Mayor Rahm Emanuel's announcement last week of a $17 million addition at Walter Payton College Prep High Schoolstirred some resentment from parents and teachers, coming so soon after Chicago closed dozens of schools and reduced spending at scores more of them.

We get that. Those parents and teachers raise an honest question: How can Chicago PublicSchoolsfind money to expand an elite high school, when it just cited a $1 billion budget deficit as reason to shutter schools and lay off teachers and other staffers? If CPS doesn't have the money for neighborhood schools, how can it have money for elite programs and schools?
 
To our mind, this goes to the critical reformation of Chicago schools, a reformation that is just at the starting block.

CPS closed schools because it has fewer students to populate the schools. It closed schools in neighborhoods that have experienced the most significant population decline.

CPS has a structural financial problem. That problem is largely — but not entirely — driven by the failure to match promises to revenues in the Chicago Teachers' Pension Fund. CPS had to make a $612 million contribution to the pension fund this year. Hello, Illinois legislature. The pernicious failure of the lawmakers to deal with this is robbing money from every classroom in the city.

The educational capability of the Chicago public school system is critical to everything else that contributes to a great city. This city won't survive if it can't keep and attract employers with the promise of an educated workforce. It won't survive if it can't keep and attract parents with the promise of good public schools for their children.Yes, Chicago needs to make every school a neighborhood treasure. How? The facile answer is that we can tap some treasure chest: Raid the TIF funds! Tax the rich! That answer ignores the reality that Chicago is in competition with the suburbs and with other cities for jobs and for residents. Businesses can move. People can move. The city's taxing capacity is constrained by that. It is not boundless.Chicago's creative capacity ... that's boundless. The challenge for Chicago is to make the very best, most efficient  use of the revenue it has available for education. And there is the most frustrating element of the debate about schools: The persistent resistance to innovation. Charter schools are seen in some quarters as a threat. The idea of empowering parents by handing them a cash voucher and allowing them to pick the best school, public or private, for their children? Huge threat. And how dare you expand a remarkably successful school like Payton?

CPS, for all its historic shortcomings, is trying innovative ways to raise the opportunities for more of its students.

More seats in academically rigorous international baccalaureate high school programs. More charter schools. More "turnarounds" of chronically underperforming schools.

The expansion of Payton is designed to open room for up to 400 more students. Competition to get into Payton grows more fierce every year because Chicago has immensely talented young people, but it doesn't have the capacity to serve them. As a result, some students with nearly perfect application scores are denied admission to the city's best public schools. Some leave the system, some leave the city, some enroll in schools that aren't challenging enough for them.

The argument is made that such investment  and disinvestment in CPS is racially discriminatory. Note that Payton's student body is 21 percent African-American, 25 percent Hispanic, 37 percent white and 17 percent Asian and other races. It draws from across the city.

Just as important, it turns out graduates who are educated and motivated and equipped to help this city thrive.

The mayor announced other school construction projects last week: a new elementary school on the Southeast Side to ease overcrowding, an annex for Wildwood Elementary on the Northwest Side, upgrades for Raby High School and feeder schools on the West Side. The money comes from state capital development funds and city tax-increment-financing funds, not from neighborhood school operating money.

Together, they reflect an effort to move forward on education improvements while CPS figures its way through a profound budget problem.