Weekend Opinion: We're Thinking About D65 Closures Wrong

The technocratic Tom Hayden Quantum Walk-ability Approach solution to school closures will make everything better

Quick note … but if you haven’t already seen the yard signs, you should check out the work the Invest in Neighborhood Schools (INS) folks are doing. They’re working on good ideas. You can join their mailing list here.

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First of all, thank you to everyone for sending me such warm and kind emails.

I’ve gotten so many questions asking me what I think of the District’s SDRP plans and/or the numbers. I’ll be honest, they are very had to read. Not because it’s not interesting or my brain is fried, but because I think this is the wrong approach. It’s a square peg in a circle hole.

We’re trying to solve a political problem with a technocratic solution.

Here’s the documents I’m talking about:

• SDRP Memo from 9/29/2025 - Canonical document that lays out options from the District.

• SDRP Memo from 10/14/2024 - Regarding closure of three schools

• Evanston/Skokie School District 65 Property Assessment Submission - Document commissioned by District 65 that has property values of all schools.

You can also look at the District’s SDRP portal.

I’ve managed data scientists and analysts and I could never bring documents like that to a Board of Directors. Their eyes would glaze over and they’d beg for mercy while sitting through 4 hour meetings trying to make sense of it, and ultimately get nowhere.

This approach feels like we are trying to engineer a magical committee-based technocratic metric that will be granted the power of legitimacy and simplify a very hard decision. But, as folks who email me have pointed out, there are fundamental disagreements about even top-level things in the analysis. For instance, how do we calculate capacity? Do we use a state average 34/sq ft per student? Do we use the inspected numbers from the 2022 assessment? If we can’t agree on capacity calculations, how can we agree on anything derived from it? Or how do we include equity assessments in this evaluation? What’s the right way to think about that?

I can go into ChatGPT right now, upload all the budget documents and ask it to come up with the “Tom Hayden Quantum Walk-ability Approach” (THQWA) and get a solution. Is it any good? I honestly, don’t think it’s half bad. Can you poke a million holes in it? Sure!

Approaching it this way, you will always run into this problem. No matter what approach you use, there’s going to be an alternate equal-or-better approach. No matter how careful, your analysis will always be deficient in some way. That’s not the fault of the District employee or the consultant putting it together. It’s the nature of quantitative analysis in an environment with different ways to think about a problem.

You might also call this by another name: politics.

Closing schools with this approach is at best a zero-sum game. There will be winners and losers. If you close Lincolnwood, it might save Kinglsey. If you close both, it might save more administrators and the JEH facility or another school. Parents, finding their schools closed, aren’t likely say, “Ah yes, it’s tragic but we scored low on the Tom Hayden Quantum Walk-ability Approach score. What am I to do?” Instead, they’ll just say the score is wrong and maybe even litigate over it.

The Bessie Rhodes situation is an example of this. Those parents were speaking at Board meetings with placards showing the evidence that closing the school would dis-proportionally impact students of color. The Board was like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

None of SAP committees or analysis mattered, the Board already made up their mind. It was ultimately a political decision.

Good leaders find ways to make zero-sum games not zero-sum games. Too often, our elected officials just kind of shrug at problems and say, “Nothing I can do here, but please vote for me in March 2026 because I hate Trump!” But, political solutions require spending political capital and thinking outside-the-box.

Let me throw out some ideas not in the SDRP analysis. Maybe they are stupid or maybe they won’t work. But they’re political solutions first.

• Hold a Referendum - I wrote about this a week ago. Hold a $80-100 million dollar referendum to rebuild, seriously renovate facilities, and bridge the funding gap.

• Consolidate with ETHS - You can get this on the ballot with 50 signatures or both boards asking the ISBE. The combined entity will be setup by a third party (ISBE), will have administrative economy-of-scales, more financing options, better private funding, and operating bond room.

• Drag the City and Northwestern into the fray - Dr. Horton burned a bridge with Northwestern, but it doesn’t have to stay like that forever. UChicago runs a lab school in Chicago, why can’t Northwestern? Northwestern, by the way, is currently spending $1.1B (the equivalent of 22 Foster Schools) on new non-educational facilities (Stadium and Allen Center). Could that $3.25m annual Foster School cost be shared with Northwestern in some way?

I’m absolutely sure we can come up with a better-than-zero-sum solution. It requires longer-term thinking and risk-taking from leadership. Otherwise, we’re going to end up in the worst-case situation which is that we close a bunch of schools, sell off public land off forever to developers (see how they feel), and everyone will even more pissed off at D65 than they are now.