The Chicago Public Schools Board of Education voted this week to institute a new admissions policy for their magnet and selective enrollment public schools that will use socioeconomic background, not race, as a key factor in deciding student admissions. At the meeting where the vote took place, Chicago Public Schools Chief Education Officer Ron Huberman nonetheless declared that “the goal is still racial diversity” for CPS schools. But starting now, the public school admissions policy will first look at whether a prospective student has a sibling at the school they apply to and lives near that school. Then, CPS will look at socioeconomic background. For the first time in 30 years, race will not be considered – an outcome that has disquieted education groups and civil rights organizations.

“Our fear is that it will reverse some of the progress CPS had made and racial diversity will decline,” says Anita Maddeli, a staff attorney at the Chicago office of the Mexican-American Legal Defense Fund. “Socioeconomic status alone is not going to get you racial and ethnic diversity,” says Lori Turner, a fellow at the Illinois American Civil Liberties Union. “The best way to get racial diversity is to use race.”

The new admissions policy comes three months after a federal judge lifted a requirement that CPS report to the Federal Justice Department each year to show they were complying with Brown v. Board of Education. Due to Chicago’s notorious history of school segregation, CPS had been under Justice Department supervision since 1980. The new admissions policy is also a response to a 2007 Supreme Court ruling – an opinion that CPS claims effectively prohibited public school systems from using race in school admissions.

The policy is either pragmatic or depressingly defeatist – or maybe both. CPS has decided that due to the alarming lack of white kids in Chicago willing to attend public schools that they are only in the business of integrating magnet and selective enrollment schools. Those schools make up less than 10 percent of the system. And yet, even integrating the select schools is a bridge too far – CPS will only take on socioeconomic segregation, in order to avoid potential lawsuits for having a race-based policy. “Whatever we do, we get litigated,” Huberman lamented at the meeting. “We want to go into these legal waters smartly.”

The Huberman proposal is what you would expect from a public schools chief with a “passion for data analysis.” For example, after the September 2009 murder of CPS high school student Derrion Albert, Huberman unveiled a formula that sifts data on race, grades, school attendance, academic track and home life to determine (by name) the 500 CPS students most likely to be future homicide victims.

The admissions proposal is no less elaborate.  Of the 675 schools in the CPS system, 50 are magnet schools – where enrollment is determined entirely by lottery, not student merit. Under the new policy, if your sibling goes to a magnet school, you automatically get in. Then, if you live close to that magnet school, you enter a proximity lottery. Winners of this lottery get 40 percent of the remaining magnet school spots. Then it gets intricate: the other 60 percent of the slots are determined by socioeconomic factors.

What does this mean? CPS has taken the 874 census tracts in Chicago and evaluated each tract by median income, adult education level, the percentage of single-parent homes, the percentage of owner-occupied homes, and the percentage of children who live in a non-English speaking household. Each of these 874 census tracts is then assigned a score and broken into quartiles. Then each magnet school selects – again, by lottery – an equal number of students from each quartile to fill its remaining slots. Selective enrollment – there are only nine such schools in the whole district – works a little differently: they use student test scores, not a lottery. But the slot breakdown is also based on the same sibling then proximity then census tract quartile system.

Huberman was self-deprecating about the policy’s complexity and stressed that this will only be the policy for the 2010-11 school year. “We hopefully have close to the same minority representation numbers we had under the consent decree,” Huberman told the board. “But this policy only gets us through the next year – we will then re-group, work through the problems and have a more community-driven process.”

However, critics offering testimony at the school board meeting, like the Black Star Project – a Chicago-based advocacy group, wondered how an admissions system can slice and dice the socioeconomic indicators of 874 neighborhoods without factoring in race. CPS is a wholly unique school district not just because of its size – 417,000 students, making it the third largest system in the country – but its socioeconomic and racial composition. Eighty-five percent of all CPS students are federally classified as low-income – meaning they are part of the free or reduced-price school lunch program.

As for race, just eight percent of all CPS students are white (the figure was 18 percent when the consent decree was instituted in 1980). Forty-seven percent of students are African American and 36 percent are Latino, though for the purposes of integration, both groups are simply viewed as minority. Due to the mind-boggling paucity of white students in Chicago who attend public schools (whites make up a 38 percent plurality of the overall city population), CPS and the Justice Department decided three decades ago that it was statistically impossible to integrate all the public schools. Instead, integration would be focused on newly created magnet and selective enrollment schools: these schools had to have between 15-35 percent white students and 65-85 percent minority students.

In lifting the consent decree, Federal District Judge Charles Kocoras ruled that CPS had made a good-faith effort to achieve diversity in these selective schools. “The continual and inalienable traces of an earlier violation,” Koceras wrote, “are too slight to justify continued federal judicial control of public education.” Koceras said in so many words that CPS had nothing to be proud of, but was no longer bad to the point of violating the constitution.

While the canceled consent decree triggered this new admissions policy, the 2007 Supreme Court, 5-4, decision Parents Involved v. Seattle School District is what drives the policy’s substance. In that case, the Court declared unconstitutional Seattle’s use of race as a tiebreaker in deciding who was admitted to their schools. Chief Justice John Roberts famously declared that, ““The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Yet it was Justice Anthony Kennedy’s concurring opinion, not Roberts’ opinion, that controlled the case – and Kennedy ambiguously suggested that, in some instances, public schools can use race. “We disagree with the interpretation that race can’t be used at all,” say Turner of Illinois ACLU. “Kennedy said it could be used if there was a compelling interest.” CPS Chief Counsel Patrick Rocks answer to such arguments is that the Supreme Court only allows an “individualized” use of race and that a “mechanized” use where swaths of students are taken in and out of schools due to their race is now unconstitutional.

Beyond the legal debate, proponents of maintaining a race-based admissions policy say that without one, fewer minorities are likely to attend the city’s best schools. Several magnet schools are located in majority white areas, meaning that of the 40 percent of students selected from the proximity lottery, the majority may be white. A Chicago Tribune study this week found that racial diversity would be lowered in the more neighborhood-oriented admissions approach. “The socioeconomic proposal means that minority students will get [only] the leftover seats after the siblings and neighborhood kids get in,” argued Robert Elchert, the education adviser to Chicago City Council Member Pat Dowell at the school board meeting.  This would lead to the best neighborhoods continuing to have the best schools.

The passionate debate over the magnet schools admissions policy, though, must ultimately return to the lack of white children in Chicago’s school system and the problem of making students of any race seek to enroll in their neighborhood public school. Said Koceras in his ruling: “A public school system which fails to attract a significant number of a segment of its population cannot claim bragging rights by virtue of its success in court.” Phillip Jackson, director of the Black Star Project put it another way at the board meeting. “We’re not testifying here today because your magnet schools are so good – we’re all here because the rest of your schools are so bad.”

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