CPS and the city of Chicago must accept corporate culpability for cultivating the conditions wherein majority Black and low-income school populations are the very same populations that are most vulnerable to the omicron variant, gun violence, police violence, asthma, joblessness, underemployment, homelessness, school closures, opioid overdose, infant mortality, maternal morbidity, cancer, heart disease, diabetes, voter suppression and everything else ailing this city.
Implementing metrics to temporarily convert individual schools to remote learning doesn’t fully address the larger systemic issues at hand. Black poor students, teachers and their families are not only disproportionately endangered by a return to in-person instruction, but they’re also disproportionately disrupted by remote learning due to things such as internet and childcare insecurity. It’s a Catch-22 situation.
If Lightfoot and CPS are going to implement metrics to do anything, they ought to be implementing metrics to eradicate childhood poverty. There can be no safe return to schools for students living in unsafe homes and communities. As long as slums exist, slum schools — whether physical or virtual — will persist in producing a permanent undereducated underclass.
On this King Day, Chicago, let us not forget that schoolchildren here inspired him to spend his final years organizing to abolish poverty and all the immoralities that come with it. So that no child would have to grow up in the type of housing he moved his children into on the West Side of Chicago.
The assignment he left us was clear, revolutionaries. Now it is up to us to do the work.