From the Chicago Tribune:

Twenty years of reform efforts and programs targeting low-income families in Chicago Public Schools has only widened the performance gap between white and African-American students, a troubling trend at odds with what has occurred nationally.

Across the city, and spanning three eras of CPS leadership, black elementary school students have lost ground to their white, Latino and Asian classmates in testing proficiency in math and reading, according to a recent analysis by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.

Even for schools so often weighed down by violence, poverty and dysfunction in their neighborhoods, news of this growing deficit was surprising to researchers considering the strides African-American students had made nationally over the same period.

“It has certainly been shocking to us to discover there has been progress in some areas but without equity progress not shared equally among all the students,” said Marisa de la Torre, a researcher on a recent report by the consortium that examined two decades of changes within CPS. “You don’t really want to leave one group of students behind.”

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