Local Profile: Education in Chicago by AH

For my first interview assignment, I interviewed an investigative reporter and Pulitzer Prize Winner from The Chicago Tribune, Dave L. Jackson. I asked Dave specific questions relating to education in Chicago and other cities to see how education relates to the MDGs that we have studied. The purpose of this assignment and interview was to think of five interview questions and to incorporate the interview questions into an essay about education. I also inquired about the connection between access to good education in Chicago and the ethnic, social, and racial backgrounds of students in urban communities. It was striking to me how so many of the MDG challenges that we are studying globally are happening right here in the inner-city of Chicago.  For example, we discussed how  economically disadvantaged students in Chicago often do not have equal access to primary schooling.  Dave mentioned in our interview that many K-8th grade children from lower income neighborhoods miss months or even years of elementary school.  We also talked about how the high school dropout rate in Chicago is much higher among Hispanics and African Americans than among whites. It is clear that education for minorities and lower income students in Chicago is struggling and would benefit from a set of local development goals like the MDGs.  I am proud of the work I put in to thinking about my five questions and how they relate to Chicago’s development goals, as well as how each of the questions connect to broader MDG issues about primary education. We talked about these issues from the point of view of student access, teachers, and local, national, and international politics. I learned how to ask interview questions and how to pull them together into a paper about development goals.

The National Center for Education Statistics shows that different ethnic groups over the past 20 years have a very different rates of staying in secondary school in America. For the years 1990 to 2010,  the graph shows that the group with the highest bar has the highest dropout rates.  For each year, Hispanics have the highest high school dropout rate; Blacks are second; and Whites are third.  For many of the years between 1990-2010,  Hispanics have dropout rates that are more than twice as high as the other ethnic groups.  Although this is a reason for concern, the graph also shows that the dropout rates for all groups have been consistently decreasing since 1990.  The fact that minorities (Hispanics and blacks) have higher dropout rates than whites means that we still have work to do to make education equal.  The fact that dropout rates are decreasing means that we are making progress.  I collected this information from this website:https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=16