Public schools not ready for reform. “The ink on President Bush’s signature was barely dry [on the No Child Left Behind act] when Illinois and Chicago school officials began working to ensure that droves of parents would not move their children” from bad public schools to better ones, writes Alexander Russo in Catalyst Chicago (September). “As enacted, the choice requirement created the possibility that low-performing students could push their way into popular and selective schools or even bump higher-achieving students out of line.” Over a four-month period, from March to late July, state legislators, the state board of education, and the Chicago Public Schools executed a dizzying series of maneuvers that succeeded in chiseling the number of elementary schools eligible for choice students from 390 to 262 to 179 to 50. Russo quotes Sarah Vanderwicken of the Chicago Lawyer’s Committee for Civil Rights Under Law: “They’re making up a lot of parameters and assumptions that aren’t in the act.”
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Twenty years on the wrong track. A team from the Sinai Urban Health Institute at Mount Sinai Hospital has found that black people and poor people have death rates more than double those of white people and rich people–and the disparity is growing (Public Health Report, September-October 2001). “From 1980 to 1998, the black:white ratio for all-cause mortality increased by 57% to 2.03. From 1979-1981 to 1996-1998, the low-income:high-income rate ratio for all-cause mortality increased by 56% to 2.68….Racial and economic disparities increased for almost all measures of mortality and morbidity used in this study.”
