Frederick Douglass Academy is in the Austin neighborhood, a Chicago Public Schools building constructed for a thousand students that now enrolls just fifty, spends roughly $93,000 per pupil, and has not a single student reading at grade level, with the majority of both students and staff chronically absent. Chicago Teachers Union-backed school board candidate Hilario Rodriguez visited the school and framed it as a beloved neighborhood institution deserving of more investment in music, art, gym and library programs, arguing the school has become an unfair target for closure. Dan Proft noted the broader pattern citywide, pointing out that CPS added 4,500 teachers over the past decade while losing 54,000 students, an improvement in staffing ratios that has not translated into better reading or math outcomes, with math proficiency actually declining over that period.
Proft brought on Geno Young, a Chicago-area musician, educator and author whose new book, “Sex, Drugs, and Illiteracy,” draws on his experience working in local schools, to discuss what he has seen firsthand. Young said his time at Hillcrest High School in Country Club Hills exposed him immediately to a near-total breakdown of basic academic standards, describing students who could not write their own names or sound out simple words, with wildly inconsistent spelling and no apparent grasp of phonics. He said the state legislature’s decision to end a modest school choice pilot program that had served roughly 9,600 students citywide for about $75 million, while simultaneously boosting Chicago Teachers Union contract funding by $1.5 billion, reflects a broader misplacement of priorities in which the system now functions more like a business protecting adult salaries and pensions than an institution focused on educating children.
Young said the response from colleagues in the teachers’ lounge tended toward resignation rather than outrage, describing a culture in which teachers who tried to hold the line on grades or discipline were often overruled by administrators facing pressure from parents. He pushed back on the idea that school failure is uniquely a Chicago or urban issue, saying he encountered nearly identical problems after leaving Hillcrest for Tinley Park High School, a school with a very different demographic profile but a similarly low literacy rate, and said he has heard from educators and parents describing the same patterns in states across the country, including places often seen as havens from the problem.
Young described a difficult experience at Tinley Park in which he clashed with administrators over student discipline, including an incident in which he says a dean overrode his decision to mark a disruptive student absent after the student stormed out of class, and another in which he was reprimanded for marking a student absent after she left the room. He said he was ultimately told in a meeting with human resources that he was being too strict for what administrators described as a different kind of student than in years past. Young said his earlier experience at Hillcrest was more serious, alleging he witnessed both violence and other serious misconduct in the classroom that went unaddressed, and that he was removed from the school after reporting a death threat from a student to police, at a school where two people had been killed in recent years. He said the administration was displeased that he had gone to police rather than handling the matter internally.
Young said he now hears regularly from parents and educators around the country as a result of writing the book, and that the pattern he describes cuts across race, geography and party lines, urging parents in every state to stay engaged with what is actually happening inside their children’s schools rather than assuming their community is exempt from the problem.