Huh? “That’s how I’m ultimately going to grade whether or not our public school system is working: based upon the investments that we make to the people who rely on it.”
I look at the numbers presented here and I find it hard to believe how bad they are. Honestly, it seems hard to do this poorly even if you were trying to. In the worst schools in Chicago, 75 percent of elementary school students and 95 percent of high school students failed to meet state minimum standards. State minimum standards do not set a particularly high bar to begin with. I'm sure if you included all the schools you would get better numbers but still...no school should do this bad. Public schools in the U.S. have gotten a bad reputation over recent years. I think the particularly poor performance of certain big cities like Chicago really pull the average down. If you have children and cannot afford private school, you would want to stay away from most larger cities, especially if that city is Chicago.
The solution, according to the mayor, is to ignore those terrible numbers, pretend that the minimum standards tests do not exist (might as well just get rid of them I guess) and just blindly throw money at the schools. Right now, a public education in Chicago costs nearly $30,000 per student per year. The most expensive private school in the Chicago area is just over $30,000. It would seem pretty obvious to me that the problem is not the amount of money being spent but HOW it is being spent. This seems to be a common problem in general when it comes to government spending money. More is always the answer, not better.
But I guess if you just ignore actual educational performance and judge schools based on how much money is being spent you can have Chicago public schools outperforming the most expensive public schools in the country in no time.