Clockwise from
above: As a
student teacher
at Morgan Park
High School in
1999; with her
husband, stepson,
and daughter on a
family trip in April;
as a 10th grader
at Hyde Park
Career Academy92 CHICAGO | SEPTEMBER 2019
IN WHITE ADIDAS SNEAKERS WITH
black stripes instead of her usual three-
and-a-half-inch heels, Janice Jackson
strides purposefully through the unfin-
ished school’s empty hallways, stepping
deftly over extension cords and around
banks of soon-to-be-installed orange and
blue lockers. The sound of beeping fork-
lifts drifts in from outside. As we walk
past a double staircase inside the main
entrance, the 42-year-old Chicago Public
Schools chief explains that the foyer will
be decorated with art that references the
history of the neighborhood. Down the
hall, she shows me the room slated to
house a health center that can be used by
both students and community residents.
Then we head upstairs to the library.
“Oh,” Jackson says, drawing a sharp
breath as we enter the room. At first,
it’s hard to read her reaction, but it
quickly becomes apparent it’s one of
wonder. Though still empty, with card-
board covering the floor, the space feels
full of possibilities. Half of the room is
soaringly open, thanks to two-story
windows framing the sky; the other
half, with a lower ceiling and dark blue
walls, has a Zen retreat vibe. Sleek cir-
cular pendant light fixtures hover above
us at varying heights. Her eyes panning
the room, Jackson says, “I’m thinking of
what this could mean to a student from
this neighborhood.”
Englewood STEM High School, which
welcomes its inaugural freshman class
in September, is an $85 million invest-
ment in a neighborhood where nearly
half the residents live below the poverty
l ine a nd more t ha n 9 0 percent of st udent s
commute to schools outside the area. But
for Jackson — a former CPS student and
teacher who by her own account was born
to the CEO job — it’s more than that. It’s a
gleaming emblem of what she believes to
be the singular goal of her tenure: bring-
ing equity to a school district where the
best educational opportunities have long
been concentrated in white neighbor-
hoods. In Jackson’s eyes, achieving that
goal starts with restoring trust in a bro-
ken system. “I have to convince people,
especially marginalized people, that this
is for them, too,” she says.
It won’t be easy. Having taken the
CEO job in December 2017 in the wake
of a string of scandals and the announce-
ment of school closings — including four
CPS high schools in Englewood — Jackson
soon had to weather new setbacks, as
well as a seismic shakeup in City Hall,
while also facing down angry residents
so accustomed to loss that many had
given up on the district completely.
“You think they’re putting all this new
stuff in here for us?” says Bobbie Brown,
the local school council chair for one of
Englewood’s high schools, Harper, which
has been allowed to remain open only
until its remaining students graduate.
“No. They treat our children like cattle.”
Brown’s comments echo those of many
residents who suspect the new school
will be a magnet or special-track school
for outsiders, despite Jackson’s assur-
ances to the contrary. Others questionedwhy the $85 million couldn’t have been
poured into the existing schools or why
three years of students being displaced
couldn’t have been avoided by consoli-
dating the kids in one of the older schools.
“We don’t have to relive that time,”
says Jackson when I ask about the
pushback against the closings and the
new school. “They had legitimate con-
cerns and we needed to discuss them
with the community.”
It’s a typically shrewd seeing-both-
sides response from a public figure
managing a fracas. When I press her fur-
ther, she fans herself and chuckles dryly.
“Just know I was called every name under
the sun. I saw the faces. I understood. No
one believed a state-of-the-art facility
would be built here or that it would be for
them. But if name-calling bothers you,
this isn’t the job for you. I talk to aspir-
ing women leaders all the time, and I tell
them, ‘You better get comfortable with
being called a bitch.’ ”THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO, RONALD
Reagan’s education secretary, William
Bennett, famously called Chicago’s pub-
lic schools the worst in the nation. He
deemed them unsalvageable and urged
parents to send their kids to private
schools so that the entire system could
be shut down. At the time, Jackson was
in fifth grade on the South Side, where
she and her parents and four siblingsI
PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF JANICE JACKSON