Chicago teachers told to give passing grades to illegal immigrant students: report

Chicago teachers told a local radio station that they are being instructed to give illegal immigrant children a “passing grade” of C or 70 percent. Since 2022, the sanctuary city of Chicago has been the destination of some 50,000 illegal immigrants who have been bussed or flown from the southern border to the city. Many of them are Venezuelan and are sent to the black neighborhoods of Chicago, WGN AM720 reported.

Reporter Sylvia Snowden stated in an interview that she has spoken to teachers at “multiple” Chicago Public Schools who have all told her that they were told to pass “migrant” children, which, in some instances, meant deliberately falsifying grades.

“We've had multiple Chicago Public School teachers come forward to us at WGN News and exclusively tell us that they were instructed to give these students passing grades in their classes, regardless of academic performance,” she said in an interview.

Snowden said that teachers told her it isn't “just the classes”: where teachers had to pass assignments and exams submitted by migrant students. “It’s not just the classes but the academic testing, the standardized testing that the students do every single year. We had one teacher tell us … that her student simply was not at [passing] grade level based upon the tests that were taken.”

Radio host Jon Hansen, noted that he thought the standardized testing was out of the hands of teachers and managed at the state level.

“The information comes back,” Snowden responded. When the tests have been proctored, after they've been evaluated, the teachers are able to see the scores. And when the teachers saw the scores, they saw that the students were not at grade level, yet they were instructed to give them 70 percent in every single class, which is the minimum C and pass them on to the next grade,” she said.

Snowden noted how the city isn’t doing much to help the kids be better educated because it is sending them to schools in black neighborhoods where there is virtually no access to English as a Second Language training.

When confronted with this information Chicago Public Schools responded with this statement: “Chicago public schools aims to provide a rigorous, welcoming, inclusive pre-K through 12 environment for all students, including those who are newly arrived in Chicago with their families from around the globe. As a district, we have high expectations for 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 described deficiencies.”