Tale of shrinking Chicago doesn't tell the whole story

"If you think you've been seeing a lot more bright young people living in Chicago lately, you have", reads the lead sentence in yesterday's story by Greg Hinz in Crain's.

Substitute the word WHITE for BRIGHT and you get the picture.

Stories about Chicago's shrinking population are misleading. Cook County did lose 20,093 residents in 2017, according to the Census Bureau. Still, it maintained its spot as the second-most-populous county in the nation while also experiencing the largest numerical decrease in population compared with the nation’s other top 10 counties. It adds up to less than a 1% population change.

But as Hinz reports,

Between 2010 and 2016, the city of Chicago gained more households in a key category—total income of more than $100,000 with the head of household under age 45—than any city in the country except for far larger New York, according to newly analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data.

And while younger, wealthier white people move in, it is primarily the out-migration of African-American families that's responsible for the overall population decline. 

The population is booming in the central area and rising on the North and Northwest sides, as well as along the South Side lakefront. But it continues to plummet in what Hinz describes as, "gang-plagued areas" on the South Side and, to a lesser degree, on the West Side.

Hinz' racist code words notwithstanding, there's been a decline of nearly 300,000 black people from the Chicago area in the past three to four decades along with the disappearance of well-paying union jobs, school closings and disinvestment in black communities.

Gradually replacing them are mainly members of high-end households, those with incomes of at least $200,000. That group grew even faster in Chicago than the over $100K/under 45 group, rising 65% to just over 75,000, according to the ACS data.

In short, black people have been pushed out of Chicago in mass, being gradually replaced by wealthier whites. You can call it gentrification or whitenization as you wish.

The fact that it is being done by plan, rather than by accident has been pointed out by many other urban sociologists and politicians. It's implications for politics and for public education in the city are astounding. Topics for another post.

Sun-Times leaps to Rahm's defense. Calls Chris Kennedy a 'Stalinist' who's 'playing the race card'. Ugh!

Kennedy and Rahm at Wolf Point : "We like investing here," Kennedy said. "Every time we attract a new resident to our Downtown, we make a contribution to strengthen the social fabric of Chicago."

Some of my liberal friends tell me I've been too hard on Chris Kennedy. He's a "progressive," they say, and they're quick to remind me that he recently broke with party hacks by leveling criticism at Mayor Rahm Emanuel over the continuing push-out of thousands of black families from Chicago. He did indeed. But more on that later.

I've posted several times on this blog offering reasons, personal and political, why I can't vote for Kennedy in the Democratic primary. Yes, I would probably hold my nose and vote for him in a race against Rauner. But I would likely vote for Satan himself in that unlikely case.

But after reading the Sun-Times editorial this morning, accusing Kennedy of "playing the race card" and of throwing "Stalinist mud" on the mayor, I find myself inclined to trudge to Kennedy's defense.

Kennedy's criticism of Rahm Emanuel's “strategic gentrification plan” was spot-on or possibly understated. Emanuel and previous mayors (before and after Harold Washington) share major responsibility, along with the big banks and real estate developers and manipulators, for the black exodus.

Can anyone deny that Rahm has stepped up school privatization and the erosion of public space? Can anyone reasonably deny the increasing gentrification of targeted black communities, under-funding or shutting down city services, mass closings of public schools and health clinics in black neighborhoods?

Not to mention the mayor's culpability in the cover-up of police killing in the Laquan McDonald case and others.

“I believe that black people are being pushed out of Chicago intentionally by a strategy that involves disinvestment in communities being implemented by the city administration, and I believe Rahm Emanuel is the head of the city administration and therefore needs to be held responsible for those outcomes,” Kennedy said during a news conference about gun violence in North Lawndale.

Of course,there are deeper systemic reasons for the reverse migration, having to do with deindustrialization and the disappearance of good-paying union jobs, as well as the easy flow of guns and drugs into the neighborhoods. But all this has been going on nationally for decades and accounts in large measure for the great demographic shifts taking place, and the whitenization of the cities. I wouldn't put all of that on Rahm--but he deserves his share.

All Kennedy did was tell us what we already knew, and no credible observer would deny it. Kennedy, for his own reasons, just put it all out there. And what are those reasons?

I suspect that he's targeted Rahm, not for personal reasons as the Sun-Times claims, but to gain a political edge in a tightening gov's race. I'm sure any one of the candidates, after looking at the mayor's plummeting poll numbers, would rather run against Rahm or better yet, against Trump, than against each other.

Yes, there's obvious hypocrisy and opportunism on Kennedy's part. He's learned it from the best. As Hank Williams, Jr.,would say, "It's a family tradition."

Columnist Mary Mitchell points out that Kennedy was one of the mayor's biggest supporters when Rahm ran against Chuy Garcia and that Kennedy family downtown real estate deals played a role in the city's gentrification.

Mitchell points to a video showing Kennedy, framed by shots of cranes and renderings of a luxury high-rise tower, comparing Emanuel to Joe Kennedy.

“He saw something in Chicago that he thought was extraordinary … It had stable and powerful political leadership, and it had a confident group of business leaders … Those factors were at work 60 years ago, and now with Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s leadership, they are still true in Chicago today,” Kennedy said at the time.

At the groundbreaking for the Wolf Point project, Kennedy praised the billion-dollar investment being made in the downtown core of Chicago. Wolf Point is a joint venture between the Kennedy family and three other entities.

“We’ve added 50,000 people to the downtown core in the last few years, which makes it one of the fastest growing residences anywhere in the United States,” Kennedy said then.

Meanwhile, low-income Chicagoans living in areas surrounding the downtown core were being routed from CHA’s public housing.

Yes, Kennedy's attack on Rahm is an obvious pitch for black votes, votes which may well decide this election. I'm glad someone's pitching there. He's so far tried to appeal to African-American voters, focusing on the issue of gun violence, educational equity, and property taxation in black neighborhoods.

But the S-T editorial is nothing but a naked and shameful racist (who says, "playing the race card" anymore?) and red-baiting (Stalinist? Really?) defense of the mayor. I was hoping for better with the change in ownership and leadership of the paper. Silly me.

A 'menu of disinvestment' leads to mass exodus of black students from Chicago schools.

The artist Jacob Lawrence depicted the Great Migration in 1941.

“It’s a menu of disinvestment,” says Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who teaches African-American history at the University of Illinois Chicago.

Kalyn Belsha's excellent piece (Thousands of black students leave Chicago for other segregated districts), in the Chicago Reporter helps explain so much about the dramatic demographic shifts taking place in American cities. The whitening of the cities, and of Chicago in particular, isn't happenstance. Rather, it's the result of conscious planning and implementing a set of policies initiated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel which include disinvestment, the closing of schools and elimination of basic social services in already devastated black communities.

The result in Chicago has been a mass exodus or reverse migration by thousands African-American families. That exodus is larger than in any other metropolitan area in the country. It's cleared the way for gentrification on a mass scale and a weakening of black community political power, historically a key oppositional base for resistance to both Republican and Democratic machine politics.

Belsha writes:

Chicago was once a major destination for African-Americans during the Great Migration, but experts say today the city is pushing out poor black families. In less than two decades, Chicago lost one-quarter of its black population, or more than 250,000 people.

In the past decade, Chicago’s public schools lost more than 52,000 black students. Now, the school district, which was majority black for half a century, is on pace to become majority Latino. Black neighborhoods like Austin have experienced some of the steepest student declines and most of the school closures and budget cuts.

A common refrain is that Chicago’s black families are “reverse migrating” to Southern cities with greater opportunities, like Atlanta and Dallas. But many of the families fleeing the poorest pockets of Chicago venture no farther than the south suburbs or northwest Indiana. And their children end up in cash-strapped segregated schools like the ones they left behind, a Chicago Reporter investigation found.

The loss of so many thousands of students living in poverty may also explain the sudden, "miraculous" bump in test scores and graduation rates at CPS, now being lauded by the mayor. This, in a school system marked by instability, where there's been no corresponding input of resources or classroom/teacher supports. Neither has there been marked improvement in the lives of most CPS students outside of school that would account for such a bump.

We can only conclude that this addition by subtraction has to do with changing the students rather than with the mayor's "reforms".

On the other hand, as African-American families leave Chicago, the percentage of poor black students in the suburbs has grown dramatically, straining already cash-strapped school districts.

High-poverty districts in northwest Indiana that took in many CPS transfers have also seen their budgets slashed in recent years after lawmakers rejiggered the state’s school funding formula and also spent more on charter schools and private-school vouchers. 

“It’s a menu of disinvestment,” says Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who teaches African-American history at the University of Illinois Chicago. “The message that public policy sends to black families in the city is that we’re not going to take care of you and if you just keep going away, that’s OK.”

You say you want a revolution? Go to post-Rhee D.C. says Toch

Okay, now that I'm done FBing about #convfefe, I can get down to more serious business -- revolution. It seems a revolution has taken place in D.C. and I somehow missed it.

But Tom Toch didn't. Toch, a leading pro-reform, education policy expert and a highly regarded education writer, has published his study of the progress of school reform in the district, titled, "How D.C. Schools Are Revolutionizing Teaching." 

I'd say, it's about time somebody did it. But who?

Toch says, it all began with former D.C. schools chief Michelle Rhee, who, despite her various "mistakes," cheating scandals and unfortunate picture on the cover of Time Magazine, got the ball rolling. But Toch's study concludes that it was her successor chancellors who carried the rev forward, bringing radical changes to the teaching profession and miraculous gains in student achievement. DCPS has not merely revolutionized teaching, says Toch; it has created a "reform blueprint" for the rest of us to follow.

No credit given to teachers, of course. In fact, Toch clearly sees bad teachers and their over-protective unions as the problem, and different performance-based evaluations with high stakes attached as the r-r-r-revolutionary solution.

According to Toch:

Building on Rhee’s early work, and learning from her mistakes, her successors have effectively transformed it into a performance-based profession that provides recognition, responsibility, collegiality, support, and significant compensation—features that policy experts, including many of Rhee’s harshest critics, have long sought but never fully achieved.

Ironically, Rhee’s successors at DCPS have redesigned teaching through some of the very policies that teachers’ unions and other Rhee adversaries opposed most strongly: comprehensive teacher evaluations, the abandonment of seniority-based staffing, and performance-based promotions and compensation. They combined these with other changes, like more collaboration among teachers, that these same critics had backed. Just as notably, the transformation is taking place not at charters but in the traditional public school system, an institution that many reformers have written off as too hidebound to innovate.

At last, a reformer who offers the possibility hope and transformation within the public schools themselves. A ray of sunshine in a very gloomy period.

Toch reports that as a direct result of performance-based teacher evals, daily attendance in D.C. has reached 90%, up from 85% in 2010–11. Chronic truancy is down by nearly 40% over the past four years and graduation rates (however they're defined) have climbed to 69%, the highest in the city’s history.

And student achievement has begun a long climb toward respectability. While Washington’s test scores have traditionally been among the lowest in the nation, the percentage of fourth graders achieving math proficiency has more than doubled on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) over the past decade, as have the percentages of eighth graders proficient in math and fourth graders proficient in reading. Scores have risen even after accounting for an influx of wealthier students. And DCPS has caught up to the middle of the pack of other urban school districts at the fourth-grade level on the national exams.

In addition, the school system’s strongest teachers are no longer leaving in droves for charter schools. In many cases, the flow has been reversed, leaving even Washington’s most prominent charters struggling to compete for talent.

Now, don't mistake my cynicism about the "revolution" for the joy I feel over any reports of progress in urban school districts, especially when that progress is reported in neighborhood schools competing for resources, students and teachers with privately-operated charters and private-school voucher programs like the ones started by Rhee in D.C. and now championed by Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos. Yes, I'm glad D.C. 4th-graders are scoring higher on the NAEP and that the district has finally made it to the middle of the urban school district pack score-wise.

If that is really happening, and I have no reason to doubt Toch's numbers, credit should mostly go those hard-working and dedicated teachers, not just to the string of top-level administrators like Rhee and her mentee and former D.C. Teach For America Director Kaya Henderson, and the others who followed in Rhee's wake, usually lasting about 2 years each before they are run out or quit.

But as Toch himself points out:

Achievement levels among Hispanic and black students, who make up 82 percent of enrollment, lag badly behind their white peers. Only 15 percent of black students scored “proficient” in reading last year on Washington’s new, more demanding, Common Core–aligned exams, compared to 74 percent of white students.

If that's his idea of  a "revolution," leave me out.

But it's mostly Toch's line about how his study "takes into account the influx of [white] wealthier students" that gets me twitching. It's such an easy way of dismissing the effects of concentrated poverty on measurable learning outcomes, and of the most dramatic democratic changes in D.C., Chicago, Philly and dozens of other large urban school districts. It's what I and others have referred to as the whitenizing of the cities.

In Chicago, for example, where a quarter of a million African-Americans have been pushed out of the city over the past three decades, by gentrification, de-industrialization and job loss, lack of social services, closing of neighborhood schools, gun violence, etc... Mayor Emanuel and his appointed school district leaders are also now reporting corresponding "miraculous" gains in reading scores and graduation rates.

In 2008, DCPS was reportedly 84.4% black, 9.4% Latino, and 4.6% white.The racial breakdown of students enrolled in 2014 was 67% black, 17% Latino, 12% white, and 4% of "other races".

Now, for the first time in decades, the district itself no longer a majority-black city. Gentrification and demographic changes in many D.C. neighborhoods has increased the white and Latino populations in the city, while dramatically reducing the black and lowest-income population.  And isn't this the exact recipe of today's school reformers who claim poverty is just "an excuse" for low scores?

Of course, as anyone who went to D.C. schools back in the day will tell you, things weren't so great in the district's predominantly black and poor, racially segregated schools back before reform. And any improvements are welcomed, especially by parents and community members.

But good researchers never claim more than they should, especially for a small-scale study. Tom Toch should know that. A few reforms do not a revolution make. And if we are really serious about reform or revolution, we need to look well beyond the classroom for answers.

'Millennial' voters not just white

"Show the younger generation what standing up looks like," Chance the Rapper at yesterday's free concert.

Please, no more hand-wringing about under-voting, so-called "millennials". I say, so-called, because I don't really think there's one such thing as millennials. Of course I know there are young people who came of age by the year 2000. The problem is, the way the term is used in media and even by academics, it's come to mean young white people/voters/consumers. Don't believe me? Close your eyes and imagine a millennial. Who do you see?

The corporate world is smart enough to see black millennials as a vast potential profit center and for their role as "culture creators". But as you can imagine, they fail to mention the stark racial disparities in the population of incarcerated youth. Among the estimated 717,800 men ages 18 to 29 who were incarcerated at midyear 2010, 37% (290,100) were black and 23% (180,400) were Hispanic.

Here's a survey done by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics which made me cringe:

Asked about the nation's future, 51 percent of those ages 18 to 29 said they feel "fearful," while just 20 percent picked "hopeful." In responding to the question, which hadn't been asked in previous polls, every demographic group felt more fearful than hopeful, the institute said, with white women exhibiting the most anxiety, at 60 percent fearful. 

I can't help but wonder which millennials are even accessible to Harvard researchers? How about Spanish-speaking immigrant youth or young African-American men in what's left of urban public housing? Or in prison.

While there is some cultural overlap, black, Latino, urban poor men, women don't occupy the same space as middle-class or wealthy white youth when it comes to education, consumption, or voting. Averaging them all together is misleading.

For example, millennial 3rd-party voting has been limited almost exclusively to white people. While Clinton holds a 36-point advantage over Trump in most polls, there's no sense even asking black or Latino youth if they voted for Trump.

In 2012, 18-29 years-old accounted for 19% of the electorate nationally. This year, it's likely to be around the same with youth voting for Clinton by an estimated 28% over Trump. But when you look more closely at the numbers you find that black youth out-voted white youth  in '08 and by about 8% again in 2012. Will that happen again this year? It depends on what's happening and what has happened already on the ground.

Yesterday in Chicago, for example, where early voting numbers (more than 350,000) have smashed records set in 2008, hometown favorite Chance the Rapper hosted and headlined a free concert at Petrillo Music Shell in Grant Park called "Parade to the Polls." Concertgoers, led by organizers from Black Youth 100 Project, Chicago Votes and other groups, then marched with CTR to the nearest available early voting location, Cook County's early voting supercenter at 15 West Washington Street, where the line to get in the door spanned nearly two full city blocks.

Much better than hand-wringing.

After a free concert in Grant Park, @chancetherapper led thousands in a #paradetothepolls on the eve of #ElectionDay in downtown Chicago. pic.twitter.com/gQpidoVEWp

— The Chicago Reporter (@ChicagoReporter) November 8, 2016

Whitenizing Chicago

The out-migration of African-Americans from the largest U.S. cities continues unabated, changing the face of urban politics, culture and education.

Greg Hinz at Crain's reports that the Chicago area is on track to become mostly people of color by 2020, a historic shift with major cultural, economic and political impact. But in Chicago proper, gentrification has created a different story -- whitenization.

The shift is almost entirely concentrated in the suburbs, with, for instance, roughly one in three residents of Will, DuPage and Lake Counties now from minority groups, up from one (or fewer) in four in 2010. In suburban Cook County, the minority share of the total population has gone from 33 percent in 2010 to 45 percent.

But the story in the city is different.

In Chicago proper, where large numbers of high-income whites appear to have moved to the booming central business district, the white share of the population rose from 31 percent in 2002 to 32 percent in 2005-09, holding at that figure in 2010-14. The African-American share continued to drop, moving from an estimated 33.8 percent rolling average in 2005-2009 to 31.5 percent in 2010-14, with the Latino share rising from 27.4 percent to 28.9 percent, and the Asian share from 4.9 percent to 5.7 percent.

The current population growth in the entire Chicago metropolitan area is being fueled almost entirely by the influx of Latinos and Asians. The white wealthy and middle-class newcomers to city are mostly younger people without families. That brings with it a declining public school population.

In the city itself, skyrocketing costs of living combined with the loss of living-wage jobs, public housing and neighborhood schools, cuts in infrastructure, social services and fear of gun violence have made life too difficult and unstable for thousands of poor and black families.

The story of urban America is indeed becoming a tale of two cities.