The four “selective-enrollment” schools — Walter Payton College Prep, Jones College Prep, Northside College Prep and Whitney Young College Prep — lead the district in test scores, and are frequent targets for white applicants, according to the paper.
Since U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras ended a 1980 agreement to desegregate the city’s schools — which had capped the percentage of white students at 35 percent — the North Side’s Payton has seen a spike in white student admissions, up 41 percent in 2013 from 29 percent four years ago.
Meanwhile, the Class of 2018 at Jones, on the South Side, is 38 percent white as compared to 29 percent in 2009. At Whitney Young, on the West Side, statistics show a downward trend in black freshmen enrollment and an uptick in the percent of white students admitted.
“We saw that coming in 2009,” Julie Woestehoff, executive director of the organization Parents United for Responsible Education, tells the Sun-Times, adding: “I consider these schools to be gated communities for children of privilege.”