Chicago Public Schools unveiled a five-year plan Thursday to improve the outcomes of the district’s Black students — at a time of unprecedented backlash against efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion in education.

The release of the , during Black History Month, is part of CPS’s broader five-year strategic plan and aims to address long-standing disparities in graduation, discipline, and other metrics faced by its Black students, who make up roughly a third of the student body.

The district set out to create the Black Student Success Plan in the fall of 2023, but its quiet posting on Thursday comes as both conservative advocacy groups and the Trump administration are taking aim at race-based initiatives in school districts and on college campuses.

Late last week, the U.S. Department of Education’s top acting civil rights official that they could lose federal funding if they don’t scrap all diversity initiatives, even those that use criteria other than race to meet their goals. He cited the 2023 Supreme Court Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision that banned the use of race as a college admissions factor.

CPS — in a progressive city in a Democratic state — has largely been insulated from standoffs over diversity and inclusion in recent years, when districts in other parts of the country have come under intense scrutiny over how they teach race and how they take it into account in hiring, selective program admissions, and other decisions. Increasingly, though, deep blue cities like Chicago are finding themselves in the crosshairs.

Last year, a Virginia-based advocacy group aimed at boosting outcomes for its Black students, which CPS said inspired its own plan. At the urging of the Biden administration, Los Angeles made changes to downplay the role of race, causing an outcry from some of its initiative’s supporters.

Chicago’s plan vows to increase the number of Black teachers, slash suspensions and other discipline for Black students, and embrace more culturally responsive curriculums and professional development to “combat anti-Blackness” — goals some of which could run afoul of the Department of Education’s interpretation of the Students for Fair Admissions decision.

Still, some district and community leaders in Chicago say CPS’s plan might be better-positioned to withstand challenges than Los Angeles’ initiative — and they said the district must forge ahead with the effort even as it braces for pushback.

“Now is not the time for anticipatory obedience and preemptive acquiescence,” said Elizabeth Todd-Breland, a University of Illinois Chicago professor of African American history and a former Chicago school board member who served on a working group that helped craft the plan. “This is not the time to shrink but to live out our values.”

The new plan says Illinois law mandates this work and cites a state statute that requires the Chicago Board of Education to have a . That committee has not yet been formed.

CPS declined Chalkbeat’s interview request and did not answer questions before publication. The district is hosting a celebration at Chicago State University at 3 p.m. Friday to mark the plan’s release.

Chicago set out to create Black Student Success Plan years ago

CPS convened a working group made up of 60 district employees, parents, students, and community members that started meeting in December of 2023 to begin creating .

The following spring, it with residents across the city — what the plan’s supporters describe as one of the district’s most extensive and genuine efforts to get community input.

The working group in May that included stepping up efforts to recruit and retain Black educators, promote restorative justice practices, ensure culturally responsive curriculums that teach Black history, and offer more mental health and other support for Black students through partnerships with community-based organizations.

The district adopted many of these recommendations in its plan. It sets some concrete five-year goals, including doubling the number of male Black teachers, increasing the number of classrooms where Black history is taught, and decreasing how many Black students get out-of-school suspensions by 40%.

“The Black Student Success Plan is much more than simply a document,” the plan said. “It represents a firm commitment by the district, a roadmap, and a call to action for Chicago’s educational ecosystem to ensure equitable educational experiences and outcomes for Black students across our district.”

The effort built on equity work to help “students furthest from opportunity” that started five years ago under former CEO Janice Jackson, said Dominique McKoy, the executive director of the University of Chicago’s To & Through Project. In CPS, by a range of metrics, those students have historically been Black children.

McKoy, whose work focuses on college access, points out that the district has made major strides in increasing the number of students who go to college. But more students than ever drop out before earning a college degree — an issue that has disproportionately affected Black CPS graduates.

“There’s evidence and data that we haven’t been meeting the needs of Black students,” he said. “This plan is about responding to the data. Being clear about that is one of the best ways to insulate and defend that process.”

But McKoy acknowledges that now is a challenging time to kick off the district’s plan.

“Undoubtedly there will be critics who will think it’s racial preference to help students who need help and will attack the district for doing so,” said Pedro Noguera, the dean of the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education.

Last year’s challenge against a $120 million Los Angeles program aimed at addressing disparities for Black students offers a case study, Noguera notes. Parents Defending Education, which opposes school district diversity and inclusion programs, filed a complaint with the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. The group has also challenged programs to recruit more Black male teachers and form affinity student groups based on race in other districts.

Ultimately, Los Angeles overhauled the program to steer additional staffing and other resources to entire schools serving high-needs students, rather than more narrowly to Black students. The that to some critics, those changes watered down the program, which was beginning to show some early results. But Noguera says he feels the program is still helping Black students.

However, it is clear that the Trump administration plans to go much further in interpreting the Students for Fair Admissions decision and seeking to root out DEI initiatives. In Friday, Craig Trainor, acting assistant secretary for civil rights in the Education Department, said efforts to diversify the teaching force or the student bodies of selective enrollment programs could trigger investigations and the loss of federal funding. About 20% of CPS’s operating revenue comes from the federal government.

“The Department will no longer tolerate the overt and covert racial discrimination that has become widespread in this Nation’s educational institutions,” Trainor wrote. “The law is clear: treating students differently on the basis of race to achieve nebulous goals such as diversity, racial balancing, social justice, or equity is illegal under controlling Supreme Court precedent.”

‘Get the help to the kids who need it’

Chicago, like Los Angeles, might consider a focus on schools — chosen based on metrics such as graduation rates, test scores and others — where the plan would help Black students and their peers, Noguera said. Maybe it doesn’t even have to refer to Black students in its name, he said.

“The main thing is to get the help to the kids who need it,” he said. But, he added, “In this environment, who knows what’s challenge-proof.”

He said what helped in Los Angeles was deep community engagement that lent that district’s initiative credibility and good will; the changes that the district made in response to the legal challenge did not erode those.

Darlene O’Banner, a CPS great-grandmother who served on the working group, said CPS got the community engagement piece right. She thinks the plan will offer a detailed roadmap for improving Black students’ achievement and experience.

“I am not going to think of the unknowns and what’s going on in the world,” O’Banner said. “We’re just going to hope for the best. We can’t put the plan on hold for four years.”

The working group issued its recommendation in early fall and stopped meeting following the September resignation of all school board members, who stepped down amid pressure from the mayor’s office to fire CPS CEO Pedro Martinez over budget disagreements.

Valerie Leonard, a longtime community advocate who also served on the working group, said during the community meetings for the Black Student Success Plan last year, there was no discussion of possible legal pushback to the plan.

“Illinois is a liberal state,” she said. “It never really occurred to us a year ago that this plan would be in danger.”

But more recently, as she heard Trump assail DEI initiatives, Leonard said she wondered if the plan would survive.

Leonard pushed Illinois lawmakers last year to mandate the Board of Education appoint as part of that cleared the way for an elected school board in Chicago. The district’s plan invokes that committee though it hasn’t been formed yet. The board formed a more generic student success committee earlier this month.

“We believe that the problem with Black children in public schools is so dire that it needs to be elevated to its own committee,” she said. “When our children get lumped into something that’s for all, they inevitably fall between the cracks.”

McKoy at the University of Chicago said he feels “cautious optimism” and hopes the city and state rally around CPS as it pushes to improve outcomes for Black students.

“The plan itself isn’t going to do the work,” he said.

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. Sign up for their newsletters at .

School was becoming the place he poured all his energy into, on the heels of his father’s incarceration and uncle’s murder. But simultaneously, from as young as four years old, disgusted looks from educators taught him schools were a place where he would be treated differently because he was Black. Being your authentic self, raw emotions and all, seemed to only be okay for white children.

He watched Eric, a Black classmate frequently isolated and paddled for disruptions or difficulty focusing, be expelled in first grade after bringing a water gun to school. From an early age, aunts and uncles imparting wisdom shared their experiences, told that they “would be lucky if they graduated.” 

Marrying autobiography with research and analysis of education reform movements, Fuller recounts his educational life in devastating detail in Being Black in America’s Schools, “an American story that I honestly believe is begging to be told.” 

From managing suicidal thoughts at eight to becoming desensitized to students’ humanity in pursuit of higher test scores working for a network charter, perpetuating the educational violence he thought he never would, Fuller verbalizes how policies landed in the mind of a Black child and educator. 

Amid debates of how and where Black history will be taught and a youth mental health crisis that is disproportionately felt by Black children, Fuller’s work has been described as a “beacon” that showcases “what keeps us captive while giving keen insights on what can free us,” by Abdul Tubman, activist and descendant of Harriet Tubman. 

Revealing the humans behind data and educational movements, Fuller shows the dehumanization happening in ways big and small in classrooms across the country. Tracked into advanced work in high school, for instance, he remembered how it felt to be isolated from his Black peers, then to see counselors write them, and their futures, off before they’d even graduated.  

“In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom,” Fuller, now an associate provost at The New School in New York City, told ����Ӱ��. 

Released in late July by Dafina, an imprint of Kensington Publishing, Fuller’s story exposes hundreds of anecdotes and presents models for transformative change in the education system. Uplifting models that champion children’s emotional wellbeing and cultures, like community schools and the freedom schools of the 1960s, he imagines a future where all children grow up learning Black history, critical thinking, and financial and emotional literacy in order to lead and “dream their way out of a dreamless land.”  

Drawing from time as an educator and administrator in and around Philadelphia, Boston and New York City’s schools, Fuller has also released a workbook companion for educators about how to concretely apply these concepts to the classroom at grade level. 

“I would have loved for them to tell me that I was worthy, to see me as their child, their nephew, a younger version of who they were, to see me the way I witnessed teachers often see my white classmates. To see me as ‘just a good kid.’ … To attempt to understand me rather than punish me. I would have loved for them to ask me about my hopes and dreams and then cultivate them in me. I would have loved for them to have fun with me and show me the joy they felt from being around me,” he writes. 

In conversation with ����Ӱ��, Fuller reflects on the importance of transforming schools to teach Black children to love themselves and what’s at stake when kids aren’t taught how to interrogate the world around them.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Jelani Cobb, writer and dean of Columbia’s journalism school, calls this “a book we needed yesterday.” Why write this now? What does it mean at this moment? 

Being Black in American Schools really came from a deep commitment of mine to marginalized children, all children, but specifically Black and brown children. And to liberatory education and powerful storytelling. I think this book is so important now in our current climate, given the attack on education that’s happening. The rhetoric in the conversation is pretty horrible.

It’s so important for us to have stories like this one to cut through a lot of the noise of the pundits, the politics because under all of that are the lived experiences of our students in our classrooms.

This book has been a four year journey really for me. In 2020 I was working for the New York City Department of Education. That was a summer where we had the killings of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor all over our television screens. What pundits now call the racial reckoning was happening. 

For me as an educator, I was looking at the world and our society and seeing that we were calling to the carpet our criminal justice system in a way that I felt was very valid – starting to interrogate its inherent racism and its inherent flaws. 

I wanted us to have that same conversation about another major American institution, which is our educational system. In the same way that the inherent racism in our criminal justice system is killing Black and brown people all the time, the inherent racism in our education system is killing the dreams of Black and brown children in the classroom. 

I imagine that coming to that realization also shaped the storytelling form you chose for this, weaving in and out of your own personal narrative, research, and historical moments in education reform. How did you decide to do that, and why are those lived experiences so necessary for people to hear and hold? 

It was really important for me to craft the book in the way that I did and I actually fought really hard for it. [Powerful storytelling] is what’s needed to really inspire action and change. Storytelling is what connects us, it’s the human aspect. 

Over the years, through false narratives, through so many things, things get so politicized and so up in the air. There’s not enough of hearing the stories and the real lived experiences of people underneath all of the theories, underneath all of the data. It was really powerful to use my own story – one that is uniquely mine but is not unique, right? 

I talk about being a child of an incarcerated parent growing up. There are millions of children right now who are living that experience. I talk about being one of a few or sometimes the only a Black child or student of color in my classroom as I was being tracked in school [into advanced coursework]. There are hundreds of thousands of children that are experiencing that right now. 

My own story was authentic to me, I knew I could tell it well and analyze it now from my lens as an educator, but also, I felt like it was one that so many people could connect to. I weave in the research and the history and keep it greater than the story because I think it helps people connect to the point that I’m trying to get across … This is what happened, and this is what this means, and this is how it looks.

That comes across in moments like when you describe working in youth development in Philadelphia, seeing the distrust in the community, both for strangers coming to their door and for education after . You feel it, the lived impact of those moments. 

And at so many points, you describe having to advocate for yourself, against the bias of white educators who assumed you cheated or wanted to discipline you or your friends more harshly than your white peers. You show why believing a phrase you repeated often, “I deserve to be here,” was necessary. How do you instill or encourage that in youth who are systemically underserved, and how might we get to a point where youth don’t have to be such fierce advocates? 

I am a strong believer in advocating for yourself, especially as a marginalized person in this world and in our society. In schools, I think how you encourage it is through developing their critical consciousness, developing their own empowering concept of self. 

We come from a legacy of being marginalized, being pushed to the side and being told that we are less-than in society. Because of that, we’re not necessarily the first to advocate for ourselves, especially where we feel discredited or feel like we are seen as second-class citizens. 

I always encourage students that I work with and parents that they deserve to have quality education, they deserve to have a quality experience, and their voice deserves to be heard. 

That advocacy is so important and as you see in the book, my advocacy saved me in many ways. That was something that was really important in my household; my mom taught me to be an advocate for myself because she was an advocate for me. I had that, but not every student is gonna have that because parents come with their lived experiences as well.

To your other question, how do we get to a point where we don’t need to … I think at some level, we will always have to advocate for more for ourselves. That’s not trying to be bleak, but I just think that’s reality. How we get to a point where there’s not much as much advocacy needed is really, the point in the book: to first acknowledge that our educational system was, in its current designs and its original intention, not designed to properly educate Black and brown people well. And then start to interrogate the designs – how we restructure an education system so that it serves all students. 

You also explore why early childhood education is particularly important for forming a sense of self. Reports keep coming out revealing how many millions of young children – for some states like New Mexico, one in two – are experiencing parental incarceration, abuse, death or other ACEs [adverse childhood experiences]. How can educators better support the earliest learners with these lived traumas?

And also RST or racial stress trauma, which is still severely underreported. I believe that every child born outside of the nucleus of what American society is, whiteness, experiences some racial stress trauma. 

We know that from the age 0 to 5, so much of your child’s development takes place. Their mental development, their identity of self. When that is compounded with trauma, we have to address that – in our early childhood centers, our Head Start centers, and as soon as they’re entering into school. 

I normally break it down – at the earliest stages, our children have to love who they are. So what does that mean? However they identify needs to be honored, uplifted and they need to be seen, empowered and know that they have a place in our society. They’re not second class in society, they’re not “other” in society. They are front and center and important in society. You do that through building authentic relationships, and in curriculum. Liberatory curriculum is age appropriate, but also brings in the identities of those youngest learners in ways that are normalized, uplifting to their identities. 

The reality we need to face in America is what you just mentioned, most of our students are coming into the classroom with some form of trauma. We are creating an education system that is just ignoring it. Early childhood is also extremely underfunded. We need more mental health counselors and specialists in our early childhood centers … to think about the designs of your classrooms, schools and how you are addressing the needs of your students.

People will probably read this and be like, well, we don’t even have them in our middle or high schools. But that just tells you how much mental health children’s mental health is put on the back burner. We see it in the numbers. . We have to start putting our resources behind these things. 

That’s a part of liberatory education too, providing them with the tools and trained individuals to help them cope with the traumas that are the reality of living in America. 

You go through some models that try to do this very thing and put a huge emphasis on building up Black children – like community schools, the , and in . That emphasis on love, grace and empathy, it’s not something that’s necessarily taught to teachers in preparation programs. How do you remind educators or leaders who are currently in positions of power of that, to champion kids’ humanity? 

It is not taught in our teacher professional development programs as much as it needs to be. There are programs out there – I mention one, Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations work which does great educator professional development around race – but there’s not a lot.

I’m not saying that children shouldn’t learn in your classrooms, but they won’t be able to learn if they’re in your classroom where they don’t feel safe or loved or like they are seen. 

I always say what moves people is storytelling. But also there’s and data out there that actually shows the more a child feels included in the curriculum, the more the child feels safe, or the better relationship the child has with their teacher, the better they’re going to do academically. There’s so much talk on disparities and how do we close the gaps … [We need more] access to that data showing that we need to have an emphasis on identity development and affirming curriculum. We need to have an emphasis on building authentic relationships. We need to have an emphasis on deconstructing bias in your practice. 

When I finished this book, we weren’t in the present day, of course. Now I’m thinking about the potential of what could happen with current policies, like book banning and the banning of diversity and inclusion, and what could come with Project 2025. I think where we need to focus is really on the grassroots. 

At the end of the day, regardless of what’s happening from a legislative standpoint, we still have millions of kids in the classroom that we are responsible for and can’t let fall through the cracks. If they ban diversity, equity and inclusion, so you can’t say those words, then don’t say those words, but still affirm your students in the classroom. Still honor their identity in the classroom. Those are the conversations that we need to be having with our teachers. 

We get caught up on, this is banned now so we can’t do this, or now we can’t teach AP African American studies. No, you can still honor your students and, and you don’t have to call it that, but you can still do it in the classroom on the ground. Our kids are suffering and we can’t continue to allow them to suffer at the hands of a small minority of people.

Particularly as you’re mentioning the hyper emphasis, especially after the pandemic, on learning losses and academic performance. I keep hearing from educators that we cannot lose the person in all of that, because it’s going to make it that much harder to do anything else. 

I hear sometimes this distinction that, oh, well, if we honor our student’s identity or if we really have a focus on what people like to call “soft skills,” they’ll lose the focus on the academic outcomes. Those two things are not separate, they go hand in hand. Children do better when their lived experiences are brought into the classroom, when you tie in real world current events and their lived experience, when you’re able to connect that to what you’re trying to teach them. They feel they feel more connected to what they’re trying to learn and therefore have better outcomes. 

Speaking of censorship and fear culture, in your writing, you express exactly why learning Black history, accurate history, is important for all children at every stage of education. Referencing the first ethnic studies course you took as a college student at Emory, you said it enabled you to “finally put theory and evidence behind many of mine and my family’s experiences. It was as if up until this point, I had been in a battle without armor.” 

Can you speak more on this, which alludes to a James Baldwin quote, about what you found in that course that you wished you had gotten earlier or that you think youth need exposure to today?

My dad was a part of the mass incarceration of nonviolent criminals who faced very long sentencing for drug related charges. I had experienced that act of violence by my society. Then growing up in South Carolina and experiencing on the ground discriminatory comments … I experienced all of that, that legacy of slavery, of racism that was passed down from generation to generation in our American society. 

When I got to Emory, I learned about redlining. I learned about mass incarceration. I learned about Jim Crow laws, I learned about all of these things and it was like, wow, no, I get it now. This isn’t just something that is happening. This is very intentional and it’s by design. It almost was an empowering thing because, as much as I had my family trying to let me know the great contributions of Black people in our society, your lived experiences are telling you a lot of different things counter to that. 

Without having the knowledge of, oh wow, our American society was designed to have these outcomes for this group of people, Black people. It’s not that we’re not as smart, or we’re just not as successful or we’re just not as capable. 

Now I understand the corrupt designs behind that lived experience, why my family and those around me have that experience. Now I understand it and I can go forward and combat it. I think that’s so important for our students to experience. 

The Baldwin quote came from a where he also said, children see everything, they are like a sponge. They’re observing everything but they can’t articulate necessarily what it is that they’re observing. But they know that something is off. They know that there’s some “terrible weight” on their parent’s shoulders that menaces them. That terrible weight is racism, is white supremacy. 

We’re experiencing that every day. Our children are experiencing it every day and they can’t necessarily articulate it. But if they’re not being taught the true history, they’re not being taught how to interrogate society, be civically engaged, and understand those individuals that were critical thinkers of our society – individuals like Baldwin, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King. If they’re not taught the designs of our American society, then that is still a very disempowering curriculum that perpetuates racial propaganda and a social caste system in America. 

It’s so important at the earliest stage I got a little bit of it at home. My first [classroom] experience of it was when I got to college, but children need to be experiencing that at the earliest ages of early stages of their educational experience that is developmentally appropriate. 

I just want to emphasize that perspective and name that it runs counter to the narrative that I often hear used to minimize the importance of teaching Black history or systemic racism: this is going to teach kids to hate America, that they will feel depression, not pride. 

I hear those same things that you’re talking about, we don’t want to feel bad, or sometimes, we don’t want kids to feel guilty for things that they had nothing to do with. But to teach truth and to learn truth is empowering for everybody. It puts everyone on the same playing field. 

It’s so empowering for a Black child to know, hey, it’s not just because of who I am innately. It’s because of the legacies of how this country was designed and policies and practices that took place that impacted my ancestors and now have impacted me. Then, what can I do now to change those things so that my legacy can be different? Or my children, grandchildren, whoever’s can be different? That’s empowering for a white child too, like, oh, this is, this is where we messed up in the past. Now what can I do to make sure that we don’t repeat that in the future? 

This book is also referred to as a call to action. To whom and for what are you calling out for? 

There are three things I hope people get from this book. One is first just the knowledge and the acknowledgment that our educational system and in its original intention and current designs was to perpetuate a racial and social hierarchy within our American society. 

Then, let’s look at the designs of our educational system and figure out, in what ways is this design perpetuating that hierarchy so we can start to redesign, reimagine, make necessary change. So that those in power who are able to make the change from a legislative perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from a school design perspective, do that. Those in power who are able to make the change from interactions with students in the classroom, do that. And then those who maybe are not a parent or educator per se but are interested in the ways that we educate children in this country, they can then start to advocate for those for changes within their local communities and school systems. 

My hope is that this book really inspires us all to action. All of us play a part in that. You don’t have to be senator or work for the federal Department of Education. I hope that this book really makes everyone feel like they all have a part in it and they all can be actors agents of change.