Chicago Public Schools Near the Bottom

The Chicago Sun-Times reports on how bad the Chicago public schools are:

Chicago public school kids generally are doing worse in reading and math than their big-city brethren, and that includes middle-class students who have been courted by the system for the last 10 years, new national test results indicated Thursday.

Compared to 10 other big-city districts that volunteered to give their students the National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, Chicago's results were far from stellar this year.

Chicago's average scores were second-worst among 11 districts in fourth-grade math; fourth-worst in both eighth-grade math and fourth-grade reading; and in the middle of the pack, at sixth-place, in eighth-grade reading.

Why have high property taxes if you have bad public schools? Maybe it's time to shut down a failing system.