Chicago protest designed to highlight school funding inequalities

In a bid to highlight funding inequalities at Illinois public schools, community leaders in the nation's third largest school district have called on students from poorer parts of Chicago to skip the first day of classes and spend the day instead trying to enroll at a school in a wealthy suburban district.

Critics of the planned Sept. 2 protest say it will undermine campaigns to get as many Chicago students as possible to attend the first day of classes and send the wrong message to children. Protest organizers, though, say their message about unequal funding trumps any on attendance.

"Today we are back to two-tiered schools—white and affluent on one side, and black, brown and poor on the other," said State Senator James Meeks, a black minister on the city's South Side. "That's an injustice and it's immoral." Read the article in Education Week online.