Same City, Different Classrooms: Educational Inequality in Chicago
By Alyssa Carino
AI disclosure: This project incorporated AI tools for select components. Summarize Wise Custom GPT was used to generate the summary, Use AI and Canva AI Image Generator was used for image creation, and Studio AI was used to produce the video content.
Summary: Chicago schools show major inequality, with underfunding and resource gaps harming low-income students’ achievement and graduation rates. Conditions like poor infrastructure further disrupt learning. Programs like Sustainable Community Schools help by providing resources and support. Experts stress meeting basic needs, increasing community involvement, and promoting diversity to improve educational outcomes for all students.
In the city of Chicago, students can live just miles apart and receive completely different educations.
Although there are many important factors that go into a school’s quality of education such as funding, access to Chicago’s resources, and taxes that the surrounding area has to pay, these should not be deciding factors to a child’s education. All students attending school in Chicago should have equal access to quality education regardless of where they live.
The current system that is in place is hurting students that live in lower income areas and giving many a disadvantage.
In an article from WBEZ Chicago that came out in 2025, data has shown that Chicago Public Schools are severely underfunded and would need about $1.6 billion more in order to provide students with a sufficient education.
Not only are students not receiving adequate learning opportunities, but this is affecting their test scores and proficiency levels. In an article from Illinois Policy published in 2023, Hannah Schmid evaluates data from the Illinois State Board of Education.
She found that out of all low income students enrolled in Chicago Public Schools, only 19% of students were able to read at their grade level, and 11% were proficient in math. In 2025, Schmid found that 35% of elementary and middle school students in low-income schools met proficiency standards in reading, and 19% met proficiency standards in math.
An interactive map from Chicago Health Atlas showed that from 2020–2024, a majority of high schools on the North Side of Chicago had 91% or more of enrolled students graduate on time. On the other hand, a majority of high schools on the South Side of Chicago had 82% or less of enrolled students graduate on time or at all.
This is due to many factors such as enrollment statistics, school budget, physical infrastructure of the school, the community surrounding the school, accessibility to resources, after school programs, and teacher support.
To combat this, in 2018, Sustainable Community Schools (SCS) was launched as a joint project between Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). Sustainable Community Schools are community hubs that are designed to provide wraparound academic, health, and social support for the entire community. By creating partnerships between schools and the community and using community assets, SCS allows neighborhood schools to provide care to students, staff, and school administration that they would not typically be able to do without this grant.
Principal of Bowen High School, Priscilla Horton, explains that at the beginning of this school year, they were granted the opportunity to become a part of Sustainable Community Schools (SCS).
Prior to their grant, Horton would come into school and walk around the entire building after it rains in hopes that she wouldn’t find a leak through the ceiling. Other days, she’d be afraid that the heat would go out in the middle of a harsh Chicago winter day.
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“I used to have anxiety walking into school because I was afraid that there would be a leak somewhere in the building…I’ve been working in this building for 9 years and the heat has gone out 3 times.”
After receiving their grant, Horton feels extremely grateful that she can now provide her students with more after school programs and electives that will satisfy her students’ curiosity. Horton explains that some students had requested for specific programs such as culinary classes and a cosmetology program, and with the help of SCS funding, Horton is now able to offer these to her students.
Bowen High School also partners with Divinely Orchestrated, which is a community organization that hosts monthly food drives and grocery giveaways to students and families in need.
Jennifer Olson, Associate Dean for Teacher Education and Clinical Associate Professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois Chicago, has been studying educational policy for 18 years.
Olson explains that it is hard for students and teachers to learn and teach if their other needs have not been met. Much like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, if any of those needs are not met, it’s difficult to expect students to be able to focus strictly on learning.
“I’ve been an educator for 27 years. I think that there needs to be more resources and support, particularly in under-resourced schools. I think it’s really hard to focus on teaching and learning when your other needs have not been met. Like Maslow’s needs. Are you hungry? Are you cold? Are you tired? Are you scared? And if you say yes to any of those things, we need to address that before we can talk about learning social studies right now.”
As an educator herself, Olson described poor conditions that she’s taught in in the past that have affected her teaching. She explains that if teachers are in conditions that are difficult to teach in, students will feel no different and it is equally as difficult for them to focus on learning.
“I’ve been in schools on the South and the West sides where there’s literally a bucket in the corner because there’s a leaky ceiling. Where I taught, there was no air conditioning, and there were no screens on the window. It’s really impossible to focus and learn and study and teach when it’s 90 degrees in your classroom, right? And things that are taken for granted in some school spaces are just really, really lacking [in others].”
While Olson gets firsthand experience as an educator, she also sits on the other side of this issue, which is being a parent too. Olson explains that a large contributor to a student’s education is their parents; how much parents want to contribute to schools, where parents decide to settle down and send their children to school, and how educated their parents are.
“What we can’t control is how much the parents are gonna contribute to a school. So I’ve been at school fundraisers for selective enrollment schools, for example, where they raised $200,000 in one night. And where my children went to elementary school, we were thrilled to raise $15,000 just so we could have art.”
Ultimately, Olson believes that one of the changes that would make the biggest difference in improving the quality of students’ learning, is having communities give input on what they would like to see in their schools.
“What do parents want for their children in Little Village vs Bucktown vs Englewood? [We should be] going into the communities and actually listening to them and responding to communities, and thinking about how to bring in the assets and the culture of the communities. I mean, Chicago is so rich. And I just don’t think that we do enough collaboration with communities and families, to think about what our schools should look like.”
With such rich diversity in the city of Chicago, it is important that students are put into classrooms with others that are different from them. Olson believes that each student brings something different and that everyone can teach another something new, and that students should be placed into classrooms with others of various backgrounds and skillsets in order to succeed.
“The thing is that research tells us that when you bring a diverse group of students together who are diverse in every way possible, whether we’re talking about ethnicity, socioeconomic background, learning differences, all of these things, that everybody benefits.”
