New CPS data: Mayor Lightfoot, Chicago Teachers Union continue to keep dozens of empty, failing schools open – Wirepoints

By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

More than one-third of Chicago’s 473 traditional public schools are currently running half empty or worse, according to 2022-2023 data released in December by the Chicago Public Schools. The city’s 20 most-empty schools are operating at 25 percent or less capacity, with the worst less than 10 percent full.

That absolute failure in efficiency is bad enough, but the situation is even worse considering the dismal student outcomes in those 20 nearly-empty schools. There are just 3.6 students for every school employee – a dream level for educating kids – and yet only 8 out of every 100 students in those schools can read at grade level. 

What are these empty, failing schools doing open? It’s clear the kids aren’t being taught to read or do math. And with so few students, the schools can’t provide a social learning environment nor can they claim to be community hubs. They are also incredibly expensive to operate – 60 percent more than the average CPS school – pushing up Chicago property taxes even higher than they need to be.

There’s absolutely no reason for these schools to exist, yet they do for two reasons: the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) wants them to – think pay, pensions and power – and Illinois and Chicago’s political leadership don’t have the spine to say no.

Chicago can’t close any of the schools above due to a moratorium that won’t end until 2025.

The moratorium originally began as a five-year ban after Rahm Emanuel closed 50 schools in 2013. The moratorium was resurrected in 2021 in the same bill that created, beginning in 2024, an elected school board for CPS.

And knowing the CTU, the moratorium may never end. The union will soon have even more power to keep empty schools open. They’ll have an elected board filled with their hand-picked candidates, and unprecedented new collective bargaining rights and powers granted to them by the “Workers Rights” Amendment. (See Wirepoints’ Amendment 1 webpage here.)

That means schools like Douglass High School, currently the emptiest, failingest school in the district, will remain open. The school has a capacity for 888 students but just 34 attend. That’s a pathetic 3.8 percent of available seats. 

What’s even more laughable, the school has 24 employees, meaning there are 1.4 students for every staff member. That student-to-staff ratio is insanely expensive – Douglass HS spends over $56,000 in operating costs per student. It’s almost like every student has a private tutor.

And yet, not a single Douglass student can read or do math at grade level, according to ISBE’s latest 2022 data. Oh, and the school of 34 students has both a principal and an assistant principal who, combined, cost Chicagoans over $280,000 a year.

It’s a similar story for 1,300-capacity Manley High School, which is just 5 percent filled and just 2.5 percent of its students can read at grade level.

Ditto for Austin High School, with a capacity for almost 1,800 students. It’s just 9 percent filled and just 1 out of every 10 students can read at grade level.

Or look at Raby High School. With 816 available seats but only 140 students, Raby is only 17 percent filled. Its 57 employees (meaning 2.5 students per staff member) contribute to the school’s costs of $30,900 per student. Yet all that money doesn’t change the school’s dismal results. Just 2 percent of students can read at grade level and not a single one is proficient in math. Presiding over that failure are an interim and an assistant principal, costing a combined $270,000 a year.

And if you’re wondering why we don’t focus on math grades, that’s because they are near-universally worse than reading scores. We covered those outcomes in greater detail in our statewide report: Poor student achievement and near-zero accountability: An indictment of Illinois’ public education system.

CPS’ failures

We’ve focused on the worst 20 schools because they bring to life to what extremes the Chicago Teachers Union will go to keep schools open, and just how weak this and previous city administrations have been regarding the interests of parents and students.

But the problem is far larger when you look at all the schools that are operating at less than 50 percent. Exactly 170 of Chicago’s 473 stand-alone “traditional” (non-charter, non-contract) schools, or 36 percent, are less than half-full. That’s up from last year, when 32 percent were less than half-full.

Ignoring the failed outcomes that we’ve covered in detail (here and here and here), there’s a massive waste of taxpayer funds in keeping these schools at suboptimal capacity. In 2022/2023, the Chicago Public Schools will spend nearly $29,000 per student once all local, state and federal dollars are added up (it’s the district’s entire spend on operations, debt and capital).

That’s up 40 percent from just 4 years ago, when the district spent $21,000 per student.

The increased spending by the billions should have Chicagoans and state taxpayers angry, but it’s even worse than that. Their fury should be compounded by the 116,000 drop – about 27 percent – in student enrollment over the past 20 years. In 2003, the district had 438,000 students, but today that number has dropped to 322,000 (see appendix). Students and families are fleeing the district, and yet local and state governments keep dumping more money into the system.

And all for worse and worse results. Just 11 out of every 100 black students in CPS could read at grade level in 2022 and for Hispanics it was only 17 of every 100. For the entire district, just 20 out of every 100 students could read at grade level. (The results for math are significantly worse across the board.)

At this point, whether Chicago closes its empty schools or dramatically reorganizes them no longer matters…the system simply can’t and won’t teach kids. It’s content to just graduate them and move on, much like it has been doing since the 1970’s. 

Defenders of the status quo in education like to claim that outcomes will be far worse for students if they are given school choice. For Chicago’s children – and especially those thousands trapped in empty schools – it’s hard to imagine anything worse than their current plight.

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Appendix.

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