To be young, gifted, and Black is fortuitous, but it is a double-edged sword.
I grew up on the South Side of Chicago in West Englewood. Generations of my family attended Goodlow Magnet School, now Earle, and Harper High School, which is now closed. Almost immediately after I started school, people noticed my above-average intelligence. Coursework came easily, and the teachers at my little neighborhood school went out of their way to challenge and support me.
Goodlow only went up to sixth grade at the time. Then, as I progressed through school, they added seventh grade. Then eighth.
Privately, teachers and administrators told me that part of the reason was me. They wanted to continue nurturing my education, and they were worried that if they sent me off to one of the local middle schools everyone considered “bad,” I might fall through the cracks.
At Goodlow, my education was individualized enough to challenge me, but that wasn’t the most important thing the school gave me. My teachers cared for me on a deeply personal level.
I am incredibly fortunate for that, and extraordinarily grateful.
School was my safe space. At home, my mother was struggling with addiction, and I was living through complex childhood trauma. I didn’t sit my teachers down and explain everything that was happening in my life. I didn’t have the language for most of it myself. Still, somehow, they knew that I needed a little extra love and care. They found ways to give it to me without making me feel like a problem that needed to be managed.
By sixth and seventh grade, I was scoring in the 99th percentile on standardized tests. Suddenly, doors were opening and more opportunities were available to me. My teachers and administrators were determined to push me through every single one of those doors.
They recommended me for the Daniel Murphy Scholarship Fund, and I received a scholarship. I was eventually placed with Girls Hope Boys Hope (GHBH), a residential program in Evanston, and enrolled at Regina Dominican High School, a private, predominantly white all-girls school in Wilmette.
Until then, virtually everything I knew about education had come from my small, all-Black school in West Englewood.
The culture shock was immediate. At first, Regina felt safe. Over time, though, I realized I had simply entered an entirely different kind of danger.
For one thing, I was completely unprepared for passive aggression as a cultural standard. I had experienced bullying at Goodlow. What I had not experienced was the sneaky, backhanded, plausibly deniable way that some of the white girls around me communicated hostility. As an autistic Black girl who was undiagnosed at the time and didn’t even know these were behaviors I should be watching for, I ended up in dynamics that took me years to fully process and understand.
I was even less prepared for the racism, classism, and tokenization.
At one point, someone’s cell phone disappeared from a locker room. Suspicion among some of my peers somehow found its way to me, the lone Black girl in the class, despite the fact that I literally never went into the locker room. I have the ABCC11 gene, barely sweat, and don’t get musty. I was not in there fighting for my life with Secret Clinical Strength after gym class. I simply didn’t go in there. I would dry any sweat, slide on my polo and skirt, and move about my day.
Initially, I didn’t even understand what was happening. Girls started casually asking questions about where I had been. Once I realized that these “innocent” inquiries were actually backhanded accusations, I went to my gym teacher.
She confirmed exactly what I suspected. She knew I was innocent.
Eventually, the phone was found. The apologies were not.
At the same time, I was struggling academically for the first time in my life. The problem wasn’t that I couldn’t understand the material. In fact, I was still outperforming many of my peers when it came to understanding it. I regularly set the curve on tests. In biology, I set it so high that my teacher eventually started using the second-highest score for the curve and giving me extra credit instead.
The problem was everything surrounding the learning.
We were beginning to realize that I had undiagnosed ADHD. My study and organizational skills were nowhere near those of classmates who had spent years being prepared for this kind of academic environment. Goodlow had recognized that I was gifted, but neither the school nor the educational system around me had the resources or understanding necessary to recognize that someone could be intellectually gifted and disabled at the same time.
There was another problem, too.
GHBH and Regina were not prepared for a student with a personal history like mine in the way the teachers at Goodlow had been.
At Goodlow, I never had to formally disclose what was happening at home for adults to recognize trauma and figure out how to teach around it, through it, and sometimes despite it. In Evanston and Wilmette, that understanding disappeared.
My mother was murdered when I was in seventh grade. I was trying to process something enormous while carrying trauma I didn’t yet know to call PTSD. I had structural barriers to achievement that could not be solved by simply reminding me how extraordinary an opportunity I had been given.
There is a particular burden attached to being the scholarship kid.
Someone has invested in you. Someone has rescued you. Someone has given you access to the “good” school. Gratitude becomes part of the academic expectation. You are supposed to prove that their investment was worthwhile or you are worthless and a liability.
After two years with GHBH and Regina, I went home and I went to Harper.
Harper was considered a “bad school.” I excelled there.
In many ways, Harper reminded me of Goodlow. I encountered teachers doing everything they could to support students despite limited resources. There was care there. There was cultural familiarity there. There were adults who understood that the lives children carried into the classroom did not disappear when the bell rang.
Still, even there, another message followed me around:
“You’re too good for this place.”
“You belong somewhere better.”
The strange thing is that nobody seemed to ask why a child should have to leave her community to receive the education everyone agreed she deserved. Instead, the solution was always to move the child.
So, in an effort to get a different school’s name onto my diploma and improve my college prospects, one of my teachers suggested Mercy Home for Boys & Girls.
I went.
Mercy was another residential program, although very different from GHBH. GHBH had been intensely academically focused. Mercy was closer to what people traditionally imagine when they hear “group home,” serving young people from a range of difficult family circumstances.
The level of residential structure suddenly imposed on me was deeply unfamiliar, and I rebelled against it.
Mercy did, however, send me to De La Salle’s Lourdes Hall free of cost. (Lourdes Hall is also closed now, by the way, so at a certain point I do have to wonder if I’m the drama.)
Educationally, though, I thrived.
De La Salle felt very different from Regina. It was in the city. The student population included Black, white, and Latina girls in much more balanced numbers, and that alone adjusted my experience enormously. I am still close with many of the people I met there.
The classes were much smaller than Harper’s. The resources weren’t necessarily individualized the way they had been at Goodlow, but the built-in diversity created a more holistic educational environment.
I graduated.
I got a nice college scholarship.
And I left K-12 education having experienced several completely different versions of what Chicago education could look like, all within the boundaries of one deeply segregated metropolitan area.
I attended neighborhood public schools and private schools. I attended overwhelmingly Black schools and overwhelmingly white schools. I attended schools serving poor children and schools surrounded by extraordinary wealth. I attended schools people described as “bad” and schools people assumed must be “good.”
The older I get, the more I interrogate those words. I personally felt the most seen, heard, and advocated for in spaces where there were more of “us.”
What broke my heart was that those spaces were rarely given the resources necessary to stop being called “bad.”
What Makes a “Good” School Good?
That question has followed me into motherhood.
Chicago Public Schools looks very different now than it did when I was growing up. Schools that shaped my childhood have closed. Communities I know and love have lived through decades of reform experiments, closures, turnarounds, and promises that the disruption would eventually produce something better.
The evidence gives us good reason to question those promises.
The 2013 mass school closures displaced thousands of students directly, and research has repeatedly shown that Black students and Black communities bore a disproportionate share of Chicago’s school closures. Researchers at UIC found that schools with larger shares of Black students had a greater probability of closure even after accounting for factors including utilization and academic performance.
Researchers at the University of Chicago later studied what happened to students after the 2013 closures. They did not find the academic transformation that was supposed to justify the disruption. Test scores were negatively affected for students in both closed and welcoming schools, with students from closed schools experiencing the largest negative effects. Negative effects in math persisted through the four years researchers studied.
In 2026, researchers found something even more disturbing. Neighborhoods near schools closed in 2013 experienced an estimated 9.9% increase in shootings compared with similar neighborhoods after closure. As of 2023, 26 of the 49 shuttered elementary-school buildings were still vacant.
A school building is not simply a place where children take math tests.
It is infrastructure. It is employment. It is where basketball games happen and where parents vote. It is where children meet adults who may become the first people outside their families to recognize something extraordinary in them. Sometimes it is where a little Black girl whose home isn’t safe finds adults who know she needs a little extra love even when she doesn’t know how to ask for it.
When you remove that institution from a neighborhood, you are removing something much larger than an educational service provider.
That is part of why I struggle with the conventional language we use around “good schools” and “bad schools.”
Goodlow didn’t have Wilmette money. What Goodlow had were people who saw me.
Harper didn’t have the resources of the private schools I attended. What Harper had were educators accustomed to teaching children whose lives didn’t necessarily become neat, quiet, and convenient simply because they had entered a classroom.
Meanwhile, some of the institutions with substantially greater resources were less capable of educating and understanding the whole child standing in front of them.
My experience does not prove that every neighborhood school is secretly wonderful or that resources don’t matter. Quite the opposite. Resources matter enormously.
That is exactly why I keep coming back to a different question. Why was the solution always to get me out? Why couldn’t the extraordinary education I deserved have been built and resourced where I already lived? This is something that I’ve reflected on as my own child entered the 7th grade.
When Opportunity Starts Looking Like Extraction
There is another part of my story that I have become increasingly uncomfortable with as an adult: the repeated insistence that I was “too good” for my own neighborhood.
Everyone who told me that meant well. My teachers at Goodlow and Harper were trying to protect me. They saw a child with enormous potential and understood the limitations of the institutions they were working inside. When they pushed me toward scholarships and private schools, they were trying to give me access to resources they could not give me themselves.
I don’t resent them for that. They were making the best choices available within an unequal system. What I question now is the system that made extraction look like opportunity in the first place.
When a poor neighborhood produces a child who is academically gifted, artistically talented, athletically exceptional, or otherwise promising, one of our most common responses is to find a way to get that child out.
We call it opportunity. We call it access. We call it giving them a chance.
At the individual level, sometimes it absolutely is all of those things.
At the community level, though, I think we need to be willing to ask what else is happening.
If the children with the highest test scores are encouraged to leave, the families with the most resources are encouraged to leave, and anyone who can access a “better” school is congratulated for getting out, what happens to the school everyone leaves behind?
Enrollment declines. Families with the time, knowledge, and social capital to aggressively advocate for school resources disappear. Alumni relationships weaken. Public perception gets worse. The concentration of students requiring more intensive support can increase while the institution’s capacity to provide that support does not.
Then those conditions become further evidence that the school is “failing.”
Declining enrollment and academic performance make further disinvestment easier to justify. Eventually, closure itself can begin to look reasonable.
Then the next gifted kid comes along, looks around at an institution that has been steadily depleted, and somebody tells her:
You’re too good for this place.
We rarely stop to ask how the place got that way.
That begins to look less like rescuing talented children and more like poaching talent from communities that are never given the opportunity to benefit from the people they helped produce.
I think about what Goodlow poured into me.
Teachers challenged me, protected me, advocated for me, recognized my abilities, and figured out how to nurture a child whose needs extended far beyond academics. That little school in West Englewood helped produce the student who would eventually score in the 99th percentile.
Then, once those scores made me legible as “gifted” to institutions with more money and prestige, the obvious next step was to remove me from the community that had cultivated me.
There is something deeply backwards about that.
Poor Black communities are routinely discussed as though they contain deficits that need to be escaped, while the talent they produce is treated as a resource worth extracting.
We celebrate the exceptional child who “makes it out” without asking what might happen if she could receive exceptional resources while staying in and what that could mean for communities and for personal identity.
There is a broader consequence to that cycle, too.
We also need to interrogate what we do to a child’s cultural esteem when we tell them any degree of talent and aptitude makes them “better” than people like them and the solution is to extract them and drop them with people who don’t look like them.
The children being encouraged to leave may grow into tomorrow’s educators, doctors, lawyers, artists, entrepreneurs, organizers, mentors, homeowners, and community leaders. Of course, leaving for school does not mean someone abandons their community forever. My own life makes that obvious.
Still, a neighborhood cannot continually export its human capital as a matter of public policy and cultural expectation and then be blamed for lacking it.
We cannot systematically identify the children with the greatest access to mobility, build pipelines designed to move them elsewhere, and then point at the communities they left behind as evidence that those communities are deficient.
This does not mean children should be denied scholarships or prevented from attending schools that can offer opportunities their neighborhood schools currently cannot.
I benefited enormously from opportunities outside West Englewood. I would never argue that another child should sacrifice her future to make a political point about educational inequality.
The indictment is not of the child who leaves or the parent (like NHJ) just trying to make the best decision for their child. It is of a system that keeps making leaving the rational choice.
If our answer to finding brilliance in a poor neighborhood is always to remove the brilliant child, we should not be surprised when inequality reproduces itself.
We built the cycle.
Stop Rescuing Children From Their Communities
This is what I’ve been thinking about as Chicago approaches its first election for School Board President.
Chicago spent years with educational governance concentrated in mayoral appointments. The movement for an elected school board grew out of a long history of community organizing around who gets to make decisions about Chicago’s schools and whose voices count when those decisions are made.
I welcome the shift toward democratic control.
I also have a personal preference in this race: Hilario Dominguez.
That preference is informed heavily by the child I used to be.
Dominguez is a CPS graduate and teacher running on a platform centered on fully resourcing neighborhood public schools. His campaign has explicitly rejected using school closures as the solution to CPS’s problems and has framed its approach around investing in schools rather than measuring them for closure.
I have had the opportunity to connect with him and learn more about his platform. What resonates with me is not an abstract belief that every existing institution must remain exactly as it is forever. It is the premise underneath his approach: children should not have to escape their neighborhoods to gain access to opportunity.
I spent much of my childhood being told, by people who genuinely cared about me, that I was too good for the schools around me.
I understand why they said it. They were looking at a gifted Black girl living in West Englewood and trying to give her every possible chance.
I will always be grateful for that.
Still, adulthood has made me interrogate the premise. Maybe I wasn’t too good for my neighborhood school. Maybe my neighborhood school deserved enough investment to be good enough for me and for other children too.
Maybe Harper wasn’t a place gifted children needed to escape.
Maybe gifted children at Harper deserved the same small classes, technology, extracurricular opportunities, specialized support, and college preparation that wealthier children received automatically.
Maybe the problem was never that children like me were in the wrong place.
Maybe the resources were.
I am a mother now. When I think about what I want for my children, I don’t want their educational success to depend upon whether someone discovers them, identifies them as exceptional, and gives them a golden ticket into somebody else’s community.
I want good education within walking distance. I want a child’s ZIP code to tell me where they live, not how many educational opportunities we have decided they deserve.
I want gifted Black children to be challenged without being culturally isolated. I want disabled gifted children to be recognized before executive-function struggles are interpreted as laziness or ingratitude. I want traumatized children to encounter educators who understand that academic ability does not make trauma disappear.
Most of all, I want us to stop treating individual escape as evidence that an educational system works.
I escaped the “bad schools” more than once… Then I kept discovering that “good” and “bad” were much more complicated than anyone had told me.
There is no easy answer to Chicago’s educational inequities. There are real questions about enrollment, finances, buildings, academic outcomes, and how a district distributes finite resources. Pretending those questions don’t exist won’t solve them.
Still, my own life has convinced me of something much simpler.
The goal should not be figuring out how to get exceptional children out of disinvested communities. The goal should be making sure children don’t have to leave their communities to receive an exceptional education.
Truthfully, there’s no easy answer. But I think it starts with creating more equitable educational experiences for everyone.
Thank you for this, it’s given me a lot to think about, esp coming from the lucky af academic opportunities I was given. Despite fully committing to being a communist bereft of that same class reductionist white supremacy bs, I never thought about it this way, as purely extraction and being lost in the mix of being used as a political tool, at the time being so focused on “getting out” what that meant in terms of capitalistic extraction. Saving this to think about better, later. I am so glad we all have your insight.
I, too, thank you for this. I not only appreciate learning more of your story, but also making me think about how ‘helping’ a student can also be “extraction.” A new perspective for me.