CHICAGO — Here's what we're reading on this sunny September Monday.
Bad Choices: School choice doesn't necessarily mean a better situation for Chicago kids, says a new study. According to an account in the Hechinger Report, researchers using years of data to track how school choice has been used in Chicago found that parents who pulled their kids out of bad schools usually placed them in schools that were just as bad or just only slightly better.
NYU researcher Peter M. Rich says that low-performing schools in Chicago are clustered in high-poverty neighborhoods on the South and West Sides. Time-consuming travel presents a hardship for low-income parents and public transportation requires journeying through unfamiliar and potentially violent neighborhoods so they are unwilling to send their kids too far. Rich concludes that school choice policies that don't provide safe transportation or housing subsidies to help parents move closer to better schools aren't going to work.
The Fourth City? Most of us have grown up with the city firmly set in third place among the nation's most populous city, but that could be changing. Chicago's population growth has been flat (less than one percent growth since 2010) while Houston is growing rapidly and gaining on us quickly, according to a Reuters report. The Texas city is estimated to pass Chicago in overall population within eight to 10 years. Houston is projected to have 2.54 million to 2.7 million people by 2025 and Chicago will be at 2.5 million, according to the report.
The Other Half of the Story: Reporter Heather Cherone is reading Andrew Moravcsik's heartfelt essay in The Atlantic about what it was like to be his two sons' primary parent while his wife Anne-Marie Slaughter's career took off, lifting her to the White House as an adviser to President Barack Obama. Slaughter, of course, launched a thousand hot takes three years ago with her cover story in The Atlantic calling on women to stop buying into the myth of "having it all" by balancing motherhood and a high-powered career. Moravcsik argues that true equality will require men to do more than take turns with their wives providing child care. Men must be open to becoming the lead parent — and be willing to suffer career setbacks and frosty looks from mothers wondering what that dude is doing at pick up.
#StopTheKnot: Two wrongs don't make a right, but Ariel Cheung couldn't help but enjoy watching a video of hipsters having their man buns cut off. The "prepubescent samurai" look, as it's described by Derick Watts and the Sunday Blues, offended the comedy duo so much that they took to the streets to physically remove man knots from the heads of men rocking them. Whether it's vigilante justice or an invasion of personal privacy, the truth is that seeing those stupid little tufts of hair get vaulted into the ocean is extremely satisfying. Now we just need to talk about that ironic turn-of-the-century mustache.
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