The CPS shuffle: moving students and money, with no promise of better results

by Josh Dwyer When Chicago Public Schools first announced that it was closing schools, the primary justification it gave was to save money – upward of $500,000 to $800,000 per school. It needed the money to address the looming pension cliff the city is facing next year. When people began questioning those numbers, CPS’s story...

by Josh Dwyer

When Chicago Public Schools first announced that it was closing schools, the primary justification it gave was to save money – upward of $500,000 to $800,000 per school. It needed the money to address the looming pension cliff the city is facing next year.

When people began questioning those numbers, CPS’s story changed – instead of being primarily about cost savings, the school closings were being undertaken to move kids out of the poorest-performing schools in the city.

This argument only had legs for a few days. Opponents of the closings quickly pointed to a study conducted by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, which showed that eight of 10 Chicago students displaced by school closings in the past have transferred to worse-performing schools than the ones they were attending.

So, what has happened since then?

Despite a $1 billion deficit, CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett has said that any school receiving students from closed schools will receive a new library, air conditioning, computer and science technology upgrades, and more access to counseling and social work support.

The price tag: $155 million. Not a small chunk of change.

And those cost savings that were the first reason for the closings? They have decreased by more than $100 million.

According to a recent article in the Chicago Sun Times, CPS Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley blamed the error on old or inexact information, including “outdated surveys of the buildings involved […] and building surveys that only estimated hard construction costs.”

Instead of saving $560 million over 10 years, the district will only save $438 million, or $43.8 million a year – a mere 5 percent of its pension deficit in 2013.

Remember, this doesn’t even include the investments CPS is making in new schools. Subtract $155 million and the district is only saving $283 million from school closings. Not nearly enough to make a dent in its past due bills.

Unfortunately, the city’s financial mismanagement will have an impact on families next school year.  Many parents are afraid that their children will have to walk across violent neighborhoods to go to school, while others are worried that their children will receive a worse  education.

It’s realistic to expect to believe that both of these things will, to some extent, occur.

This bureaucratic shuffle could have been avoided long ago if Illinois or Chicago had given parents the right to send their children to a school of their choice.

Instead of worrying about the financial health of city pension systems, parents benefiting from school choice would have been able to concentrate on what is most important to them – whether or not their child is receiving a quality education.

Now, these parents’ concerns are falling on deaf ears and their children are being treated like interchangeable parts that can be moved from location to location.

This is what happens when an irresponsible government controls the public funding and public provision of education. Let’s separate them and free families from all of these worries.

To learn more about how this might be accomplished, watch these two mini-documentaries about families that have benefited from school choice in Indiana and Wisconsin.