Millions of dollars fail to brighten dismal academic picture at troubled Chicago high schools

The Chicago Tribune reports:

For at least 25 years, Chicago's Bowen High School has endured tumultuous and often disheartening change, with educators trying one reform after another to improve dismal academic performance at the South Chicago neighborhood school.

Chicago Public Schools tried a "school-within-a-school" plan in the 1990s, creating small schools within the massive red-brick building. Then came intervention teams to guide educators, and a "redesign" that closed Bowen in favor of four separate high schools that operated within its building for many years.


Next came a curriculum overhaul, followed by the four schools becoming one again. After that, Bowen was awarded nearly $4 million in federal school improvement grants to transform itself with strategies that included extending school hours, creating literacy programs and providing extra instruction in math.

Yet the school's academics remain abysmal, demonstrating the difficulty of rescuing places like Bowen, one of 17 neighborhood high schools identified by a Tribune analysis as being among Chicago's most underused and underperforming — "shrinking schools" that are shortchanging students who deserve better.

Despite the hefty investment of taxpayer dollars, private foundation funds and countless hours of work, Bowen produces rock-bottom scores on state exams and other academic measures. And with enrollment dwindling to about 300 students, most of them African-American, in a cavernous building CPS says is suited for 912, alumni and other supporters fear Bowen could be shut down after a moratorium on school closings ends next year.

There's more:

Eleven of the 17 underenrolled and underperforming schools identified by the Tribune received grants totaling $59.8 million, with awards ranging from $2.4 to $5.8 million, usually over a three-year period. Bowen's initial grant was $3.45 million over three years. The school later got an additional $500,000 for a fourth year to help sustain reforms, according to CPS.

Very few kids at those schools have been able to meet Illinois' academic standards in reading and math, based on results from last spring's SAT college entrance exams given to juniors as well as average ACT scores for the graduating class of 2017. And the vast majority of the students have not been considered prepared for college and work — a chief state and federal education goal. In Bowen's case, not one student tested on the SAT met the academic standards, state data show.

You'll want to read the entire article and wonder are government schools the answer for Chicago residents? You can't say they haven't been tried.