I live around the cornder from Drummond. The video is pretty much accurate. What they don't mention is that many of the kids at Drummond at one point or another, had families living in the area, or learned about the school through someone else who once lived there. The Puerto Ricans moved west, but their kids stayed at Drummond.

So given that, what's the alternative? Open enrollment which in theory makes the schools more fair to all city residents, or neighborhood restrictions?

If the bigger point is that the white residents of Bucktown haven't embraced the local schools yet, well, that's true. The whites either game the magnet system or send their kids to private school.

Trust me, if Drummond was brought up to par with Alcott, you'd see a line of SUVs on Cortland every morning.

I don't blame people for not sending their children to CPS schools. The Trib did that study a while back that said 6 out of every 100 CPS grads gets a bachelors by age 24. Most of those 6 students are from the magnets. Seriously. I work with CPS grads (non-magnet) on a daily basis and they have limited reading and writing skills. Their comprension skills are substandard. Sure I make some typos or grammatical mistakes posting but you can't compare the two.

I wonder if in the next few years Bucktown's schools will undergo the transformation that happened to the old Waller High on Armitage near Halsted. Before Lincoln Park became "gentrified" this was considered a sub-standard neighborhood high school. Once LP became yuppie heaven it became Lincoln Park High, an above-average magnet school.

anon,

Wasn't Waller a junior high? And isn't "sub-standard" a massive understatement? It was the pits, as I recall.

Can't tell you how "pitty" it was since the transition took place after I moved here and just had to go by whatever the newspapers chose to say.

I know a graduate of Waller, he remembers when they tore down the homes to blow out Oz Park.

to call LP an above-average magnet school is true, to a degree. the magnet programs/IB program there are good, but they also serve (in what I assume are massively declining numbers) the Cabrini Green kids. I haven't been in there for over a decade, I'd be curious as to how it's changing as Cabrini has come down.

there were a lot of burnout kids there who had parents well off when I was in high school, and a lot of kids who started in magnet programs and spent too much time smoking dope on the Hill and ended up in the general programs.