Christie Thompson
All eyes were on Chicago this week, as 29,000 teachers took to the streets to strike. Reports are coming in of a tentative settlement, which would be welcome news for Chicago teachers and parents. But there’s still one key fact that the settlement is unlikely to effectively address and that was buried in most mainstream media coverage: Chicago has the most segregated school system in the country.
Almost 70 percent of African-American Chicago Public School students attend institutions where over 90 percent of their classmates share their ethnicity. As Chicago Union teachers call for an end to “apartheid-like” disparity, they assert that what happens in Chicago isn’t just a labor issue: it’s a question of racial justice.
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