When 10-year-old Cadence Silas says she’s bored in class and that her teacher spends too much time trying to control the kids, her father’s jaw tightens.
Charles Silas says he remembers feeling the same way when he was in school and that he wants something better for his children.
“They get straight A’s, but they are not being challenged,” Silas says of his daughter and his 12-year-old son Daniel.
Cadence and Daniel go to Johnnie Colemon Elementary in West Pullman on the Far South Side. Silas’ youngest son has a disability and goes to a school with a special program.
Colemon is a solid neighborhood school, but student performance levels range widely. Silas says teachers try to keep his bubbly girl and quieter son engaged, but it often feels like they are juggling too much.
“It is close to 30 kids in the class, and they don’t get enough attention,” he says. “All the attention goes to the kids who need more assistance.”
Silas and his wife want to get Cadence and Daniel into a gifted or classical elementary school. These schools offer accelerated classes and enrichment. They also set up students to get into Chicago’s elite test-in high schools, which are among the top performers in the city and among the best in the state. So far, they’ve yet to land coveted spots.
Last year, the Chicago Board of Education announced plans to reexamine the admissions process that determines who can enter the Chicago Public Schools’ test-in schools and to prioritize neighborhood schools over so-called schools of choice, like selective enrollment test-in schools and charter schools.
That’s prompted a great deal of attention about how this might affect prestigious high schools such as Walter Payton College Prep and Northside College Prep.
But not as much attention has focused on the schools that often feed those high schools — CPS gifted elementary schools and programs. CPS has 15 regional gifted centers and seven “classical” schools, which together enroll 4% of the public school system’s total of about 323,000 students.
Students admitted to an elementary school with a gifted program are three times more likely to get into one of the city’s 11 test-in high schools than students who go to nonselective neighborhood elementary schools, a WBEZ analysis of CPS data found. These students not only get an advanced education, but also are set up for a more advanced high school experience.
And it starts with an admissions process that gives a high-stakes test to 4-year-olds.
CPS officials won’t release data that would show how many students can access these gifted programs or would show their racial and socioeconomic backgrounds. But using demographic and admission data, a WBEZ analysis found that only 3% of CPS low-income elementary school students were enrolled last year in the programs. Three percent of Latino students and 5% of Black elementary school students were in these classes. That compares with 12% of white students and nearly 14% of Asian American elementary school students in the programs.
Writing in 2018 about these disparities, Lillian Lowery, the late vice president of the Education Trust, said on the education news website The 74 that if disparities aren’t eliminated, “We will continue to squander the powerful potential of too many truly gifted students of color and students from low-income families — not because they couldn’t handle the challenge, but because we never gave them the opportunity to even try.”
Michael Petrilli, president of the Fordham Institute, a think tank that is an advocate of school choice, sees such disparities in gifted programs across the United States.
“We need to do a much better job of building a wider, more diverse pipeline of advanced learners starting as early as possible,” Petrilli says. “If all you do is wait until it’s time for the admissions process in eighth grade to decide who gets into these high schools, it’s too late.”
Dad: Parents need CPS test info sooner
Silas lives in West Pullman in an area that’s mostly low-income but has pockets of middle-income families. He works two jobs. His wife also works. But Silas says he makes every assembly at school and all sports games.
When Silas’ son was ready for kindergarten, he and his wife knew he was bright. They didn’t want him at the school down their block because it had low test scores.
As someone who attended CPS schools, he knew about gifted programs. But he didn’t know children could get tested at 4 — nearly a year before starting school.
“That information should be somewhere big on CPS’ website,” Silas says. “If I would have known, I would have definitely had them tested.”
One reason for the disparities in access to CPS gifted programs stands out: Performance on just one test determines whether a child will get a spot — and few students ever take the exam.
That’s because the onus is on parents to take their child to a single testing site in the fall prior to the school year in which they are seeking admission. The greatest number of seats are available for kindergarten.
This is the worst way to assess students for gifted education, according to Scott Peters, director of research for NWEA, which creates student assessments.
“A single data point in time, especially if it requires any kind of family initiative, where I have to go out of my way to sign my kid up or take him or her to a testing center on a testing date, was a really common and really bad practice,” Peters says, noting that most school districts, including New York City’s, no longer do that.
Testing nearly a year before a child enters kindergarten is especially unfair because it requires parents to know and understand the school system before being part of it, Peters says.
“It’s hard to design a practice that was going to be more inequitable in its outcomes,” he says, calling the outcome “completely predictable.”
Few tested in some communities
Just 9% of incoming kindergartners get tested. And 4-year-olds in Chicago’s poorest, majority Black and Latino ZIP codes rarely get tested.
Only 1% of incoming kindergartners were tested in the ZIP code that includes most of West Englewood on the South Side. The same percentage were tested in the West Side ZIP code that includes West Garfield Park and parts of East Garfield Park, Humboldt Park and North Lawndale.
But one-quarter of incoming kindergartners in the more affluent and more heavily white North Side ZIP code that includes Lincoln Park were tested. And nearly half were tested in a ZIP code that includes part of the affluent South Loop.
Even some parents who have gotten their children tested question it. Melissa Trini Alvarado de Leon says it took a lot of coaxing to get her 4-year-old son to go with a stranger to take the oral exam.
“It is not a very long test, so they have to shine right away, or else they will not get in,” Alvarado de Leon says. “It is a lot to ask of a 4-year-old.”
Alvarado de Leon grew up in Chicago and knew about the gifted programs. But she says a lot of the immigrants who live in her Logan Square neighborhood don’t know.
The Illinois Association for Gifted Children and experts urge school districts to use multiple measures to identify students for gifted education. They also say school districts should consider universal testing. When one unidentified district described by researchers as one of the country’s largest and most diverse tested all second graders — rather than only those recommended by parents or teachers — the number of students identified as gifted increased, and the newly identified students were disproportionately low-income and Black or Latino, according to a 2015 study.
Some CPS parents who defend selective schools worry that their bright children will get lost in neighborhood schools that often are juggling students with many needs.
One girl, flanked by her father, told a Board of Ed meeting that she attended her neighborhood school for a time but was so unhappy there that her parents allowed her to transfer back to a gifted school, even though it meant driving her three hours a day.
Students and parents also point out that these schools are among the most highly ranked, not only in the city, but also among the relatively few islands of racial integration in an otherwise highly segregated school system.
Silas says he’s skeptical that even strong neighborhood schools will be able to support above-average students. He says his family generally likes Colemon School, that it has a lot going for it — low student mobility, low teacher absences and a principal who’s been there for more than six years.
Still, Silas had Daniel tested for a gifted program in third grade but he didn’t get a spot. Now, he’s hoping to send him to an accelerated seventh and eighth grade program.
Silas says he gave CPS a grade of C for a recent poll overseen by Public Agenda, a nonpartisan organization focused on researching challenges facing democracy that collaborated with the Chicago Sun-Times and WBEZ for the survey.
He says he doesn’t think his children are being failed completely. But he also doesn’t think they’re being given access to the best education possible.
Chicago’s most marginalized students have little chance of getting in to CPS’ elite high schools
A student’s elementary school is a key predictor of who gets in to a test-in high school, WBEZ found. Students from mostly low-income and Black neighborhood schools rarely get in to these high schools.
Charese Munoz says she eels lucky her son goes to Whitney Young Magnet High School, one of Chicago’s top test-in high schools. But it frustrates her that so few of the students she teaches at her neighborhood elementary school in Austin get in to high schools like Whitney Young.
Marc C. Monaghan / WBEZ
Antonio goes to Whitney Young Magnet High School on the Near West Side. It’s one of the Chicago Public Schools’ top-performing selective-enrollment high schools.
But as a teacher on the West Side at Spencer Technology Academy, a neighborhood elementary school in Austin, it pains her that so few of her students can get in to a high school like Whitney Young. The assigned neighborhood high school for Spencer students is among the 5% lowest-performing schools in Illinois, though most students choose a charter or another CPS-run school.
“I have a good amount of students every year, who, when I ask, ‘Where did you get accepted?’ I’m, like, ‘ugh,’ ” Munoz said. “I know they should be at different types of more-diverse, more-resourced high schools, but they didn’t get accepted.”
There’s an ongoing debate in Chicago about the future of the city’s 11 test-in, selective-enrollment schools. Last winter, Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Board of Education said they want to prioritize neighborhood schools and move away from a system of school choice that includes selective-enrollment schools, magnets and charter schools. The board is expected to propose changes this summer to the admissions process for these selective schools to try to make them more equitable and accessible.
This past spring, Johnson wrote to Illinois Senate President Don Harmon, D-Oak Park, pointing to a decline in the numbers of Black, Latino and low-income students at Chicago’s highest-performing test-in schools and saying that “is not a system that reflects my values as mayor, or our values as a city.”
And students from low-income families are also underrepresented. Seventy-six percent of CPS students are considered low-income, while 46% of students at selective schools are from low-income families, according to state data.
A student’s elementary school is a key predictor of who gets in to a selective-enrollment high school, a WBEZ analysis found.
Students from mostly low-income and Black neighborhood elementary schools like Spencer have almost no chance of getting in to the city’s top five selective schools. Only 1% of eighth graders were offered a seat at one of these elite schools in the past three years.
Elementary schools where more than half of the students aren’t from low-income families — many with significant white or Asian American populations — saw almost one-quarter of their students admitted to the most elite high schools. And one of five students admitted to a top CPS high school didn’t attend a CPS elementary school.
“Much of these disparities root back to just differences in socioeconomic status,” said Michael J. Petrilli, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institute who is president of the Fordham Institute, a think tank that is an advocate of school choice. “Black and Latino families are much, much, much more likely to be poor and especially in deep poverty than white and Asian students. And, especially in some of these cities, there’s not that many middle-class white families left, and those that remain tend to be upper-middle-class.”
From the earliest grades, there’s a wide gap in performance in school, according to Petrilli, that some call the achievement gap and others call an opportunity gap.
There are only about 165 public test-in high schools in the United States, most of these in Midwestern cities and on the East Coast, according to the Fordham Institute.
Undercutting CPS’ advantages
Across the country, other school districts have tried to improve access to elite high schools in recent years. Thomas Jefferson High School in northern Virginia, ranked among the best in the country, took steps in 2020 to increase diversity that included eliminating the use of standardized tests. It now admits top students from every middle school as part of its admissions process.There’s also more attention going to the demographics of gifted and talented programs in elementary schools as they prepare students for selective schools, according to Halley Potter, director of PK-12 education policy for The Century Foundation, which calls itself a “progressive, independent” think tank.
CPS’ selective-enrollment schools have some advantages over other test-in schools around the country. For 70% of the seats, CPS factors in the socioeconomic status of the neighborhood where an applicant lives. This system was devised to maintain diversity after racial quotas were abandoned after the lifting of a federal desegregation consent decree in 2009. The Century Foundation helped CPS devise this admission system.
Six of Chicago’s selective-enrollment schools serve almost all Black or Latino students, making the demographics of CPS’ 11 schools more reflective of the school system than test-in schools in other cities, according to a 2019 report by the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C., think tank.
But WBEZ’s analysis also found that elements of the admissions process meant to make it more fair are undercut by a provision that benefits the most-advantaged students. That provision distributes the top 30% of selective seats to the top scorers. Looking at the top five schools, 75% of those seats went to students living in the city’s wealthiest areas, the analysis found.
Pedro Martinez, CPS’ chief executive officer, suggested changing that provision a few years ago but never went through with doing so, though he implemented universal access to the high school admissions test in 2022. Now, all CPS eighth graders take the entrance exam and do so at their own schools, rather than have to qualify for the exam and go to a testing center on a Saturday.
Big picture, the Chicago Board of Education and others are questioning whether separate schools or programs are really the best approach for high-achieving students.
“Should we tinker with the admissions system or change the whole structure,” Potter said. “Those are the conversations we are having.”
Janice Jackson, who was CPS’ CEO from 2017 to 2021, tried to reduce the “be-all and end-all” attitude about selective high schools, pushing to bring International Baccalaureate, Advanced Placement and other specialty programs to more high schools.
But alumni, parents and some Chicago City Council members blasted the Board of Ed for suggesting that changes might be coming to these schools, saying that would destroy what’s “working.” The Illinois Legislature nearly passed a bill to prevent changes to their admissions policies and budgets until a new, partially elected board takes over in 2025.
To stop that bill, Harmon asked Johnson to write a letter pledging not to close any selective-enrollment schools, though it doesn’t appear that doing so ever was even being considered. Johnson also committed to ensuring that testing remains part of the admissions process.
For some students, getting in to a selective-enrollment high school is the pinnacle of years of work.
Brianna Ibrahim, a child of immigrants, got straight A’s at her neighborhood elementary school and went to an after-school program twice a week to prepare for the admissions test. When she opened her acceptance email and saw Northside College Prep, her mother was ecstatic. It meant everything to make her parents proud, she said.
At Spencer, Munoz said many of her students aren’t in the running to get a spot at a selective high school and don’t worry about that. But she said she always has some students who are “brilliant” and would benefit greatly by going to a high school where they’d be around other high achievers who can push them.
But few of them, Munoz said, ever get that chance.
