The future of Chicago Public Schools is in the hands of the Chicago Board of Education, as a critical vote over the district’s new five-year plan is expected.
The 47-page plan was unveiled earlier this week, revealing a list of goals and strategies designed to be implemented by the year 2029.
“The plan addresses historical decisions and missteps in the past that have prevented strategic investments and led to long-standing challenges and opportunity gaps, particularly for Black students, Latinx/e students, students with disabilities and students in temporary living situations, and English learners,” CPS said in a statement.
The district said it wants to redefine student success, moving forward with what it called an “ambitious, equity-driven” vision to close a long-standing opportunity gap.
“This strategic plan is saying, in fact, we are going to organize the work of our district around a very different idea of how we measure student success, how we think about student growth,” CPS CEO Pedro Martinez told NBC Chicago.
Under the plan, the district aims to increase the percentage of students who attend a school in their neighborhood, rather than a highly touted school in a different zone.
Currently, the district said its accountability system ranks and labels schools, “adversely encouraging families to select schools with the highest ratings,” and school resources were based on enrollment.
Under the new plan, schools would no longer be ranked.
“Accountability for student success is shared between the district and the schools,” CPS said.
“We are committing in the plan to equitably, as equitably as possible, distribute resources to make sure with funds we do have control over we are working intentionally to close those opportunity gaps for those students furthest from opportunity,” Martinez said.
Also included in the plan was a decrease in class sizes, particularly for schools with higher needs. They’ll also aim to shift away from standardized test scores, though they acknowledge testing won’t be eliminated due to federal and state requirements.
The Chicago Teachers Union, however, said while the plan “admits that there are disparities across the district,” Martinez’s “policy is to make cuts that make inequity worse not better.”
“The best parts of the district’s Strategic Plan are taken right from our contract proposals, the same proposals the district is actually fighting at the bargaining table,” the union said in a statement. “It’s another case of CEO Martinez telling the people of Chicago one thing and actually doing another.”
On the same day as the board’s vote, the union called for Martinez’s ouster.
“We need a CEO who can truly lead in this moment — a CEO who will focus on raising the revenue needed to fully fund our schools, who will finally turn the page on the shameful days of closures and community disruption,” the union wrote in a letter to families.
The district’s plan does not mention the potential for school closures related to the shift away from selective enrollment, though officials noted it is not to eliminate it.
“There’s only so many slots in selective enrollment schools. We have 20,000 eighth graders that applied to our top five high schools. People ask me, ‘Why can’t you make it easier to get in?’ We have 20,000 students applying. The answer is not create more selective enrollment… that’s the big shift we’re making,” Martinez said.