Yet a closer investigation of Duncan's record in Chicago casts doubt on that label. As he packs up for Washington, Duncan leaves behind a Windy City legacy that's hardly cause for optimism, emphasizing as it does a business-minded, market-driven model for education. If he is a "reformer," his style of management is distinctly top-down, corporate, and privatizing. It views teachers as expendable, unions as unnecessary, and students as customers.
Disturbing as well is the prominence of Duncan's belief in offering a key role in public education to the military. Chicago's school system is currently the most militarized in the country, boasting five military academies, nearly three dozen smaller Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programs within existing high schools, and numerous middle school Junior ROTC programs. More troubling yet, the military academies he's started are nearly all located in low-income, minority neighborhoods. This merging of military training and education naturally raises concerns about whether such academies will be not just education centers, but recruitment centers as well.
Rather than handing Duncan a free pass on his way into office, as lawmakers did during Duncan's breezy confirmation hearings last week, a closer examination of the Chicago native's record is in order. Only then can we begin to imagine where public education might be heading under Arne Duncan, and whether his vision represents the kind of "change" that will bring our students meaningfully in line with the rest of the world.
Yes, I added double emphasis, because it says middle school. Twelve- and thirteen-year-olds. Thanks, Arne.
So, President Obama, why did you make this man our chief educator? For his track record of militarization?
The father of the American common school system, Horace Mann, once referred to the public school as "the greatest discovery ever made by man". I tend to agree, though the scientific method is up there, too: giving every child the same education and critical thinking skills is necessary to building the cognitive girding that a true meritocracy requires.
A public school system is also invaluable to democracy because they are in a sense immobile, essentially local, and connect families, workers, and youth in one place. It's easy to see why the public school system is a favorite target of reactionaries on the right: done right, it undermines the status quo by its very existence.
Despite the right's constant harping on the evil teachers' unions, there's no debate as to their positive impact on education historically. America's schools improved by every conceivable measure as unionization of the profession grew. In fact, teaching only became a profession because of teachers' unions. It's easy to forget now, but the schools were a patronage dumping ground in all but the toniest of schools for generations.
Despite the hysteria whipped up among parents and the free market fundamentalists, teachers don't go into the profession because they hate children and teaching. Teaching is an immensely stressful profession--consistently ranked among the most stressful. Teachers have to face roomfuls of children and adolescents in the most emotionally trying times of their lives, and they must manage to both educate them and keep them in line. The caricature of the teacher who puts on a movie and puts her head down to sleep is just that, and is the result of years of propaganda and little else.
Don't get me wrong; teachers' unions need reform. There needs to be a reasonable method for removing bad teachers; there needs to be room for innovation in curricula. And they need democracy.
During his time here, Arne Duncan had little detectable effect on our schools. In fact, he left behind a mess, according to Chicago Magazine's profile of Ron Huberman. He accomplished little to nothing. His program of privatization has put and is putting unqualified, terrified teachers in front of students who have no faith in the adults around them.
Now people are wondering: Does the policy of school "turnarounds" that guts schools of all its leadership, denigrates teachers, alienates parents from schools, and destabilizes school life for kids, have something to do with the increased chaos and poor performance? (Yes.)
Was Arne Duncan not only ineffective but detrimental to our schools? If so, then how the hell did he get a promotion?
The tragic beating death of Derrion Albert of Fenger High School brought national media attention to Chicago's failing schools. Electing a guy who was a "community organizer from the south side of Chicago" will get you that kind of attention. They are starting to ask the question we've been asking here: what qualified Arne Duncan to be the national leader of our public schools, other than his playing basketball with the President?
Today the Illinois Policy Institute is releasing a new short film about charter schools and their success in Chicago.
Entitled 'Charter Schools: Changing Lives,' the documentary profiles students, teachers and administrators in three Chicago charter schools: Chicago International Charter School's Ralph Ellison campus, Noble Street Charter School's Pritzker College Prep, and the Urban Prep Academy for Young Men.
To the speculator, "saturation" is the filthiest word. When a market is robust and investments see steady and steep returns, all is good. When too many of his cohort are vying for the same investments, the rate of return diminishes.This situation forces these investors to get creative.
The "edupreneur"- a creature that is one part philanthropist and a thousand parts venture capitalist- is the paving the way for the newest, untapped market; our schools.
The Sun-Times and the Chicago Teachers Union conducted a joint survey of Chicago Public School teachers that revealed that a shocking percentage--among High School teachers, more than half--have felt pressure to change a student's grade. Given the high stakes of the "percent graduating" statistics as a metric of public schools, it makes sense that the heaviest percentage would be among High School teachers. Still, more than a quarter of middle school teachers also reported feeling pressured to change a student's grade.
Of seven thousand teachers in CPS, fourteen hundred responded to the survey; while that provides more than enough for a statistically valid survey, it should also be considered or understood that the fact that it was self-selected to some degree could have altered the results.
With that in mind, this is still absolutely shocking, and adds yet another piece of evidence to the (well, my) on-going case that Arne Duncan was hardly qualified to be named Secretary of Education.
Obviously it was not Duncan pressuring teachers. According to the survey, the pressure came primarily from principals. But as the "CEO" of the schools, the buck must stop with him. And if principals felt the need to put the arm on teachers, that did not come from nowhere. There must have been in-turn pressure on them to meet statistical standards no matter what the cost.
While that pressure may have gotten Mr. Duncan the press needed to ascend in his career, it has done nothing for students.
Of course, this is not Duncan's school district. Many of these teachers had been teaching well before Duncan came on the scene--but the vast majority (64%) of teachers reporting have been teaching less than ten years, which puts them under either Duncan or Vallas, and certainly inside the Amendatory Act, Daley-control era.
Have our schools made progress since William Bennett described them as the worst in the nation in 1987? Perhaps; but with each new revelation and report, we seem to be getting further away from being able to actually answer that question.
De La Cruz, in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, was a small middle school, taking kids mainly from Whittier Elementary and sending them on to Juarez HS. Small--a few hundred students. To the Chicago Public Schools, under the auspices of the Renaissance 2010 program, that is a bad thing.
Because the school was small, the class sizes were, relatively speaking, small. But the teachers, being unionized, tenured, and with in many cases decades of experience teaching in that neighborhood, were expensive. That, according to Ren2010, is "under-utilization". Too few kids, too much school. Yet, of course, small school size is touted as among the benefits of charter schools--more personalized instruction and care from teachers.
De La Cruz, in a neighborhood with a high number of Spanish-speaking families, in a neighborhood periodically plagued with gang problems, is an award-winning school. It won the Spotlight Award from the state Board of Education. Not a decade ago. Not five years ago. In 2009.
So here was a public school where the kids were learning. The school was making progress. The school was small and the class sizes manageable. And it had to be closed.
Why? Why close a successful, small school in a working class neighborhood?
The residents, teachers, and students surely didn't understand. A heart-wrenching "hearing" last year in February featured parents and students astounded at the callousness of a Board of Education indifferent to local control, so sure were they in the magical wizardry of the "market" to fix education. Given what happened to De La Cruz, is Ren2010 about fixing public schools? Or destroying them?
The neighborhood, the Board argues, simply doesn't need a school.
When I appeared on the 848 "Month in Review" on WBEZ last month, I made a comment that I heard a lot about afterwards: that Arne Duncan appeared to have no qualifications to run the nation's schools. I followed it up with a joke that the only qualification appeared to be that he used to play basketball with the President. You can listen to my appearance here.
Looking now at the increased news coming out that the CPS is in bad shape and made essentially no progress under Duncan's leadership, I think that point is made more serious. Why did President-Elect Obama choose this man to run the nation's schools?
If it is because Duncan had supposedly achieved such great progress with the Chicago Public Schools, then the President has to answer for why he failed to perform his own due diligence in evaluating potential picks.
Former CEO Arne Duncan often said that a key to creating the best urban school district in the country was to improve long-failing high schools. But Duncan's broadest, most expensive effort, called High School Transformation, sputtered in implementation and has failed to spark significant improvement, according to an evaluation released Thursday.
Granted, this information is just coming out now. But if President Obama was truly seeking change and was as in touch with the neighborhoods as he claimed to be (skinny kid community organizer from the South Side, right?) why didn't he know what every parent and every teacher knows: that the CPS privatization efforts were doing little to help students and schools?
If it is because Duncan was such an aggressive pursuer of Renaissance 2010 and the school privatization effort, why didn't the President say so? Even during his confirmation hearings Duncan was noticeably unwilling to give specifics. Given the criticism Obama was getting at the time from the left for importing much of the Clinton-era economic minds, it would have been risky to come out and say, "Privatize American education the way Duncan tried to do in Chicago."
The skeptical person could conclude that it isn't Duncan's supposed "new approach" to school reform--an approach that all evidence shows failed conclusively--that prompted his choice, but perhaps his ability to mask failure with corporate-speak laced "initiatives" that give liberals the sensation that schools are "innovating" and provide a good bulwark against criticism from teachers' union and public school advocates.
That would be the skeptical person. I'm going to give the President the benefit of the doubt and say that it was because they played basketball together.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Ron Huberman takes notes from RepublicanDemocrat Daleycrat playbook by invoking the tax increase boogeyman to garner support for raiding teacher pensions.
The CPS proposed budget for 2009-2010 was unveiled (in a limited capacity) last week. The budget projects a $475 million dollar deficit (which, to the keen observer is $25 million less than the proposed "cap" on Olympic spending). Huberman is using this as an opportunity to pit Chicago resident against Chicago resident over scarce dollars.
City officials have stated that a property tax increase may be necessary to fill in budget gaps. This increase will average about $18 per year increase per home valued at $262,000 per year. The framing of this increase, however, is textbook means for pitting recession-beleaguered homeowners against public school teachers (many of whom also being recession-beleaguered homeowners).
Huberman, along with officials from the Civic Federation, have blamed this shortfall on one thing, teacher pensions.
Kids getting preferential admission because of who their parents are is wrong--although, of course, it happens in higher education all the time and basically creates America's version of a ruling class--but I'm not fully convinced that what Alderman Munoz did, in placing a call to request admission of his daughter to Whitney Young despite her grades, was wrong.
He is a parent. And parents call schools and ask for reconsideration all the time, particularly in cases where they want to keep siblings together (and I imagine for a dad, keeping his young daughter with her older brothers would be a particularly strong motivator). Should he not do what any other parent would do simply because he is an alderman?
Perhaps that is something you sacrifice when you enter public service. But if you put, "sacrificing basic parental prerogatives" on the list of things you sacrifice when you become a public servant, I'm not sure you'll ever get any quality public servants.
Ald. Ricardo Munoz (22nd) acknowledged Wednesday that his daughter was admitted to Whitney Young Magnet High School for the upcoming school year after he called the principal to ask that his daughter be allowed to follow in her brother's footsteps.
Perhaps the most interesting thing to come out of the follow-up was this bit of candid talk from the Mayor, who apparently has abandoned any pretension that the City Council's statutory powers are anything but a formality:
"As a parent, he is speaking for not only his family, but his own constitutents," Daley said. "They don't have to accept the child. They can refuse the child because [aldermen] have no power over the Board of Education. They don't fund them. They don't review their budgets or anything else."
The City Council does approve the Board of Education's property-tax levy and ratifies the mayor's appointment of school board members.
No offense to my print journalism friends (may your Victrolas play joyous tunes) but reporting like this from the Chi-Town Daily News, who are covering the discrimination lawsuit at the City Colleges that implicates the administration in intimidation over personnel decisions, leads me to believe that democracy could potentially survive the death of ink. (Don't get me wrong--I love ink).
Here is staff writer Peter Sachs:
Last week, we reported that there was a culture of retaliation inside the City Colleges, citing the deposition of the district's former general counsel, now a circuit court judge. There's more to it.
Now that we've had time to go through yet more of the depositions, we find this:
"Non-African-Americans were easy to promote and were not punished as severely if they made a mistake, or if they did something that was not within procedures or the rules of the City Colleges."
That's Marnell Love, a former vice chancellor (read: high-level manager) inside the district's HR department, in his deposition in the Shaw lawsuit.
Speaking of promotions:
"I wanted to promote my employees who had outstanding records, and we had documented their performance ... and that they deserved to be promoted. And I had to promote other people that did not deserve it in order to get my promotions through, which, basically, I promoted everybody in the department."
Love goes on to talk about the tense work environment, festering upset over pay inequities, and infighting and feuding among some people in the HR department.
Displaced Teachers, concerned parents, and employees concerned over tyrannical principals spoke during the public participation portion of Wednesday's Chicago Board of Education monthly meeting. Board President Micheal Scott and CEO of CPS Ron Huberman castigated many of these Chicago taxpayers for expressing their concerns in the public arena.
CORE member Jay Rehak expressed his concern that Huberman would attempt put CPS on two-tiered pension as he did while at the helm of the CTA. Rehak was also concerned about pension holidays. Current budget shortfalls in the CPS make these options desirable for public administrators.
Rehak:
I hope to some day, God willing, retire from CPS. In that retirement, I hope to receive the full pension that I will have earned. I am concerned about the financial health of the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund, not only for myself, but also for my brothers and sisters in the system who hope to retire both before me and after me.
Huberman shamed Rehak for relaying what he claimed were falsehoods and accused Rehack of being misleading. Board president Michael Scott shouted over Rehak as he attempted to defend his own honor.
The mood of the meeting shifted from ominous and combative to lighthearted as one teacher asked Huberman about a rumor. She heard that CPS was holding a secret job fair that was invite-only and dibs would be given to first-year alternative certification teachers in programs like Teach for America and the Chicago Teaching Fellows. The notion made Huberman and his newly hand-picked CPS administration team burst into laughter.
"I can dispel the rumor,'' schools CEO Ron Huberman told the giggling crowd. "There are no secret teacher fairs. Any teacher fairs are public. Everyone is invited, and they are advertised.''
According to the Chicago Sun-Times, Huberman found out a few hours late that there was indeed a secret job fair to be held July 31 from noon to 3 pm. at the Lakeside Center of McCormick Place, 2301 S. Lake Shore Dr.
Although the new buzzword of "accountability" is thrown around the CPS to justify the caustic policy of school "turnarounds," apparently when it comes to bureaucracy, the CPS advocates for a free-for-all. According to spokesperson for CPS, Monique Bond:
"There will be no reprimand for an honest mistake.''
This puts either the internal communications of the CPS into question, or the honesty of its leaders. If an "honest mistake" created a secret job fair and said fair was never relayed to the CEO, how much stock can be taken in Huberman's word when he says that teachers pensions are safe.? He stated that CPS will not go after pensions with the same confidence as he "dispelled" the rumor that there was no secret job fair.
Chicago schools reporter and publisher of Substance News George Schmidt documents the utter failure of Mayor Daley's public schools to serve special needs kids. The Mayor's hostile takeover of the Chicago Public Schools with the 1995 Amendatory Act made him a hero with Mayors around the country and his "taming" of the Teachers Union an idol to education reformers who think privatizing education is the only way to improve it. Arne Duncan's tenure at the schools earned him a promotion to be the nation's top education bureaucrat. Why? Because they fired teachers. The only discernible record of the Daley administration is this: performance is little or no better, and the most experienced teachers, particularly if they're Black, have been fired. Congratulations, Team Daley!
Principals, parents, teachers and students across Chicago are growing in the awareness that the Chicago Board of Education, for the past seven years under the leadership of Mayor Richard M. Daley and Michael Scott, has been systematically (and illegally) depriving the city's most deserving children of the public special education services both the law and common decency say they deserve.
The recent revelations that the principal of Prescott Elementary School, Erin Roche, had dumped as many special education programs as possible from his school in his drive to create an "elite" school for the children of a wealthy handful who have been moving into the area is not singular.
The closing of schools with programs for the neediest children, along with massive cuts in special education services and the sabotaging of the IEP process (so that teachers cannot prescribe one-on-one services for children) was a long-term policy of the Duncan administration (2001 - 2009).
At RAINBOW/PUSH's annual convention on June 29th, 2009, the audience was filled with college students working for the city college system. Two of these students who told me that they were getting paid $9.00 an hour to be at the event and claimed that the summer program was "excruciatingly boring" and that they had to beg their supervisors for "something to do." It should surprise no one that patronage and trading favors was part of the Secretary of Education's homecoming, after all he's been rewarded mightily by his corporate sponsors for spawning Chicago style school reform. Regardless of why people were there, the topic of the day was an admirable one, how to fix our failing educational system.
Jesse Jackson began the session asserting that "strong minds break strong chains" but deemed it unacceptable that a school like Harper High gets a mediocre education while other school communities get an "Olympic education." In a comment seemingly directed at the young people in the room Jackson insisted that "if you're behind, you have to run faster."
That opening gave Duncan an opportunity to expand upon his educational vision for the country. He started by thanking himself for doubling "the number of those passing and taking AP courses" in Chicago and for the fact that we "have more Gates Millenium winners than anyone in the country." Then he delivered the bad news "we [the United States] have a 30 percent dropout rate, we used to lead the world in the number of college graduates." Never mind that we have never had such a high number of low-income students of color attending college in our nation's history. Duncan then proceeded to insulate himself any doubts that his compassion and empathy for student struggles might not be legit. Referencing his close ties to the White House, Duncan insisted that the president and first lady "were not born with silver spoons in their mouths" and "the president talks about being on food stamps at one point." He also commented on the importance of Historically Black Colleges for training "half of our nations African American Teachers," this despite the fact that his Turnaround policies have led to a tremendous loss of black teachers in the Chicago Public Schools. Last, he took aim at the bad guys, us teachers.
"We're gonna push a very strong reform agenda" apparently necessary because "standards have been dummied down," something Duncan ensured was the case when he presided over a new Illinois State Achievement Test test that drastically improved the performance of elementary schools on state exams. Arne got on with his message, teachers are at the center of the achievement gap because "talent matters tremendously, great teachers, great principles matter." Last came the punch line; "were challenging the country to think about the schools that are not performing....when that happens we as educators perpetuate poverty and perpetuate the status quo." Another speaker challenged the Secretary of Education to think about the "health gap and the wealth gap" when diagnosing the distress of our schools but Duncan was nonplussed and responded, "this is not just about closing the gap, we have to raise the bar."
Apparently, that bar is to be raised, even if it chokes us!
Substance News has been the go-to unofficial news source for the Chicago Public Schools and Chicago Teachers Union for decades.
They will be publishing a series of letters from students, teachers, and other Chicagoans who have been affected by school closings. The first in the series highlights the plight of De La Cruz, an elementary school in the rapidly gentrifying neighborhood of Pilsen that closed its doors this month.
From teacher Kristine Mayle, recounting the plundering of "goods" by neighboring principals:
The Final Days of De La Cruz...A free-for-all of greed
By Kristine Mayle
They let the Area 10 principals into the building to take and claim whatever they could get their hands on... while teachers were trying to close up for the year and with students present!
I even had a principal reach over my head while I was typing to put a sticker on my classroom computer to claim it as her own. WHILE I WAS TYPING.
She didn't say a word, just reached over me. Shocking behavior all around. One student compared it to when her grandma died and all the relatives rushed her house to claim and fight over her property. I do not understand why they couldn't have had this free-for-all next week, when teachers and students were out of the building....
The Caucus of Rank and File Educators has filed charges against the Chicago Board of Education under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, claiming that the "turnaround" policy of the Renaissance 2010 initiative has amounted to discrimination against African-American teachers in the Chicago Public Schools. According to a CORE release, there are 2,000 fewer African-American teachers in CPS today than there were at the beginning of the Renaissance/Turnaround process in 2002.
Title VII prohibits formal or practical discrimination in hiring and firing practices--so even where a system is formally fair, if the practice or operations are discriminatory, legal action is possible.
In a statement, CORE co-chair Karen GJ Lewis said, "Since the beginning of the year, I've met black teachers who are working as substitutes. They are in tears, not just about the loss of their jobs but also about the loss of their status in the community. These school and position closings are insidious and Draconian. They are based on only one measurement -- test scores -- which say more about socio-economic status than they do about teaching and learning."
Copies of the complaint were not immediately available. A spokesperson for the Board of Education declined to comment.
The new bill eliminates boundaries -- now there are two areas: Chicago and everywhere else. Under the current law Rockford is considered "downstate" Illinois.
That means 15 charter schools can be licensed outside Chicago, on top of the previous five licenses left for downstate Illinois. In Chicago, 40 new schools can be added, and five new schools in Chicago can be allocated for dropout recovery. Before this approved act, only five charter licenses were available for downstate.
To clarify, one charter is not the same as one school. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has boasted in the past how Chicago was able to get around the original cap by allowing one charter operator to run multiple campuses. This new bill, if signed into law by Governor Quinn, will turn the charter school epidemic into a pandemic throughout the state.
Charter schools are non-union schools that are managed by private non-profit and for-profit organizations, using public dollars. The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has not taken a stance against these schools, but advocated organizing them into union schools The AFT launched an aggressive campaign to organize schools run by the Civitas organization, and was successful in obtaining a majority of union membership cards to be signed by educators at three of its campuses.
Remember, these organizations use property tax dollars to run these schools and the schools are supposedly available to all students who enroll in public schools.
Civitas argued that its charter schools are essentially private schools not accountable to the public, despite receiving taxpayer dollars. In the brief Civitas submitted to the NLRB, it claimed it is a for-profit company not required to provide any type of annual presentation to any government body to justify its annual expenditures, and that it has no "direct personal accountability" to any government public officials.
What are the word does President Obama and Secretary Duncan repeat profusely when talking about the advantages of charter schools? To give you a hint, it rhymes with "schmaccountability."
What does this mean?
If the schools were declared public entities, they would fall under the jurisdiction of the Illinois Education Labor Relations Board, which would recognize the majority of cards signed as a vote for the union at the schools. Since the the NLRB has declared them private employers, they now must conduct a "secret" ballot "election."
This gives the charter operator more time to intimidate and/or fire staff before the election occurs or EFCA is passed...
CORE, the movement of rank-and-file teachers to democratize their union, is tweeting (twittering? I'm only 27 years old, and I'm not sure) the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates Meeting. Follow 'em.
Last month, Ramsin Canon wrote about Tribune columnist and "consummate phony tough guy" John Kass.
In that vein, I would like to nominate Arne Duncan for a Phony Tough Guy Award, for being quoted as saying he would
"come down like a ton of bricks" on anyone who defies the administration's plans to bring relief to states who face layoffs because of budget cuts."
Words signify things and his metaphor of "coming down like a ton of bricks" should mean something. Does this mean that he's going to fight Bobby Jindal?
Board member payments would go from the current $1,000 per month to $2,000. The Board president's payment will go from $1,600 to $3,000/month.
This means that the yearly cost of paying Board members will go from $91,200 to $180,000. It's is important to note that the members of the Board of Education are all extremely wealthy members of the business community who meet once a month and rubber-stamp every initiative coming from the fifth floor.
These appointees of Mayor Daley claim that the schools are "failing" and that merit pay schemes like the Chicago Tap program (unveiled in collusion with the Marilyn Stewart-led Chicago Teachers Union) will bring about positive change in Chicago. This group sets forth the policies of these "failing" schools and insist that they are "meritorious" enough to warrant 100% pay raises.
Although members of the Board represent organizations like Banco Popular and LaSalle Bank, their practices are akin to the bailout-bonus frenzy of AIG. The City is hemorrhaging money, and these part-time Board members are cutting off the tourniquet.
Let's put this into perspective. According to the salary schedule listed in the Chicago Teachers Union contract, a first year teacher with a bachelor's degree will make $46,761 with pension.
This means that about four more teachers can be hired for the year. Looking again at the contract, on average, class sizes are "advised" to have no more than 28 students. Hiring four more teachers would allow 112 students to have class sizes as advised by the contract. Of course, since the passing of the Amendatory Act of 1995, which gave the Mayor of Chicago control over the CPS (and the ability to appoint the Board of Education) class sizes are not grievable, and thus these numbers are "advised."
Of course, the CPS does need a Board of Education. It cannot be cut entirely. However, these positions should not be patronage jobs for the rich. The city schools are constantly compared to their suburban counterparts. Until an equitable funding formula is devised to level the playing field, there are other things that can be done to make city schools more like suburban schools. One of those things is to repeal the Amendatory Act and have a school Board comprised of community members elected to these positions.
This would be a great civics lesson for our students.
Rep. Sara Feigenholtz, candidate for Rahm Emanuel's House seat, is a Chief Co-Sponsor. The bill has a Republican co-sponsor, Roger Eddy of Hutsonville.
The Board of Education has no standards for its school closures. It views our city as a "market" and is merely trying to increase the "market share" of the privatized schools so favored by the Mayor and the myopic mopes who purr in his lap on the Fifth Floor.
There are many excellent arguments in support of charter schools -- including nearly 17,000 in the form of students voluntarily enrolled in Chicago's charters from 2006-2007 -- but I've never encountered a bad one.
There are few choices for dissatisfied Chicago parents. Either move to another school district, find an alternate means of education for their children, or get over their concerns, accept homosexuality as normal and admit to themselves they are abnormal for thinking anything different...One way is to establish more charter schools.
Eaton quotes the director of the Illinois Family Institute's Division of School Advocacy, who thinks Huberman's appointment portends certain doom -- or gayness -- for CPS students:
"First, Huberman will be called upon to superintend issues related to how homosexuality is addressed in Chicago public schools," Higgins wrote. "Second, Huberman serves as a public role model. His open, unapologetic, unrepentant appropriation and affirmation of sexual deviance as morally defensible and central to his identity vitiates any legitimacy as premier educational leader in Chicago that his admirable qualities may have otherwise conferred on him."
(Hypothetically speaking, would Huberman be more acceptable as CPS's CEO were he to apologize for his sexuality? Just how silly is that question?)
The recent actions by CORE, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, under the umbrella group GEM (Grassroots Education Movement), may have brought life back to a moratorium on school closings that was tabled in the General Assembly in 2007, and re-introduced by State Representative Cynthia Soto.
Rep. Soto announced the moratorium at a press conference held at her office on Tuesday, February 3.
"[Rep.]Soto presented a similar version of this bill in 2007, but it was tabled, she said, because former schools CEO Arne Duncan offered to work with legislators on a new decision process. But the district has broken its promises, she said, and continued its Renaissance 2010 program, aimed at opening 100 new schools by 2010."
Had the bill been passed, or had Duncan kept his promise, the staffs and faculties at Copernicus, Fulton, Howe, and Morton elementary schools, along with Orr and Harper High Schools, would still be intact. Apparently, this type of reneged horse-trading was overlooked during the Senate confirmation hearings of Arne Duncan for Secretary of Education.
Rep. Soto called a press conference yesterday, well attended by members of CORE and GEM, where she called for a one-year moratorium on school closings and reorganizations.
"So you are hearing from my constituents. They want a moratorium now and that's what this bill will do. There is going to be a process...and we are going to be investigating how the old process works," said State Rep. Cynthia Soto, (D) Chicago.
Wednesday was a day of protests warning incoming CEO of Chicago Public Schools Ron Huberman of the resistance that lies ahead of him as he implements Mayor Daley's Renaissance 2010 Program.
They came, and they came fast and furious, and before one knew it, as many as a thousand children, teachers, parents and other concerned community members came out in mass to protest the Renaissance 2010 plan to close, turnaround, phase out, consolidate and otherwise turn the Chicago public school system upside down and inside out.
"Hey, hey. Ho, ho," they chanted. "Mayor Daley's got to go."
The march came to rest in Daley Plaza, with demonstrators huddled at the foot of the larger than life cubist Picasso statue...organizers impressed upon those gathered that this wasn't the end, but merely one of many calls to action....
The event was so large that it even brought out the mainstream media:
After making Ron Huberman's first day on the job at CPS quite unpleasant (h/t to Progress Illinois), a large demonstration of hundreds -- inching into thousands -- of teachers, parents, and students will be demonstrating in front of the Chicago Public Schools building at 125 S. Clark Street, beginning at 3:30pm today. If you work downtown, you may want to head over there and check it out -- and send us pictures, while you're at it. We'll post 'em!
Mayor Daley's Board of Education is run by the business community and himself. It's enough already. How much longer are the people of Chicago just going to accept that "The Mayor gets his way?" Do you really think forever?
In shifting Mr. Huberman, Mayor Daley candidly admitted he believes that educating kids is more important than getting people to jobs.
"The most imporant aspect of life is a quality education," he replied when I asked him if having both good schools and good transit wasn't important. "Education is the answer to all the ills."
I don't know if you can interpret that as Daley prizes education above transportation. Transportation is crucial for a city to function, and a fool our mayor is not. He's on the money earlier in the same piece:
At the CTA, Mr. Huberman wasn't perfect but he was a breath of fresh air.
Unlike his immediate predecessors, he recognized that the CTA is in a consumer business, a business in which good service is required. Thanks to him, those slow zones on miles and miles of el lines are gone. Articulated buses get fixed fast, rather than breaking down every day. The amount of service has increased. And, while fares went up, the system's basic finances are in the best shape in decades.
Even bigger were his dreams for the future, dreams of clean, high-tech service like other cities have on existing and new lines. At least some of those dreams were starting to come into focus with the prospect of billions of dollars in federal aid under President Barack Obama.
Is it too much to ask to keep the somewhat competent people in the places where they actually are competent? I'm going to channel Daley right now and say "yes."
Mayor Richard Daley on Saturday acknowledged he has spoken with CTA President Ron Huberman about succeeding Arne Duncan as public schools chief, but Daley declined to say if he has offered the post to Huberman, Daley's onetime chief of staff.
Teachers are planning a sit-in picket at Oliver Wendell Holmes Elementary at 955 W. Garfield (55th St.) beginning tonight tomorrow night (1/22) at 7:30p.m. 5pm to 7pm, when the school must be evacuated.
Holmes Elementary was slated to be a "turnaround" school, the Board of Education's method for liquidating public schools.
Come out and show your support for the parents, teachers, and students of Wendell Elementary.
A letter from the teachers, faculty, and LSC after the jump.
UPDATE: Sit-in details have been changed to a picket after a community meeting.
I attended the Rockford School Board's meeting on Tuesday and witnessed their unanimous approval for the first charter school in the city. The Legacy Academy of Excellence will be a K-5 school for "at-risk" students.
Charter schools are public schools open to any families who wish to apply. Charters design their own curricula, hire their own teachers and need to meet certain student achievement standards set forth in their agreements with state and local officials. If they don't meet these standards, the school must close, and students return to their local traditional public school.
In other words, Legacy will have freedoms that other public schools lack. From flexible work rules that allow charters to hire and retain the best teachers, to their independence to design curricula without mandates from Springfield or Washington, charters are fundamentally different than traditional public schools, and results in Chicago and elsewhere prove their high worth.
"I am Jackson Potter and I'm here to recruit you." Those were the words that opened the Community Meeting on School Closings that took place last Saturday at Malcom X College. Potter, founding member of CORE (The Caucus of Rank and File Educators), was alluding to the phrase Harvey Milk used to open his movement-inspiring speeches. From the success of the Saturday event, it was clear that a new movement is spreading through Chicago.
CORE, along with several other community groups, organized the meeting. Eighty-two Chicago Public Schools were represented and an estimated 500 attended.
According to Professor Elliot Weinbaum of the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education:
"Obama chose Arne Duncan for a reason, and part of that reason is the experimentation that Duncan has done in Chicago and his real attention to data and outcomes." .... "Duncan's willing to try new things and see if they work, hopefully keep the ones that do and drop the ones that don't. I expect that experimentation to continue on a national scale."
One of Duncan's most famous "experiments" is the proliferation of charter schools across the city and his ability to get around the state cap on charters.
The teacher who blew the whistle on this activity was rewarded by being fired. As charter schools are non-union schools, she had no recourse in the matter.
Duncan, who is facing confirmation hearings next week, did not return two days of phone calls by the Sun-Times in relation to the story. Apparently "accountability" is only important when it comes to test scores; when it comes to the dignity of children, "experimentation" is acceptable.
President-elect Obama's choice of his pick-up basketball buddy and Daley apparatchik Arne Duncan as the highest education official of the world's only superpower was met with either yawns or vague plaudits by "liberal" commentators who think a free market model of competition in education will lead to greater equality. But Chicago's teachers, who have faced years of school closures, meaningless benchmarks, and an all-consuming focus on testing, are not letting Duncan enjoy his honeymoon. An organization of teachers, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, has raised a ruckus about Duncan's destructive "turnaround" and Renaissance 2010 policies. And the negative reviews keep coming in:
Meanwhile, new charter schools face far less regulation and less accountability during their first few years. The charter school experience either provides a curriculum that should be the envy of the world or teach-to-the-test discipline with a bland curriculum. The test-till-you-drop method, utilizing the "research-based" models designed solely to improve test scores, appeals to the CEOs running charter school administrative companies (complete with their "chain" of schools, such as Alliance, Nobel, or ACT), Department of Education officials, and businesses providing capital.
The best charter schools, staffed by teachers envisioning a radically different kind of experience of childhood, resemble the education every child deserves but few receive: child-centered, stimulating, and explorative, with relevant materials and teaching strategies flexible enough to reach all learners.
The policies touted as educational "reform" by the New Democrats apply the same neoliberal theories responsible for NAFTA, the WTO, and GATT with the same results: the inequalities become greater while those in positions of power receive even greater rewards. A two-tired education system lurks in the distance, the result of neoliberal efforts to create equality. The gradual privatization and outsourcing of public schools represents a shift towards the voucher system, the ideal school system envisioned by Milton Friedman and present-day neoconservatives.
Apologists have made the argument that Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan's lack of experience as an educator will not impede his ability to fulfill his role as Secretary of Education. Outside of a few photo ops, he has not worked within the classroom; his experience was in the business sector, which has been crucial to informing his policies in Chicago.
One particularly egregious example of Duncan's vision of education can be seen in the conference he organized with the Renaissance Schools Fund. In May 2008, the Renaissance Schools Fund, the financial wing of the Renaissance 2010 plan operating under the auspices of the Commercial Club, held a symposium, "Free to Choose, Free to Succeed: The New Market in Public Education," at the exclusive private club atop the Aon Center. The event was held largely by and for the business sector, school privatization advocates, and others already involved in Renaissance 2010, such as corporate foundations and conservative think tanks. Significantly, no education scholars were invited to participate in the proceedings, although it was heavily attended by fellows from the pro-privatization Fordham Foundation and featured speakers from various school choice organizations and the leadership of corporations. Speakers clearly assumed the audience shared their views.
Without irony, Arne Duncan characterized the goal of Renaissance 2010 creating the new market in public education as a "movement for social justice." He invoked corporate investment terms to describe reforms explaining that the 100 new schools would leverage influence on the other 500 schools in Chicago. Redefining schools as stock investments he said, "I am not a manager of 600 schools. I'm a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I'm trying to improve the portfolio." He claimed that education can end poverty. He explained that having a sense of altruism is important, but that creating good workers is a prime goal of educational reform and that the business sector has to embrace public education. "We're trying to blur the lines between the public and the private," he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change in terms of both money and intellectual capital. He also attacked the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), positioning it as an obstacle to business-led reform. He also insisted that the CTU opposes charter schools (and, hence, change itself), despite the fact that the CTU runs ten such schools under Renaissance 2010. Despite the representation in the popular press of Duncan as conciliatory to the unions, his statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep hostility to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters created under Ren2010 are deunionized). Thus, in Duncan's attempts to close and transform low-performing schools, he not only reinvents them as entrepreneurial schools, but, in many cases, frees "them from union contracts and some state regulations." Duncan effusively praised one speaker, Michael Milkie, the founder of the Nobel Street charter schools, who openly called for the closing and reopening of every school in the district precisely to get rid of the unions. What became clear is that Duncan views Renaissance 2010 as a national blueprint for educational reform, but what is at stake in this vision is the end of schooling as a public good and a return to the discredited and tired neoliberal model of reform that conservatives love to embrace.
Congressman Davis has published with Yvette Clark an essay on the need to "bail out" students, over at Truthout. Read it.
The Treasury-Fed plan seems to equate credit card, auto and student loans. However, these debts are not equal. Private student loan lenders enjoy federal protections from bankruptcy that other consumer creditors do not. Specifically, unlike other types of consumer debt, private student loans are protected from discharge during bankruptcy except under extreme circumstances. Thus, an individual who accumulates thousands of dollars in debt for purchases of cars or luxury goods can obtain relief via bankruptcy; however, a teacher with private student loans cannot.
LSC attorneys Elaine K. B. Siegel and Associates argued that the Chicago Public Schools' broad practice of closing schools and reopening them without elected LSCs violates the school reform law.
Judge Hall expressed frustration with CPS lawyers who were unable to produce evidence in support of their arguments that CPS had followed the law or even their own policies in disbanding a number of LSCs and replacing them with advisory bodies appointed by the Chicago Board of Education.
On Wednesday, December 17, the Chicago Board of Education held its regular monthly meeting, one day after Barack Obama announced his nomination of Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan for Secretary of Education. The meeting began with a standing ovation for Duncan, local champion of school "turnarounds" and school choice. The board praised Duncan for his work in Chicago. Principals from various CPS schools were on hand, each giving their iteration of how Duncan was wonderful for Chicago and will be wonderful for the nation.
The public comments portion of the proceedings, the time when community members are given the chance to weigh in on their proposals and reactions to the CPS, sharply contrasted the preceding love fest. In this time, a coalition of teachers, parents, and students was there to voice its concerns over Duncan's model for urban education. The groups, including members of CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators), PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education), and the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization took to the mics during the public portion of the meeting to voice their concerns about the school closings, school turnarounds, and Mayor Daley's educational piece de resistance, Renaissance 2010.
Most on the list of forty-four speakers spoke critically of the policies under Arne Duncan. One notable exception was the principal of Namaste Charter School , who proposed a renewal of her school's charter, citing a decrease in the Body Mass Index of her students. Two foci of Namaste are continual assessment of students and yoga.
Although our governors are making us the shame of the nation, much of the state is still feeling the afterglow of Obamamania. Slowly, we see our sons and daughter pack their bags and head out to D.C. to create change. The popular media have reported that Chicagoans are happy to see our citymen make the transition to the national spotlight.
Tuesday, Obama announced Arne Duncan, CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, to be his choice for Secretary of Education, to succeed Margaret Spellings. The popular media again report that we Chicagoans are all happy with the choice of Duncan, who they repeatedly mention as a "reformer."
Duncan comes from the camp of "reformers," a term widely used by the popular media to describe big-city superintendents who lead districts with vast disparities in educational opportunities using scarce resources. Duncan, Washington, D.C.'s Michelle Rhee, and New York City's Joel Klein share the belief that the underlying problem in education in the United States can be mainly pitted on "bad teachers." Solutions they propose: merit pay for teachers whose students make gains on standardized tests, giving parents the option to enroll their students in charter and specialized schools, and working around the much vilified policy of teacher tenure. These are all measures that keep budgets low but have unproven track records for success.
Sources have leaked that tomorrow President-elect Barack Obama will announce that his pick for secretary of education will be his pick-up hoops buddy Arne Duncan, current CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
We've been artificially stimulating consumption for decades now. Isn't it time we stopped and thought about what we should be "stimulating?"
I think "stimulus packages" are nonsense, but if we are going to go down that path, shouldn't we rethink what we should be stimulating? We ought to be stimulating the production of value, and nothing else. Perhaps more importantly, stimulating the production of value goes hand-in-hand with preventing (current and future) the unnecessary destruction of value, which comes in the form of waste, corruption, duplication of effort, and any other misallocation of resources in both the public and private sector.
Richard Cohen, op-ed columnist from the Washington Post, offers his endorsement for the Secretary of Education...NYC School Chancellor (nominal reform of "superintendent") Joel Klein, due to his pro-merit pay stance. He argues that this appointment will mean that Obama is showing his ability to triangulate by throwing teachers unions (many of whom endorsed him) under the bus:
On Wednesday, November 5, at the delegate meeting of the Chicago Teachers Union, members were twelve votes shy of a majority to protest the upcoming announcement of another round of massive teachers firings. The motion, proposed by Jackson Potter, member of the reform caucus of the Chicago Teachers Union, CORE (The Caucus of Rank-and-File-Educators) read as follows:
"Approve that CTU organize a protest against contract, turnaround and charter school proliferation by calling for a emergency protest in response to any announcement of mass layoffs, scheduled for the Monday following such an announcement."
Union president Marilyn Stewart herself came down off the dais to argue against the motion, blaming membership for the inaction of the CTU leadership in opposing these school closings and mass teacher firings.
The Chicago Board of Education has recently announced the opening of 13 new schools for 2009, the turnarounds of up to 12 additional schools. This will eliminate over 1500 union positions. The CPS has not released the names of the schools involved, making a this a waiting game for the 30,000+ Chicago Public School Teachers anticipating the news as to whether or not they will have a job next year.
It shocked many education wonks when President-elect Barack Obama announced Linda Darling-Hammond as his campaign's education policy adviser.
Their pick would have more likely been a staffer from one of the big-city school districts that adhere to the a very simple orthodoxy. The formula is simple. Deprofessionalize teaching, hire fresh-faced Ivy-League graduates ready to do their two years of service in the classroom (that they would normally reserve for the non-profit sector), privatize everything from school services to curriculum, and make the bottom line as small as possible.
