Submitted by Elaine Magliaro, Guest Blogger
CPS Parent Matt Farmer Puts Penny Pritzker on Trial at CTU’s Stands Strong Rally
Rahm Emanuel promised to “shake up the Windy City’s schools” when he campaigned for mayor of Chicago in 2011. One of his main goals was to change the teacher evaluation process. He is a big proponent of using students’ standardized test scores in determining the effectiveness of classroom practitioners.
On September 12th, Mike Klonsky wrote the following on his blog SmallTalk:
It appears this morning that our autocrat mayor has decided to stonewall the negotiations. While he’s moved on compensation issues, he’s refusing to even discuss teacher evaluation and the power of principals to hire and fire teachers at will.
Rahm is operating here without the benefit of knowing much about education. He’s that just-right combination of street-thug ward politician and Wall St. hustler who thinks that because he believes something to be true, he has the right (power) to force it on the public. First case in point was his notion that more seat time in school necessarily produces better results. It doesn’t. Now he’s convinced that you can evaluate a teacher based wholly or largely on their student’s score on a standardized test. You can’t.
Yesterday Rahm hauled a few of his pet principals, (including Ethan Netterstrom, principal at Skinner North) in front of the TV cameras, to claim that in order to be “successful” they need the unchecked power to hire and fire whoever they choose, regardless of qualifications and experience and without any due process. This is a recipe for City Hall-style patronage and going back to the days when teachers (and principals) worked at the pleasure of ward politicians. It is also a recipe for principals getting rid of teachers who may be the wrong color or political persuasion. It’s interesting to note here that principals already have lots of authority over faculty hiring and that black and Latino teachers have been the victims of these kinds of hiring practices. Today, just 19 % of the teaching force in Chicago is African American, down from 45 % in 1995.
This is what happens when you make the school system a wing of City Hall, weaken collective bargaining, take power away from popularly-elected school boards and Local School Councils, and dismantle public space and public decision making.
This strike really represents a last stand for teachers and all public employees against moves by Tea Party governors and their Democratic Party counterparts in urban districts like Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, to eliminate teachers collective bargaining rights altogether. This was the original idea behind SB7 which made it illegal for teachers in Chicago (nowhere else in the state) to bargain over anything except salary and benefits — two issues that could easily be reneged on after the contract was signed for budgetary reasons. Remember, the board agreed to a 4% raise in the last contract only to take it back once the contract was signed.
All this leaves Chicago’s teachers with only one option. Dig in and fight back with the only tactic left to them under SB7 — the power to withhold their labor and put their bodies on the line in defense of their profession and of democracy. What happens here in Chicago will ultimately determine the fate of teachers and public worker unions everywhere.
Emanuel’s children do not attend public schools. They are enrolled at an elite private school—the University of Chicago Lab School, where the tuition is said to be more than $20,000 a year. According to Mike Elk, the conditions at the school Emanuel’s children attend are far different from those one finds in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS).
Elk provided information about the U of C Lab School:
The Lab School has seven full-time art teachers to serve a student population of 1,700. By contrast, only 25% of Chicago’s “neighborhood elementary schools” have both a full-time art and music instructor. The Lab School has three different libraries, while 160 Chicago public elementary schools do not have a library.
“Physical education, world languages, libraries and the arts are not frills. They are an essential piece of a well-rounded education,” wrote University of Chicago Lab School Director David Magill on the school’s website in February 2009.
Magill also wrote the following in his Director’s Address to Returning Faculty in 2010:
I believe that the “business model” of improving education will fall on its own sword.
It is unfortunate that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation developed primarily by politicians and enacted in 2002 morphed into what many refer to as a “business model” of improving education. Measuring outcomes through standardized testing and referring to those results as the evidence of learning and the bottom line is, in my opinion, misguided and, unfortunately, continues to be advocated under a new name and supported by the current administration.
In the past decade, there have been many critics of the educational policies promoted by the so-called corporate reformers. Only recently have some voices been taken seriously—in particular, the voice of educational historian Diane Ravitch. Her recent book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System, provides a compelling argument to examine the data that tells us that reforms of the past ten years are not working and are actually degrading the intellectual potential of students. And this comes from one of the early architects of many of those reforms. This is a book worth reading, authored by a person who admits she was wrong yet is forceful when advocating for change. Listen to this from Ms. Ravitch:
“We must honor those teachers who awaken in their students a passionate interest in history, science, the arts, literature, and foreign language. Such teachers (if acting today under NCLB) would be stifled not only by the data mania of their supervisors, but by the jargon, the indifference to classical literature, and the hostility to their manner of teaching that now prevails in our schools.
“Without a comprehensive liberal arts education, our students will not be prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship in a democracy, nor will they be equipped to make decisions based on knowledge, thoughtful debate, and reason. . . . Not everything that matters can be quantified. What is tested may ultimately be less important than what is untested, such as a student’s ability to seek alternative explanations, to raise questions, to pursue knowledge on his own, and to think differently.”
And to that, I say AMEN and thank you, Ms. Ravitch, for seeing the light and for cracking the armor of the “business model.” Because of her and others like her, I believe this disturbing chapter in American education history is coming to a close.
I must admit that I am not as hopeful as Mr. Magill is that this chapter in American education history is coming to an end. What I hope is that the teachers’ strike in Chicago will awaken many Americans to what has been happening to our public schools over the past decade in the name of school reform…to how high stakes testing of students has perverted the educational process in this country…to the narrowing of the curriculum because everything is focused on prepping children for tests and not on helping them to become critical thinkers and doing what is best for each individual child…to the elimination of art and music teachers and school librarians.
Matt Farmer, the speaker in the first video that I posted, is a lawyer, musician, local school council member, and a CPS parent. He stands with and supports the striking teachers. He wrote the following in an article for the Huffington Post titled Teachers Don’t Like Bullies last May:
Teachers and their union representatives are simply gearing up — outside of the classroom, mind you — to fight for their professional lives this summer, and I’m glad they’re finally getting engaged.
I say that both as a longtime CPS parent and as a local school council member. I talk to a lot of teachers around the city, and from Rogers Park to Gage Park they’re angry.
They’re tired of being made scapegoats for the devastating effects of the generational urban poverty that Emanuel and his aides would rather not talk about. They’re tired of having their students used as over-tested lab rats by an ever-changing cast of out-of-touch, out-of-town “reformers” who specialize in “public education by press release.” But what really angers the teachers I’ve talked to is the absolute lack of respect that this mayor and his hand-picked team have shown them during the last year.
In fact, I’d fear for my fourth-grade daughter’s next eight years in the CPS system if her teachers were not mentally and emotionally invested in the ongoing contract negotiation process.
Make no mistake — I want my kid in class next September. But if her teachers ultimately vote to go on strike, my daughter will know why.
She may not have a deep understanding of tenure issues, pension contributions, or “step and lane” increases, but (like most kids I know) she has a solid grasp on the basic concept of “fairness.”
Even a 10-year-old can understand that if 75 percent of the CTU’s membership ultimately concludes that our charter-school-loving mayor is trying to give them (as Emanuel might say) “the shaft,” then those teachers need to stand up and fight, not only for their individual jobs and their profession, but also for the well-being of the kids in the classrooms in which they now teach.
The deck is undeniably stacked against the teachers in their current negotiations with the Board of Education, and a strike vote is the only leverage teachers have to secure a fair contract.
You want to call mock strike votes a scare tactic, be my guest. But don’t forget to call out Emanuel and his high-priced media machine the next time the mayor starts talking about putting 55 kids in a classroom, or complaining that CPS teachers enriched themselves for years while “cheating our children,” whom, he claims, teachers effectively “left on the side of the road.”
It’s easy, I suppose, to make a habit of dumping on CPS teachers if the only parent-teacher conferences you ever have to attend take place at a private school.
Chicago Public Teachers Stage Historic Strike in Clash with the Mayor on Education Reforms
Striking Teachers, Parents Join Forces to Oppose “Corporate” Education Model in Chicago
Chicago Teachers Strike Could Portend Referendum on Obama Admin’s Education Reform Approach
CTU President Karen GJ Lewis Speech May 23 Rally
Addendum: The Worst Teacher in Chicago (This is a true story.)
CHICAGO. In a poorer city school, one English teacher–I won’t use her name–who’d been cemented into the school system for over a decade, wouldn’t do a damn thing to lift test scores, yet had an annual salary level of close to $70,000 a year. Under Chicago’s new rules holding teachers accountable and allowing charter schools to compete, this seniority-bloated teacher was finally fired by the principal.
In a nearby neighborhood, a charter school, part of the city system, had complete freedom to hire. No teachers’ union interference. The charter school was able to bring in an innovative English teacher with advanced degrees and a national reputation in her field – for $29,000 a year less than was paid to the fired teacher.
You’ve guessed by now: It’s the same teacher.
It’s Back to School Time! Time for the editorialists and the Tea Party and Barack Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan to rip into the people who dare teach in public schools.
And in Arne’s old stomping grounds, Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is stomping on the teachers, pushing them into the street.
Let’s stop kidding ourselves. This is what Mitt Romney and Obama and Arne Duncan and Paul Ryan have in mind when they promote charter schools and the right to fire teachers with tenure: slash teachers’ salaries, bust their unions.
NOTE: Chicago Teachers Strike May Near End As Union Releases Deal (Huffington Post)
SOURCES
Autocrat Rahm draws a line in the sand on test-based evaluation (SmallTalk)
Director’s Address to Returning Faculty 2010 (University of Chicago Lab School)
Director of Private School Where Rahm Sends His Kids Opposes Using Testing for Teacher Evaluations (In These Times)
Teachers Don’t Like Bullies (Huffington Post)
The Worst Teacher in Chicago (Chicago Tribune)
mespo,
Read up on what has been happening in Chicago with the schools in the past 10-15 years. Look at the poverty…the lack of educational resources in many of the schools…the funds being taken away from the traditional public schools to help establish charter schools…the firing of entire staffs of teachers…the closing of neighborhood schools…the rising numbers of children being killed…what Arne Duncan’s corporate model of school reform has done to the public school system in Chicago. Sure, teachers bear some responsibility–but why are they vilified and made the scapegoats for all that has gone wrong with the schools in the Windy City?
*****
PISA: It’s Poverty Not Stupid
http://nasspblogs.org/principaldifference/2010/12/pisa_its_poverty_not_stupid_1.html
Excerpt
“There are three kinds of lies; lies, damn lies, and statistics.”–Mark Twain
The release of the 2009 PISA results this past week has created quite a stir and has provided ample fodder for public school bashers and doomsayers who further their own philosophical and profit-motivated agendas by painting all public schools as failing. For whatever reason, these so-called experts, many of whom have had little or no actual exposure to public schools, refuse to paint an accurate picture of the state of education.
Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan, should be providing the nation with a proper vision and focus for public education. He knows our challenges all too well. He confirmed that he gets it when he recently wrote me saying, “We must build a culture nationally where great educators … choose to work with children and communities who need the most help.” I believe his message is sincere and heartfelt and it is spot on. However, overstating a problem in order to increase the sense of urgency around school improvement is just as bad as understating the problem.
This week, Duncan had a golden opportunity to use the PISA results to provide focus for our education efforts and to point us in the right direction. Instead, he dug himself deeper into the pseudo-reformers’ hole–more charter schools, more reliance on competition and free-market strategies, more testing, more use of test scores to evaluate teachers, more firing of principals and teachers, more closing of low-scoring schools–when he said, “the PISA scores released this past Tuesday were “a massive wake-up call,” because the scores show American students holding relatively steady in the middle of the pack of the developed nations taking the international exam.
There is, however, someone who recognizes that the data is being misinterpreted. NEAToday published remarks from National Association of Secondary School Principals Executive Director, Dr. Gerald N. Tirozzi, that have taken “a closer look at how the U.S. reading scores on PISA compared with the rest of the world’s, overlaying it with the statistics on how many of the tested students are in the government’s free and reduced lunch program for students below the poverty line.” Tirozzi pointed out, “Once again, we’re reminded that students in poverty require intensive supports to break past a condition that formal schooling alone cannot overcome.” Tirozzi demonstrates the correlation between socio-economic status and reading by presenting the PISA scores in terms of individual American schools and poverty. While the overall PISA rankings ignore such differences in the tested schools, when groupings based on the rate of free and reduced lunch are created, a direct relationship is established.
Free and Reduced Meal Rate–PISA Score
Schools with 75%–446
U.S. average–500
OECD average–493
With strong evidence that increased poverty results in lower PISA scores the next question to be asked is what are the poverty rates of the countries being tested? (Listed below are the countries that were tested by PISA along with available poverty rates. Some nations like Korea do not report poverty rates.)
Country–Poverty Rate (PISA Score)
Denmark–2.4% (495)
Finland–3.4% (536)
Norway–3.6% (503)
Belgium–6.7% (506)
Switzerland–6.8% (501)
Czech Republic–7.2% (478)
France–7.3% (496)
Netherlands–9.0% (508)
Germany–10.9% (497)
Australia–11.6% (515)
Greece–12.4% (483)
Hungary–13.1% (494)
Austria–13.3% (471)
Canada–13.6% (524)
Japan–14.3% (520)
Poland–14.5% (500)
Portugal–15.6% (489)
Ireland–15.7% (496)
Italy–15.7% (486)
United Kingdom–16.2% (494)
New Zealand–16.3% (521)
United States–21.7% (500)
Elaine,
Since no child left behind….. Which is an oxymoron in my opinion……schools focus primarily on testing the student to measure if the school is meeting the standards set forth…..
We are trying a home schooling with a daughter that really hates school….. She does have things. Show up to take the states tests but takes everything else online….. She was allowed to do this based upon state test scores and classroom results….. So far she is doing exceptional…… The part lacking is social skills….. That I worry about….. But, things have changed so much since I was in school….. It’s pretty much all electronic even while in the classroom anyways……
So yes…. I see your point…..and when you have to slow the classroom down to make sure everyone is on the same Page….. It’s boring for the ones that don’t want to be there or don’t care….. And feel really the ones that want to learn…. But can’t because the teachers attention is focused elsewhere…… And then the disruptions commence……
“Seventy-nine percent of the 8th graders in the Chicago Public Schools are not grade-level proficient in reading. In addition, 80 percent are not grade-level proficient in math.”
That’s what we learned from a post on our site here:
http://jonathanturley.org/2012/09/11/report-seventy-nine-percent-of-eighth-graders-in-chicago-public-schools-are-below-proficient-in-reading/
Those are failing scores by any scale and teachers bear SOME responsibility. I know we can argue resources but Catholic Schools have done much better without a computer at every desk or a field house at every end zone.
The teachers would have a better case if they had a better record. They don’t.
Citizens United granted certain questionable rights to corporations and everyone claimed that it also granted those same rights to unions so all was good.
Surprise, surprise … the next step … union busting.
“Children also learn to hate school. Test-focused schools take all the joy out of education for students AND teachers.” (Elaine)
That, for me, is the true reason test-focusing is so wrong-headed.
Four key Chicago teachers’ strike questions
The most pressing queries to consider when pondering the Windy City showdown
BY DAVID SIROTA
9/12/12
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/12/four_key_chicago_teachers_strike_questions/
Excerpt:
As if on a precisely calibrated timetable, Dean Singleton’s Denver Post today published an overwrought screed cheering Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s anti-union efforts on, and urging him to pulverize his city’s teachers union in order to send a nationwide message that the education concerns of teachers will no longer be tolerated in the schoolhouse. Singleton, as I documented in my recent Harper’s magazine expose, had long used his media empire to denigrate organized labor, so it is no surprise that he’s using the crown jewel of his vast MediaNews empire to try to nationalize a municipal dispute between educators and an investment-banker-turned-mayor. If every crisis is an opportunity, this is Singleton’s chance to help crush the teachers union in specific and the labor movement in general.
Whether you live in Denver or not, the screed in Singleton’s broadsheet is an important read because it is a succinct primer echoing almost every distortion, omission and skewed assumption that now dominates the larger media narrative about both the Chicago teachers strike and the larger assault on organized labor. Because that narrative is now so skewed, it’s easy to feel confused about what’s really going on in Chicago — and what the Chicago strike means. That’s, of course, by design. Anti-union ideologues don’t want anyone asking any questions of their cause.
But when it comes to the complexities of education policy and labor politics, those questions must be asked. Here are four of the most pressing of those queries — two political, two policy-based — to consider when pondering the Windy City showdown.
Why would anyone believe Rahm Emanuel cares about kids, but teachers do not?
One of the two hallmarks of Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s political career has been his affinity for undermining the cause of organized labor. He was a driving force behind Clinton era free-trade deals that decimated the union movement. His official position on the auto bailout was “Fuck the UAW.” He has aggressively pushed to privatize municipal services, undermining public employee unions. And, as the Chicago Sun-Times reports, he “took the Chicago Teachers Union on as an adversary rather than attempt to make them a partner,” denigrating educators as anti-children, and successfully lobbying for legislation to undermine them.
The other defining characteristic of Emanuel’s political career is his worship of Huge Money. As a congressman, he led the corporate fundraising efforts for House Democrats. After leaving Washington, the Chicago Tribune reports that he “made more than $16 million in just 2 1/2 years” as an investment banker in “a tale of money and power, of leverage and connections, of a stunningly successful conversion of moxie and a network of political contacts into cold, hard cash.” As candidate for Chicago mayor, he unsurprisingly ran as the anti-union corporate candidate — and, according to Chicago historian Rick Perlstein, received $12 million from anti-union charter school advocates, who have money signs in their eyes when it comes to education policy.
In light of this deep record, it’s shocking that anyone might believe Emanuel’s effort to crush the Chicago Teachers Union is anything other than just another step along the same anti-union, pro-corporate path that has marked his career. Just think about what the basis of his “reforms” are: As the Associated Press reports, his central initiatives are about “expanding charter schools, getting private companies involved with failing schools and linking teacher evaluations to student test scores.” To someone with Emanuel’s record, non-union charter schools are seen as a blunt-force instrument to crush the union, private education companies are seen as potential major campaign contributors as are the huge multibillion-dollar testing companies that will win big with more standardized tests.
To look at that and then somehow believe Emanuel cares as much — or even more — about poor kids than teachers do is to ignore the very career Emanuel has forged.
AY,
“Teacher are over worked and generally underpaid…… With them having to account for test scores, teachers teach to test…… Rarely do the children learn anything of substance….. Except to fear the next test…”
Children also learn to hate school. Test-focused schools take all the joy out of education for students AND teachers.
Mayor Rahm-Ney’s Attack on the Chicago Teachers Union
By Amy Goodman
9/12/12
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/mayor_rahm-neys_attack_on_the_chicago_teachers_union_20120912/
Excerpt:
Unions are under attack in the United States—not only from people like Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin, but now, with the teachers strike in Chicago, from the very core of President Barack Obama’s inner circle, his former chief of staff and current mayor of that city, Rahm Emanuel. Twenty-five thousand teachers and support staff are on strike there, shutting down the public school system in the nation’s third-largest school district. This fight now raging in Chicago, Obama’s hometown, has its roots in this historic stronghold of organized labor, and in the movement started one year ago this week, Occupy Wall Street. The conflict presents a difficult moment for Obama, who will need union support to prevail in his race with Mitt Romney, but who is inextricably linked, politically, to his brash, expletive-spewing former aide, Mayor Rahm-ney Emanuel.
At the heart of the conflict is how schools will be run in Chicago: locally, from the grass roots, with teacher and parent control, or top-down, by a school board appointed by Emanuel. Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, worked as a board-certified chemistry teacher at King College Prep High School in Chicago. She understands how the system works. Months before the strike, I asked her about the situation in Chicago. The newly elected Emanuel had an appointed board comprised mostly of corporate executives, the Academy for Urban School Leadership. Lewis told me, “One of the biggest problems is that when you have a CEO in charge of a school system, as opposed to a superintendent, a real educator, what ends up happening is that they literally have no clue as to how to run the schools.” The AUSL not only relies on business executives with no education experience to run schools, but also brings in recent college graduates to teach. These recruits cost very little to pay, but arrive with little or no teaching experience.
Pauline Lipman is a professor of education and policy studies at the University of Illinois-Chicago. She explained, “Chicago was the birthplace of this neoliberal corporate reform agenda of high-stakes testing, paying teachers based on test scores, disinvesting in neighborhood schools and then closing them and turning them over to charter schools.”
Lipman credits Arne Duncan with driving this corporatization of Chicago’s public schools. Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education, was the chief executive officer of the Chicago Public Schools, where he led the institution of charter schools, 90 percent of which are nonunion. “Arne Duncan pushed through this agenda of closing neighborhood schools, turning them over to private operators or expanding charter schools and having charter schools come in … and increasingly putting more pressure on teachers to respond to high-stakes tests. That agenda has been really devastating in Chicago.”
Chicago is also the epicenter of the community pushback against the Duncan/Obama/Emanuel attack on public schools and the teachers union. Lewis comes out of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, CORE, which took over leadership of the union with a commitment to transparent school administration. Opposition to Emanuel’s dictates has provoked the union into this historic strike. Phil Cantor, a strike captain for Teachers for Social Justice, explained: “We’re not allowed legally to strike over anything but compensation. But teachers are not most interested in compensation; we’re most interested in being able to do our jobs for the students we serve.”
Teacher are over worked and generally underpaid…… With them having to account for test scores, teachers teach to test…… Rarely do the children learn anything of substance….. Except to fear the next test….
Excellent article and great points elaine…..
The School Reform Showdown in the Chicago Arne Duncan Left Behind
by Julianne Hing
September 14 2012
http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/09/the_school_reform_showdown_of_the_year_in_the_chicago_arne_duncan_left_behind.html
Excerpt:
It’s not mere coincidence that the school reform showdown of the year, which has become an uncomfortable referendum on President Obama’s education policy agenda, is happening in his adopted hometown.
Rather, it’s an arc come full circle in the raging national debate on school reform policies. Chicago Public Schools, the testing ground for decades of market-based reform schemes, is also the district where Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, as CPS CEO, cut his teeth as an test-driven education reformer, and it’s the district now run by Obama’s former chief of staff, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Chicago Public Schools also happens to be home to a progressive caucus of the local teachers union who’ve led 26,000 teachers in the nation’s third largest district to stand up to Emanuel, and those very many years of reforms, which they say have wreaked havoc on the city’s schools, teachers and students.
By Thursday, negotiators began spreading word of the hopeful end of the weeklong strike. But the fight has been a long time coming, and the issues which gave rise to the strike in the first place will not be resolved with the strike alone.
What’s happening in Chicago is rather unlike most strikes, which typically hinge on conflicts over compensation and benefits. Both sides have repeatedly said that those are not the issues district and union negotiators are getting snagged on. The city’s teachers have decided to take on, instead, Chicago’s unrelenting market-driven school reform policies, which have targeted the city’s black and Latino students, and in the process, made teacher’s work lives untenable.
Chicago’s teachers have called for more student support services and smaller class sizes and protection from the market-driven policies which are taking over Chicago schools, and which are spreading across the country under the direction of Arne Duncan, who’s brought to the federal level the policies he implemented while he headed Chicago Public Schools from 2001 to 2009.
President Obama is now walking a fine line; the teachers strike is a bad look for his administration. Obama is reliant on labor’s support to win re-election, yet many teachers and their unions despise his education policies. Duncan’s short, empty statement this week reflected that tension. “I’m confident that both sides have the best interests of the students at heart, and that they can collaborate at the bargaining table — as teachers and school districts have done all over the country — to reach a solution that puts kids first,” Duncan said in a statement.
When the GOP vice presidential nominee, Rep. Paul Ryan, criticized striking teachers and announced his support for Emanuel this week, it was reflective of just how twisted the education reform debate’s become; championing market-based reforms while vilifying public school teachers is a bipartisan issue these days.
And that’s where Karen Lewis and the new progressive leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union have centered their fight. “This fight is not about Karen Lewis,” Lewis said on Sunday night announcing the strike, the NY Times reported. “Let’s be clear — this fight is for the very soul of public education, not just only Chicago but everywhere.”
In order to understand how Chicago arrived at this moment, it’s worth a look back at Chicago’s central role in the national school reform discourse, and Arne Duncan’s legacy in the city schools he used to run. To hear community activists tell it, the fight in Chicago today is 15 years in the making, going all the way back to 1995 when then Mayor Richard Daley was handed control over the city’s schools. With that power Daley oversaw the beginning of an era of targeting schools with low test scores for closure. When Duncan came on board as Chicago Public Schools’ CEO in 2001, he carried forward Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan to shut down 60 failing schools and replace them with 100 new ones. Over the course of his tenure Duncan employed a series of measures besides the complete shuttering of a school, the replacement of a failing neighborhood school with a charter-run school, or the total replacement of a school’s teaching staff.
Shutting down a poorly performing factory, for instance, may work for a large corporation whose bottom line is based on cranking out widgets. But schools are not factories, Jitu Brown, an education organizer at Kenwood Oakland Community Organization in Chicago argues, they’re public institutions and essential anchors of communities. School closures have wreaked havoc on Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods, where struggling schools tend to be located. Students get sent to schools across town, which often aren’t given extra resources to help integrate the new students. Just the commute can be a risk; students cross dangerous neighborhood boundaries on a daily basis.
Education Apartheid: The Racism Behind Chicago’s School “Reform”
9/12/12
http://occupiedchicagotribune.org/2012/09/education-apartheid-the-racism-behind-chicagos-school-reform/
Excerpt:
Dyett High School students are not allowed to enter the front door of their school. Instead, the more than 170 students at the Southside high school enter through the back. From there, they must spend their day pushing through other students in the one open hallway, after half of the building was placed off limits.
“Just imagine, all these students in one hallway trying to get to where they’re going … everyone’s just trying to get through each other,” says Keshaundra Neal, a junior at Dyett and a student organizer for the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO).
The phasing out of Dyett, one of 17 schools that the Board of Education voted to close or turn around last winter, highlights a process being played out across Chicago—the dismantling of neighborhood public schools, the ushering in of corporate-controlled charters and, in many cases, the gentrification of predominately African-American and Latino neighborhoods. Closing schools, like tearing down public housing, has proved an effective way for Chicago’s rich and powerful to push out and further segregate people of color.
The “global city” that Chicago’s elite have been crafting for decades is a racially and economically segregated city—gleaming downtown office towers for the upwardly mobile, and blighted neighborhoods of low-wage or would-be laborers, tucked away, out of sight. A 2012 study of census data by the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research found that Chicago is the most racially segregated city in the United States. And how could it not be? While corporations receive TIF money to subsidize their largesse, and billionaires like the Board of Education’s own Penny Pritzker evade paying their full share of property taxes, the seeds of the city’s inequality are re-sown every year in our segregated school system.
A Corporate Renaissance
In Bronzeville alone, where Dyett is located, 19 schools have been closed or turned around since 2001, often replaced by charter and selective-enrollment schools that admit students from anywhere in the city, further displacing neighborhood students.
Renaissance 2010 institutionalized the idea that closing public schools and pushing their students into selective-enrollment or charter schools would solve the problems afflicting urban education. The 2004 project, started by then-mayor Richard J. Daley and CPS CEO Arne Duncan, planned to close up to 70 of the worst performing schools in the city and reopen 100 new schools, with two-thirds as charters or contract schools.
Renaissance 2010 was called “perhaps the most significant experiment in the US to reinvent an urban public school system on neoliberal lines,” by education academic Pauline Lipman. She places the education changes in the context of Chicago’s push to become a Global City: “Ren2010 is a market-based approach that involves a high level partnership with the most powerful financial and corporate interests in the city.”
Eight years after Renaissance 2010 was launched, Chicago has 96 charter schools, 27 turnaround schools, and a record summer of gun violence under its belt.
The numbers show a stratified society. More than two-thirds of all African-American students in Chicago, and more than 40 percent of Latino students, attend schools where more than 90 percent of all students are of the same ethnicity.
These schools are the first to be closed or turned around, and the last in line to receive extra resources. Of the 160 schools in Chicago without a library, 140 are south of North Avenue. Predominately white and affluent schools receive the majority of capital improvements. Often, as with Herzl Elementary School this past year, students at underserved schools see sorely needed construction begin only after CPS has decided to give away the building to a charter network or AUSL.
With black and Latino communities facing the brunt of the recession, and the poorest residents among them living in a state of permanent depression, students from these communities bear the results of economic segregation. In 188 schools in predominately black neighborhoods, 95 percent or more of students qualify for free and reduced lunch. One-third of Latino students go to schools where more than 90 percent of students qualify. Only 3 percent of white students can say the same.
The racial inequalities in school funding affect teachers as well as students—school closures and turnarounds, where a targeted school’s entire staff is fired, have been forcing African-American teachers out of their jobs. In the schools closed this year, 65 percent of their teachers were African American. Since the era of reform accelerated, the number of African-American teachers has declined by 10 percent, while that of white teachers has increased 5 percent.
Myths vs. Facts in the Chicago Teachers Union Strike
By: Kevin Gosztola
September 14, 2012
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/09/14/myths-vs-facts-in-the-chicago-teachers-union-strike/
Excerpt:
MYTH
This is about teachers wanting to get paid more — not Chicago students’ wellbeing.
FACT
In 2011, a provision was added to the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act that makes it illegal for teachers to strike on all matters except compensation involving pay and benefits. The teachers had to make salary an issue in order to strike over classroom conditions in Chicago public schools.
*****
MYTH
This is not the right time for teachers to strike.
FACT
Whether it is the right time or not is a subjective discussion but what is clear is there are multiple systemic problems with Chicago public schools that certainly warrant the teachers taking a stand.
1. Class sizes in Chicago are largest in the state of Illinois.
2. On average, only a quarter of Chicago public schools offer arts and music education.
3. There are only 370 social workers for 15,000 homeless children
4. One-hundred and sixty schools do not have libraries.
5. Schools lack air conditioning.
6. Chicago continues to close schools or “turnaround” schools by firing by teacher and staff to improve student learning without any evidence that this meaningfully benefits students.
one of the main problems with education today is the mandated testing to measure student progress.
My wife is a high school teacher (capt ratty she is a very smart woman and could have done many other things although I have met some very stupid teachers [and some very stupid doctors and lawyers as well] and Thomas Sowell calls the departments of education in universities intellectual cesspools) and she says along with the mandatory testing is the parental neglect. The children do not come to school prepared or willing to learn. Education is not considered a privilege, it is considered their right. Therein lies part of the problem.
If taxpayers are funding education we need to know our money is being used properly, take the children who cause most of the problems and throw them out and teach them a trade. If they decide to get a high school degree later on there is always a GED. There is nothing wrong with becoming a good tradesman, too much emphasis has been put on a college education. For the most part it cripples your earning potential and makes you fit, for the most part, to be someone’s lackey. That is what public education was designed for, to provide drones to the factory owners.
Instead of teaching people how to start their own businesses they teach conformity. Public education is all about providing the hired help for the rich.
If poor people were smart, they would demand vouchers.
Not that all public schools are bad, we have very good ones where I live and many poor and middle class students go on to Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Princeton, Vanderbilt, Dartmouth, etc.
Great links Elaine! The Sun Times hit a home run unmasking value added as an alleged tool to evaluate teachers performance.
Standardized test scores are worst way to evaluate teachers
COMMENTARY BY ISABEL NUNEZ
Chicago Sun-Times
September 12, 2012
http://www.suntimes.com/news/otherviews/15107882-452/standardized-test-scores-are-worst-way-to-evaluate-teachers.html
Excerpt:
As a university professor and educational researcher, I sometimes feel like I’m in that old ’50s horror movie, “The Blob.” Remember that one, where an invader from outer space grows with everything it eats, until it is a giant monster that threatens the entire town? Testing has done the same to education, harming students and schools — and is now poised to bring down the whole enterprise by taking over teacher and principal evaluation.
I am part of a group called CReATE, or Chicagoland Researchers and Advocates for Transformative Education, which is trying to unite the voices of academics in opposition to these changes and to the corporate takeover of public education. We are trying to spread the message that what is happening in our schools today is not supported by the research.
Standardized testing has become monstrous, which brings us to the proposed changes to teacher evaluation: the latest and worst use of testing so far. The Chicago Public Schools are planning to implement evaluations based in part on student test scores this school year. Terror at this prospect prompted CReATE to gather 88 signers on an open letter criticizing the plan, which we hand-delivered to the mayor, schools CEO and the Board of Education.
This new evaluation plan alone makes a strike no “choice” at all.
First, testing is not the way we should measure student growth. Large-scale educational testing was born in the early 1900s at a particular time in history: the industrial revolution. Some might argue that this was appropriate when preparing for the early 20th century work force, but in today’s globalized, information-based economy, “student growth” must be more meaningfully defined and assessed.
Next, if we are going to make the mistake of reducing student growth to a line graph, we must at the very least abide by the principles of measurement. The discipline of testing, called psychometrics, is governed by rules, and the new system of evaluation breaks some of the most fundamental rules.
The first important consideration of testing is purpose. The process of test construction is so specialized that an instrument designed for one purpose cannot be used for another. Even if we use the best tests possible, it is a core truth of psychometrics that no test is completely reliable: Error is part of every score.
For this reason, test developers, academic bodies and professional associations alike warn against attaching severe consequences to performance on any test.
It gets even worse from there. The way that CPS plans to use test scores in teacher evaluation, referred to as value-added, is so incredibly flawed that almost no one with a knowledge base in this area thinks it’s a good idea.
The National Research Council wrote a letter to the Obama administration warning against including value-added in Race to the Top federal grant program because of a lack of research support. The Educational Testing Service, an organization that stands to benefit tremendously from any expansion of testing, issued a report concluding that value-added is improper test use.
These are the people who know the statistics, and none of them thinks the models work. There is a list of obstacles:
One: A correlation does not mean a causality. Researchers have found fifth-grade teacher “effects” on fourth-grade scores using these models. Ridiculous, right?
That’s because the models don’t work. For one thing, there must be random assignment of students for this kind of comparison among teachers to work — and no administration that cared about students would ever do that. There are deep statistical problems, and no way to reduce the amount of error to an acceptable level. The biggest problem of all, though, is that this is a ranking. So half of all teachers will always be below the 50th percentile. That’s math.
This is setting teachers up for failure. This will ensure regular turnover, keeping the teaching force young and inexperienced, afraid and compliant. This is only one of many ways that teaching is being turned from a vocation to a job — and a low-paid, temporary one at that.
Which Democrats Are Hostile to Teachers?
By Diane Ravitch
September 3, 2012
http://dianeravitch.net/2012/09/03/which-democrats-are-hostile-to-teachers/
As a historian, I can assure you that the roots of the current “reform” movement are on the far right. Vouchers began with Milton Friedman in 1955; charters began in 1988 with liberal origins, but were quickly adopted by the right as a substitute for vouchers because voters always defeated voucher proposals. The attacks on teachers’ unions are out of the rightwing playbook. The demands for test-based accountability did not originate in the Democratic party. The effort to remove all job protections–seniority, tenure, the right to due process–did not originate with liberal thinkers or policymakers, but can be traced to the Reagan administration and even earlier to rightwing Republicans who never wanted any unions or job protections for workers. The embrace of privatization and for-profit schooling is neither liberal nor Democratic.
How this happened is a long story.
No matter who supports this agenda, it is not bipartisan. It originated in the ideology of the rightwing extreme of the GOP. Its goal is privatization.
This reader notes the long list of Democrats who have adopted the rightwing GOP agenda:
It’s not just right wing states and politicians that want to harass teachers.
Plenty of Dems are in on the fun.
Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado is a nominal Democrat who never saw a teacher he didn’t look upon with suspicion or a test company he didn’t want to give a contract to.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel is leading the charge in teacher demonization efforts in the Midwest, and I would argue that his anti-union, anti-teacher track record is beginning to rival that of his brethren to the north, Scott Walker and Paul Ryan.
Emanuel is a Democrat in name and once led the DCCC when Dems took back the House of Representatives.
Congressman George Miller, who chairs the House Education Committee, is a Democrat but like Bennet in the Senate, he too never met a teacher he felt could be trusted to teach without “high stakes accountability measures” imposed from afar.
Cory Booker is a Democrat who is currently engaged in the wholesale privatization of the Newark school system. He’s got buddies in the hedge funds and Wall Street who bankroll him, he’s great friends with Chris Christie and loves Christie’s privatization efforts at the state level and his demonization of teachers and teachers unions in the media. That won’t stop Booker from running against Christie for governor next year, however, so those of us who live in NJ can expect privatization of the schools no matter who wins – Christie or Booker.
Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein and Michael Bloomberg were all nominal Democrats before they embarked upon their teacher demonization/school privatization agendas as well.
And of course the Democratic politician who has had the most impact in the teacher demonization/school privatization effort is Barack Obama – from Race to the Top to Central Falls, Rhode Island to Race to the Top II: The Municipal Version to Race to the Top III: The District Version, few politicians have been as successful at bringing teacher evaluations tied to test scores and changes to tenure laws or promoting a broad expansion of high stakes testing in every grade in every subject, K-12, as Barack Obama.
I wish it were simply right wingers and Republicans out to harass teachers who were the problem. Unfortunately, because both parties take money from the same corporate masters, politicians in both parties are out to give those masters what they ultimately want when it comes to public education – a privatized system with busted unions, cheap labor costs, and lots and lots of opportunities to cash in on the latest ed buzz craze (these days that being the Common Core Federal Standards, the tests that are going to be aligned to those standards and the test prep materials that are going to be needed to get students prepared for those tests.)
Elaine,
Great article from the Guardian.
The Chicago strike is typical of American politicians’ war on teachers
Teachers were once revered, with cops and firefighters. Now, the bipartisan consensus says bullying their unions is good politics
By Michael Paarlberg
9/11/12
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/sep/11/chicago-strike-union-teachers
Excerpt:
The Chicago teachers’ strike is barely a day old, and the teacher-bashing is already well underway with great gusto.
As you may have heard, these teachers are greedy, lazy bullies who are holding kids hostage in their mad lust for power. Their choice of profession is not at all motivated by an interest in child betterment, but entirely by the obscenely lavish salaries they receive – some even approaching those of skilled jobs that actually contribute to the public good, like sales managers and insurance underwriters. All this at – never forget – taxpayers’ expense. Even liberal bloggers warn that this strike will leave children forever scarred and ruin their future earnings, or at least their test scores.
Teachers might respond that they’re not striking over money: both the teachers’ union and the school board acknowledge the two sides are close to agreement on wages. They might point out that their demands that are the real sticking points – smaller class sizes and air-conditioned classrooms – are entirely reasonable things most parents also want for their kids. Or they might point out that Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s key demand to tie teacher evaluations to student test performance reflects a bureaucratic zeal to replace more and more of the curriculum with standardized tests (one Chicago teacher says 18 to 25 days of the school year are already lost to testing) – an ethos and aim that many parents, and certainly most students, do not share.
They could say all of this, but it wouldn’t matter. Any union negotiator or human resources manager can tell you that contracts are never settled by who has the best argument. Bargaining is a question of clout, and which side has more of it. Unions have been losing ground for years, public sector unions in particular, and no unionized profession has been more vilified – by politicians, thinktanks and two Hollywood movies so far – than teachers.
Looking back, this is remarkable. There was a time when teachers were lauded as local heroes: overworked, underpaid pillars of the community who could – with their credentials – earn more elsewhere, but chose to pursue a career sharing the joys of learning with kids. Politically, they were untouchable, up there with cops and firefighters. Endorsements by their unions were prized by politicians hoping to run as “the education candidate”.
Then, at a certain point, teachers’ unions woke up to find their favorability rating hovering somewhere between al-Qaida’s and herpes. This didn’t happen overnight, but a confluence of state budget crises, urban blight and suburban flight, a well-funded school reform movement and private charter school industry created the need for a scapegoat for bad public schools. Could it be their financing structure, dependent locally on grossly unequal property tax revenues? Or their unaccountable school boards, such as the one appointed by Rahm Emanuel? Might poverty and unemployment not be to blame? The drug economy? Poor parenting?
No, none of the above. It’s teachers and their pesky insistence that they know how best to educate kids simply because they spend most of the day with them.
Teachers’ unions were slow to realize their scapegating and its (for them) dangerous consequences. They were slow to defend against some of the more salacious – but fact-challenged – charges against them. And they have not responded effectively by articulating why teachers should have pensions, job security and collective bargaining rights when other workers were either losing theirs or never had them in the first place.
These failures opened the way for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie to make trashing teachers the centerpiece of his political career, in turn setting the stage for Scott Walker in Wisconsin and others. Hard as it is to imagine candidates running for office on a “screw the troops” platform, this is essentially the climate teachers find themselves in today.
Two Visions for Chicago’s Schools
By Diane Ravitch
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/sep/12/two-visions-chicagos-schools/
Excerpt:
According to most news reports, the teachers in Chicago are striking because they are lazy and greedy. Or they are striking because of a personality clash between Mayor Rahm Emanuel and union president Karen Lewis. Or because this is the last gasp of a dying union movement. Or because Emanuel wants a longer school day, and the teachers oppose it.
None of this is true. All reports agree that the two sides are close to agreement on compensation issues—it is not money that drove them apart. Last spring the union and the school board agreed to a longer school day, so that is not the issue either. The strike is a clash of two very different visions about what is needed to transform the schools of Chicago—and the nation.
Chicago schools have been a petri dish for school reform for nearly two decades. Beginning in 1995, they came under tight mayor control, and Mayor Richard Daley appointed his budget director, Paul Vallas, to run the schools; Vallas set out to raise test scores, open magnet schools and charter schools, and balance the budget. When Vallas left to run for governor (unsuccessfully), Daley selected another non-educator, Arne Duncan, who was Vallas’s deputy and a strong advocate of charter schools. Vallas had imposed reform after reform, and Duncan added even more. Duncan called his program Renaissance 2010, with the goal of closing low-performing schools and opening one hundred new schools. Since 2009, Duncan has been President Obama’s Education Secretary, where he launched the $5 billion Race to the Top program, which relies heavily on student test scores to evaluate teacher quality, to award merit pay, and to close or reward schools; it also encourages the proliferation of privately managed charter schools.
This is the vision that Washington now supports, and that the Chicago school board, appointed by current mayor and former Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, endorses: more school closings, more privately managed schools, more testing, merit pay, longer school hours. But in Chicago itself, where these reforms started, most researchers agree that the results have been mixed at best. There has been no renaissance. After nearly twenty years of reform, the schools of Chicago remain among the lowest performing in the nation.
The Chicago Teachers Union has a different vision: it wants smaller classes, more social workers, air-conditioning in the sweltering buildings where summer school is conducted, and a full curriculum, with teachers of arts and foreign languages in every school. Some schools in Chicago have more than forty students in a class, even in kindergarten. There are 160 schools without libraries; more than 40 percent have no teachers of the arts.
What do the teachers want? The main sticking point is the seemingly arcane issue of teacher evaluations. The mayor wants student test scores to count heavily in determining whether a teacher is good (and gets a bonus) or bad (and is fired). The union points to research showing that test-based evaluation is inaccurate and unfair. Chicago is a city of intensely segregated public schools and high levels of youth violence. Teachers know that test scores are influenced not only by their instruction but by what happens outside the classroom.
The strike has national significance because it concerns policies endorsed by the current administration; it also raises issues found all over the country. Not only in Chicago but in other cities, teachers insist that their students need smaller classes and a balanced curriculum. Reformers want more privately-managed charter schools, even though they typically get the same results as public schools. Charter schools are a favorite of the right because almost 90 percent of them are non-union. Teachers want job protection so that they will not be fired for capricious reasons and have academic freedom to teach controversial issues and books. Reformers want to strip teachers of any job protections.
Eeyore:
It is possible to measure success of police departments. I worked in that profession and it is a long discussion and I don’t want to detract from Elaine’s topic but essentially I have seen departments that were dysfunctional and others that really made a big difference in the crime rate, all in the same county.
Two Departments Soap Lake PD, (the most Dysfunctional) and Royal City (Reduced crime rate by probably 40% over two years). The Chiefs and officers of both towns were polar opposites as far as their efforts and standards. It can be done, and it is measurable in these cases. But as Elaine made the case for the larger the city and the more the social/crime problem the harder the task and the more time and resource requirement is at hand.
In the case of police, just answering calls doesn’t cut it any more.