West Cook News

For the better part of the past decade, Oak Park and River Forest High School has served as both high school and, often politically-acclaimed, “critical race theory” science lab.

In an effort to equalize black and white student test scores, OPRF has shifted some grade point scales, to make it harder to get “Ds” and “Fs.” 

The school has rescinded graduation requirements for "black and brown" students who said "police brutality and racial violence" made it too difficult to study.

OPRF teachers have been barred from lowering grades for student misbehavior, missing class or failure to turn in homework. They’ve been required to allow students to re-take tests when they fail, and to extend deadlines for late assignments.

Honors classes for the brightest students were banned at OPRF, deemed discriminatory to black students, who are now admitted to any class they desire, regardless of their aptitude.

School leaders won’t yet say definitively whether any of this has had its stated, desired effect, of improving the academic performance of its black students and/or, correspondingly, lowering the performance of white ones. But they’ve offered some hints 

In March, halfway through a nearly three school board meeting, the woman in charge of running the student experiments, OPRF Chief Student Scientist Laurie Fiorenza, made a passing confession. 

 “Despite best efforts," Fiorenza said. "The data does not show us that we are obtaining the things that we wanted to see.”

“Our coaches did an excellent job collaborating with lots of teachers…but those key things have just eluded us,” she said. “As a result of that evaluation this past year of the past three years we determined that at this point we are not obtaining what we had hoped and we determined it was best not to proceed with that program again.”

She didn’t specify which program she meant. 

No matter; two months later, Fiorenza announced she would resign and leave OPRF after six years. 

Six degreees of Ralph Martire

After implementing a similar program while leading the River Forest School District 90 board, teacher's union activist and River Forest resident Ralph Martire turned his focus to OPRF in 2019.

Both Fiorenza and current superintendent Greg Johnson started at OPRF that year, in administrative roles focused on school curriculum.

Martire promoted Johnson to superintendent in 2021.

Johnson promised equalizing black and white test scores would be the district’s top priority. 

He shephered OPRF's "Honors For All" program, also known as "detracking," to school board approval in Oct. 2021, beginning implementation the following fall, in Aug. 2022, for school freshmen.

The program eliminated separate stand-alone honors classes in English, history and science. Mathematics courses in Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II were replaced with an ‘Integrated Math’ curriculum combining math disciplines.  

Martire obtained federal taxpayer funding to implement its honors ban. OPRF was part of $232 million U.S. Department of Education  experiment that sought to prove "the effects of systemic racism within education." 

Consultants from a U.S.-government funded non-profit, the American Institutes For Research in the Behavioral Sciences ("AIR"), set up shop at OPRF to coach teachers and administrators on how to run their experiments.

"A diverse classroom will lead to thoughtful discussions in which students will learn from their peers,” read an AIR-produced flyer promoting the benefits of the honors ban to OPRF parents.

At River Forest District 90, Martire hired curriculum chief Alison Hawley in 2016 to implement his "social justice equity" program there, promising to equalize test scores between white and black students.

But the "gap" expanded.

According to the Illinois State Board of Education, all three River Forest K-8 schools were "Exemplary" in 2016, when Hawley arrived.

They fell to ‘Commendable’ by 2019, as the percentage of third grade students at grade level fell from 86% to 71% in English and from 73% to 65% in math.

By 2021 just 59% of all students in the district were at grade level in English, and 57% in math.

Hawley had resigned from her previous curriculum chief job in Winnetka after her boss revealed she “concealed student performance data” from that community. 

Winnetka reading and math scores ranked in the 99th and 100th percentile statewide, respectively, in 2011-12, according to the Illinois State Board of Education. But those percentiles fell to 54th and 70th by the 2015-16 school year.

Hawley, who similarly concealed student performance data in River Forest, resigned from her position in Nov. 2023.