The top brass at Chicago Public Schools seemed broadsided by news of the district’s latest enrollment — a plunge of 10,247 children to 330,411 students. New Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez said he “would have never imagined seeing this steep of a decline.” CPS Board Vice President Sendhil Revuluri described the enrollment plummet as “kind of a bucket of cold water.”
Yes, it’s a hard slap in the face for CPS higher-ups. But it’s a blow that’s been delivered year after year for nearly two decades.
No one at CPS should be surprised that enrollment has been spiraling down at a rate of — not thousands — but often tens of thousands of fewer students every year. Last year, enrollment dropped by 14,498 students. Martinez has a good gauge for just how precipitously enrollment has fallen through the years. In 2003, when he was CPS CEO Arne Duncan’s chief financial officer, the district had 434,000 students.
So, from 2003 to today, CPS has shrunk by more than 103,000 students. That’s like losing the entire population of South Bend, Indiana.
This is an existential crisis for CPS.
Shrinking enrollment creates underused schools that burden a neighborhood rather than serve its kids. Taxpayer money gets wasted on heating and maintaining buildings that are largely empty. And because the district distributes funds to schools based on their enrollments, half-empty schools get less money, which leads to an increasingly bare-bones curriculum at those schools. Parents get fed up with the lack of a quality education their children are getting, move away, and the vicious cycle continues.
More than half of CPS schools are underutilized, according to district data for the 2020-2021 school year. The district is cash-strapped and lacks the wherewithal to keep half-empty or mostly empty buildings operating. And given the enrollment tailspin, expect the number of underused schools to grow. Things are only going to get worse.
Martinez returned to Chicago after spending several years running public schools in San Antonio. On the job for about a month, he’s had to cope with keeping schools open amid the pandemic and a Chicago Teachers Union driven by politics rather than the welfare of students. Shrinking enrollment, however, may be his toughest challenge.
Tough, yes. But not impossible.
The right response — the only response — to enrollment plunges is to right-size the district’s infrastructure so that the finite resources of CPS can be directed to the core mission — giving children the quality education they deserve.
That means closing mostly empty schools and repurposing those buildings into uses that contribute to the community. It means relocating teachers from those buildings to schools with robust enrollments, so that class sizes at those schools can be optimized. And it means holding the line against the CTU, which has opposed any and all school closings without regard to logic.
We still remember when the district prepared the close of John Hope College Prep High School on the South Side in 2019. At the time, Hope did not have a single student. And yet, CTU denounced CPS’ move, saying: “Our union contends that no school should ever be closed in the city of Chicago, which is an action that will not only put student safety and academics at risk, but also further destabilize our neighborhoods.” CTU wanted to keep open a school with no students. It’s impossible to fathom that kind of reasoning.
Except when you realize that the union’s motives were solely political and self-serving. Union leadership understands that closing schools is a political minefield for City Hall and CPS. Then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel took a political body blow in 2013 when he closed nearly 50 elementary schools suffering from shrinking enrollment. For months, parents protested. CTU seized the moment, calling the mayor’s decision “a real horror for people.”
The politics of school closings explains why the General Assembly has effectively tied CPS and Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s hands on the issue. Slipped into the legislation that created the framework for an elected school board at CPS was a moratorium on school closings until 2025, when elected school board members will take office. That moratorium won’t become effective until next June, but a measure sponsored by state Rep. Kam Buckner, a Chicago Democrat, would make the moratorium on school closings immediate.
Sure, lawmakers are capitalizing on the unpopularity of school closings. But what they don’t realize is that CPS cannot afford inaction when it comes to the severity and scale of its dwindling enrollment. It’s an urgent problem, with the health and future of CPS and the students it educates at stake. Closing schools is political quicksand, we agree. But there’s a way to do it right. Involve and engage the communities that surround underused schools in the process of consolidation. Give parents and citizens a seat at the table, and get their input. Allow them a say in crafting solutions.
A primary reason why parents are taking their kids out of CPS schools and enrolling them in private schools or schools in the suburbs has to do with how those parents assess the quality of education at CPS, and the district’s future. Chicago mother Kristin Cunningham told the Tribune she enrolled her son in a private school this year instead of staying with CPS because “the public school system in Chicago is slipping backward.”
That’s a sentiment Martinez and his team cannot ignore. If parents had confidence in CPS, they’d stay. That confidence can be renewed if the district makes the right — and yes, tough — choices about right-sizing school infrastructure. The alternative — to do nothing — will only further imperil CPS, and in turn our city. After all, nothing is more important for Chicago’s future than its schools.
