Chicago’s Cancelled Classes Intensify Debate Over What’s Best for Black, Latinx Students

(Bloomberg) -- Classes were cancelled on Friday for the third day in a row in Chicago’s school district after the local teachers union voted in favor of remote learning over in-person classes late on Tuesday. And as the unions, and city and district officials go back and forth on what Chicago Public Schools has called an “illegal strike,” 330,000 students, the majority of whom are Black and/or Hispanic or Latinx, are being left in the balance.

Both sides say they’re looking out for the best interests of their students in the third-largest school district in the nation. Mayor Lori Lightfoot arguing the safest and most equitable thing for disadvantaged students is for them to be in schools, and teachers arguing that being in classrooms would only put the students more at risk for Covid during a surge driven by omicron cases. A plan from the district to shift to case-by-case school reopenings was blasted by the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, saying that would only exacerbate existing inequities.

With a student base that is 89.2% non-White, Chicago’s public schools are among the most diverse in the nation —New York City’s school district’s student base is 85.2% non-White. In Chicago, 36% of students enrolled are Black, according to September data from the district, and an additional 46.6% of students are Hispanic.

School principals “want parents to know we had no part in this decision,” CPAA President Troy LaRaviere said in a phone interview. “They felt like it was setting them up to basically deliver the news that was predictable based on race and class and where your school was.” He said that schools with majority Black student bodies would bear the brunt of the case-by-case decision, given historical understaffing and neglect.

“That fact is a result of the city and the school districts' neglect, inequitable policy, and a precedent going back decades that's yet to be addressed or corrected.”

Neighborhood by Neighborhood and School by School

The disparities among neighborhoods are stark, says Rousemary Vega, a 41-year-old mother of five and a community parent organizer for Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education in Chicago's Humboldt Park neighborhood.  She said schools in predominantly minority communities are often not properly ventilated and children have to learn with windows open in the winter, and that many families “lack the bare minimum” given the cost of masks and hand sanitizer. Black and brown communities also lack sufficient access to testing and vaccine sites, and many parents are asking for more mitigation measures to protect their children, she said.

“I don't think CPS takes that into consideration,” she said. “We don't argue that our children belong in school, it’s where they belong getting an education, but what kind of education are they getting if they are constantly being disrupted by someone being positive in their classroom, if they are constantly being disrupted by shortage of staff?”

President Joe Biden has been advocating for schools to maintain in-person lessons by using test-to-stay methods and encouraging mitigation protocols such as masking, vaccines and distancing. Black and Latinx students in Chicago are less likely than their White peers to be partially or fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to data compiled by CTU, putting them and their families at disproportionate risk to contract the virus. The teachers’ union said on Jan. 6 that it would engage teachers in a door-to-door effort that afternoon to sign families up for Covid testing. 

Meanwhile, the city and the teachers’ union continue to bargain, and Lightfoot said in a statement late on Friday that the day’s talks “remain productive but must be concluded this weekend.”

Continued Closures

On top of safety, Lightfoot said the district is also trying to make up for the learning loss that occurred when classes were fully remote for months in 2020, with about 100,000 mostly poor black and brown children “disconnected and disengaged.”

“We have to make up a lot of ground with them and just when we are starting to do that CTU pulls the rug right out from under them,” Lightfoot said. “Is that right? Is that fair when the data and the science tell us that a different result should follow? It's not.”

The teachers’ union wants to resume in-person teaching, but the immediate focus has to be on safety, says a spokesman for the union.

“This pandemic that is unrelenting, it is especially unrelenting in communities of color who have been taken for a ride in this country for a very long time,” Stacy Davis Gates, vice president of the Chicago Teachers Union, said during a press conference on Jan. 3.  

Students Are Stepping In

As the news of school closures first broke on Wednesday, Chicago students began using their Google classrooms to disseminate information to one another, including details that take-home lunch would still be available to them. A coalition of high school students, called the Chicago Public School’s Radical Youth Alliance, issued on Jan. 6 their own letter to the mayor, as well as to the Chicago Department of Public Health Commissioner Allison Arwady and Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Pedro Martinez.

Catlyn Savado, a high school freshman and Chi-RADS organizer who shared information with classmates when teachers were locked out of their accounts, said that while they miss their friends and teachers, their school's social distancing protocols left them feeling unsafe. Constant upheaval in the past several years has also affected her grades and mental health. The closures during the district’s first week back from winter break follow a delayed and phased-in opening in 2021 as well as a strike in late 2019, before the pandemic began.

“It's like not wanting to go to a job that is treating you unfairly, or that is not acknowledging that you are a human and you have needs,” she said in a phone interview. “That's exactly what going to school feels like. And that's what it felt like last year, right? It didn't even feel like school.”

Savado also said they were frustrated by posturing from officials that points to the ways in which Black and brown children have been disproportionately affected at school. “It's like, ‘Okay, you are the adult, you are leadership, you are at the bargaining table. Please implement that.’ There's constant conversation without any implementation.”

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