Chicago United for Equity - CPS equity maps

I attended an event last night titled "65/54 Brown v. Chicago: Race and Access in Education" which was held at the Hull House Museum near UIC in Chicago. The map below was shared by one of the speakers, Niketa Brar, a co-founder and executive director of Chicago United for Equity (CUE). 

Link to interactive map - click here

The event description says "Sixty-four years after Brown v. Board of Education (1954) declared that separate was unequal, Chicago’s public schools remain segregated, and access to education continues to be out of reach." Panel members were passionate and full of data to support this claim and urged that anyone who cares, should take an active role.

The map on the CUE web site helps support this. It is one of the few maps I've found that show CPS school boundaries. You can zoom in to enlarge the maps. You can also run your mouse over the map and find data for each school, showing segregation rates, student gains and/or loss over past few years, and school utilization by community members.

Other speakers were Amanda Lewis, Director of the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy and Professor of African American Studies and Sociology at UIC and  David Stovall, a Professor of Education Policy Studies and African American Studies at UIC. I met Dave last year and continue to encourage him to put his research on a blog or web site.  The moderator was Cassandra McKay-Jackson, an associate professor, and the new director of the Master of Social Work program at Erikson Institute. 

Last night's session was recorded and once the video is available I will add it as a link to this article. Listening to the speakers is much more effective than me trying to paraphrase what they were saying.

As you look at the CUE map, look at map stories on this blog and on the Tutor/Mentor blog.  I feel that students, parents, volunteers and others could be using map platforms like the CUE site to tell stories, specific to areas as small as a city block or a CPS school neighborhood. Every time something happens that shows the inequity in the city, a story needs to be created. Every time something good happens, stories can be created.

This needs to be happening daily if we're going to get more people involved and build the political power needed to address the deeply implanted root causes of these problems. 

Do you value what I write about and the information I share. Visit this page and use the PayPal to send me a small contribution to help me continue this work.