Chicago right fit for young family?

[Vlajos]

Originally Posted by lenniel

This is exactly right. It's not the schools job to educate your children, (at least, not 100% of their job).
The problem is, if you have parents that didn't go to college and don't value education beyond high school, then in general, their not going to be as involved in their kids education, pushing them to excel and do better than they did.

I think I follow what you are getting at, but I would say the job of a school is to educate, not to provide hundreds of social services outside of education though.

[chet everett]

...all but a handful of pretty rare neighborhoods in Chicago are too much "at risk" to do well in school.

It is not just violence (though that is sadly all too common in some areas) it as whole set of circumstances that breeds hopelessness and defeat.

From the truly awful lack of jobs that really makes it sort of impossible for kids to imagine that any job other than some extremely low level future awaits them to the prevelance of lay-about thugs and scam artists that are often the most "well off" people in too many neighborhoods. And the scams are so pervasive -- from families that do literally get paid to sell food stamps (which is illegal) to families that 'recruited' for illegal Medicaid claims or even 'personal injury law suits' including questionably malpractice and workplace injuries it is frankly all too common to meet middle schooler that know a family member that has a pretty solid 'income stream' from these abuses.

And let's not forget that even the folks that really do try to set a good example for their kids by working in a legitamately tough job often have ridiculous hoops to jump through in Chicago -- make no mistake the women cleaning office highrises in the Loop are predominately Latin American or Polish immigrants with very limited English proficiency and very likely not quite 100% accurate documentations of right to work. A layer up folks fortunate enough to get a gig with a pension working for the CTA or Cook Co can be assumed to have "known somebody who knows somebody" and they still might not really be paid just for sweeping out a court room or El stop if they don't also carry campaign literature for the correct canidates and can prove to their poltical patron that the were sufficiently effective in poltical organizing.

There are just so few jobs left in the private sector that do not involve a college degree that fall into mainly two categories -- those with such inhuman hours (like health care aide or similar shift work) and/or those with unbearably short hours / small wages -- the folks working at fast food chain resturants pretty much need to work at multiple locations as no one operator wants to have folks ellgible for mandated benefits. While this is also true in the suburbs the degree to which latch key kids won't be overly tempted to join gangs and such does give kids in a rougher suburb at lots less pressure...

I have no doubt that there are little pockets of more functional middle income families in some areas, maybe Vlajos has some neighbors like that.

The challenge is that increasingly the spots that have such pockets have grown so expensive that only folks that can afford them drive out the folks happily living in the city. This is fundamentally differnent than the kind of gentrification that takes literal burned out slums or vacant blocks and makes them habitable -- this reshapes a neighborhood from the sort of families making due without two college educated professionals working fulltime to provide at least a modicum of family life to an area with swaths of very high income families that just do not have the time or inclination to walk over to the local school and volunteer to make it more acceptable.


And it will not likely get better until / unles there are fundamental shifts in what sorts of firms the city / state is attractive to AND what sorts of policies that political leadership will support.