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When Chicago school board member and longtime activist Jitu Brown heard last spring that the school district’s Black Student Success Plan was under a federal investigation after a complaint from a conservative group, he vowed that the district would stay the course.
“I am not built to shrink,” said Brown, who will lead a school board committee tasked with overseeing the plan’s rollout.
“It’s racism cloaked as civil rights,” he added about the investigation.
Chicago Public Schools unveiled the long-awaited plan to address academic and disciplinary disparities its Black students face this past February. It outlined several five-year goals: Double the number of male Black teachers, decrease Black student suspensions by 40%, and grow the number of classrooms where Black history is taught, among others.
Brown said the district will forge ahead this school year despite the investigation by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, which is reviewing whether the plan discriminates against other district students. He said he will announce the members of the school board’s Black Student Achievement Committee later this month.
But the Trump administration’s campaign against race-based initiatives and the threat of withholding federal funding is casting a shadow over the Chicago plan’s implementation.
District officials deferred all questions about the plan and its rollout this year to the school board.
In spite of the federal scrutiny, some parents and advocates are pressing the district to ramp up work on the plan this fall. They are eager to see a more detailed blueprint for meeting the plan’s goals, a dedicated budget for its rollout, and metrics to track whether the district is making headway each year.
A spokeswoman for the Office for Civil Rights, which has requested that CPS turn over extensive documents related to the plan, said the inquiry is ongoing.
Parents Defending Education, the Virginia-based group whose complaint triggered the investigation, did not respond to a request for comment. It has previously argued that Chicago’s initiative is “racially exclusive” and conflicts with the Trump administration’s sweeping interpretation of a U.S. Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions.
Black students make up roughly a third of CPS’s student body. Based on early, unofficial enrollment data, they were the racial group whose numbers decreased the most this fall as the district’s enrollment resumed a decades-long downward slide.
Board committee to listen and seek out best practices this year
Brown, who has a long history of activism on racial justice and equity in Chicago, represents the West Side on the school board and was chosen earlier this year to chair the new Black Student Achievement Committee, which is required under Illinois law.
He said his first order of business is firming up the committee’s membership, which is expected to be unveiled at the board’s regular meeting later this month. Brown said appointed board member Michilla Blaise, who also represents West Side communities, will serve as the committee’s vice chair, alongside principals, teachers, students, community leaders, local school council members, and others. Once the committee is announced, it will tackle the task of fleshing out a vision to implement the plan.
Developed with extensive community engagement, the Black Student Success Plan acknowledges a district track record of falling short in serving Black families, noting that Black students have disproportionately attended racially segregated, disinvested schools and have been affected by school closures more than other racial groups. The plan sets five overarching goals, but it does not explain exactly how the district would meet these goals.
The day after the plan was released in February, Parents Defending Education, which has challenged race- and gender-based initiatives across the country, filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights. It argued that the effort discriminates against other students in the district, particularly Latinos, who have also lagged behind their white and Asian American peers.
Within weeks, the OCR announced it would pursue an investigation into the complaint. It requested records describing the initiative’s rationale, how students and schools would be chosen to receive services, and more, according to documents the district provided in response to a Freedom of Information Act request by Chalkbeat. CPS said its responses to the feds are not public.
While CPS works through the details of the investigation, Brown said he is preparing for a year of outreach.
“Year one will be about building a rapport and rhythm within the committee and beginning to engage communities on what can be done differently,” he said.
Brown said there are effective practices benefiting Black students across the district — some involving little to no additional spending. He pointed to a peer mentoring program at National Teachers Academy, in which older students coach and read with students in the earlier grades. He also held up Kenwood Academy, a high-performing neighborhood school with a magnet component serving predominantly Black students, which Brown’s son attends. Brown said other schools can learn from what “the HBCU of Chicago” is doing right.
Despite the OCR investigation and a broader societal swing away from diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, Brown said he’s not interested in watering down the plan’s goals. In Chicago, Brown is well-known for his activism, including spearheading a 2015 hunger strike to reopen a shuttered South Side high school. Brown now leads Journey for Justice Alliance, a national network of community-based organizations, which issued a pre-pandemic report on educational disparities.
Still, it remains unclear how close CPS and the school board are to start implementing the plan. District officials have declined to discuss its implementation this year since the announcement of the federal inquiry. CPS’s recently released budget did not spell out a specific allocation for the rollout but listed it as a signature initiative of the Office of Equity, saying it will work closely with 13 district departments crafting their own strategies for implementing the plan.
According to the district’s budget book, the Office of Equity’s budget decreased slightly compared with last year’s approved budget, to about $1.9 million. The document says that in the spring of 2026, the office will reconvene a community working group that provided input into the plan and prepare to launch districtwide Black student unions.
Valerie Leonard, a community advocate who served on the community working group and who lobbied state lawmakers to mandate the Black Student Achievement Committee, said she believes CPS is moving slowly and cautiously because of the federal scrutiny.
She said the blueprint is a “wonderful beginning,” but continues to push for a detailed vision for how it will meet the plan’s goals year by year, with interim goals and concrete, nonpunitive measures of how the Black student experience is improving.
She urged officials not to delay that work or leave advocates like her out of the loop, noting that intensive community engagement has already happened.
“We can’t get bogged down in analysis paralysis,” she said.
CPS could have a legal case to make
Cara McClellan, an associate practice professor of law at the University of Pennsylvania, said Chicago is not required to put its initiative on hold during the federal investigation. CPS could be on solid legal footing as long as it can make a strong case that its efforts are tailored to address discrimination and inequities its Black students have historically faced under its care, she said.
The district needs to clearly articulate how it fell short and how the plan tackles the fallout, McClellan said. For example, she pointed to extensive research showing that racial bias and discrimination have historically contributed to disproportionate discipline, including suspensions, for Black students.
McClellan said she is skeptical of the Trump administration’s effort to apply the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions decision banning the use of race in college admissions.
“There’s nothing in Students for Fair Admissions that says you can’t remedy a history of discrimination against students,” McClellan said.
The federal government has argued that the decision prohibits institutions from using even non-racial factors such as poverty to address disparities.
“What we’re seeing is an attempt by the Trump administration and conservative groups to say that Students for Fair Admissions stands for much more than it does,” she said. “One decision doesn’t append other areas of the law.”
Parents Defending Education, the group challenging Chicago’s plan, had previously filed a complaint against a similar plan to help Black students in the Los Angeles Unified School District in 2023. Under pressure from the Biden administration, that district last year made changes to its plan to target high-needs schools rather than Black students specifically to receive extra support — changes that rankled some of the original plan’s supporters.
Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has said the city would sue the Trump administration if it moves to take away CPS funding over its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
Chicago parents urge action and practical solutions
Hal Woods of the advocacy group Kids First Chicago said regardless of the federal scrutiny, the district should earmark money for implementation and spell out clearly where it stands now on the goals it has set: How many Black male teachers work in CPS? How many classrooms teach Black history now?
Woods said some of the parents affiliated with his group are concerned about the possible loss of federal funding at a financially precarious time for the district and want CPS to navigate the federal scrutiny cautiously. Others want it to move forward unapologetically.
Katrina Adams, a mom of three district students who leads a nonprofit that offers after-school and summer programs through the Chicago Park District, says she has long been deeply concerned about the disparities facing the district’s Black students.
Not enough are graduating ready for college or careers in high-demand fields. If salvaging the district’s initiative means changing its name or how the district steers help to students, she’s open to it: “It’s about who needs the most support. In the long run, this will help all students.”
But Mykela Collins, the mother of two CPS students, doesn’t want the CPS to make any concessions, even as she worries about how the district will roll out the plan amid rising budget pressures and a tough political climate.
“Why can’t Black students have a focus solely on them?” she said. “What’s the problem with focusing on a group of students who really need it?”
Brown said the school board is determined to push the district to serve Black students better, regardless of how the federal inquiry plays out.
“This work will happen no matter what,” he said. “There’s a deep commitment to it.”
Mila Koumpilova is Chalkbeat Chicago’s senior reporter covering Chicago Public Schools. Contact Mila at mkoumpilova@chalkbeat.org.
