Chicago Public Schools teachers were instructed by school officials to give migrant students passing grades and promote them to the next grade, “even if the students displayed severe academic deficiencies,” a new report claims.
WGN News reported that “multiple” teachers from different schools within the district reached out to them to expose the troubling trend.
One teacher said she was told to give one of her students a “C” in all her grades and pass her along to the third grade despite testing at “kindergarten level.”
Another teacher revealed that school officials directly told him during a training to promote migrant students to the next grade.
The influx of students who don’t speak English has also created challenges, the teachers said.
According to the report, many migrants have settled in Black neighborhoods where schools are not typically equipped with programs for non-English speakers.
“They’ve been assigned to teachers or assigned to classrooms where nobody speaks Spanish … so there’s a significant language barrier,” WGN News’ Sylvia Snowden reported.
One teacher described having to use Google Translate and relying on the Spanish teacher to translate to communicate with her migrant student “for the entire year,” Snowden said.
According to the city of Chicago, at least 48,000 migrants have been bussed and flown to The Windy City from the Texas border since August 2022.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Dr. Pedro Martinez told WGN that migrant students and U.S. students are held to the same academic standards. He also claimed “over 90%” have bilingual support programs in their schools.
However, Snowden said that Dr. Martinez was not aware of the WGN investigation when giving those comments.
“However, once confronted with our reporting, a CPS spokesperson acknowledged in a statement that the district’s promotion guidelines are ‘modified to serve the specialized needs of English Language Learners,’” WGN reported.
“Chicago Public Schools aims to provide a rigorous, welcoming, inclusive pre-K-12 environment for all students, including those who’ve newly arrived in Chicago with their families from around the globe. As a district, we have high expectations from all students and policies and promotion guidelines in place, that are modified to serve the specialized needs of our English language learners, and offer in-school, after-school year-round interventions developed with the principal, counselor, teacher and parents to target the students’ assessed learning deficiencies,” a CPS spokesperson told WGN News.
The district also claimed that ESL students who enrolled in the school during the last quarter of the school year were put in summer school programs to improve their English literacy. Teachers who spoke to WGN disputed this claim, saying “none” of their students were enrolled in summer school.
Chicago Public Schools did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
