By Emily Peiffer and Anna-Lisa Castle, How Housing Matters, August 21, 2019
Chicago is starkly segregated by race and income. But the city’s schools are even more segregated than its neighborhoods, and school segregation persists even in more residentially integrated areas. For students, this can perpetuate vast disparities in education resources and hinder children’s opportunities and well-being.
This disparity was clear in Chicago’s Near North neighborhood, where two public schools sat just one mile apart but looked very different. Ogden International School, in the city’s wealthy Gold Coast neighborhood, served a largely affluent and ethnically diverse—but plurality white—student body. At the neighboring Jenner Academy of the Arts, located where the Cabrini-Green public housing complex once stood, nearly every student was black and from a low-income household.
The schools also faced opposite challenges: Ogden was overenrolled and Jenner was underenrolled. Ogden attracted students with its prestigious K–12 International Baccalaureate curriculum, but overcrowding strained its facilities. And, like many other Chicago public schools educating low-income students of color, Jenner’s low enrollment numbers meant the school received less aggregate funding under the student-based budgeting model used by Chicago Public Schools (CPS), which affects the resources the school could provide for its students.
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