Chicago public schools and gentrification

Here is an article about reviving Chicago Public Schools as opposed to jettisoning them. The initial reader question (isn't the system so bad we should just get rid of it?) is silly. It clearly comes from the perspective of someone coming from outside the city and the school system, and probably rather scornful toward the mass of low-income city folk. Furthermore, it's a typical case of worshiping the new. If the reader's idea of replacing CPS with a whole new system were to pass, why would we believe that a so-called new system would be any different, given that it would be working in the same city, the same buildings, the same neighborhoods, with the same parents, students, and many of the same teachers? And wiping out all the pre-existing infrastructure and organization would require a needless rebuilding of things.

The article's answer though, that schools can be improved with a committed group of parents, is inspiring. I know it to be true, because my mother's participation in my high school led to concrete improvements in teaching content and other areas.

Here's a second article, touching on the ethical concerns of a gentrifying school or neighborhood. The cited school, Nettelhorst, is in my old Chicago neighborhood. During my childhood this area was a sort of down-and-out mix of vagrants, immigrants, poor migrants from West Virginia and the southern US, and some wealthy people living in isolated condo buildings. I was witness to the neighborhood's transition to a shiny, wealthy, mainly white area. Despite the evident improvements in many types of infrastructure and commercial enterprise, we lost a lot of what we were, and in certain aspects the neighborhood is a crappier place to live than it was before (fewer public resources, colder bourgeois attitudes, drunken yuppy revelers peeing and littering everywhere). But the article does a fair job of weighing the advantages of an improved school and a local student populace, with the ugly pushing out of poorer, prior residents of the neighborhood and students of the school.