Do majority send their chidren to Evanston Township (Chicago, Lincoln: crime, credit)

[2many2choosefrom]

In reading about different areas - ive learned that majority who choose to stay in the city of Chicago send their high schoolers to private school. Do the majority of middle class/upper middle class in Evanston also send their kids to private schools? I cant really tell from reading threads. It seems that the gangs around the high school combined with the low score on great schools (which i realize isnt the end all be all) would steer people away from utilizing ETHS. Please share what you may know. Thanks.

[nana053]

https://www.usnews.com/education/bes...gh-school-6729

U.S. News & World Report released its "Best High Schools" rankings for 2016, placing Evanston Township High School (ETHS) at 13 in Illinois and 452 in the nation. The ranking, which includes selective enrollment high schools, reiterates ETHS’ placement in the top two percent of high schools in the country.


ETHS was awarded a gold medal ranking based on a comprehensive rankings methodology developed by U.S. News & World Report and a global nonprofit social science research firm. A four-step process determined the Best High Schools list, with the first three steps examining how well the schools serve all their students. The fourth step assessed the degree to which schools prepare students for college-level work.

https://www.niche.com/k12/evanston-t...l-evanston-il/

Evanston Township High School Rankings
Niche ranks over 14,000 public high schools based on statistics and millions of opinions from students and parents.

2017 College Readiness Ranking in Illinois
#16 of 660
2017 Largest Public High Schools in Illinois
#23 of 802
2017 Most Diverse Public High Schools in Illinois
#16 of 500

You can also look at the Illinois Report Card

Great schools does not really mean much.

I will say that even back when my kids were in school, there were people complaining about ETHS. My kids got a fantastic education there. My son's class included the grandson of the physicist Edward Teller, so his parents were certainly satisfied. His older brother also went to ETHS and is Astro Teller, the captain of Moonshots. My son is a chemical engineer and credits the phys/chem program at ETHS for a lot of his success. My daughter is a theater techie and her teachers at ETHS got her into Carnegie Mellon's theater program.

Obviously, it may be different now to an extent, but I think it still competes well with New Trier.

https://patch.com/illinois/lakefores...news-2016-list

New Trier's ranking this year is behind that of rival Evanston Township High School, which was No. 13 in the state and rated 452nd in the country.

Fourteen other Illinois high schools cracked the top 500. The No. 1 high school in the U.S. rankings is the School for the Talented and Gifted in Dallas, Texas.

I suspect people who don't want to use a public school like ETHS just don't want to mingle with the poorer segment of ETHS's population because academically, the school is damn good.

[Clark&Addison]

Originally Posted by 2many2choosefrom

In reading about different areas - ive learned that majority who choose to stay in the city of Chicago send their high schoolers to private school.

Just an FYI, the above is not necessarily true. It really depends on income level and area. In beverly and Mt Greenwood, almost everyone goes to a Catholic high school except a few that get in and choose selective enrollment public schools. In Lincoln Park there are probably as many children of millionaires at Lincoln Park High School as there is at prestigious Latin and Parker. On the northwest side there are more kids going to public Taft and selective enrollments than there are going to private high schools. In areas like Irving Park or Logan Square, most middle class and above families are avoiding the neighborhood schools at all costs. It is an interplay between the quality of the neighborhood school, the kids ability to get in to a Selective Enrollment, and the means of the parents.

To your original question, I think Evanston families with a serious enough aversion to ETHS to send their kids to a private school for that reason alone would be a very, very small minority. ETHS is a well respected school.

[chet everett]

It is one thing to say that the affluent with school aged children who don't get into top rated selective admissions CPS high schools and choose to continue to live in the city do decide between: a) taking on the costs of private schools b) deciding if the less than top rated school is really better than neighborhood high school in CPS c) weighing the trade-offs of CLOSEST neighborhood high school ... Of course for well paid city workers who are required to live inside Chicago many accept the costs of tuition as much out of tradition as any real issues with the schools. It is not true that a majority of high schoolers in Chicago are in private schools, though among certain groups it might seem that way...

Even is you look the the math such a statement makes no sense -- there are over 300K kids in CPS. Factoring in the drop out rates and bias towards kids in the early elementary schools being over represented there still tens of thousands of high schoolers Nothing even close to that many "slots" for the 9-12th grade private schools...

When you look at the relative desirability of Evanston and ETHS it is probably well below that of other towns that folks focus on when considering moving primarily for school but there is nothing like the true "mass avoidance" such as happens with CPS non-selective admissions public high schools that have real issues with basic safety...

SO -- the OP is technically way off base in thinking that any such a "pattern" might exist. Quite the opposite, there really are very few slots for private high schools in the greater Evanston area, the families who choose such options are likely doing so for the same sorts of traditions / preferences that exist in the most desirable areas -- handful of private schools are really giving families that want different experience with regard to things like total school size, religious basis, and social aspects...

[2many2choosefrom]

Thank you all for your feedback. It was something that had piqued my interest when reading through this forum.

Also I apologize as i think i misworded my original post when I Said the majority do not utilize CPS

[chet everett]

Originally Posted by 2many2choosefrom

Thank you all for your feedback. It was something that had piqued my interest when reading through this forum.

Also I apologize as i think i misworded my original post when I Said the majority do not utilize CPS

There are LOTS of confusing things about CPS and it is understandable to wonder if similar issues spill over the the suburbs. The short answer is "suburban schools are far more responsive than CPS". Every school district other than Chicago has an elected Board of Education and the folks that run for those positions are generally parents that receive little if any compensation for serving. That makes it much less likely for the schools to be run for the benefit of "insiders" in the way that CPS has largely perverted the aim of schools. In fact, the handful of suburban districts that are routinely found to have the worst performance also tend to be loaded up with jokers that abuse the rules designed to keep money in the classroom; sadly these tend to be in the most economically devastated suburbs where violence and poverty are as bad as the worst of Chicago's crime ridden areas. Such things cause one to swing between , , and ...

For folks who like what Evanston offers, which include unique mix of fairly high end living near Lake Michigan, NU, an urban downtown, as well schools that serve a wide range of families, there are plenty of pluses. In some ways it strikes me that if Evanston was not sandwiched to the south by the sort of odd mix that defines Chicago's Roger's Park / Edgewater with Loyola's campus and the high rises and to the north by the affluent and "village like" towns served by New Trier it probably would have more a "college town" feel but even as it is there are lots of good people associated with NU that do get involved in local elections and that certainly helps steer its direction which has mostly been positive. The few instances where such influences have gone toward the more "politically correct" type decisions have not really been terribly polarizing; the results from recent elections confirm this:

https://dailynorthwestern.com/2017/0...ent-to-equity/

https://patch.com/illinois/evanston/...-votes-winners

[SloopyJ]

The short answer to your question is yes, the overwhelming majority of families in Evanston send their kids to ETHS - and I say this as an Evanstonian fitting your demographic description but with a kid in private high school. My kid is very much an anomaly around our area, or any area in Evanston. I should note that his reason for selecting a private school had much to do with his specific interests rather than any overriding concern about ETHS; I fully expect that my second child will choose ETHS like all of her friends will do.

[Hiruko]

Originally Posted by 2many2choosefrom

In reading about different areas - ive learned that majority who choose to stay in the city of Chicago send their high schoolers to private school. Do the majority of middle class/upper middle class in Evanston also send their kids to private schools? I cant really tell from reading threads. It seems that the gangs around the high school combined with the low score on great schools (which i realize isnt the end all be all) would steer people away from utilizing ETHS. Please share what you may know. Thanks.

Evanstonians overwhelmingly send their children to the local public schools. As someone who grew up here and attended both public and private schools, I can tell you that when I attended private school I was a minority in being from Evanston at my Evanston private school, and a small minority among my neighbors for going to private school. Also, I was a middle and high school student within the last 10 years.

[nana053]

If anyone is interested, there is a history of the high school here:

https://archive.org/stream/historyof...0davi_djvu.txt

Apparently, Evanston had a private high school, the Preparatory School of Northwestern University and there was great opposition to establishing a public high school with taxpayer money. The school was established in 1876. The first actual high school building opened in 1883.

The whole thing is long and hard to read with lots of typos, but it is an amazing story.

[Hiruko]

Originally Posted by nana053

If anyone is interested, there is a history of the high school here:

https://archive.org/stream/historyof...0davi_djvu.txt

Apparently, Evanston had a private high school, the Preparatory School of Northwestern University and there was great opposition to establishing a public high school with taxpayer money. The school was established in 1876. The first actual high school building opened in 1883.

The whole thing is long and hard to read with lots of typos, but it is an amazing story.

Thank you for sharing this. It was a very interesting read.