‘Glass Slipper’ Program : Chicago Ghetto Families Bloom When Quietly Moved to Suburbs

Vonder Ray couldn’t believe her luck. Finally, after years of trying, she had won a place in the “glass slipper,” a program that promised a new life. She and her son, Vincent, 10, were getting away from the Chicago housing developments, up from the ghetto, out to a mostly white suburb, a place with good schools and safe streets.

But soon after they moved to Schaumburg, 40 miles west of their bombed-out street in a scruffy lake-front section of Chicago, Ray got some disturbing news. Back in the city, Vincent had earned A’s and B’s in school. Now, his teachers said Vincent was far behind his classmates; he had to go to summer school and a remedial reading class.

Ray, 27, was skeptical. Was her son, the only black child in his class, being singled out?

‘Homework Every Day’

Two years later, Ray wonders no more. Vincent’s grades are back where they were in Chicago and, she believes, mean much more. School is great, she said. “He has homework every day, not just once in a while. And the classes are much smaller here, 16 instead of 30. This is a blessing to me.”

The Rays are among almost 4,000 Chicago families that have escaped from “crack” markets, deteriorating housing and a school system that Education Secretary William J. Bennett has called the worst in the country. Their passport to the suburbs has been a program begun in 1976 as the result of a federal court order directing the Leadership Council for Metropolitan Open Housing, a nonprofit civic group, to move residents of city housing developments to the suburbs in a low-key, highly scattered fashion.

Suddenly, blacks who grew up knowing only blacks live in communities that are at least 70% white.

The ostensible purpose of this unusually quiet social engineering effort, known as the Gautreaux program after the plaintiff in the discrimination suit that led to the court order, is racial integration.

But the program provides a chance to answer a question that goes to the heart of the problems facing city schools across America: How much of the low achievement of children at risk--students who are statistically likely to fail because of their race, poverty and location--can be blamed on the trappings of poverty and the inadequacies of urban education? Would children learn more if they were removed from the danger and hopelessness of city slums?

Busing Caused Opposition

Academic studies arguing the importance of environment helped pave the way for the massive busing efforts of the 1960s and 1970s. But those programs moved only children, and then only for the school day. They were conducted on such a massive scale that, in almost every place where busing was proposed, it met with seething political opposition.

Unlike busing, the Gautreaux program moves entire families, scattering them widely, taking care to keep their identities secret, even from school officials. The program has attracted little attention and no opposition.

Families pay 30% of their income toward rent in moderately priced apartments and townhouses; federal subsidies cover the rest. This year’s rent ceiling is $558 for a two-bedroom apartment. The cost of administering the program is $350,000 a year, paid by a federal grant.

In the suburbs, Gautreaux children attend schools vastly more impressive than those they left behind. So far, they are performing quite well, according to a team of Northwestern University researchers.

There have been only a few storybook reversals, but they do exist, said James Rosenbaum of the university’s Center for Urban Affairs. “These were children who were mediocre in the city schools and they just blossomed in the suburbs,” he said.

Study Tracks Children

More typically, the Northwestern study, which tracked more than 100 Gautreaux children, found clear, though less dramatic, academic benefits. Urban blacks, after an initial adjustment period, maintained their grades despite being in classes with students accustomed to a more advanced curriculum. Some grades even improved.

Although it is impossible to watch the Gautreaux children in school because of the program’s emphasis on secrecy, the researchers concluded after studying students and parents that the children--especially the younger ones--have adjusted well to the smaller classes and higher standards of suburban schools.

The suburban schools seem to treat Gautreaux students like any others, with some exceptions. Researchers expected suburban teachers to treat Gautreaux children equally or “shunt them off as problems,” Rosenbaum said.

Instead, “we were pleasantly surprised to find them going out of their way, staying after school to help, giving lots of time,” he said. “Obviously, that’s a result of the program being so limited.”

There have been unhappy episodes. In one town, a school bus driver told two black children to go to the back of the bus. Children have gotten in racially tinged schoolyard fights. And a few parents complained about teachers who paid less attention to their children than to others.

Air Smells Sweet

Veronica Brown moved with her 8-year-old son, Gerard, and infant daughter to Glendale Heights, more than an hour from the city. Their new home is a place where the evening air still smells sweet, where bulldozers and signs for new developments dot the horizon, where new shopping malls and road-widening projects are rapidly replacing farms and fallow fields.

Brown believes Gerard’s new teachers have been too quick to blame him for fights stemming from racial name-calling. She had to appeal to Gerard’s teacher and his principal to obtain a promise that they would protect her son from children who direct racial slurs at him.

Gerard says the children still use slurs. “My teacher sends them to the principal, but they call me names,” he said. “I miss my old friends. But there’s a field at school. And I got a real baseball and a glove in my room. Want to see it?”

In the classroom, too, there have been problems. Researchers were initially disturbed to find that some Gautreaux children were left back a grade when they moved to the suburbs. Teachers would tell parents that their children’s skills were no match for those of suburban classmates.

And a significantly larger number of the children were placed in special education classes in the suburbs than in the city. Although only 7% of children in the sample were in special classes in the city, 19% were assigned there after their move.

Did these numbers mean that suburban schools were segregating black students, or were they simply paying closer attention and finding disabilities that had gone unnoticed in the city?

“We don’t know,” Rosenbaum said. “But we do know that, when we talked to the mothers about it, they said they were very pleased with the extra attention their children were getting.”

Parents Become Active

The extra attention devoted to many Gautreaux children at school has proven contagious. In the new suburban environment, where families’ lives often revolve around education, some Gautreaux parents become active in ways their parents never were.

Each evening, for example, Brown calls Gerard in from the lawn outside their apartment so the two can go through math flash cards as the local soul station blares on the stereo.

Brown, a welfare recipient who has been unable to find a job, has plenty of time to spend with Gerard and his infant sister: She says no one in her apartment complex talks to her. “I’ve been here more than a year, and I still hardly know anyone,” she said. “I really only go out to go to the store. But nobody’s going to make me leave. I have my children for friends.”

The isolation of many Gautreaux mothers was one of the researchers’ most disturbing findings. The children, especially those 10 or younger when they left the city, fit in well with their peers. The harsh sacrifices many mothers make, giving up any semblance of a normal social life, worry program organizers, who offer families counseling and occasional group meetings.

“They’re like pioneers, moving so far from everything they know, away from everything supportive,” Rosenbaum said.

Brown, 28, sometimes takes Gerard back to Chicago for weekends with friends and family. But she will not brook discussion of a permanent return to the city, even though she has no friends in her apartment complex of barbecues and swimming pools, even though some of her neighbors stare straight through her.

Brown has finally given her children what she never had, the safety and schooling of suburban life. She will not give it up. Nor will other mothers, no matter how much their children may pine for old friends and familiar faces. That stage passes quickly, new suburbanites say.

Prejudice and Safety

“Oh, yes, my son misses the city,” said Ray, a single mother who has found work as an office manager. She laughed. “He misses crime, dope, gangs, people breaking in houses. What would we miss? There is prejudice here, but that don’t bother me. It’s not hard to adjust to safety.”

Gautreaux organizers credit much of their success to the program’s low profile. To avoid the racial backlash that met well-intentioned school busing efforts, only a few black families are placed in any one white neighborhood. No one other than the landlord knows that the new tenant is subsidized.

“We try to get the parents not even to tell their children, so they won’t tell their teachers or the neighborhood kids,” said Ana Franklin, who is in charge of placing and counseling families.

Some signs of poverty follow people into the suburbs. Brown, who has no car, tells of stares as she loads groceries into a taxi. Fellow shoppers make disparaging remarks when she spends food stamps. And, when an article in a local newspaper identified a Gautreaux family’s address several years ago, that family found a cross burning on its lawn.

“This is not for everybody,” Franklin said. “Not everyone can adjust or handle the name-calling or the discomfort. Not everybody’s ready to advance. You have to be strong. But it can change your life.”

Gautreaux organizers say their efforts can be duplicated in any city, and on a larger scale than the Chicago effort, which is scheduled to continue until about 5,000 more families are moved.

“This works better as a less-than-massive program,” Harry Gottlieb, deputy director of the Leadership Council, said. “But we’re meeting only a small portion of the need. There’s no reason other cities can’t do this.”

Cheap Way to Change Lives

“Total the costs of running the housing projects and dealing with the failures of city schools,” Rosenbaum said. “Then compare it to what’s happening with these children. This is really a cheap way to change lives.”

The program has had its failures. A few families have given up and gone back to the city because they missed friends or could not stand racist remarks. But the overwhelming majority of Gautreaux families stay in suburbia.

They do it for the children.

Brown is pained by her son’s description of slurs and schoolyard fights. Still, she is certain he is better off in their $525 two-bedroom apartment on the curling streets of Glendale Heights than in the city-owned row house downtown where hustlers and thugs clotted the streets.

“The Chicago schools are very slow,” Brown said. “Here, they do multiplication in second grade; there, it was third grade. In Chicago, they said my child had a mental problem and he wasn’t able to learn. Here, his grades are getting better and his speech has cleared up.

“One day, he’ll thank me for this.”

But life for Gautreaux families can be a series of social and financial frustrations. Many activities in and out of school that are free in the city carry fees in the suburbs.

But moving out of the slums has given some children experiences they might never have had. Crystal Hoard is one of the Chicago area’s top high school tennis players, a result, she says, of moving in 1981 into an apartment complex that had a health club complete with tennis courts and instruction.

“My children didn’t have a chance where we used to be,” said her mother, Janice Hoard.

Do Gautreaux children do well in suburbia simply because of the change in atmosphere? Or were they more likely to succeed from the start because they have driven parents, people motivated enough to call in, search for an apartment and give up ties to Chicago?

The Northwestern researchers compared Gautreaux families to others in city housing developments and found little difference in the two groups’ backgrounds or skills. Gautreaux parents were slightly more educated, but not significantly, Rosenbaum said.

Easier to Find Jobs

Many are like Brown--young, single mothers who grew up on public assistance and have held few, if any, jobs. Indeed, many Gautreaux parents complete their educations only after leaving the city. And, although many parents remain unemployed in the suburbs, some find it easier than ever to get work, especially in low-paying service jobs that often go unfilled in affluent areas.

Janice Hoard, for example, was a high school dropout and welfare mother. After she and her children moved to a new three-bedroom apartment in a safer area, she went back to school, then on to college, nursing school and finally graduate school, where she is completing a doctorate in psychology.

Now 49, she works as a therapist and makes enough money to reduce her subsidy and soon expects to pay her entire rent. Families whose incomes put them over the program’s limit lose their subsidy but may stay in their new homes and participate in Gautreaux counseling.

“We had it in us,” Hoard said, “but this program brought out the high hopes and high standards.”