The U.S. Justice Department opposes the Chicago Public Schools’ bid to be released from the latest version of its 25-year-old desegregation plan, guaranteeing a legal fight and ending the federal government’s decades of silence on the case.
Federal attorneys said “CPS cannot meet its burden” of proving that it is in compliance on integration and equity matters by the end of the current school year, according to documents filed recently in U.S. District Court in Chicago. While the government sometimes has questioned Chicago’s compliance on integration matters in the last two years, this is the first time the U.S. Justice Department indicated it would oppose Chicago’s efforts to be released from court supervision in 2006.
Among the school district’s transgressions outlined by Justice Department attorneys was the school system’s failure to offer any African-American or Latino children a chance to transfer into its largely white schools in the 2004-05 school year before the courts ordered it to do so. The system claimed the white schools had no room, but then, in what federal attorneys described as a “remarkable turn of events,” Chicago administrators found seats in the white schools after being pressured to do so.
The government also found the school district lacking in its efforts to integrate its faculty and principals roster and in its spending on programs to give children in racially isolated schools extra academic help. It also cited problems with access to special education, gifted programs and magnet schools for students learning English.
Chicago school officials strongly disagree, saying in their latest court filings that the government “after two decades of silence, now attempts to micromanage public education in Chicago without any evidence of (racial) discrimination by the board.”
“Any consequences of segregation that may once have existed in the Chicago Public Schools are gone,” the district told the court.
“The board has fostered desegregation to the extent practicable” through its magnet and selective enrollment schools that draw children from across the city and through voluntary transfer programs that allow a small number of African-American and Hispanic youngsters a chance to attend less diverse or better-performing schools outside their neighborhoods.
“At worst, any alleged non-compliance with the (latest desegregation plan) is attributable to the current fiscal crisis, rather than to any intentional discrimination by the board,” the school district said.
Which view will prevail will be decided after extensive hearings scheduled for May before U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras. Kocoras originally planned those hearings for February, but he agreed to delay the process this week because of a school attorney’s pending surgery.
The disagreement stems from a new desegregation plan–called the modified consent decree– hammered out between attorneys from the school system and the federal government in 2003 and approved by Kocoras in March 2004. It was the first time Chicago and the government tinkered with the schools’ desegregation obligations since 1980 when it agreed to a voluntary settlement to avoid being sued for segregating and discriminating against its African-American students.
Since Chicago’s original desegregation plan, the school system’s demographics changed dramatically as the white student population dwindled to under 10 percent and Hispanic children became the fastest growing schools’ ethnic group, comprising about 38 percent of the city’s students this year. These changes caused many, including Kocoras, to question if integration was a realistic goal.
At the same time, on the national level, the era of busing and lawsuits to make sure white and black children sit side by side in the classroom was also ending. Beginning with a pivotal decision involving the Oklahoma City school district in 1991, the courts began releasing school districts from court-ordered busing and integration plans once they had taken all “practicable” steps to eliminate the legacy of segregation. The courts also found that school districts were not responsible for reversing school segregation caused by housing patterns.
Chicago’s latest desegregation plan was supposed to serve as an exit strategy that eventually would free the district from court scrutiny and lengthy reporting on myriad statistics. For most of the last 20 years, Chicago dutifully filed its complicated desegregation reports and the U.S. Justice Department never commented. That hands-off approach ended within two months after the new decree was approved. In the following 21 months, the Justice Department has repeatedly taken Chicago to court for alleged violations.
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lolszewski@tribune.com
