And yet Obama was never comfortable with this idea. For example, when asked during a 2003 interview with Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell if he thought it would have been a better idea to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods rather than on the construction of Millennium Park in the Loop, Obama, at the time an Illinois state senator planning a U.S. Senate run, responded, “If I told you how I really felt, I’d be committing political suicide right here in front of you.”13 Whether due to sheer political expediency or to Obama’s increasingly pragmatic orientation, such ambivalence about Daley’s policies seemed to resolve itself by the time he set his sights on the White House. But Obama’s reluctance to embrace the Daley mystique in 2003 reflected perhaps his rather privileged glimpse into the underside of the Chicago success story. In 2002, for example, Chicago’s 647 homicides made it the murder capital of the country, and two of its highest-profile murders that year occurred in the North Kenwood–Oakland area of Obama’s own Thirteenth Senate District, where a brick-wielding mob of youths had beaten two men to death after their van had lost control and struck a group of young women sitting on a porch.14
This was merely one in a series of brutal murders perpetrated in Chicago’s black ghetto neighborhoods that received national exposure in the first decade of the twenty-first century, each incident reminding white Chicagoans of the other world they sped through in the sealed safety of their automobiles on the Dan Ryan, the Skyway, and the Congress Expressway, or else in an “L” train rattling westward or southward from the Loop. During Congressman Bobby Rush’s highly ineffective 1999 mayoral primary run, which culminated in his crushing defeat by Daley by a 73–27 margin, the former Black Panther had tried to arouse the ire of blacks and liberals alike by evoking the idea that there were, in fact, two Chicagos: “One Chicago is symbolized by flower pots and Ferris wheels and good jobs and communities where police respect the citizens,” Rush had claimed, making reference to Daley’s massive program to beautify the city’s tourist areas and his $250 million renovation of the Navy Pier lakefront recreation and entertainment area, with its 150-foot-high Ferris wheel. “The second Chicago is still plagued by a lack of jobs, poor schools and police less tolerant of youths who dress and talk differently than they do.”15 If this message posed little threat to the seemingly invincible Daley and his Chicago success story on the citywide stage, it no doubt played a role in Rush’s reelection to the House of Representatives the following year, when he collected twice as many votes as his challenger in the Democratic Primary—an ambitious state senator named Barack Obama.
When the figures from the 2000 census appeared, few could take issue with the veracity of Rush’s claim. According to the new census data, Chicago had managed to retain its middle class during the 1990s; its median household income had grown at a rate that was twice the national average; and overall poverty had modestly declined—all of which seemed to confirm the triumphant image of Chicago as a leading global city and tourist destination, up there in the top tier with the likes of New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston. But the data from the “second Chicago” offered a very different vision. The census readings related to black Chicago and to its astonishing disparity from white Chicago showed a city more statistically akin to the nation’s most distressed urban centers: Baltimore, Newark, St. Louis, New Orleans, and Detroit. While the median household income for whites and Latinos in Chicago was $49,000 and $37,000, respectively, it was just $29,000 for blacks, and only 13 percent of black adults held bachelor’s degrees, compared to 42 percent of whites.16 Such disparities helped to explain why Chicago’s 50.2 percent employment rate for black males over the age of sixteen put it just barely above New Orleans and St. Louis and well behind Baltimore (54.4) and Newark (54.2). Moreover, Chicago topped all other major metropolitan areas for its percentage of black residents having no access to telephone service (7.2), with Detroit a somewhat distant second. Perhaps most tellingly, African Americans were just 19 percent of the overall population of the Chicago metropolitan area but 43 percent of the population living below the poverty line, figures that placed the city ahead of every one of the fifteen largest metropolitan areas except for St. Louis in this statistical measure.17
FIGURE 17. The other Chicago: view north along S. Dearborn Street towards the Robert Taylor Homes on E. 54th St. in 1998. Photo by Camilo José Vergara. Reprinted with permission.
Such figures tell only part of the story. They say little, for example, about the street culture and underground economy that so powerfully shaped the life chances of a generation of youths coming of age in the second Chicago. One of the major consequences of the festering poverty was the development in the late 1980s and 1990s of a Hobbesian world of ruthless street gangs engaged in a battle to the finish for control of the lucrative crack cocaine trade that exploded across the American urban landscape in the second half of the 1980s. By the early 1990s, several of the city’s mightiest gangs—the Gangster Disciples, Vice Lords, Saints, and Latin Kings, among others—had set up elaborate centralized, hierarchical organizations to administer crack distribution in their respective territories. The business approach they came to adopt resembled the franchise model of the fast-food restaurants that were quickly becoming the only sources of nourishment in their communities: gang leadership distributed product to a number of competing “crews” within the general organization, each of which controled its sales methods and wages so as to maximize its profits after paying “dues” and “street taxes” to the central leadership. The arrangements amounted to a neoliberalism of the streets. Researchers studying the underground drug economy of this moment even observed subcontracting schemes, in which one gang leased a building or street corner to another for the purposes of drug trafficking within its territory. Since crack was normally distributed in small quantities with low purchase costs, the business tended to be labor intensive, requiring countless hand-to-hand transactions and numerous foot soldiers to make the sales, watch for police, keep track of the money, and, when need be, engage in turf battles. Even though estimates of total drug trafficking revenues in the city of Chicago ranged from $500 million to $1 billion, investigative journalists and ethnographers alike determined that the many thousands of foot soldiers—mostly teenagers pursuing hip-hop video dreams laden with Mercedes Benzes and Cadillac Escalades, gold chain necklaces, swimming pools, and shapely women—earned wages just a bit above those offered at McDonald’s and KFC.18
Yet, despite the disadvantageous risk-reward ratio associated with entry-level work in a crew, gangs were incorporating—if not by financial inducements, then by force and intimidation—increasing numbers of young men into their ranks. In 2006, a Chicago Crime Commission study estimated that some 125,000 youths—more than a quarter of the total number of students within the entire Chicago public school system—belonged to between seventy and one hundred gangs within the city, a sharp rise from the previous count of 70,000 gang members in 2000.19 It was this trend more than anything else that accounted for Chicago’s top rankings among the nation’s ten largest cities in rates for both violent crime and homicide. Between 1992 and 2004, the share of murders within the city that were “gang-motivated” rose from 15 percent to more than 35 percent, while the average age of the victims of gang-motivated homicides dropped significantly.20 During the 2008–2009 school year, a record forty-three Chicago public school students became the victims of gang-related murders, a situation that gained national attention in September 2009 after the brutal murder of sixteen-year-old Derrion Albert, a solid student who had managed to stay clear of gang activities. The Albert affair attracted national and even international coverage through a mobile-phone video of his savage beating during a wild street fight between opposing neighborhood gangs in the far South Side Roseland area—one from around Fenger High School, where Albert had been an honor student, and one from the Altgeld Gardens Housing Project, where Barack Obama had worked as a community organizer in mid-1980s.21 The video sh
ows Albert, who had apparently walked into the fracas by chance, knocked to the ground by a youth swinging a long wooden board and then bludgeoned and stomped on repeatedly by several others, amidst the screams of female onlookers, who eventually tried to drag the boy to safety.
This scene of unspeakable horror belies or at least complicates the idea, heard in urban policy circles beginning in the late 1990s, that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) under Mayor Daley’s management had become what President Clinton referred to in 1998 as “a model for the nation.” Once dubbed the “worst in the nation” by President George Bush’s secretary of education William Bennett in 1987, Chicago’s schools had been, by many accounts, transformed after 1995, when the Illinois state legislature handed complete control of the CPS over to Mayor Daley. With Gerry Chico as the president of the CPS and Paul Vallas its CEO, the Daley administration implemented a sweeping corporate-style reform that imposed centralized authority over the elected, neighborhood-based Local School Councils (LSCs) established during the Washington years, created a range of special schools and programs, and, perhaps most importantly, ushered in an unforgiving system of accountability based on student performance on annual standardized tests.22 It was precisely the kind of model that the Bush administration looked to when it designed its No Child Left Behind program, which, after being legislated by Congress in 2001, required all government-run schools receiving federal funding to administer a statewide standardized test in order to evaluate performance. Any school failing to achieve acceptable results after a number of years faced a range of “corrective actions,” from curriculum and staff changes to major restructuring measures, including subcontracting its administration to a private company. Several years after its inception, Chicago’s program appeared to show some significant results. Between 1995 and 2005, the graduation rate increased from under 42 percent to 51 percent, which moved Chicago from the lower ranks into the middle of the pack of the nation’s big cities.23 Moreover, between 2004 and 2009, the rate of CPS graduates enrolling in college rose from 43.5 to 54.4 percent, a jump that more than tripled the 3.4 percent rise nationally.24
And yet such signs of progress pointed to the creation of a multitiered educational system rather than any wholesale improvement. If the Chicago school reforms of the mid-1990s had played a role in increasing the percentage of high school graduates heading off to higher education, they had done little to diminish the city’s sizable share of the country’s most troubled high schools. According to high school rankings compiled in a 2009 study based on standardized test scores, Chicago possessed seventeen of the one hundred worst performing schools in the United States. New York, by contrast had three, and Philadelphia and San Francisco one each.25 With only 4 percent of its students proficient in math and 9 percent proficient in reading, Derrion Albert’s school, Fenger, was twenty-fourth from the bottom—a situation that helps explain the scene that Albert walked into in September that year. Indeed, while an array of “college prep” magnet schools, charter schools, and high school International Baccalaureate programs had raised the educational bar for many middle-class Chicagoans, such new opportunities remained far out of reach for the vast majority of students.26 In working-class black and Latino areas of the city, access to the kind of public education that can qualify students for advanced degree programs was scarce. To take but one example, out of the total 11,915 spots available in the city’s nine selective college prep high schools in 2011, schools located in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods outside the North Side or immediate Loop vicinity provided only 2,670. And, while students were of course eligible to apply to schools outside their neighborhoods, if they could handle the long commutes, low-income students, who made up some 85 percent of the total student population in the CPS, constituted only about one-third of the enrollments in these North Side and Loop area schools that year.27 In effect, then, Mayor Daley’s celebrated reforms created a system of winners and losers, with the winners living predominantly in white, middle-class, and some gentrifying neighborhoods, and the losers concentrated in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods south and west of the Loop, where according to a 2003 report by the Center for Labor Market Studies, black males were six times more likely than their white counterparts elsewhere in the city to be out of school and unemployed.28
Certainly, the allure of the gangs and the absence of promising employment opportunities for young men in the ghettos and barrios loomed large in any explanation for this disparity. But there was also reason to believe that school policies implemented during Daley’s aggressive drive to boost test scores and hold schools accountable for poor performance played a role in pushing young men into the precarious place between school and work. A number of studies conducted between 2000 and 2003 revealed dramatic increases in school suspensions for minor nonviolent infractions. Between 1999 and 2000, for example, suspensions jumped from 21,000 to nearly 37,000, with students of color receiving the vast majority of them. Increasing suspensions, moreover, also meant more expulsions, with African Americans, according to a report published by the social service agency Hull House, being three times more likely than whites or Latinos to be expelled.29
These strategies of weeding out the students identified as bringing down the numbers gave way in 2006 to a new policy under Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan to close some eighty poorly performing schools over four years and replace them with one hundred privately run charter or contract schools, whose teachers were not required to be certified by the state, received lower salaries, and were barred from joining the Chicago Teachers Union. This discovery of charter schools as the panacea for the city’s failing public education system represented the same logic of neoliberalization that was shaping the city’s approach to social services provision. Driving this scheme was none other than the Commercial Club, which constituted a committee of high-powered captains of industry and finance under the chairmanship of Exelon Corporation CEO John W. Rowe—including the chairman of the board of McDonald’s Corporation and the CEO of the Chicago Board Options Exchange—to design a private-sector answer to Chicago’s school problems. The report issued by this Education Committee of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club was aptly named Left Behind. Journalist Rick Perlstein revealed that it “deployed the word ‘data’ forty-five times, ‘score,’ ‘scored,’ or ‘scoring’ 60 times—and ‘test,’ ‘tested,’ and ‘testing,’ or ‘exam’ and ‘examination,’ some 1.47573 times per page.”30 Within a year, Daley was moving on the Renaissance 2010 charter school initiative. Overseen by Arne Duncan, CEO of the CPS at the time, the implementation of Renaissance 2010 met fierce resistance from many LSCs objecting to the disruptions and violence caused by the often-precipitous school closures. In the initial phase of the plan, for example, a series of school closures on the South Side led to student transfers to neighboring areas, which, in turn, caused sharp spikes in gang violence. Community concerns like these, however, were clearly secondary to the objectives of raising scores and cutting costs. Further suggestive of the neoliberal rationality that infused the plan was a 2007 speech made by CPS president Rufus Williams in front of the Chicago City Club, a group of civic and business leaders, in which he compared the idea of LSCs running schools to a chain of hotels being managed by “those who sleep in the hotels.”31
Such policies—suspensions, expulsions, closures, and the dampening of local participation in the decision-making process—were components of a public relations campaign to manufacture evidence of progress resolving problems that had opened the city to widespread criticism in the 1980s and early 1990s, when a series of teachers’ strikes and parent-led community protests raised awareness about gang violence and of the lack of funding for necessary school improvements and salary increases. But they also spoke once again to the revanchist spirit of neoliberal governance that fed off the hard-edged antiwelfare, law-and-order rhetoric coming out of Washington during this same period. This was an approach and an ethos that circulated among policy makers in cities acr
oss the United States, but that saw perhaps its clearest expression in Richard M. Daley’s Chicago success story. One of the pioneering innovations brought about by Daley’s overhaul of the system in 1995 was the establishment of three military high schools as well as the dramatic expansion of military programs in numerous high schools and middle schools.32 Predominantly enrolling blacks and to a lesser extent Latinos, these military high schools, which used military-style forms of punishment for violations of school rules, achieved graduation rates and test scores that placed them in the top ranks of the schools available to working-class blacks and Latinos. But they were also living monuments to the idea that what was amiss in Chicago’s schools had more to do with the cultural shortcomings of black and Latino students than with the structural inequalities of the school system itself. All it takes is some military-style discipline, the argument went, to make things right.
Chicago on the Make Page 36