In Chicago, 55 percent of public high school students attend schools outside their neighborhoods. The mobile students are often the better students, who can today apply to a growing array of magnet schools and programs throughout the school district. A series of articles in last month's Catalyst take a close look at the schools left behind. The 12 least popular neighborhood high schools in Chicago are losing 62 to 77 percent of the students in their attendance boundaries and find themselves facing a high concentration of hard-to-teach students. "There are more discipline problems, less support from parents, students are less prepared," explains once principal, and this takes a toll on teachers. From 18 to 28 percent of the students are in special education in these 12 schools and all 12 are on academic probation. In interviews with parents and teenagers, the top 3 reasons for leaving neighborhood schools were: 1) the schools are perceived as gang-infested and dangerous, 2) they lack special vocational programs that will help kids land jobs, and 3) they have poor academic reputations. How to turn neighborhood schools around? Some think the answer is to spend money to recruit better teachers for the neighborhood schools, some say the schools should be shut down and reopened with new staff, and some think that dividing them into smaller, semi-autonomous schools within the same building will do the trick. Others believe that the solution is to add more choices or to impose open admission policies on the city's elite magnet schools. For more, see articles under "High School Choice: The Impact of Student Flight on Schools of Last Resort" in Catalyst: Voices of Chicago School Reform, December 2001.
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