Is Bessie Rhodes School "Opportunity Hoarding"?

Even through the most equity-forward lens, closing this school is a bad idea

The Bessie Rhodes community is having another protest next week, starting at the school and walking to the District 65 Board meeting:

• Date: Monday, May 20th

• March: 4:30pm at the Dr Bessie Rhodes Global Studies

• Protest: 5:00pm at Joseph E. Hill Center, 1500 McDaniel Ave

I’ll be there for both events and plan to give a comment during public comments. This time I’m going to stick to the script. If you plan to give public comments, please be aware that if there are lots of people you may only get 30 seconds for comment - so you should have a 30 second script and a 2 minute script.

Regarding the status of Bessie Rhodes, you can view the updates regarding Bessie Rhodes at the below links:

• January 2024 - Future of Bessie Rhodes

• March 2024 - Bessie Rhodes Closing Process & Transition

  Tentative Timeline

• April 2024 - Middle School Dual Language Expansion and

  Bessie Rhodes K-8 Tentative Transition Plan

These decisions are the output of the Student Assignment Process (SAP) committee. The role of the SAP committee is to recommend boundaries for the District to the Board. This memo from March 2022 summarizes how the SAP committee views itself. You can see an active list of the members on the website, which includes a lot of people with conflicting interests: various District administrators (Dr. Horton, Dr. Turner, etc), a spouse of a current board member, the local alderman, and various community activists. If I had to staff a committee that was preordained to open a new school in the fifth ward, I can’t think of a better list.

Anyway, back in 2022, the committee recommended the closure of Bessie Rhodes and suggested the “school within a school” model.

The SAP committee also recommends the eventual closure of the current Bessie Rhodes School building, upon completion and student enrollment at the Fifth Ward School. The school as a whole, including programming, will be co-located at the new Fifth Ward campus and operate independently from the K-8 neighborhood school. This will follow a school within a school model, maintaining the Rhodes community's historical name (Bessie Rhodes), magnet programming, and legacy. Families will have the choice to enroll their child at their neighborhood school or continue in their current program at the new location.

Roll the clock back further to August 2021, Dr. Horton sent out an email with the following (and also a reference that the bus savings were only $2.3m not the $5m that Board President Hernandez would later cite);

This spring we launched a multi-year Student Assignment Project (SAP) to modernize our district structure and address historic inequities that continue to most significantly impact students of color. This may include:

• changes to school attendance areas

• reconsideration of a more equitable selection process for magnet schools and programs

• establishing a school in the Fifth Ward.

So you can say, “Well, OK - maybe they have a point here. If the Bessie Rhodes students all live in the fifth ward anyway, why not try to find a way to move them to the new school and kill two birds with one stone?” But the facts do not support that. The District’s own data from January 2024 shows that only 39% of Bessie Rhodes students live in the Fifth Ward.

Opportunity Hoarding

Opportunity hoarding is the concept which comes from a book called “Durable Inequality”. The idea is that powerful groups leverage their access to institutions, to maintain their financial and political status quo. Probably the most obvious example to me is the mortgage interest deduction. In educational circles, especially in 2021, this was a hot topic. Consider the following examples often cited:

• Gifted Programs - Consider this article about Seattle terminating their gifted programs.

• IEP/504s¹

• Magnet Schools - Magnet schools are often complicated to apply for, require transportation, and use resources.

But when it comes to racial segregation and magnet schools, the research actually shows the opposite. Consider a story from Louisville, Dr. Horton’s former District;

The school district exempted racially balanced neighborhoods from busing, creating incentives for parents to choose residential integration. And students can apply for sought-after magnet and specialty programs like language immersion (Semuels, 2015; Siegel-Hawley, 2013). Researchers found that levels of housing segregation fell precipitously in Louisville Metro as parents knew that school assignments did not depend on where students lived.

Back to Bessie Rhodes, you can argue, “61% of Bessie Rhodes students are kids from NOT the fifth ward and are opportunity hoarding!” But the facts do not support this argument. Of the 167 students that do not live in the fifth ward, 69 are English learners (EL) and 98 are English first language speakers.

You could still look at this and say, “Yes, but there are still 98 kids in Bessie Rhodes who are non-EL and from outside the fifth ward. Those kids must be opportunity hoarding!” - and maybe that’s true - I have no idea. But Bessie Rhodes has an admissions process which prioritizes English learners; non-EL kids get in through a lottery. If the number of EL students in Evanston increases, it is the non-EL kids who won’t make the cut. Also, it’s not just white kids that live outside of the fifth ward - Evanston is both a diverse and segregated place at the same time, depending on where you live.

Check out the map that the city puts out on the subject.

Evanston: A Changing City

I think it’s fair to ask - what are those 69 non-fifth ward Spanish EL families supposed to do now? They lost their home without a real replacement. Perhaps the board should suggest they buy one of the two one-million dollar houses for sale near the site of the new school, so they can have a walkable TWI program.

These are some real HGTV houses!

What about migrant families coming into Evanston? The city is trying to convert a building at Church and Oak into migrant housing. This location is feeds to Dewey, not the fifth ward school. Board President Hernandez gave a speech at the last meeting about how being a new immigrant results in kids being othered. So his solution is to .. make the new migrants go through the exact same experience he did?

The District can say, “Well, we are going to have TWI in every school now!” - but there is no evidence to support that claim. With the current plans, the District is going to have TWI Strands in some schools but that is not wall-to-wall TWI like Bessie Rhodes. Will the District require bilingual principals? Will the District train teachers in Spanish? What’s the budget for this? Where is that budget coming from? There’s currently an exodus of employees at District HQ - who is actually going to implement this and have accountability? They even tried this before and it didn’t work - what is going to be different this time?

This looks good on a slide - but who is going to actually do this???

It’s a noble goal to have every school be a “walkable magnet school” but that is just not the reality we live in. The Board uses visionary language like “a transformation of a system that has not been accountable to every student,” that is very light on details and lacks any form of accountability. Meanwhile, they’re blowing up something that has a concrete, tangible, equity impact on Spanish speaking families.

I’m a municipal finance nut and will say, there is a compelling argument to close Bessie Rhodes. The District is in very bad financial shape. It costs a lot of money to transport those kids to and from Bessie Rhodes. A magnet school is a luxury! But you have to be careful with the cost/benefit analysis here - Bessie Rhodes isn’t a frivolous magnet school. This isn’t the Tom Hayden School of Jazz. Bessie Rhodes serves an important role at a point in time where Evanston can show we are a welcoming place. ²

Lastly, this isn’t a zero sum game with the Fifth Ward School. The new school is going to proceed whether Bessie Rhodes closes down or not. I still believe it is debatable whether they have enough money, but that has very little to do with Bessie Rhodes. Even if they sold Bessie Rhodes today, they would get a couple of million bucks, barely a dent in the $48 million dollar construction costs for the new school.³

I will even go so far as to argue that closing down the wall-to-wall Spanish-language school, literally as the City is arranging housing for migrants is downright Trumpian. I ask: who is really building the wall?

1. I’ve never seen any evidence to suggest the claims of white parents abusing IEP/504s is true, but in an abstract sense I can understand the arguments. Getting these resources for your kids is so hard and requires lawyers or legal resources unavailable to most people. The system is so messy, Evanston even has a non-profit to help parents navigate it.

2. See footnote #3

3. The District is pretty financially close to funding the new school. Lease certificate funds add up to about $44m and pure construction costs are $42m. They can’t use Bessie Rhodes funds for construction, even if they wanted to. They could use it for stuff in the building ($6m worth of costs) but the District has reserves for that, whether Bessie Rhodes sells or not. Again, I think the most compelling case for a building closure is Kingsley (Sorry Kingsley readers) - it is one of the highest maintenance cost buildings, is on land the city would love to redevelop, is 4 blocks from Lincolnwood and 3 blocks from the new school. Frankly, I think of the fifth ward school as basically an asset replacement for the Kingsley building.