on issues of race and public education.

Often, the road to valedictorian for white and Asian students begins in middle school, where they are challenged by harder courses, Johnson said. And in high school they get more opportunities to take "weighted" honors classes.

"Students are still tracked based on color," she added. "They are often put in low level classes based on the whims of an administrator."

A March 2000 ERASE Initiative report, "Facing the Consequences: An Examination of Racial Discrimination in U.S. Public Schools," compared the number of black and Latino students enrolled in AP courses with their numbers in nine school districts. The report does not include Chicago, but in the cities studied, "Black[s] or Latinos or both were underrepresented in these gateway classes, [and] whites were overrepresented," the report's authors wrote. For example, 55 percent of Boston students are black, while African Americans make up 27 percent of the students in AP classes.

DePaul's Radner said that historically the Chicago Public Schools' magnet programs have been used to attract white students, leaving others to languish in poorly funded neighborhood schools.

But the system's move to bring exemplary programs to neighborhood schools "gives me some hope," she said.

In cities like Chicago, students are also tracked by the school they attend, said Gary Orfield, a former education and political science professor at the University of Chicago who studied the city's schools in the 1980s. He is now a professor of education and social policy and co-director of the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass.