walking to school
Back in the fall, when we still had just one fully baked child, I was shocked when my wife signed us up for a panel discussion on finding the right preschool. A couple weeks after that she dragged a very fussy 38-year old to an upscale car dealership for a school fair, which is like a trade show minus all the sex marketing, but with more comfortable shoes and a real focus on tote bag quality.
Both of these events were organized by the local upscale parents' group, NPN (which stands for "Neighborhood Parents Network," but originally, and more accurately, it was "Northside Parents Network"; for those of you not familiar with Chicago, the north was not the side of town known for birthing the modern blues), and I was terrified that this was the first step in our transformation into the kind of people who buy special music for their fetuses in hopes of achieving that definitive edge on the MCATs.
I have long been convinced that nothing that happens in the first five or six years of school can push a kid too far off the trajectory set by their home life and how they did in the genetic lottery. As long as you're talking to them instead of sitting them in front of a screen to shut them up till bedtime, as long as you're there to show them how to hold a book and how to read it and to think and talk about it, as long as you create an atmosphere for them to explore and learn and figure things out in--how much can a mediocre third-grade teacher mess that up? And seriously, how much can even the worst preschool mess that up?
It was clearly far too early for me to be going to events like this. I have to be eased into situations that I'm that reluctant about, and since I wasn't eased into these ones, and was grossed out by the anxious control-freak alpha-parents surrounding me, and there was a fair amount of only mildly disguised money talk, I absorbed very little beyond the following: 1) absolute surety that there's no fucking way we can afford private school in this city; 2) that I'm still not interested in being Catholic (although they seem to be slackening their standards lately, so I might be able to qualify on technical grounds without having to ruin my Sundays); and 3) Chicago Public Schools is a huge and terrifically complex system of overlapping and contradictory interests, containing three or four distinct school systems under the main umbrella. The whole business made me want to go home, drink strong drink, and sleep for days. Unfortunately the days are long gone when that was a feasible response to anything.
Eventually it sunk in that CPS is the route we must go if we're to resist the siren call of the suburbs. We're buying a house this year, and since the days of a new house every three years are well behind us all, this is the place our kids will be going to elementary school from. In a nutshell, we would like for them to walk to school, and then we'd like to continue on our way on foot to the train and to the job.
Good schools, walkability, and transit--and a house we can afford. Where in Chicago do you find that, and how? The systems hidden within CPS range from high-performance games of chance to random grab-bags of academic quality shaken by the invisible hand of the free market. All that's sure is that every address in the city is guaranteed admission to at least one nearby school, of no guaranteed quality. How to take that apart? We've got a couple of months to figure this out, at least enough to find a neighborhood school we can live with for the elementary years if nothing else about CPS works out our way.
Step one: figure out where all the schools are in Chicago, and how they're doing.
Luckily I've learned just enough GIS to create overly feature-laden maps and think they mean something. Here'a just a taste of the data-rich future:
This is super-simplified at this point, based on only the most coarse indicators that come out of the modern testing regime. But just like driving, green means you're fine, yellow means watch out, and red means you're going nowhere. And of course gray means a train station is nearby.
This is the very first map I made, and all it shows is the broadest kind of comparison among schools. The several CPS subsystems are not broken out, so charters, magnets, and the various gifted schools are all jumbled in with plain old neighborhood schools. (The great site CPS Obsessed is where I've been learning most of this information since I figured out that I really need to.) So far, CPS has pretty cagey about giving up a version of the neighborhood school boundaries useful for GIS purposes, so we don't know quite what school a given address goes to.
Still, some big patterns are obvious if you know anything about Chicago. You may notice that this is essentially a map of wealth and poverty in the city, and I'm sure we'll find that it's pretty much a proxy map of home prices too, but we have to start somewhere.
Okay, I gots to go, there are babies to feed, but I'll talk about the thinking behind all this later, along with whatever progress there is.
Both of these events were organized by the local upscale parents' group, NPN (which stands for "Neighborhood Parents Network," but originally, and more accurately, it was "Northside Parents Network"; for those of you not familiar with Chicago, the north was not the side of town known for birthing the modern blues), and I was terrified that this was the first step in our transformation into the kind of people who buy special music for their fetuses in hopes of achieving that definitive edge on the MCATs.
I have long been convinced that nothing that happens in the first five or six years of school can push a kid too far off the trajectory set by their home life and how they did in the genetic lottery. As long as you're talking to them instead of sitting them in front of a screen to shut them up till bedtime, as long as you're there to show them how to hold a book and how to read it and to think and talk about it, as long as you create an atmosphere for them to explore and learn and figure things out in--how much can a mediocre third-grade teacher mess that up? And seriously, how much can even the worst preschool mess that up?
It was clearly far too early for me to be going to events like this. I have to be eased into situations that I'm that reluctant about, and since I wasn't eased into these ones, and was grossed out by the anxious control-freak alpha-parents surrounding me, and there was a fair amount of only mildly disguised money talk, I absorbed very little beyond the following: 1) absolute surety that there's no fucking way we can afford private school in this city; 2) that I'm still not interested in being Catholic (although they seem to be slackening their standards lately, so I might be able to qualify on technical grounds without having to ruin my Sundays); and 3) Chicago Public Schools is a huge and terrifically complex system of overlapping and contradictory interests, containing three or four distinct school systems under the main umbrella. The whole business made me want to go home, drink strong drink, and sleep for days. Unfortunately the days are long gone when that was a feasible response to anything.
Eventually it sunk in that CPS is the route we must go if we're to resist the siren call of the suburbs. We're buying a house this year, and since the days of a new house every three years are well behind us all, this is the place our kids will be going to elementary school from. In a nutshell, we would like for them to walk to school, and then we'd like to continue on our way on foot to the train and to the job.
Good schools, walkability, and transit--and a house we can afford. Where in Chicago do you find that, and how? The systems hidden within CPS range from high-performance games of chance to random grab-bags of academic quality shaken by the invisible hand of the free market. All that's sure is that every address in the city is guaranteed admission to at least one nearby school, of no guaranteed quality. How to take that apart? We've got a couple of months to figure this out, at least enough to find a neighborhood school we can live with for the elementary years if nothing else about CPS works out our way.
Step one: figure out where all the schools are in Chicago, and how they're doing.
Luckily I've learned just enough GIS to create overly feature-laden maps and think they mean something. Here'a just a taste of the data-rich future:
 |
| Public elementary schools in Chicago ranked by CPS performance rating (levels 1-3), along with Metra and CTA rail lines and stations (and 0.5-mile station-area boundaries). Made with QGIS, using public data from the City of Chicago Data Portal. |
This is super-simplified at this point, based on only the most coarse indicators that come out of the modern testing regime. But just like driving, green means you're fine, yellow means watch out, and red means you're going nowhere. And of course gray means a train station is nearby.
This is the very first map I made, and all it shows is the broadest kind of comparison among schools. The several CPS subsystems are not broken out, so charters, magnets, and the various gifted schools are all jumbled in with plain old neighborhood schools. (The great site CPS Obsessed is where I've been learning most of this information since I figured out that I really need to.) So far, CPS has pretty cagey about giving up a version of the neighborhood school boundaries useful for GIS purposes, so we don't know quite what school a given address goes to.
Still, some big patterns are obvious if you know anything about Chicago. You may notice that this is essentially a map of wealth and poverty in the city, and I'm sure we'll find that it's pretty much a proxy map of home prices too, but we have to start somewhere.
Okay, I gots to go, there are babies to feed, but I'll talk about the thinking behind all this later, along with whatever progress there is.
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