Chicago's half-empty schools reveal a crisis city leaders refuse to confront
On the West Side of Chicago, Frederick Douglass Academy had a grand total of 27 students inside a building that was built for 1,000 students. That is only 2% of the building's capacity. The school was one of 13 Chicago schools that had fewer than 100 students. Across the city, 35% of schools are less than half full. The Chicago Public Schools system has lost more than 77,000 students since 2010.
So where are all the students disappearing to? The answer is an indictment of the city and its public school sector.
It is true that many families have left the city because of its rising cost of living. I know many Black families who have moved out, and their numbers are in the tens of thousands. It is also true that the birth rate in Chicago has dropped by nearly 50% in less than 20 years. It is not surprising that many graduates choose to leave the city instead of staying and starting families here.
But these are not the only reasons why so many public schools are suffering from abysmal enrollment numbers.
The children who live on the West Side and South Side did not all disappear. They chose not to go to their neighborhood public high schools. I cannot blame them. Students stuck in these schools tell me they can't learn because the teachers cannot control the rowdier kids. There's a lack of discipline, and rules are hardly enforced. Some students even tell me that some teachers don't even try and just pass the kids. So kids know that if they challenge the teachers and make trouble, they will often give up and award them a passing grade.
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The students and parents hear all of these stories, and that plays a major role in why they are choosing to enroll in magnet schools, charter schools, parochial schools, and even private schools. CPS still enrolls most of the city's remaining kids, but its share slipped from about 75% to 71%. That is roughly 18,000 children who live in Chicago and chose something else. Parents in Kids First workshops said school quality is one of the reasons families stay or go.
And they are right to do so.
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If we look more closely at the statistics, it is easy to see why so many families have opted out of public schools, especially Black families. In the same district, Black students in selective enrollment high schools are three times more likely to read at grade level than Black students in traditional public schools. When it comes to math, the numbers are even starker. Black students are five times more likely to be proficient in math in selective enrollment schools than their peers in public schools. Parents are seeing the data, and they're voting with their feet.
It doesn't help that the Chicago Teachers Union has made a mockery of itself. The head of the union doesn't even send her own children to the public schools that she oversees. The CTU has continued to choose politics over its teachers and schools time after time. In 2025, CTU spent a record $4.2 million on politics and lobbying while spending less than 18% of its total spending on representing teachers. It poured millions into electing Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former CTU organizer. It then used that alliance to freeze school closings and to fight school-choice initiatives that have been a boon to many poor parents.
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If it couldn't get worse than that, CTU also helped kill Illinois' Invest in Kids scholarships because they allowed kids to escape the public schools. Not only that, CTU has made the national news several times for using "days of action" to turn kids into activists for whatever left-wing cause is in vogue at the moment. So why would CTU be shocked when families see all of this political activity and instead choose to get the best education for their children?
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I want to be clear that I'm not here to slander teachers. Many of them are excellent, but they will tell you, as they have told me, that they are trapped in a system that does not allow them to teach to the fullest of their abilities. One told me, "I want to teach algebra, and I want to experience that joy when I see a child struggling at the beginning of the year only to become masterful by the end of the year — I don't want to teach activism."
That is why the buildings are empty. The people who run these buildings are largely the problem.
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They have created schools that hold little appeal to families. This is America, a capitalist society, where people will always choose what is best for them. No parent wants to drive that extra hour or pay extra fees or tuition, but they will do so for their child's education. If the public schools want to bring these students back, then they have to buck the existing leadership.
They have to return to the original purpose of the public schools: to develop young minds into educated, upstanding citizens. The empty buildings are a symbol of how far we have strayed from that original purpose.