Every year as a Chicago Public Schools eighth grade teacher, I am forced to reflect on the memory of my high school application process.
I remember arriving at Lane Tech’s village-sized campus on a Saturday morning for my high school test. Both my parents worked that day. My grandfather dropped me off. It was the support of my family that got me into Lane’s enormous cafeteria.
At that point, I had not thought about the way I was a drop of water in the cavern that is Chicago’s high school process.
A few months later, my results were in. No Lane Tech. No Whitney Young. No Northside College Prep. For me as an eighth grader, this was a personal failure. I had failed to get into one of the “good” high schools.
According to my parents, school was my job. I was a strong student, but those rejections made it clear: The job I had done was not good enough.
I think about how disappointed and confused my 13-year-old self was. I reflect on what I would have wanted to hear in that moment.
I would have wanted to know that opportunities exist at every high school. I would have wanted to know that, though I didn’t get into my top choices, I could still become the first in my family to graduate college out of state and on a full-tuition scholarship.
I currently teach in Logan Square, the neighborhood I grew up in. Every year, I again experience the complex and cutthroat application process each Chicago eighth grader faces. I meet with families that do not understand the selection process and with families that believe that anything other than a “good” school is not an option for their child.
On Friday, students will receive their results. They will be told if the “top schools” find them to be desirable or undesirable. On Monday, I will enter my classroom and repeat the message I give each year to eighth graders:
First, I am proud of you. No high school result will change that. Wherever you go, you can, and will, do well. I am here if you want to celebrate or if you want to cry. Regardless of the high school, I am here to support you. That does not change.
Now, I love my city and the work I do. But this love has required me to reckon with its ugliness.
Chicago has had a dark history with racial segregation. Public schooling here has always been a case of the haves and have-nots, the desirables and undesirables. This is a city where students have protested Willis Wagons, where mothers have gone on hunger strikes for better schools and where a teachers union has been a target due to CPS’ Black Student Success Plan. It is not an accident that Chicago’s top schools are in the more desirable parts of the city away from Black and brown students.
The results students receive today are a product of one day’s test scores and one year’s grades, with a city’s history of educational injustice baked in. Yet, it is these numbers that will determine which doors are open and which doors are closed.
This is an unforgiving system.
I think of a student I taught last year who was devastated by her high school results. She was not accepted into her top schools and felt her dreams of becoming a designer had been derailed. At the time, I felt as though I could not offer any support to counterbalance her disappointment. She was another strong student, convinced that she had failed because she did not get into one of the “good” schools.
I received a quick message from her recently via a current student of mine. The student is enjoying her freshman year and says “hello” and is “way too busy to visit.”
Being “way too busy to visit” is exactly what I want to hear as an eighth grade teacher. This means that she is pursuing opportunities and that her mind is on the possibilities of the future and not on the disappointment of the past.
We often get hung up on futures when it comes to our students. “What comes next?” is on the mind of every eighth grader. There is no changing that.
What we must remind these students of, in their acceptances and rejections, in their celebration and in their grief, is that they are supported. They do not face their futures alone. There is no changing that.
Eder I. Aguilar is a teacher in and from Chicago’s Logan Square neighborhood.
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