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Chicago Found a Shockingly Simple Way to Improve the Lives of 315,000 Kids

By turning student IDs into instant library cards, Chicago just gave 315,000 kids access to books, tutoring, and digital resources.

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In a political era where “innovation” usually means just finding a new way to destroy and make things more difficult, Chicago just did something rather refreshing: it made something easier. And it did so with little effort.

As reported by Block Club Chicago, Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Public Library have rolled out a citywide expansion of the “81 Club.” It’s a program that automatically turns every Chicago Public Schools student ID into a fully functional library card. Students don’t have to fill out any forms, wait in any lines, or cut through any bureaucratic red tape. If you’re a student in Chicago, you’re in. You have a library card now. Simple as that.

More than 315,000 kids have now been granted immediate access to books, databases, tutoring, and all sorts of digital learning tools. The broadening horizons of a public library system are now at their fingertips, and they didn’t even have to do anything.

Chicago Just Gave 315,000 Kids a Library Card Without Making Them Do Anything

The idea sounds so obvious, so simple, so elegantly executed, that it almost seems suspicious. Especially in this day and age in the United States, where politicians seem to be putting in maximum effort to destroy it rather than build, to complicate rather than simplify, to make what should be intuitive, daunting. Instead of building another program that requires not just steps like proving eligibility, the city used its existing infrastructure in the form of the student IDs every kid is automatically assigned and paired it with the city’s shared data systems to eliminate the barrier.

The idea is to provide instantaneous access for hundreds of thousands of students while simultaneously removing the friction that often prevents it.

And the best part? They already know it works. Thanks to a 2022 pilot program, Chicago officials already know that converting a student ID into a library card led to an astonishing 63 percent increase in library access among economically disadvantaged students and an 81 percent increase among English language learners. They found that in some neighborhoods, student participation in the 81 Club now outpaces traditional library card ownership. That’s a seismic shift that could potentially change the course of thousands of lives.

Another elegantly brilliant part of the plan accounts for students most likely to fall through the cracks, like unhoused children, foster children, and children of undocumented families, by not requiring additional documentation.

On top of the instantaneous access granted to 300,000+ students, the program also includes several creative elements designed to increase student engagement, such as student-designed library cards that give kids a sense of participation and ownership.

It certainly is a feel-good story, but I find myself struck by how unusually creative it is for a modern government. Maybe it’s just that we’re all prisoners of low standards and unimaginative thinking, but it is rather refreshing to see public policy that rethinks how power is distributed. Especially when it’s not to regulate or restrict the people’s power, but to widen it.

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