Chicago’s school board created a Black Student Achievement Committee in April 2025. On Thursday at 6 p.m., at district headquarters on West Madison Street, its 15 members will sit down together for the first time, as Chalkbeat Chicago reported.
Black students are roughly one-third of Chicago Public Schools enrollment. The committee’s job is to oversee the Black Student Success Plan, the five-year effort the district unveiled in February 2025 to cut punitive discipline for Black students, hire more Black male teachers and widen access to advanced coursework.
Getting to a first meeting took far longer than anyone promised. Board member Jitu Brown said the members would be named last September. In June, he announced another postponement and acknowledged an internal “struggle” after two rounds of applications, without saying what it was. Koron Nash, one of the applicants, told Chalkbeat at the time: “At this point, we should be well beyond informing people. We should be taking action.” About 500 people applied. The board named the members in July.
The co-chairs are Michilla Blaise and Brown, both West Side board members. Brown lost his seat in the Nov. 3 election, and the committee he helped build will outlast his time on the board: Chicago’s first fully elected school board takes office in January. Blaise kept her seat. She said advocates “were banging their pots and pans and saying we need to get to work. They are unhappy it took us this long to get up and running.”
The delay is not only a local failure of paperwork. The plan the committee oversees has been under attack from Washington. The Education Department opened a civil rights investigation into it in April 2025, after complaints that it discriminates against students who are not Black, and demanded the district scrap it. Last year the department pulled about $6 million in magnet school money, plus funding for future years. CPS refused to drop the plan and sued. On Aug. 27, the department settled and agreed to return the money, as the Chicago Sun-Times reported. It did not say why. The settlement terms were not made public, and the district did not announce either the lawsuit or the deal.
The investigation itself has not been reported closed, and a Republican-led House committee demanded the district’s policies on transgender students the same week. A plan built to repair documented harm to Black children has had to defend its right to exist before it had a committee to run it.
The committee’s first test is plain arithmetic. Valerie Leonard, a community leader on the panel, put it this way: “How do you measure whether you are moving the needle?” A plan that promises fewer suspensions and more Black male teachers needs yearly numbers for both, published, school by school, so families can check whether the district is keeping its word.
The members should demand those numbers at the first meeting and keep demanding them. Black families have waited more than a year and a half for a committee. They should not have to wait again for results.
Have your say