Two students, two high schools, two divergent paths to college 

Page 3 of 6

• Paul John Higgins

Significant desegregation could still be achieved, Orfield wrote in his report, through methods such as the expansion of local and regional magnet schools and the federal funding of transportation costs for students whose voluntary transfers would enhance diversity. But the political leadership for any form of desegregation has been missing, he wrote: "There have been no major positive steps from the Obama administration to alter these patterns." Obama has pushed for the expansion of charter schools—"the most segregated sector of U.S. public education, particularly for African American students," Orfield noted. (Chicago's charter school enrollment is 98 percent minority.) Like the four presidents before him, Obama has focused on testing, competition, and accountability, he added, "with little recognition of educational problems rooted in race and poverty."

Jasmeen's brother initially outdid her in school. She recalls an awards ceremony on her last day of first grade. Her brother, who'd just finished second grade, "was racking up these awards, and I didn't get anything." She went home in tears. Her mother told her that if she tried harder, she could get awards, too.

Jasmeen took that to heart, and at the end of second grade, she got a trophy for her schoolwork. She didn't think her father had made it to the ceremony—but when she walked up to receive her award, there he was, with a bouquet of purple flowers. "After a while, it wasn't about getting a trophy," Jasmeen says. When she did well in school "my mom was happy and my dad was happy, and I just liked the feeling. I wanted to please them, and I wanted to please myself."

On her parents' advice, she peppered her teachers with questions when she didn't understand something. "I wasn't one of those nonchalant kids—'Whatever, who cares?' Kids are scared to ask; they're scared to sound stupid. Well, it's OK to be wrong at one point, but not to keep being wrong."

Jasmeen's parents never married or lived together. She was raised by her mother, but she saw her father often as she grew up, and says he's always been supportive of her. She's the youngest of five, and was raised with two nieces as well. The family subsisted on public aid and child support from Jasmeen's father, a postal worker. She wasn't in any camps or out-of-school classes or programs when she was in grammar school, and she never traveled—her family couldn't afford it.

Like most schools filled with students from poor families, her schools fared badly on standardized tests. When she was in third grade in 2002, at Carter elementary at 57th and Michigan, only 23 percent of students were meeting or exceeding standards on the Illinois Standard Achievement Test—compared with 40 percent of students citywide, and 63 percent statewide. From fourth through eighth grade, she attended Avalon Park elementary, at 80th and Kenwood. When she was in eighth grade, 40 percent of the school's students were meeting or exceeding standards on the ISAT, compared with 64 percent citywide and 79 percent statewide.

One day when Jasmeen was a seventh-grader at Avalon Park, she saw something unusual in the lunchroom: a blonde, blue-eyed white girl. She apparently was a new student. "Everybody was like, 'Wait a minute—where'd she come from?" Jasmeen never spoke with the girl, who was younger than her. The girl's time at the school was brief, but she got Jasmeen wondering about her school's composition. "I was like, 'Why aren't there more of her around here?'" But she figured she knew the answer. "I just assumed that they had the money to live somewhere nicer. I'm sure if we had the money, we would have lived somewhere nicer."

When Jasmeen was in eighth grade, a friend of hers was attending Senn High School in Edgewater, on the north side. Senn has long been one of Chicago's most ethnically diverse schools, and when Jasmeen's friend—who is African-American and Mexican—showed her the Senn yearbook, Jasmeen found the diversity appealing. "I thought, I want to go to a high school where there are all these different kinds of people."

She knew that the selective-enrollment high schools were among the most diverse of the city's public schools, and that was one reason she took the entrance exam for them. But her score wasn't high enough to qualify. She was disappointed but not surprised: her success in grammar school was due to hard work, not brilliance, she tells me. She's a slow reader, which hurts her on timed tests. So she ended up at her neighborhood school, Hirsch.

Hayley's father is a doctor and her mother a psychologist. She has one sibling, a sister six years older who Hayley modeled herself after. Her sister sang and danced in shows Hayley went to when she was small, and Hayley wanted to do so too. She took ballet and tap-dance classes starting at age four. In grammar school and junior high, she was in hip-hop classes and took voice lessons, and was in acting classes in Wilmette and at the Piven Theatre Workshop in Evanston. The classes and lessons "helped shape the person I am," she says. They also convinced her she wanted to be an entertainer.

In the two elementary schools and the junior high Hayley attended in Glencoe, 95 percent of the students were white and only about 4 per cent were from low-income families. Year after year more than 90 percent of the students in these schools met or exceeded state standards. Hayley did well in school from the beginning. She loved reading, which seemed to be the norm among her peers, she says.

When she was about ten, she started going to "enrichment" classes for gifted kids at Northwestern University on Saturdays. There was more of a racial and ethnic mix among the students in these classes than in Glencoe, and she noticed. "I was like, where do they come from, where am I coming from, and how does that make us different?"

The enrollment of Hirsch High, at 77th and Ingleside, shifted radically in the 1950s and '60s. The neighborhood changed from white to black, and so did the student body. The school had more than 2,000 students in the 60s, but its enrollment has withered recently; at the beginning of last year there were only 390 students.