HOW does a city attempt to undo 60 years of racial discrimination? Can integration be successfully accomplished in a school system that has educated generations of children in segregated settings? These are the questions repeatedly asked by the federal government, state government, community leaders and parents about Chicago public schools. For the past 25 years the Chicago Board of Education has been under constant pressure to create an integration plan for Chicago's children. Until recently, it was able to turn aside even half-hearted attempts at integration. Never has the Chicago Board innovatively created plans; it has only reacted to lawsuits and threatened cutoffs of state and federal funds. But within the past two years, these threats and pressures have become more intense, and Chicago's efforts to achieve integration have become more specific, if not necessarily more workable. The magnitude of the problem is suggested first of all by the sheer size of the Chicago school system and its unique racial composition. The 512,000 students in Chicago public schools include only 23.2 per cent who are both white and nonhispanic, and these numbers and percentages change almost daily as whites continue to flee the city, and blacks and Latinos move to Chicago. In addition, the number of Asian children is increasing with 1.6 per cent of students in Chicago schools from this growing minority in 1977. The pattern of segregation goes back over half a century to the time after World War I when blacks first moved to Chicago in large numbers and settled in narrowly restricted areas. By 1921, when Wendell Phillips became Chicago's first black high school, the isolation of the races had become an established fact of the city's life. By the 1930's, three-fourths of the city was under covenants banning the sale of property to blacks, a situation which led inevitably to the formation of ghettos. By 1941, there were 278,000 black people living in an eight-square-mile area, a situation that guaranteed segregation in the schools. And even after 1948, when the courts declared the covenants unconstitutional, the practice continued de facto, thereby perpetuating racial separation.
VICKI GERSON 14/September 1978/Illinois Issues In the late 1950's, Chicago School Supt. Benjamin Willis permitted no student transfers to eliminate overcrowding in the predominantly black schools. Instead, the Chicago Board purchased hundreds of mobile classrooms for these schools, which not only solidified segregation but also eliminated school playgrounds. Supt. Willis rejected even a modest transfer plan in 1963, and the Chicago Board upheld his decision when he threatened to resign. At this time 562 classrooms stood empty in white neighborhoods, while schools in the black ghetto were severely overcrowded, even with the mobile units in use. By the 1970's this situation was exacerbated by the steady growth of the Latino population in the city. Latino barrios, formed by the same practices and policies that had promoted the black ghettos earlier, presented a new and growing element in the city's demographics. And the recent influx of Asians has added a new complexity to the problem. The effort to bring children of diverse backgrounds together in positive ways — learning with each other in class, playing with each other at recess, eating together at lunch — is one which is bound to arouse hostility and resistance, especially in a city with Chicago's separatist tradition. The fact that Chicago's metropolitan racial segregation is the highest of the 10 largest cities in the North suggests the depth of the problem, and the notorious violence that characterizes life in Chicago's public schools is the inevitable result of a half century of geographic segregation and its attendant misunderstandings and prejudices. In the past two years, however, the Chicago school system has been forced to take more decisive steps to insure the integration of its schools. In March 1976 the State Board of Education officially ruled that the Chicago public schools were not in compliance with the Board's Rules Establishing Requirements and Procedures/or the Elimination and Prevention of Racial Segregation in the Schools. Chicago was given 30 days to submit an acceptable plan, but Dr. Joseph Hannon, superintendent of the Chicago public schools, informed the State Board that it was impossible to develop a comprehensive desegregation plan in 30 days. On the 30th day, when no plan was submitted, the State Board placed the Chicago schools on probationary status pending the submission of an acceptable plan. If no such plan were submitted, the State Board threatened to cut off state and federal funds, which amounted to about half of Chicago's $1.2 billion school budget. Under this pressure, the Chicago Board considered several plans, all of them primarily voluntary, involving the use of "magnets," "clusters" and other groupings of schools and programs to encourage the movement of students to achieve racial balance. In the process, a City Wide Advisory Committee (CWAC), composed of 40 representatives from business, finance, education, unions, civil rights groups and other constituencies, was established in the fall of 1976 to generate ideas and policies, and numerous subcommittees and fact-finding study groups were appointed to examine all sides of the issue.
The incentive to create CWAC came from the Chicago desegregation proposal. Equal Education Opportunities Plan, outlined by Hannon in November 1976. The first phase of this plan was initiated in 1976-1977. The major components of this plan were career development centers, to be planned jointly with cooperating businesses, and academic interest centers, to be developed with community input and community participation. After careful study and deliberation, CWAC proposed the Equalizing Educational Opportunities Plan. This detailed and extensive plan called for, among other things, the establishment of magnet schools in all of the administrative districts of the city. It also called for the development of integrated clusters of elementary schools throughout the city, the establishment of a minimum of 15 thematic vocational high schools to provide job-entry skills for various vocations, and an exchange program with suburban schools. Most emphatically, the CWAC proposal called for "mandated compliance" with desegregation guidelines should the voluntary elements of the plan fail to achieve integration. The CWAC plan was submitted to Dr. Hannon but was never formally presented to the Chicago Board for approval. But in April, Hannon asked the'Chicago Board to dismiss Dr. Edward Welling, Jr., the board-appointed project manager of the CWAC committee, and presented the city and State Board of Education with Access to Excellence, a voluntary five-year plan. The Chicago Board fired Welling and adopted Access, but criticism of Access began almost immediately — from blacks who saw it as tokenism, from whites who saw it as unnecessary meddling with the neighborhood school concept, and from supporters and members of the CWAC, who saw it as a wholesale rejection of their efforts and recommendations (see "Chicago's reaction to 'Access'" by Robert McClory starting on page 18 for more detailed reaction.) In any case. Access is, according to Hannon, "a plan that will strengthen the public school system, and the City of Chicago." Hannon has stated that Chicago should strive for a "bottom line of excellence rather than making Springfield happy by moving thousands of children around." He believes an aggressive desegregation plan would "exacerbate" the flight of white and middle-class people from Chicago, and feels that the city's unique character must be respected in any integration plan: "Irrespective of what state guidelines are, we have to look at the demographics of the city." But whether Access will result in compliance with the State Board's Rules, especially in terms of achieving prescribed racial mixes in Chicago's schools, is at least doubtful. The 151-page Access plan to some degree reflects the programs recommended by CWAC, but it falls short of CWAC's goals and omits CWAC's mandatory backups. The desegregation projection for Access is a minimum acceptable level of "10% minority to 90% nonminority or 10% nonminority to 90% minority." This percentage is not the same as the Rules policy of the State Board which states that minority and white students September 1978/ Illinois Issues/ 15 in each school shall be within 15 percent of their district wide enrollment. In addition to its "permissive enrollment program" to allow students to change schools if space is available, Access calls for the implementation of specialized programs at designated schools plus additional specialized schools to encourage racial integration. The total cost of the program, according to Dr. Hannon, will be around $368.6 million over five years with first-year spending estimated at $46 million. Hannon estimates that 120,899 students will participate in integrated programs the first year, 1978-79. By the fifth year, 1983-84, Hannon projects approximately 208,014 students participating in at least one of the integrated programs. (For details of Access programs and enrollment projections, see box.) Despite its numerous programs, Access was severely criticized by a special committee established in January by State Supt. Joseph M. Cronin. The six-member Technical Assistance Committee (TAC) reported to Cronin and the Board that the plan contained no explicit desegregation goals and no actual steps for achieving desegregation. TAC pointed out that the plan has no mandatory backups and that Hannon does not promise to develop such backups if his voluntary plan does not work. The 90-10 ratio used in Access for defining desegregation should be considered unacceptable, according to TAC. "Changing this definition raises the number of students in Chicago purported to be in integrated schools by more than 100 per cent. In fact, by this definition the average white. Latino, and Asian child is already in a desegregated school." TAC concluded that no long-term desegregation would result from Access and that the plan would probably only move about 20,000 students (4 per cent of the enrollment) per year into full-time desegregation programs, resulting at the end of five years in only 100,000 students involved in the plan. TAC also concluded that the cost could be exorbitant, as much as $40,000 per integrated student over five years. TAC also specifically criticized the part-time nature of the academic interest program, which is the second largest element of Access. Other criticisms concerned the monitoring process, the bilingual education program and the advanced placement program. About the only part of the plan that TAC thought would work is the magnet schools, specifically, Dyett Magnet School's elementary program and the Young Magnet School expansion. Even with the unfavorable report of TAC, the State Board voted May 11 to tell the Chicago Board to immediately implement Access for summer school, but to submit by December 1, 1978, a more comprehensive plan to eliminate the deficiencies of Access. The implication is that state funds will be cut off if by the deadline Hannon does not add the following provisions to Access to Excellence: 1. Involvement of all students in full-time and not part-time desegregation. 2. Precise time frames and goals for implementation, especially with regard to bilingual education. 3. Mandatory reassignment of students should voluntary efforts fail to meet desegregation goals. 4. Teacher training and curriculum revision to insure an effective integrated learning program. Hannon seems to believe he has already complied with the Rules and appears undisturbed about the threatened cutoff of funds. "If I had heard it for the first time, I might be tragically worried. We don't need threats," he has said. In the face of Chicago's long history of racial segregation and resistance to change in its housing patterns and school system, it is probably optimistic 16/ September 1978/ Illinois Issues to assume that any voluntary plan will help achieve integration in the city's public schools. Supt. Hannon is gambling that Access to Excellence will be an inducement to change, but most observers doubt that Chicago's situation can be altered by a plan that depends so heavily on the cooperation of a historically divided community. Most parents in the city will no doubt resist sending their children to schools outside their neighborhoods no matter what the educational attractions in these schools may be, and maintenance of the status quo is obviously not consistent with the Rules of the State Board of Education. The authority of the Rules has been challenged by the Aurora East School District 131, and the outcome of that challenge could well affect Chicago's response to the pressures of the State Board. On July 5, 1977, the Aurora East district, with an enrollment of 9,000 students, sued Dr. Croninand the State Board claiming it did not have the authority to forceably integrate Aurora's schools, and Ernest Akemann, chief judge of the 16th Circuit Court, decided January 12 that the State Board did not, in fact, have the authority to enforce its desegregation Rules. The State Board has appealed this unexpected decision to the 2nd Appellate District, and if the ruling is not ultimately overturned, Chicago and other districts in the state could legally avoid compliance with the Board's guidelines. Moreover, the debate over integration comes at a time when taxpayers are in revolt against additional government spending. Since Access to Excellence calls for the building of 20 new elementary buildings and five new high schools at a time when Chicago school population is dropping (from 524,221 students in the fall of 1976 to 512,000 in the fall of 1977), it may be impossible to get the funds that Hannon feels are necessary to implement even his voluntary plan. In short, there are awesome demographic, emotional, legal and economic barriers hindering the achievement of racial integration in the beleaguered Chicago schools. Access to Excellence appears but a small step toward surmounting those barriers. A giant step remains to be taken.
September 1978 / Illinois Issues/17
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