Showing posts with label Chicago. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chicago. Show all posts

Sunday, July 21, 2013

Newark's NEW Caucus on Chicago Layoffs

Some of them were union activists, trying to make their public schools and their union better.... NEW Caucus
The Chicago layoff story while hiring Teach For America scabs (Mark Naison: Teach for America-Our Modern Day Pinkertons) is a declaration of nuclear war.

RBE did a good job the other day in branding Rahm Emanuel a murderer (Rahm Emanuel's School Closings Put Children's Live). In a fair society Rhambo would be on death row, along with his pals who murder innocent civilians (Obama: I Could Be My Own Drone Bombing Victim.)

NEW Caucus, which basically won the Newark union elections last month, is predicting that Cami Anderson will be doing her own version of Rhambo next year once Rosemary's Randi's baby -- the contract she brokered -- hits full force.

Despite it being the summer, NEW Caucus has been busy.  More on that in a later email...

But for now, we wanted to share some recent articles that are relevant to all Newark education workers and public education in general.  So those articles are toward the bottom.

But the huge, terrible news today is what has been taking place in Chicago since Friday.

Chicago has begun laying off 2,100 education
workers!!!  MANY OF THEM ARE (were) TENURED!  

Some of them were union activists, trying to make their public schools and their union better.  



PLEASE READ!  This is what is coming to Newark!  We have already heard rumors that because our Superintendent did not close any schools this past year (an election year for her employer) she WILL close schools in large numbers next year if Christie wins a second term.    

Newark education workers MUST begin mobilizing to protect our students, our public schools, our city, and our profession!  

The corporate education reformers are willing to destroy schools, communities, student lives, and 
the lives of education workers in their push for markets and profit.  

It's up to US to stop them.


Below are more articles, further driving home the damage caused by the corporate "reform" agenda:

1)  article on Philly school closings.

2)  Jersey City Public Schools outsourcing substitutes.

3)  Corporate reformer push to "reform" schools of education.

and another critiquing the "reform" agenda for schools of education.

4)  GREAT article on the disruptive and negative results of "renew" or "turnaround" schools
in Washington, DC.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

Hey Arne: Chicago Schools Branded a Failure by Mayor Emanuel and Brizzard

Even more insulting is that Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis refused to sit on the board to discuss how the extra 90 minutes would be imposed.  Is it too much to ask that she provide a little political cover by making it appear that the teachers were consulted.....


Only then will Chicago students be able to rise to the level of education juggernauts like the Houston Public Schools
 --Last Stand for Children First (satire)

"Chicago should not lead the country by being at the bottom," he (Rahm Emanuel) said, to some cheers.
Emanuel's handpicked Chief Executive Officer for Chicago Public Schools, Jean-Claude Brizard repeated the talking points about the city's public schools that he has been using since his first meeting with the Chicago Board of Education on June 15, 2011. According to Brizard, the public schools of Chicago have become a failure after sixteen years of mayoral control under Mayor Richard M. Daley and his school chiefs (Paul Vallas, from 1995 to 2001; Arne Duncan, from 2001 into 2009; and Ron Huberman, from 2009 to late 2010). In every speech, Brizard lists the various reasons why Chicago's schools are "failing."  
- Substance (Not satire, but could be)


Don't you love the fact that Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Superintendent John Claude-Buzzard are trashing the Chicago schools run by Arne for 7 years and his predecessor Paul Vallas, the "pass the lemon" no-nothing Supt who destroyed school systems in Chi, Philly and New Orleans)? And that CTU President Karen Lewis refused that seat at the table that the UFT/AFT leaders so hunger for? Our union would have settled for 89 minutes and sold it as a victory.

One of our favorite master of satire bloggers has been enlisted in the cause.

Extending School Day is The Answer to All Our Problems

Last Stand for Children First has been involved in the education reform movement in Chicago since last winter when we were asked by Mayor elect Rahm Emanuel and business leaders in the Civic Federation to help with their grassroots efforts to fundamentally change education in the city.  This effort came to fruition with the passage of SB7 and now with Mayor Emanuel's attempts to impose a longer school day.

The teachers are being most uncooperative really.  After having their 4% raise voted down because the schools didn't have enough money, we promised to find a way to give them half their raise if they would only work another 327 1/2 hours.  That's a tidy little $3.08 per hour for a beginning teacher.

MORE AT: Last Stand for Children First

Go beyond the satire with the full story at Substance.

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago Public Schools sponsor Christian breakfast to promote CPS push for longer school day and year in Chicago

Excerpt:
Emanuel has changed his talking points since the mayoral election campaign, when he seemed to draw all of the "facts" he was citing from the movie "Waiting for Superman" and some unverified claims about Chicago's public schools. Prior to the prayer breakfast on August 25, Emanuel had been telling audiences that the average Chicago public school students had "four years" (later reduced in his talking points to "three years") less time in the classroom than a comparable public school student in Houston, Texas.

By August 25, 2011, Emanuel had changed years to "minutes."

Emanuel called on the clerics at the breakfast to issue a "battle cry for our children." He told the group that all over the USA children were in classes for "67,000 minutes per school year..."

Except in Chicago, where Emanuel claims the average public school child only gets "57,000 minutes..."

Emanuel then went through the grades, in the process ignoring the difference between Chicago high schools and elementary schools. He counted down, as if every year from kindergarten through 12th grade represented a "loss" that Chicago children suffered by comparison with the children across the USA. As usual, mayoral press people and others have refused to provide Substance with the studies and other materials that verify Emanuel's forcefully stated claims.

Like Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, his ideological counterpart, Chicago's mayor is attacking public worker unions... Public education workers have become the new mayor's scapegoat... Rahm Emanuel continues his two Big Lies about Chicago teachers and school workers during Town Hall Meeting


Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on right for news bits.

Friday, July 8, 2011

Chicago Notes

Last Update: Sunday, July 10, 2011, 3AM

GEM At LaCASITA

Friday, July 8, 2011, 6AM

Chicago

As usual, I'm the only one up. We are still 4 people in the suite - one person left and another took over the cot (I have the fold-out couch). Two more are leaving tonight. (I haven't asked my roomies and colleagues from NYC if I can mention their names so I am staying mum for now - though you might see some you know in the pics I've been posting the last few days.

Today is sightseeing day. We may connect up later with Puerto Rico Teachers Union President Rafael Feliciano, who was one of the major stars of the National Educators' Conference to Fight Back for Public Education. Jeez, they're all still sleeping. This place serves one mean breakie and I can't wait to hit that waffle iron.

There's no way I can report on the details of the conference because there was too much incoming info for me to process. Thus, I was perfectly comfortable being the official videographer, a role I like more and more as I don't have to think beyond pointing the camera and pressing a button. I will probably start putting up snippets of what I taped when I get back home on Saturday.

It is certainly interesting to hang out with leaders of unions who have progressive visions of union reform and how to effectively fight back for public education. I was surprised when Chicago TU President Karen Lewis ended her speech at the opening by pointing to me and saying the first thing she does every morning is go to Ed Notes so she can know what's going on in NYC. (I will put up video soon). Earlier, a teacher from Kansas City told me the same thing. And yesterday a union leader from Canada said he subscribes. That was funny because I've been thinking of cutting back. Darnit!

A bunch of people hung out yesterday for more chewing the fat after which we hit a local bar where I was sitting with Washington Teacher Union leaders Nathan Saunders and Candi Peterson, who is an old blogging pal. We are meeting up again at the SOS in Washington DC.

In many ways the formal meetings are not as important as the side conversations and the after hours hanging out in bars. I have quite a load of stuff to report on some of the interesting things I learned. Ooops - they're up so gotta go eat soon.

Here are a few quick points:

CORE as a caucus is an awesome operation with awesome people. Mostly young activists - one of the key people in setting up this conference is a 25 year old 2nd year teacher. How different from Unity for a caucus in power. They all proudly wear their CORE tee-shirts. And how interesting that they try to keep the leadership of the caucus in the hands of classroom teachers and somewhat separate from the Chicago Teachers Union. Thus, CORE was the host, not the CTU and they have an amazing amount of top-level activists who do an awesome amount of work.

There were lots of people from Los Angeles - mostly from a caucus called PEAK. Very impressive people. They're doing a lot of work there around the teacher evaluation and other issues. And of course, there was our gang from NYC, always a great crew to hang out with. GEM was there in force but there were other groups represented too. (I'm trying to be careful about naming groups and names since I've been reprimanded in the past - you know who you are.)

There are things I can talk about and other stuff probably left off the table for now.

After the bar, George Schmidt of Substance* (the model for the tabloid print edition of Ed Notes c. 2002-4) took us over to the Whittier school where parents have been sitting in at the attached community center and library which offers so much to the community and the city is trying to tear down. I have some great interviews with the parents and George does lots of commentary. Film being processed and I will put something up when I get home. For now, here are some stills I put into a slideshow.



Here is a report on the conference from George Schmidt's Substance:

Union activists develop many strategies at CORE’s National Conference to Fight for Public Education

About 150 activists from across the United States — mostly union teachers — gathered at the “National Conference to Fight for Public Education” in Chicago on Wednesday, July 6, 2011.
 


Earthy Girl commented:
We must have just missed you at Whittier, Norm. We were there early afternoon. Here are my pictures.
You can use any of them if you want. Email me if you need a direct attachment.
http://flickr.com/gp/good4kidz/a5mvZ2/. I've seen a lot of sadness in my life but this broke my heart. I kept thinking 'This is the USA? This is the best we can do for our children?'
-------------
Check out Norms Notes for a variety of articles of interest: http://normsnotes2.blogspot.com/. And make sure to check out the side panel on right for news bits.

Tuesday, April 19, 2011

There's an April Brizard Hitting Chicago

When news reports surfaced late last year about his wife angling for a role in the all-girls charter school, Superintendent Brizard said he was trying to keep the media off of the story until the charter application was in. Brizard's new boss, Rahm Emanuel, successfully did the same thing by keeping media questioners at bay.  -
http://abclocal.go.com/wls/story?section=news/iteam&id=8080428&rss=rss-wls-article-8080428
Chicago, Chicago - the birth of mayoral control and vicious ed deform - still not getting it right after 16 years. Vallas, Duncan, Huberman, Brizard - what a lineup.

Lots of Brizard stuff - Rahm bringing him in to stand up to Karen Lewis and CORE. What a laugh. He will however last longer than Cathie Black - but hey, isn't she from Chicago? Now that she has some ed experience why wasn't she a candidate?

Brizard is another Broad Acad grad. (Scroll down sidebar for Sharon Higgins' list of failed Broad Acads.)

Ed Notes has done some Brizard stuff in the past:
"jean-claude brizard in a letter to parents of december 12 the major problem was that tilden was “not on track” to meet the city's goal of “raising the city-wide 4-year graduation rate to 70% and the 6-year graduation rate to 80"

Nov 24, 2007
He basically pegs Brizard as a Klein flunkie. What is the real story on Brizard? He gets appointed on Thursday and then there is no turning back. http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article? ...

My friend Bill Cala (who should be NY State Ed Commissioner AND Chancellor) preceded Brizard in Rochester as Superintendent. He had this to say about Brizard's claims he raised grad rates - from Substance:
Brizard’s claim has even been called into question by his predecessor, former Interim Superintendent of the Rochester schools, Dr. William Cala.
Here’s what Dr. Cala had to say about the graduation rates, in a series of e-mails with Brizard which were obtained by a Rochester reporter using the Freedom of Information Act: "Let’s make one thing perfectly clear. Brizard had nothing to do with a 12 point graduation increase. Here are the facts. In 2007 the graduation results were announced by SED for 2006 graduates at 39%. In 2008 the results for the 2007 year were announced at 51%. 2008 was Brizard’s first year. The 12% increase came before he stepped in the door. The real facts are that graduation rates dipped below 51% during his tenure, thus actually losing ground.
More on the story at Substance.

Here (http://bit.ly/dHP3kB) is a good year by year summary of articles related to Brizard from his tenure in Rochester. I know a few goodies from his time here but he was bumped around a lot because he was not on a fast track - I think he kept going down in the pecking order - Klein passed the lemon in this case.

Just some of the titles should stimulate some debate. Here are a few favorites:

RCSD School Officials in Vegas During Testing, Layoffs
RCSD Board to Question Brizard’s Raise
Brizard Hires $100,000-a-Year, Part-Time Special Assistant
Principals Told to Cut Art, Music, Phys EdRCSD Staff Stayed at Luxury Resort During Budget Crisis
Brizard Said He Didn't Give Raises to Top Staff, but He Did
State Test Scores Plummet, Erasing Gains
Brizard Spinning Graduation Data
EEOC Finds Brizard Discriminated Against Official
Staff Survey Finds Little Support for Brizard
Fact-Checking Brizard on Cabinet Spending
State: Only 5% of RCSD Grads Ready for College

Looks like the right guy for Rahm.

Thursday, June 24, 2010

Eduwonk Takes Note of Events in Chicago as Karen Lewis is Turning into the Anti-Randi

With new Chicago union chief Karen Lewis taking office on July 1, expect her to become the anti-Randi. Eduwonk has noticed while Alex Russo who writes a Chicago blog while living in Brooklyn has his head in the sand. But both are open or closet ed deformers.

Eduwonk is Andrew Rotherham, a chief ed deformer - a Democrat who worked for Clinton so you know where the bread meets the butter - who went to some extent to challenge and expose Eduwonkette when she was anonymous.

Truth Stranger Than Fiction I

AFT President Randi Weingarten has collaborated with Race to the Top and other White House education initiatives, even at the cost of retreating from the union’s opposition to merit pay and defense of tenure as the basis for teacher job security. But the election in the CTU–the third largest teachers’ union local in the U.S.–is a clear signal that rank-and-file teachers have different priorities.


Going along with the above as the Chicago establishment tries to challenge CORE even before they take office on July 1 here are some links from Gotham.

Chicago’s schools chief wants more than just seniority to determine layoffs. (Catalyst)

Chicago’s school board agreed to lay off teachers by quality rating, not seniority. (Chicago Sun-Times)

CORE will be sending 146 delegates to the AFT convention in Seattle (July 8-11.)

---------------
After-burn

See the Karen Lewis interview with Labor Beat:





If you haven't been following events in Detroit, Gotham has this link:
Momentum is growing for mayoral control of Detroit’s schools. (Detroit Free Press)

Now the Detroit union has also been in a state of flux and is sending 20 anti-Randi delegates to Seattle. Rest assured, the Chi/Detroit totals pale in comparison to the 800 Unity junketeers who dominate the convention.

Saturday, October 17, 2009

Chicago Resistance to Ed Deform Grows as Does Opposition in the Union

Maybe it takes 15 years of mayoral control and the entire ed deform program to get things moving. Chicago has been the poster boy, having had first Paul Vallas (who ruled and ruined Philadelphia and is doing the same to New Orleans as we write) and then Arne Duncan, who was almost considered a joke when he ran the schools before Obama put a punctuation point on Duncan when he Peter Principled him into a national role as Education Secretary.

The Chicago Teachers Union, being run a basic clone of our own Unity Caucus dominated UFT, not only didn't stand up to the Mayor Daley assault, but actually cooperated in many areas (sound familiar to UFTers?) The CTU version of Unity is called the United Progressive Caucus (UPC). In 2001, an opposition caucus led by Debbie Lynch won power (with George Schmidt's Substance playing a major organizing role by distributing 3 issues of the paper to every single Chicago teacher). By the way, it should be pointed out that Daley supporters on the editorial pages actually urged teachers to vote for the UPC and against Lynch's PACT Caucus.

For a number of reason too complicated to get into here, Lynch lost the next election (she got the most votes in the first round but lost in the run-off to UPC's Marilyn Stewart. But for those in NYC thinking about this spring's UFT elections that all it takes is "winning" an election, the point should be made that the UPC still controlled the House of Delegates (like out DA) and the staff positions and used these positions to undermine Lynch at every turn. (She also made some crucial mistakes.) Stewart won the next few elections as Lynch's power waned (she is running again with PACT in the CTU elections this May).

The ed deform program in Chicago is known as Renaissance 2010 and the attack on the public schools has been intense. We've seen the entire program here in NYC under BloomKlein. They have the nerve to call it Children First. I won't get into details of the impact of ed deform but watch the 5 minute video below for Jackson Potter's perfect representation. It is no accident that these deforms have been linked to the increasing violence in Chicago, as we reported on George Schmidt's wonderful piece a few weeks ago. (Chicago Turnaround' the deadliest 'reform' of them all.) I love it when Schmidt's bitter enemies and who were silent for so long write about this issue but make sure to never mention the work Substance does.

The impact on the CTU has been intense. The CTU has hemorrhaged over 6000 teachers to charter schools and other privatized operations. Stewart's response has been to try to repress the growing opposition. She recently forced opposition groups to give out their literature outside and banned Schmidt from selling Substance at the doors of the House of Delegate meetings (which he has been doing for 30 years) and even called 911 on him and two cops threatened to arrest him.*

The rise of the Caucus of Rank an File Educators (CORE)

Around 18 months ago, CORE came on the scene and created an alliance of sorts with Schmidt. The combo has had a dynamic effect on the Chicago scene. Jackson Potter is one of the chief spokespersons for CORE. I got to hang with Jackson and a group of CORE people in July at the 5 city conference we held in LA and I learned an enormous amount from them.**

Here is a 5 minute video from March 2009 where Jackson elucidates the impact of Renaissance 2010 and the work CORE has been doing.

The URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=akv07-iXs_c




Related

Follow all the doings in Chicago at Schmidt's Substance News. http://www.substancenews.net/
And the CORE blog.

Must see 28 minute video of Chicago's George Schmidt and CORE Shredding Arne Duncan and the Chicago Corporate Model on our sidebar or at Labor Beat hosted on blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/2428857

See the Black Agenda Report on CORE's anti-discrimination suit.
""The fired teachers are disproportionately African American, and the newly hired teachers are not-(ironic, eh, in Obama land?)

Chicago Teachers File Racial Discrimination Suit Against Obama Administration's School “Turnaround” Plan


*{By the way, this same kind of repression has started here in NYC. And I believe that was one of the reasons Mulgrew was chosen because the AFT/UFT hierarchy knows that what happens in Chicago will eventually happen here, but much more slowly because Unity is way more powerful than the UPC. Mulgrew is there to bring the goon mentality to the table, as opposed to Randi's "I feel your pain" mantra. (Speaking of goons, I saw Jeff Zahler at the DA after his return from Washington DC as AFT staff director - look for the usual red-baiting from Zahler in this year's union elections - mr. zahler goes to washington....). Mulgrew's new regime has forced all visitors to the DA up to the 19th floor to watch on TV, something I refused to do and was harassed by 2 Unity goons. I told them to call the cops and they backed down. But I think it will eventually happen as Mulgrew will feel he has to defend his toughness (GEMers and ICEers will be ready with cameras.) More on this issue in a separate post.}

**We are way behind here in NY in organizing efforts but maybe we need a decade or more of ed deform for things to jell. The work of GEM, ICE, TJC, NYCORE, and Teachers Unite allied with the growing core of parent and community activists, and even some politicians, give us hope.

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Is Arne Duncan Guilty of Murder? Will BloomKlein Be Next?

The violence around Chicago schools has received national attention. Today's Times has a major story, but as usual only tells half of it. "Derrion Albert, the 16-year-old who was beaten to death recently with wood planks after getting caught on his way home between two rival South Side gangs, neither of which he was a member..."

George Schmidt told a different story where he blames the corporate reform which closes schools, turns them into "reform" schools which only take select students and force thousands of students out of their own neighborhoods and into schools in hostile territory:

"It's just seven and a half days since Derrion Albert had his skull crushed in that now-world-famous gang fight on 111th St. in Chicago. And most people still don't realize that "turnaround" was a partial cause of that death.

And the White House is sending Arne Duncan and Eric Holder to Chicago next week to keep the cover up alive and well.

And most of Chicago's media will go along with that cover up, just as they've been cheerleaders for corporate school reform for 14 years now, since Mayor Daley became dictator over Chicago's schools.

But since Arne Duncan is going to force every state in the USA to do Chicago-style "turnaround" or lose stimulus money, let's take a close look at what just happened in Chicago. Not the hype. From the streets around Fenger High School I've been walking the past few days as a reporter, blacklisted Chicago teacher, and former "director of security and safety" for the Chicago Teachers Union. And, oh, as editor of www.substancenews.net.

"Turnaround" and a decade of corporate media manipulation in Chicago and now beyond Chicago's lies, hoaxes, and Orwellian nonsense.

I published the full piece over the weekend: 'Chicago Turnaround' the deadliest 'reform' of them all

Now, the amazing stuff Schmidt writes at Substance doesn't often get into the mainstream press, and of course the Times' article did not give a hint. I loved this opening about Arne Duncan's replacement, Ron Huberman:

The new chief officer of the public schools here, Ron Huberman, a former police officer and transit executive with a passion for data analysis, has a plan to stop the killings of the city’s public school students. And it does not have to do with guns or security guards. It has to do with statistics and probability.

It's just too funny to see how a former cop and transit executive is making educational decisions, just as Duncan and Paul Vallas before him created the Chicago ed deform movement called Renaissance 2000 something or other.

But low and behold, I am listening to a report on NPR this morning on the murder of Derrion Albert and they make exactly the same point George made in linking the gang violence to the forced evacuation of thousands of students from their own neighborhoods, even pointing to the fact that the local high school was turned into a military academy by Duncan.

Is Duncan guilty of murder? Maybe not. How about an unindicted co-conspirator along with Mayor Daley, Huberman and the rest of the ed deformers, which unfortunately includes our current president.

Friday, October 2, 2009

'Chicago Turnaround' the deadliest 'reform' of them all

Norm:
I'm posting this and thought you might like to share with New York friends. It's been very very busy here.
George Schmidt


October 2, 2009 

Colleagues:

It's just seven and a half days since Derrion Albert ha d his skull crushed in that now-world-famous gang fight on 111th St. in Chicago.

And most people still don't realize that "turnaround" was a partial cause of that death.

And the White House is sending Arne Duncan and Eric Holder to Chicago next week to keep the cover up alive and well.

And most of Chicago's media will go along with that cover up, just as they've been cheerleaders for corporate school reform for 14 years now, since Mayor Daley became dictator over Chicago's schools.

But since Arne Duncan is going to force every state in the USA to do Chicago-style "turnaround" or lose stimulus money, let's take a close look at what just happened in Chicago. Not the hype. From the streets around Fenger High School I've been walking the past few days as a reporter, blacklisted Chicago teacher, and former "director of security and safety" for the Chicago Teachers Union. And, oh, as editor of www.substancenews.net.

"Turnaround" and a decade of corporate media manipulation in Chicago and now beyond Chicago's lies, hoaxes, and Orwellian nonsense.

Read on if you want some narrative fact.

If you're waiting for all the "data" in this "data driven" age, I can't help you.

I just posted another critique of Chicago's school "turnaround" craziness at www.substancenews.net and hope it will he lp people understand what we have been talking about from Chicago for the past ten years or more. "Turnaround" as applied to Chicago's schools has a specific meaning, and is largely unrelated to the buzzwords of corporate America.

If you want to check out the mixed history of "turnaround" in corporate America, I urge you to Google Al Dunlap -- "Chainsaw Al Dunlap" prior to his nasty fall after destroying Chicago's Sunbeam corporation during the dot-com con. For the ten years prior to 2001-2002, "Cahinsaw Al" was a media favorite, and the public snarl of corporate "turnaround." His legacy was about to be poised into corporate "school reform" courtesy of Forbes magazine, which was about to nickname Paul Vallas "Chainsaw Paul" until Dunlap was exposed, top to bottom, as a fraud. They quickly withdrew the "Chainsaw Paul" sobriquet and went on to construct a new identity for Paul Vallas as he was leaving his mess behind in Chicago (after leaving CPS in June 2001) and continuing his corporate school reform work in Philadelphia. But that's another story for another time.

In public schools, as we've reported for years at Substance, 'Turnaround' is a Chicago process that is actually reconstitution. That is what the Chicago Board of Education approved on February 25, 2009, when it chainsawed Chicago's Fenger High School (the latest to be "turnarounded", as we put it here in Chicago). The vote of the Board was to do "turnaround," but Illinois state law doesn't have "turnaround" (yet) in its vocabulary, so the Board votes to do "reconstitution" (which all you ed researchers know has been a failure, at least as measured by any legitimate researchers and peer reviewed).

But Chicago still does "turnaround." It's the flavor of the month from Chicago's Madison Ave. hucksters, David Axelrod at the White House and Peter Cunningham working on Arne Duncan's spin from the Education Department. With Barack Obama reading the scripts.

Now we have "turnaround" on brutal display, courtesy of the murder of 16-year-old Fenger student Derrion Albert last Thursday (September 24) while one of his fellow students made a video that is now on international display.

How does "turnaround" relate to the Derrion Albert murder?

In June and July, after being warned not to, the administration of Ron Huberman, who succeeded Arne Duncan as Chief Executive Officer of Chicago's public schools, fired all but seven or nine of the more than 150 staff (teachers, principal, custodians, lunchroom workers, etc.) at Fenger High School and brought in a newly trained "turnaround" team. In July and August, the new "turnaround" team (mostly white, replacing a mostly black staff at an all-black segregated public high school) prepared its lessons avidly and studied its scripts earnestly.

Then on September 8, the kids arrived.

The 10th, 11th and 12th graders were the same from last year. This is because for the first time since "turnaround" began in Chicago Chicago forced the school to keep all the previous students. A year earlier, at Harper and Orr High School, "turnaround" allowed the new regime at each school to dump the "bad" kids. But last year they got caught, not only by Substance (that's us) but by public radio. By the time WBEZ reporter Linda Lutton was done with the Harper story, anybody paying attention knew that Harper had dumped between 300 and 400 kids between June and September 2008, Those kids (whom Lutton and some friends of ours tracked) wound up at schools like nearby Robeson (that's Paul Robeson High School) where they were kept (vaguely) under control because Robeson had a strong veteran staff.

But over the summer of 2009, CPS ordered Fenger High School not to dump its "trash" (this was the term used by both charters and "turnaround" schools to describe the process) into nearby schools. So Fenger began this school year not only with its exotic collection of 10th, 11th and 12th graders (hint: more than 30 percent were classified "special needs" even under CPS negligent special ed department), but it also added a group of 9th graders that nobody else on the South Side had to take.

Result?

By September 14, the teachers at Fenger High School were under siege. The bad guys knew the new teachers were what are called on ghetto streets "Marks." The majority of the kids were caught in the middle. Gang fights every day; coverups in the media (except for us at substancenews) 14/7.

By September 21 (the first day of the third week of school) things were still escalating despite the addition (quietly; keep it out of the media) of several cops, and enhanced police patrols. At one point they called in police from two already overstretched south side police district.

The teachers (a) didn't know the kids (b) didn't know much about inner city teaching, except what they got in their summer "turnaround" lessons and (c) were scared to death (not all, just the majority) at the first sight of blood.

Flash forward to September 24, 2009.

By 10:00 a.m., one of the Fenger children had gotten angry and fired a weapon outside the building, roughly from the corner of 113th and Wallace. The police got the child, a 15-year-old. But the building "heated up" all day.

At 2:46 p.m. (dismissal time) things were chaotic, except that Chicago had deployed at least eight squad cars around the building.

Rather than fight adjacent to the building (which fills the entire two-block square space at 112th - 113th and Wallace; use Google Satellites to see from space if you don't believe me), the really bad guys took the fight a quarter mile north and east of the building, to 111th and "the tracks." (Everyone knows "the tracks" except Chicago's "turnaround" geniuses; the tracks are where you find ammunition for a major battle, from huge rocks to throw to broken bottles to that 2 x 4s and 4 x 4s you can now see on display if you have the stomach for the video).

So, at a little after 3:00 p.m.. while eight or more Chicago police squad cars huddled around the Fenger High School building, a major gang battle was beginning at 111th St. outside the now famous "Agape Community Center" (which, by the way, was securitized like a fortress even before it became part of an international news story).

And one young lady turned on her phone camera and recorded the murder of Derrion Albert.

And a major commentary on "turnaround" in the real world.

Although that's still being covered up from the White House to 111th St. (where, irony of all ironies, young Barack Obama supposedly worked as a "community organizer" -- although don't try to find many people who remembered any impact he had on the public schools from Roseland and Pullman out to "The Gardens").

Anyway, that's all the time I have to share Chicago "turnaround" reality -- from "Chainsaw Paul" to Ron Huberman. And from Antwan Jordan (that's a kid I watched die with a bullet through his head outside Bowen High School in 1997 when I was "security coordinator") to Derrion Albert.

But if you want to continue believing in fairy tales, I'm sure Oprah will be back in time to feed you a couple of dozen.

As Deborah Lynch reports in this morning's Chicago Sun-Times (reprinted right now at www.substancenews.net)...

"Turnaround is the deadliest reform of all..."

George N Schmidt
Editor, Substance

and


Thursday, May 28, 2009

New Yorkers Contesting Push by Bloomberg and Klein to Privatize Public Schools

Susan Ohanian sends us this comment and link to an article written by ICE/GEM NYC teacher John Lawhead for George Schmidt's Substance.

Susan said:
If you want to see the future of education, read this thorough, well-documented article about how corporate school reform is working from a common plan to privatize public education, create charter schools to destroy existing public schools, and undermine the 200 year tradition of free and democratic public schools in the USA.

Published by Substance: http://www.substancenews.net/ and linked at Susan's site.
http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=8586

Kudos to John for a wonderful job. This is such an important piece Ed Notes is publishing the entire thing, with the permission of Substance. Subscribe to the print edition of Substance and share it with your colleagues to support the important work they do in Chicago and nationally.

New Yorkers Contesting Push by Bloomberg and Klein to Privatize Public Schools

"The immediate problem facing upper District 3 and students attending Harlem schools is that the [New York City Department of Education], without the input and participation of the community, is closing down our community schools and replacing them with others that serve only a narrow group of children. Students in the schools they are shutting down are being dispersed without regard for them or their families."

New York public schools are facing the same 'phase out' privatization lies as Chicago's. Substance photo by John Lawhead.So declared a letter from parents, elected parent representatives and community organizations to Chancellor Joel Klein following an announcement in March that three schools, two in Harlem and one in Brooklyn would be closed and replaced by schools run by two chains of charter school operators.


The move was just one part of an ongoing, wholesale closing of neighborhood schools that has become central in a battle over the direction of public education in New York City. Over the winter nearly a dozen school closings were announced by the NYC DOE. The unilateral decision making was met with a surge of protests unlike any time since mayoral control was begun in 2002.


Recent protest at P.S. 72 in New York. Substance photo by John Lawhead. Not every threatened school community rallied to defend its school but many did, including M.S. 399 in Bronx, I.S./P.S. 72 in East New York, P.S. 150 in Brownsville, P.S. 144 and P.S. 241 in Harlem and Louis D. Brandeis High School on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The local daily newspapers and most of the broadcast media ignored the ruckus. Participants and supporters shared video clips of rallies on Youtube and the education blogs.


In late March a conference was held, entitled "Defend Public Education," by a coalition of grassroots teacher groups and several United Federation of Teachers caucuses that brought together teachers, students and parents from several of the affected schools. This event, attended by about eighty people, was the first such gathering to compare first-hand notes about the school closings, high-stakes testing for students and the long-term excessing of teachers across the city. Joel Klein and Mayor Michael Bloomberg made an effort in 2008 to raise their national profiles as "school reformers," often hitching this self-promotion to a campaign for increasing charter schools.


However, the decision to directly replace zoned schools with charters at the city level was something of a provocation. It threatened to antagonize erstwhile supporters of the Mayor's "school reform" agenda and unsettle some key alliances in a year when the legal framework for mayoral control is being reconsidered by the New York state legislature. A lawsuit was filed to stop the plan by the UFT and the New York Civil Liberties Union. The suit claimed that the changes required approval by the local Community Education Councils (weak successors to local community school boards). “Zoning laws are the one small area of oversight that parents were allowed to keep under mayoral control," declared Executive Director Donna Lieberman in an NYCLU press release. The DOE quickly reversed itself and said that the schools could remain open but would share space with the charters. Klein wrote letters to parents in the schools previously targeted for phase-out, stating as much and urging them to transfer their children immediately, naming adjacent zoned schools and pointedly giving them both names and contact information for area charter schools to apply to.

Brooklyn students protest privatization of public schools. Substance photo by John Lawhead.


This shrinking of neighborhood schools and forcing them to share space with new charters is a familiar arrangement for the poor and largely African-American areas of the city where the charters have proliferated. The more than eighty charter schools in New York City are nearly all confined to the Bronx, Harlem and north Brooklyn. Although the charter operators receive millions in corporate and foundation largesse, they are given space by the city without cost to them. As the website of the Harlem Success Academy gloats: "We could raise millions and build a gorgeous new facility with all of the bells and whistles... [but] we take a different approach..."


The tens of millions received from private sources that are not used for bells, whistles or new buildings allow the schools to cap class sizes at levels well below that of the city's neighborhood schools, some as low as 18 students, and offer arts, music and technology programs not seen in zoned schools. It also goes to pay salaries like the $371,000 collected by Eva Moskowitz in 2007. Moskowitz is a former member of the New York City Council who is now the CEO of the Harlem Success Academies. Teachers at Harlem Success work longer hours and like all but a handful across the city are without union representation. They typically quit in droves at the end of the year and have to be replaced. One quarter of the teachers in Moskowitz's first academy were gone in a year. Reliance upon the patronage of Bloomberg and Klein (whose city education department is commonly called "Tweed" in reference to its headquarters which are housed in a restored landmark building, the old New York County Courthouse, built by William M. "Boss" Tweed at phenomenal expense, bloated by embezzlement, during the 1860s and 1870s) goes well beyond sharing space. Figures in the campaign for charter school expansion have played key roles in helping to set up political organizations to promote Klein's "reform" agenda and mayoral control. For instance, a recently disclosed donation of $500,000 from former schools Chancellor Harold Levy's hedge-fund management firm to Al Sharpton's organization, the National Action Network, was channeled by way of Democrats for Education Reform, a national advocacy group for charters. The money went to Sharpton as he was beginning a propaganda tour with Klein much of which involved the promotion of charters.


Klein often presides at lotteries for places in charter schools which have become media events with Klein extolling the parents' desire for "choice" and their apparent satisfaction with the inherent genius of free enterprise unfettered by regulation. The so-called "choice" the parents seek is never perceived as a flight from Klein's own mismanagement, overregulation, narrow curriculum choices or oversized classes.


The favor and admiration was recently reciprocated as contingents of placard-waving charter school parents appeared at the New York State Assembly Education Committee hearings on mayoral control held in each of the city's five boroughs from January to March. Juan Gonzalez, a columnist for the Daily News called them the mayor's "shock troops." In Brooklyn they carried signs that read "mayoral control = better schools."

Parents, teachers, students and community leaders have joined the New York protests. Substance photo by John Lawhead.


More than a hundred had rallied in the morning but by the afternoon the group had thinned out. Gonzalez also reported that "disgruntled charter school parents" told him their principals require them to attend."


The show of support might perhaps constitute the groundswell that never materialized for the actual "school reform" initiatives Tweed has planned, implemented and abandoned in favor of new initiatives. For Bloomberg's mayoral control, installed by the legislature and operating in the absence of any direct popular mandate it is no small matter that his regime enjoy some semblance of public enthusiasm. The mayoral-control experiment of the last seven years was shaped at the outset by lessons learned from Edison takeover fiasco of 2001. It no doubt influenced Bloomberg's demand for mayor control and his continuing demand that his power not be divided in any way. It also played a role in his successfully courting and enjoying the support of groups who opposed the Edison takeover plan, including ACORN and the UFT. In 2001 Chancellor Harold O. Levy announced a plan for Edison Schools Inc. to take over the management of five public schools. He selected the schools from the state's SURR list. The regular SURR process (Schools Under Registration Review) included the now-all-but-forgotten concept that the closing of schools should be carried out as a last resort. The state provided schools on the SURR list with increased resources, three years of intensive monitoring and clearly defined goals that would allow the schools to get off the list.


Levy’s plan was to jump the gun and put the schools under private management more quickly by way of getting majority approval from parents, if not the much hoped-for groundswell. At first Edison Schools was entrusted with publicizing the plan. Students were promised computers to take home and the New York daily press joined in with a chorus of approval. However, in response to a lawsuit ACORN and other communities organizations were allowed to distribute less-than-flattering fact sheets about Edison to families involved in the decision. Mail-in ballots were required. After hearing both sides the parents defeated the plan by a four-to-one margin.


The defeat of the plan together with other events souring Edison’s prospects resulted in dramatic losses for investors. In the immediate aftermath of the vote the New York Times attempted to digest the development. A reporter interviewed parents at P.S. 161 in Harlem, one of the schools targeted by the plan. Under the headline “Parents Explain Resounding Rejection of Privatization of 5 Schools" some stark responses were offered. “Some parents said they did not know the schools were in trouble,” the reporter writes and continues, “Nearly all said they were afraid that their children would be used as guinea pigs in a business experiment.”


If Albany lawmakers do nothing by June of this year the legislation providing for the grander business experiment that it began in 2002 will expire. Most elected officials have staked out a “mend it, not end it" position toward mayor control, denouncing much of the mayor's actual record but holding fast to the concept of centralized authority and the "school reform" agenda.


The hearings involved long summaries of an institution brought out of control by a lack of democracy though not always in those words. Speakers denounced the lack of “voice” or "consultation" by parents and their representatives, the privatizing of public policy, the lack of transparency, the extravagant spending on testing and review systems, no-bid contracts, cost overruns, the squandering of money directed by the state to lower class sizes, and the failure of Tweed to follow state education laws. The proposals to "mend" mayoral control with a new law face a disturbing challenge in Tweed's tendency to scoff at laws. For parents and rank-and-file educators who have been focused on school-level educational issues there is frustration with the plans to reform the "reformers," many of which seemed intended merely to widen the circle of those participating in the deal making and preclude direct democracy of the sort that led to the rejection of the Edison plan in 2001.


Randi Weingarten, president of both the AFT and UFT testified before the New York State Assembly Education Committee in early February. She argued that basic decisions about the schools system should be debated more and described how Tweed often left the union with no option but “going to the streets, to sue, to grieve, to embarrass the school system in the public press.” She went on to say, “ultimately, that doesn’t feel like the way to do things when the mission of this institution every day should be to educate the children... We've got a lot of power. When you do it in the streets it makes us really powerful. When you do it inside behind closed doors, where you’re trying to make the best interests of the children paramount, it makes us less powerful.”


Few would disagree that the teachers' union has become less powerful in recent years. It might be attributed both to a preference for closed-doors deal making as well as being politically outmaneuved by Bloomberg. It also stems from Weingarten's tendency to use the same reform rhetoric spouted by Klein and Bloomberg.


Raises for teachers' were a "reform" designed to draw better teachers into the schools. A bargaining agreement in 2005, dubbed a "school reform" contract by the factfinders brought dramatic concessions from the teachers' union, adding time to the school day and taking away transfer rights, school decision making, and the right to grieve letters to file. Tweed also unilaterally changed school financing so that school would be penalized for hiring teachers with higher salaries. With the loss of seniority rights, Klein by closing schools has created a surplus of teachers, called Absent Teacher Reserve teachers or ATRs whose numbers have reach some 1700. Many of these teachers have been in excess for several years. Despite an agreement at the end of 2008 to subsidize schools who hired teachers in excess, only a handful have got positions in the months since while Tweed has continued to recruit and hire hundreds of new teachers.

On the march in New York City. Substance photo by John Lawhead.


The weakening of the position of teachers in the schools had the effect of giving principals more power and diminished collective planning and decision making. Tweed's emphasis on principals as the "instructional leaders" of the school has made them virtually exempt from previous constraints, including the state law requiring consensus and a real role for school leadership teams.


Klein who loves the relatively tiny portion of educating done by charter schools has only infinite disdain for any "gradualism" when it comes to changing the "status quo" of the school in his charge. He is the shock therapist with the incomprehensible priorities: bewildering, breakneck administrative reorganizations, an erratic school grading system, new schemes for bonuses, threats and all manner of school improvement by remote control, the condemnation and abandonment of what he controls, and the school closings. He never shows any interest in what has worked so far and what hasn't, which leads some observers to see a modern-day Lord of Misrule in the proceedings, perhaps something worthy of what the former GE chief and management guru Jack Welch called "creative destruction."


Leonie Haimson, a parent and school advocate, writing on the New York City Public School Parents blog, wrote that the Tweed strategy seemed like an effort to "create such incompetent, dysfunctional government that the public will no longer support the notion that the government can provide useful public services, leading to further privatization and the undermining of the whole notion of the public good." Teachers who never wanted to be part of any lousy schools wonder, who wins from the closings and reorganizations? Concerned about "failing" schools? Poverty schools are like the overmedicated patient that eventually needs a different pill for every function. How will the dizzy, disordered, hysterical, somnolent, depressed school ever get "fixed" when it is such a lucrative prospect for the education companies? Profits are predicated on students and teachers' lack of control over the institutions where they work and learn. How many of the products, the packaged teacher-proof lessons, the training and consulting, interim assessments would be exposed as unnecessary if school communities could find a way to use their own judgment and solve their own problems?


The activists who organized the "Defend Public Education" conference in March have formed a much broader group called the Grassroots Education Movement that is seeking to work with parent and educator groups throughout the city. On May 5 a forum was held to discuss the charter school conundrum and was well was attended by parents and educators.


Mike Fiorillo of the Independent Community of Educators (ICE) described a "corporate-philanthropic-academic complex" that was using civil rights rhetoric to undermine public control of public institutions. Cecilia Blewer of the Independent Commission on Public Education said the word choice is something to be suspicious of. "Some choices cannibalize others."


In the discussion a parent of two children in charter schools discussed an administration's opposition to her forming a parents' association.


A teacher from a "conversion" charter presented a rebuttal to some of the claims that charters exclude students with special needs. Someone else distributed a handout that illustrated as much in a set of graphs. A parent representative from Queens discussed how the folks attending could get beyond preaching to the choir.


There was debate about whether the campaign for scaling up charter schools had hijacked what had once been a grassroots effort or whether charters had racist roots in segregationism. Many agreed that the threat of privatization required redefining the purpose of education. Another speaker Akinlabi Mackall, of Black New Yorkers for Educational Excellence spoke about "the unglamorous day to day work" of building a movement to create something different.


This article was originally published in the print edition of Substance, May 2009. Copyright 2009 Substance, Inc. Reprint permissions are hereby granted to not-for-profit and pro public education groups and for teaching purposes. Please give full credit to Substance, www.substancenews.net. Your subscription to Substance helps provide timely and accurate news about the fight to save public education in the face of corporate media lies.

Tuesday, March 10, 2009

Chicago: Ed Forecast for the Nation

Today's announcement that Obama education plan to call for performance-based pay
should focus out attention on Chicago. Don't forget, Obama lived in the belly of the beast where the educational plan is coming down around their ears. But just watch the Obama ed apologists ignore this one and focus on all the "good" things. But what this shows is the basic faulty market-based thinking. How did that performance pay thing work out for the American financial system?

And not so well for Chicago schools:

Today's AOL story listed the worst 100 schools based on NCLB and other factors. Four of the Chicago schools are in the top 25 and a total of 21 in the the top 100. A little over 20% of the schools from Duncanland.

Read this report from Pauline, Teachers for Social Justice, Chicago

People need to know what is happening in Chicago because it is a preview of the national agenda for urban schools. Since 2004, under Arne Duncan, Chicago has been closing neighborhood schools in African American and Latino working class communities and turning them over to charter schools, selective enrollment schools for new gentrifiers, or to an outside turnaround specialist.

We have been fighting for quality neighborhood schools in every neighborhood and against these school closings every year. This year Duncan, before he became Sec. of Ed, recommended closing or turning around 22 schools on a few weeks notice. In the end the Board of Ed. voted to go ahead and close or "turn-around" 16 neighborhood schools, rocks of stability in their communities, each with a compelling story to tell.

We saved 6.

We, a multiracial coalition of grass roots community organizations, teachers, parents, and students are angry but not surprised. They ignored research data (2 reports that disputed their reasons for closing the schools), the data from the parents and teachers and students who testified for hours and compiled elaborate piles of documents in their defense. At the Board meeting, Board members admitted not one had read the testimony from these hearings -- the tears, anger, pleas, careful documentation and reasoned argumentation of hundreds and hundreds of African American and Latino working class parents and children and their teachers and administrators.

This travesty of democracy and disrespect, this crass closing of neighborhood schools for gentrification and charter school give aways, this "cost cutting" on the backs of Black and Brown communities is made possible in part because the mayor, who works in collaboration with the most powerful corporate and financial interests, runs the school system and appoints the Board of Education and CEO of CPS. They are completely unaccountable. Now Arne Duncan recommends Detroit (and what other cities?) follow Chicago s lead with mayoral control.

After candlelight vigils in the cold, many many community meetings, 2 mass rallies and marches, a tent city sleep over in front of the Board of Ed in subfreezing temperatures, and many other kinds of protests, we are tired but unbowed. We are pushing for a retroactive moratorium on school closings in the state legislature right now and regrouping for the next phase. It's the parents, especially women, and youth and community members who are the heart and soul of this fight. Their courage and determination to fight, to picket and march and speak out day after day, to become media spokespeople overnight, and to rise up as grassroots leaders should
inspire us all. It's a long fight because the stakes are high. People need to know. This is the national education agenda on the horizon. We have to stop it.

For good coverage of the recent phase of our struggle see http://www.substancenews.net
Pauline, Teachers for Social Justice, Chicago

Monday, March 2, 2009

How do you watch Arne Duncan...

....operate as the leader of the Chicago school system - read this post as an example - People need to know what is happening in Chicago--forecast for the US and write this:

Obama’s education budget strikes some themes beyond Ed. Sec. Duncan’s refrains so far of KIPP, TFA, and value-added data-tracking systems as the “proven strategies” to push. The new themes in the budget overview on education strike me as more promising - maybe more of Obama, less of Duncan? - and hint at reforms progressives have been calling for. Clay Burell


It looks like a bunch of interested parties are starting to judge the Obama administration based on its appointments and early policy direction. And that’s just fine. But when there’s Fordham’s Reform-a-meter, and Diane Ravitch proclaims Duncan’s USDOE to be Bush’s third term, I’ll chime in with Fred Klonsky: judge people for what they do, but remember the context. Sherman Dorn


Isn't the appointment of Duncan the context? I mean, why choose Duncan and then go counter to his core beliefs? There seem to be a lot of pro-Obama ed people on their knees praying Duncan will not be Duncan. And who are these "interested" parties?

One NYC parent commented:
Obama's "key White Advisor is Bob Gordon, a former advisor to Klein, and, the author of the New York City Weighted Student Funding plan." Talk about the frying pan and the fire!

Exactly how much "context" do these people need?

Saturday, February 28, 2009

People need to know what is happening in Chicago--forecast for the US

People need to know what is happening in Chicago because it is a preview of the national agenda for urban schools.

Since 2004, under Arne Duncan, Chicago has been closing neighborhood schools in African American and Latino working class communities and turning them over to charter schools, selective enrollment schools for new gentrifiers, or to an outside “turnaround specialist.”

We have been fighting for quality neighborhood schools in every neighborhood and against these school closings every year. This year Duncan, before he became Sec. of Ed, recommended closing or turning around 22 schools on a few weeks notice. In the end the Board of Ed. voted to go ahead and close or "turn-around" 16 neighborhood schools, rocks of stability in their communities, each with a compelling story to tell. We saved 6.

We, a multiracial coalition of grass roots community organizations, teachers, parents, and students are angry but not surprised. They ignored research data (2 reports that disputed their reasons for closing the schools), the data from the parents and teachers and students who testified for hours and compiled elaborate piles of documents in their defense.

At the Board meeting, Board members admitted not one had read the testimony from these hearings -- the tears, anger, pleas, careful documentation and reasoned argumentation of hundreds and hundreds of African American and Latino working class parents and children and their teachers and administrators.

This travesty of democracy and disrespect, this crass closing of neighborhood schools for gentrification and charter school give aways, this "cost cutting" on the backs of Black and Brown communities is made possible in part because the mayor, who works in collaboration with the most powerful corporate and financial interests, runs the school system and appoints the Board of Education and CEO of CPS. They are completely unaccountable. Now Arne Duncan recommends Detroit (and what other cities?) follow Chicago’s lead with mayoral control.

After candlelight vigils in the cold, many many community meetings, 2 mass rallies and marches, a tent city sleep over in front of the Board of Ed in subfreezing temperatures, and many other kinds of protests, we are tired but unbowed.

We are pushing for a retroactive moratorium on school closings in the state legislature right now and regrouping for the next phase. It's the parents, especially women, and youth and community members who are the heart and soul of this fight.

Their courage and determination to fight, to picket and march and speak out day after day, to become media spokespeople overnight, and to rise up as grassroots leaders should inspire us all. It's a long fight because the stakes are high. People need to know. This is the national education agenda on the horizon. We have to stop it.

For good coverage of the recent phase of our struggle see http://www.substancenews.net/

Pauline
Teachers for Social Justice, Chicago

Pauline Lipman
Professor, Policy Studies
College of Education
University of Illinois-Chicago
1040 W. Harrison, MC 147
Chicago IL 60607-7133
312-413-4413

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

Chicago Teachers Organize Against Privatization


With a severely weakened union, there's a new union caucus in town in Chicago. CORE (Caucus of Rank and File Educators) organized the protest, which is being reported by Labor Notes.

Here's on interesting note in the articlem which I posted on norms notes with links active:

As Chicago’s school district has become increasingly run by private contractors, the 31,000-strong Chicago Teachers Union, an AFT affiliate, has seen its rolls plunge by 6,000.

Chicago Teachers Organize Against Privatization

See the video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z1v-dSTOsbc

The Core web site.

Friday, January 23, 2009

Arne Duncan, Segregationist?

Would the first African-American president appoint as an education secretary someone who has led Chicago backwards in terms of integration and percentage of black teachers being employed? George Schmidt has some answers.

Chicago, under Arne Duncan, has finally begun the job it was unable to do back in the days when Al Shanker (in the name of "standards") was sustaining an ethnic cleansing of the teaching force in New York City.

As you know, Chicago was always an anthesis to New York inside AFT. By the 1970s, Chicago had an enormous base of black teachers, and black leadersip at all levels within the Chicago Teachers Union. By the mid-1980s, that leadership was across-the-board. Jackie Vaughn was CTU President, and with massive support from unionized black teachers (and some others, like us here at Substance) Harold Washington had become mayor. By the time Jackie Vaughn died in 1994, the number of black teachers in Chicago's public schools nearly equalled the number of whites (with "other" gaining). By the end of the 1990s, white teachers were in the minority in the teaching force, and the majority of people working (in union jobs) in Chicago's public schools were black.

"School reform" in Chicago has been a sustained attack on those gains for black people. But, like other bourgeois attacks (especially of course the Jim Crow South under the Dixiecrats, the old "Solid South") on unionized workers, the entire class suffers when these divisions take hold.

The most grotesque thing about Barack Obama's appointment of Arne Duncan to be U.S. Secretary of Education is not (as some including former CTU president Debbie Lynch) that Duncan is "unqualified," but that Duncan has successfully led the ethnic cleansing of Chicago's teaching force (via privatization) while simultaneously ignoring Brown v. Board of Education and all federal desegregation rules (including Chicago's deseg consent decree) in a white supremacist way that would have been unthinkable at any time between the 1960s and the dawn
of this century.

1. Chicago has purged the teaching force of 2000 black teachers and principals since Duncan took over in 2001.

2. Chicago has created a segregated separate privatized school system (the charter school system of more than 80 "schools" and "campuses") since Duncan took over in 2001. That school system would be the second largest school system in Illinois were it made outside CPS.

Needless to say (especially for those of us who supported Barack Obama from "back in the day" when we first met him as an Illinois State Senator), the appointment of a segregationist privatizer and union buster to run the Department of Education is more than a bad sign. It's a clear indication of the struggle we will face in the years ahead.

Reading the entire thread about the Kahlenberg book, Sean's take on the underlying lie of 1969, and the Hirsch attack on Norm and Vera*, I'm hoping in the coming months there will be time and space to make a few of these points coherent in the pages of Substance and to our broader audience. Sean's points are among the most important, especially from the point of view of Chicago history.

And, as Sean notes in his material about 1968, our ability to counter a Big Lie with facts will continue to be challenged. After all, it's only been 40 years since "Ocean Hill Brownsville". And that Big Lie still holds central sway, not just because it's being repeated now in "Tough Liberal."

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net

*NY Teacher Reporter Responds to Our Shanker Book Review

Related: Duncan's Last Move: Close 25 Schools


Saturday, January 17, 2009

Some Thoughts



From Loretta on ICE mail:

When I saw the photo of the pilot and noted the gray hair, I thought that if Joel Klein ran American Airways the pilot's 40 years of experience would have landed him in the pilots equivalent of the teachers' rubber room– not safely on the Hudson. How lucky those 154 people were to be in the hands of experienced people.

Comment: Pilots are unionized. They have work rules. And seniority. Are there calls for 6 week summer training programs for pilots? In the heaps of praise from the press, these facts get lost by the wayside.


From Michael Fiorillo on ICE-mail in response to this headline:

16 Chicago schools to be closed, consolidated or relocated


It's the Shock Doctrine at work: the economic crisis being used as an opportunity to implement the plan to close, reorganize, charterize, privatize and de-unionize schools.

Not exactly what we thought we were voting for in November, although some of that was our own - meaning those of us who voted for Obama, myself included - self delusion, since Obama has never hidden his intentions to expand charters.

"Change We Can Deceive In"

Related
Chicago Fight Back on School Closings

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Are Racial Achievement Gaps Closing in Chicago?

Gee, has it only been 13 years of mayoral control and market-based education with 2 Superintendents (Vallas and Duncan) who were not educators? Eduwonkette zeros in on that elusive gap.

Monday, October 27, 2008

Debating School Reform: George Schmidt on Bill Ayres and Mike Klonsky

NOTE: 2 versions of this article were posted accidentally and each elicited comments, which have been consolidated into one post while the other was deleted.

Small schools, and charters as well, have often been pushed by well-meaning people who were then overwhelmed by the tsunami of corporate and foundation money that used the force if its investments to put in place policies that are anti-student and anti-teacher. Anything short of open and active opposition to this is political log-rolling.
-------Michael Fiorillo

We sort of fell into the current Bill Ayres/Obama controversy by wondering where Ayres (and Obama) stood during these 13 years of Chicago mayoral control/education reform and its exportation to other cities like New York.

Education Notes has consistently lined up with people like Susan Ohanian and George Schmidt amongst many others to call the high stakes testing and standards movement a major instrument of school privatization and the bash the teacher and union as the cause of failures.

This is a long post but I didn't want to cut any of it. We may take George up on his suggestion to hold a conference on school reform next year and I will throw that idea out to ICE, Teachers Unite, NYCORE, Class Size Matters, ICOPE and other activists that may be interested.

Reading George (and Michael Fiorillo, a UFT HS chapter leader and member of ICE) will get at some of the core issues facing education reformers, so hang in there.

[Bill] Ayers and [Mike] Klonsky both were part of the union bashing "left" here in Chicago in those days. Their disciples in the "small schools" stuff exported those things elsewhere.

By the late 1990s, the same time I was being sued for a million dollars and Mayor Daley and his appointees were trying to drive Substance out of business, Mike and Bill were collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the Chicago Board of Education directly as a "external partner" to a handful of "failing schools."


George Schmidt

I made charges (here and here) the other day about Bill Ayres and teacher unions based more on instinct than knowledge and received comments from both Fred and Mike Klonsky challenging my assertion that behind the Ayres' world view is a certain level of anti teacher (and union) bias. Klonsky urged me to read "Renaissance 2010 Meets the Ownership Society"* and "Private Management of Chicago Schools is a Long Way from Mecca,"** (Feb. 2006 - see abstracts at the end of this post.)

Mike Klonsky said that after reading these articles (I just read the abstracts) I should send a letter of apology to his brother and Bill Ayres.

Not so fast, Mike. Your articles were written in 2006. Where were you guys when Bloomberg and Klein instituted their assault on the NYC school system in 2002? Due to George Schmidt's warnings Ed Notes was able to be out there since 2001 when before Bloomberg took over, Randi Weingarten came out for mayoral control. Wouldst there have been more voices out there then. Besides, I've learned by watching Randi Weingarten, who can say good things but act directly opposite. Watch what they do, not what they say. But there's more.

George had direct experience with Ayers and Klonsky as his school was one of the closing schools:

One of those was the school (Bowen High School) where I taught and was union delegate until I was suspended (February 1999) by Paul Vallas, later to be fired (August 2000) by a vote of the Chicago Board of Education for publishing the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations) tests in Substance and consistently opposing the use of high-stakes secret multiple choice so-called "standardized" tests for "accountability."

Part of that "accountability" in Chicago was that if your school was "failing" (as measured by the test scores; nothing else mattered) you were forced to buy an "external partner" (in the case of Bowen, Small Schools Workshop; headed by Mike and Bill).

Instead of joining in the critique of the use of so-called "standardized" tests for the corporate accountability attacks on public schools (and unions) in Chicago, Bill and Mike (and most of their colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as others at other Chicago colleges and universities) got on the gravy train, soaked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of CPS money every year, and came into the schools to tell veteran teachers how to "reform" the schools we had worked in for years, decades, and in some cases, generations.


A familiar refrain to NYC teachers.

I want to make it clear. What Ayres did in the 70's has no relevance here. We're more concerned what he did in the 90's and early years of this century in relation to the Chicago model of mayoral control/ed reform that is entering its 14th year and served as a model of the Bloomberg/Klein shakeup of NYC schools, with the destruction of teachers union influence by attacking unions as being the major obstruction to ed reform (see the debate between Linda and Lisa last week.)

So where did Ayres stand through those years? As supporters of small schools (I hear Klonsky's new book is a must read) one must also think of the consequences of how this movement is implemented. In other words, if you get your small schools going in a manner that results in the undermining of public education and teacher unions then where did you really stand? If you acted in a way that contributed to tearing down teachers and teacher unionism, then it's a duck because you quacked. As Mike Fiorillo calls it: political log-rolling.

More from George Schmidt

I'm going to return to the details of the small schools activities in relation to corporate school reform in Chicago after November 4.

Suffice to say, a lot of people profited in the early days of "standards and accountability" here in Chicago and elsewhere, and among those were Chicago's small schools advocates. The fact that the process continued under George W. Bush and No Child Left Behind after 2001-2002 does not wipe out the history between 1995, when Chicago got mayoral control, and 2001, when the Republicans became dominant nationally.

The "ownership society" is in ways a distraction from the neoliberal project that was well on its way via "housing reform," "welfare reform", and "school reform" by the year that Bush defeated Al Gore for President. And the people who supported and profited from the teacher bashing, union busting, and other activities of corporate school reform in Chicago between 1995 and 2001 included Mike Klonsky and Bill Ayers.

I agree with Mike Klonsky about one thing. The stuff from 1968 to around 1976 is mostly irrelevant (except perhaps some of the origins of the myths of "small" as a solution to massively segregated urban school systems).

I'm still waiting to be invited to have at it at a public forum on these questions. Let's just say that certain people for a long time were given the high ground for their theories, while many of the facts that we've published over time in Substance were suppressed.

Finally, about "piling on" [Ayres.]

When Mayor Daley and his appointees at the Chicago Board of Education sued me and Substance for $1 million -- in January 1999 -- and set out to destroy me and Substance, Mike Klonsky was one of the people who assured "progressives" that I was the bad guy. He put it in writing and devoted some considerable energy to that project.

It hurt us dearly back in those days, because it cut off a large swath of potential support at a time when we were under unprecedented attack by the ruling class. Without attributing causation to Mike's behavior back then, let's just say it was a few years later that his projects became defunded by the Daley dynasty. While I might agree in the abstract that there is some general need not to allow the ruling class to pile on "progressives," there is no record of praxis in Chicago that the rule currently being invoked in defense of Bill Ayers was part of the culture of our official progressives. And I don't personally think anything's changed that much since.

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

www.substancenews.net


Mike Klonsky's original comment:

Sad to see leftists and progressive educators piling on Bill Ayers right at this opportune moment and pronouncing various educators at "anti-union." The Weatherman faction of SDS is pretty easy pickens from the right or the left. I ought to know, having led the fight against them in 1968. Problem is, that was 40 years ago and the Weather faction is not really the problem facing New York's teachers or their union at this moment.

And the charge that Ayers is "anti-union" today, or that he supports the current Chicago school reform initiative, Renaissance 2010, is pure bullshit and the people feeding you that crap know it. So if you are really interested in this question, read Bill and my Kappan (Feb. 2006) articles, "Renaissance 2010 Meets the Ownership Society" and "Private Management of Chicago Schools is a Long Way from Mecca," and then go back and tell my brother Fred that he was right all along, and send Bill a note of apology.

Michael Fiorillo's response

My original comment about Bill Ayers was not intended to address whether he has anti-union sentiments. I assume he would declare he does not, and I would believe him.

But that was not really the purpose of my posting, though I perhaps could have expressed it more clearly.

The point to be made about Weatherman was less its arrogance - which was ample - but rather its self-delusion, and there continues to be much self-delusion among so-called political progressives who've signed on to various ed reform programs, only to have them hijacked by the corporate drive to control and privatize public education, with its beach head being urban school systems. From what I've read, that drive has been underway longest and has achieved its greatest influence in Chicago, with DC quickly gaining ground.

Mr. Klonsky, please point out what Mr. Ayers has done to resist these attacks against public education, teachers unions and democracy, by Messrs. Daley, Duncan and others, and I will stand corrected.

Small schools, and charters as well, have often been pushed by well-meaning people who were then overwhelmed by the tsunami of corporate and foundation money that used the force if its investments to put in place policies that are anti-student and anti-teacher. Anything short of open and active opposition to this is political log-rolling.

Call me old-fashioned, but I don't think that activism that results in the neutralization and weakening of unions - even ones as incompetent and misguided as most AFT Locals - constitutes progressive politics.

And it's self-delusion to claim otherwise.

Michael Fiorillo

More follow-ups from George
As I note (and you can print) I look forward to the day when these historical realities can be debated in public and full frontally with equal time to me and Mike (and Billy). On the basis of the realities of Chicago's public schools, the history of what they've been part of, and the alternatives that were rejected when their theories became praxis.

[Bill] Ayers and [Mike] Klonsky both were part of the union bashing "left" here in Chicago in those days. Their disciples in the "small schools" stuff exported those things elsewhere. Oakland was one example I got some information about. But I think the toxic impact of their theories is as close as Bushwick, if I'm not mistaken.

If anyone wants to set that kind of thing up I'll debate any of them -- including Deb Meier -- provided that the structure is equitable. No weighting. Just because I was a classroom teacher and the three of them were honchos (Meier most interesting, let's not forget) doesn't erase the historical realities here.

It's been a very hectic time, but wondrous.

George

MORE
I can't wait until we can all get together, in about a year, for a day-long discussion of urban schools, unions, and "reform." Be sure to write Billy and Mikey and invite them to be on a panel about their projects – especially "small schools" -- and their relationships to corporate "school reform."

Remember, by the late 1990s, the same time I was being sued for a million dollars and Mayor Daley and his appointees were trying to drive Substance out of business, Mike and Bill were collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the Chicago Board of Education directly as a "external partner" to a handful of "failing schools."

One of those was the school (Bowen High School) where I taught and was union delegate until I was suspended (February 1999) by Paul Vallas, later to be fired (August 2000) by a vote of the Chicago Board of Education for publishing the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations) tests in
Substance and consistently opposing the use of high-stakes secret multiple choice so-called "standardized" tests for "accountability."

Part of that "accountability" in Chicago was that if your school was "failing" (as measured by the test scores; nothing else mattered) you were forced to buy an "external partner" (in the case of Bowen, Small Schools Workshop; headed by Mike and Bill). Instead of joining in the critique of the use of so-called "standardized" tests for the corporate accountability attacks on public schools (and unions) in Chicago, Bill and Mike (and most of their colleagues at the University of Illinois at Chicago, as well as others at other Chicago colleges and universities) got on the gravy train, soaked up hundreds of thousands of dollars of CPS money every year, and came into the schools to tell veteran teachers how to "reform" the schools we had worked in for years, decades, and in some cases, generations.

In the case of the schools where I taught those years, the majority of the teachers were black (or other minorities) and we were under attack by university and college experts who were uniformly white and petit bourgeois and (in relation to our situations) privileged.

So...

Let's do a decade long review of urban "school reform" and invite the proponents of "Small Schools" to the debate, before audiences of union teachers, veteran teachers, in the context of a real examination of their praxis, and not the flaccid articles they can publish, without real peer review, in publications like "Educational Leadership."

But, as I said, it will take a bit of time after November 4 for us to synthesize all the things we're been learning, both from this intense political experience and from the even more important economic situation.

So, let's talk and actually bring people together. But not among university theoreticians who pontificate about what veteran teachers ought to be doing in our overcrowded classrooms. Let's bring them to us and listen to them explain what they actually did during the years, as school reformers in places like Chicago, when their alliances with guys like Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley brought their organizations more than a million dollars in public money to engage in one part of the teacher bashing that was being sold to the USA (exported from Chicago to just about every other major town) as the "reform" urban (read; mostly minority children; mostly poor children; strongly unionized staffs) public school systems.

The facts of history are clear. They just have to well up from underneath the sludge heaps of lies that "progressives" have heaped over them.


Abstracts:
*Would-be reformers need to beware of those who would co-opt the language of reform to undermine its ideals. Mr. Ayers and Mr. Klonsky examine how Chicago's Renaissance 2010 initiative has used the terms of the small schools movement to promote privatization and the erosion of public space.

**Arne Duncan, the brightest and most dedicated schools leader Chicago has had in memory, wants Chicago to be a Mecca where entrepreneurship can flourish. In this article, the authors contend that private management of Chicago schools is a long way from Mecca. There is no evidence or educational research whatsoever to show that privately run charters can produce better results. They urge a renaissance in schools based on expanding and not selling off the public space. This involves mobilizing communities and engaging and unleashing the talent and wisdom of teachers. At his best, Duncan has upheld this direction. In this contested space, this conflict over principles and fundamentals, they hope that Duncan finds a way to bring the resources and support of his business partners into play while preserving and transforming public schools and respecting the rights and the power of engagement of teachers and communities.


NOTE: Arne Duncan signed on to the Sharpton/Klein EEP project as well as the Broader, Bolder approach.