The Problem
The Crisis In Urban Education
In the United States today inequity traces racial, class and regional lines. The educational disparities stemming from such inequity grow increasingly pronounced, bringing us to the present moment of crisis in urban education:
- Today, nine-year-olds growing up in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities.
- Those who do graduate will, on average, read and do math at the level of eighth graders in high-income communities.(1)
- And while affluent schools with few minority students graduate nearly 100% of incoming ninth graders, schools with high-minority populations often graduate fewer than half of their ninth graders four years later.(2)
The problem is most visible in the public school systems of the largest urban centers. Our program targets students in Chicago Public Schools (CPS), the nation’s third-largest school system, including more than 600 schools and serving 431,000 students(3):
- The average ACT score for CPS students is 6 points lower than that of their west-side suburban peers at Oak Park and River Forest, and nearly 10 points lower than that of their north-side suburban peers at New Trier.(4)
- Approximately half of the students who enter CPS make it to graduation, and only one third of these will then enroll in a 4-year college in the following year.(5)
- A child growing up in Englewood is seven times less likely to graduate from college than a child growing up in Lincoln Park, Chicago.(6)
Statistics such as these can bring a sense of hopelessness to the education reform debate. Oftentimes foundations, organizations, and governmental agencies focus any and all of their resources exclusively on early elementary education because the student trends are seen as unalterable once high school begins. Because of this mindset, urban high school students are left with even fewer resources, support, and guidance in the years immediately before graduation—a time when they are most in need of support.
1.National Assessment of Educational Progress, as cited by Teach for America.
2.University of the State of New York, The State Education Department, “Statewide Profile of the Educational System” June 2002.
3.Chicago Public Schools, 2003.
4.Illinois State Board of Education, 2003.
5.US Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, and the Chicago Postsecondary Transition Project, University of Chicago, April 2006.