Shootings, schools, and “values”

Over 500 people have been shot in Chicago in just four months. My teenage son casually commented that they are picking up fast these past few weeks. Last night a 14-year-old girl shot another 14-year-old girl over a boy. When the summer comes, I’m grateful that my son is at camp in Michigan where he might fall out of a tree or get bit by a snake but he won’t get shot.

Last week Rahm Emmanuel suggested that the people who live in the communities that see the most violence must “live by a moral code …. It’s whether you have values.” Now this is the same mayor who has made it clear that many communities have no value to him. He’s closed their schools, their libraries, their mental health centers. He’s starved neighborhood schools in most communities but particularly those of color while he gives millions of dollars in TIF money to private universities.

I also had the opportunity to hear Passi Sahlberg this weekend, the Finnish educator and author who has studied education systems and reforms around the world. What struck me is the overall attitude in Finland is the philosophy that every child should have access to equal opportunities in education.

This came on the heels of Rahm’s announcement that another Selective Enrollment school will be built on the near North Side with $60 million in TIF funds. While he’s clearly playing to his demographic – white middle class North side – it’s outrageous that a school named after an African American president wouldn’t go in or near the South Side neighborhood he calls home.

Lack of values? Or perhaps it’s just that what Rahm values is all too clear.

Is Public Education a “Radical” Idea?

At a recent family picnic, an elderly uncle growled at me for wearing a “radical political” t-shirt. My shirt has the popular internet meme “Every Chicago Public School is My School,” which accurately captured the groundswell of anger at Rahm Emanuel’s closing of 50 neighborhood schools. In fact, when Parents4Teachers spokesperson Erica Clark read out the names of the school at the CPS meeting finalizing this deal (the Board did not; they voted them closed in an omnibus vote that took all of one second) people began shouting “my school” when they heard their school’s name. Very shortly the entire room was shouting “My school!” after every name read.

I’ve been wearing this shirt a lot because it gets such a response, mainly “I like your shirt!” But to my uncle I took the opportunity to say, “It’s a sad day in this country when public education is a ‘radical’ concept, isn’t it Uncle Moe?”

Yesterday Catalyst reported that a $20 million no-bid contract went to an organization with connections to CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett. This comes as no surprise to CPS teacher and parent Timothy Meehan who claims in his SunTimes commentary that CPS is starving schools n order to privatize.

This corporate reform of education is part of the neoliberal viewpoint that says that school systems should be run like businesses. There’s an inherent problem with this view: it collides with a societal view that democratic ideals include a thriving public school system that offers opportunities. As we go to hearings and protests and file lawsuits, we need to keep alive the question of what is meant by democracy and what is really meant by freedom.

Freedom is not throwing public education open to the free market so parents are free to “choose” a charter school; freedom is knowing that your child can walk to school in a safe neighborhood.

School Closings are Shortsighted

Last week I was a guest blogger for the Christian Science Monitor’s column Modern Parenthood. The photo they ran of the President includes my nieces, nephew, son, and husband (see below).

Is Mayor Emanuel Here?

Last week as some 60 parents, students, teachers, and community activists from Manierre School on the near north side embarked on the third “Walk the Walk” protest against school closings, organizer Sherise McDaniel called out, “Is Mayor Emanuel here?”

Since the announcement of 54 school closings, parents of soon-to-be-closed schools have commenced walking the route children will have to take to their receiving schools, inviting the press and Mayor Rahm Emanuel to join them.

So far, the mayor has not shown up. He did respond to queries from reporters that he wanted to ensure that Manierre kids “have a bright and successful future.” However, they can’t do that if they’re threatened by gang violence.

Yesterday Manierre parents made their last pleas at the CPS impartial hearings.Manierre received a $200,000 library renovation from Target that included a computers, televisions, iPods, 2000 books and a parent corner as well as murals on the wall. Further, the teachers at the Child Parent Center receive training and other benefits from the prestigious Erikson Center for Early Childhood Education.

George Manierre Elementary School is located at 1420 N Hudson Ave. The receiving school, Edward Jenner Elementary Academy of the Arts, is located at 1119 N Cleveland, across a busy intersection including a street that is five lanes wide.

Ten years ago, this area was teeming with children from the Cabrini Green High Rises. In 2000, before residents were relocated, Manierre had over 800 students enrolled. As of this year, they have 351 according to CPS data. Jenner also once had hundreds of Cabrini Green children. But while the enrollment has declined, gang rivalries and tensions have not.

Alderman William Burnett pointed out that the families in this community have “a generational curse. Some of these kid’s parents were killed by other kid’s parents. That’s the real stuff in that neighborhood.”

Parents say they have already seen gang threats on Facebook. CPS could decide to send Manierre kids to Franklin Fine Arts Academy, which is three blocks closer. Or LaSalle Language Academy, or Walter L. Newberry Math and Science Academy – all of which are nearby. But these are selected enrollment schools reserved for the city’s cream of the crop.

On the walk, Sherise McDaniel from the Parent Action Council pointed repeatedly across Sedgwick to how “nice” the neighborhood looked as she warned us not to be fooled. The Evergreen Terrace Apartments are largely Section 8 and the Marshall Field homes are little pockets of low income housing nestled between posh Old Town townhouses and mixed development on the busy riverfront. Parents fear this closing will spark an “all out gang war.”

Throughout these stressful weeks since the announcement about school closings frustrated parents are beginning to say, “I’m just going to move” or “I’m going to find a different school.” School closings to further gentrification is nothing new; and with the list for charter schools just getting longer Rahm has more reason to demand more charter schools.

I have a feeling in the upcoming weeks we’ll see more drastic parent actions….

Canter School Makes The Nation

This week The Nation took the struggle to keep Canter Leadership Academy open nationwide. While it’s a great boost for the community fighting to keep it open, it also should heighten the debate about public education and corporate school reform.

As I pointed out in my earlier post, more and more research is surfacing that shows how closing schools has not solved any problems, financially or otherwise, and in fact has been proven to be harmful to children.

In meetings with our elected representatives they have raised the issue that many Canter students, a middle school in Hyde Park, are not from the feeder schools the school was intended to serve. Perlstein’s article supports this with testimony from many of the kids who found Canter after floundering in other schools. As one young man put it (and I’m paraphrasing), “It takes a lot for me to walk through my neighborhood with bus money in my pocket, but I do it because I want to learn something.”

Canter students plead with CPS officials not to close their school.

It’s useless to point out that if we had strong schools in every neighborhood this wouldn’t be the case because these officials are more concerned with who votes for them. In fact, one local official pretty much admitted that Canter was the sacrificial lamb to keep other schools in his district open.

But Canter has an interesting history. Formerly Louis Wirth Elementary School, it opened in 1969 after completion of the new building for Kenwood High School (now Kenwood Academy and formally housed in the Wirth/Canter building). The school was meant to be a place where students from different socio-economic, and racial backgrounds from surrounding schools (Reavis, Kozminski, Shoesmith, Ray, and Murray) that fed Kenwood High School could meet each other before they would all be in school together in High School. This was the dream of Miriam G. Canter, a community activist who championed the cause of an integrated middle school, according to her son Evan.

Wirth served grades 6th through 8th. In 2002, school’s CEO Arne Duncan decided that the Middle School model was the way to go. Further, it made financial sense to consolidate the considerable resources necessary for the upper grades (counselors, algebra teachers, etc.) in one building rather than have it duplicated through all Hyde Park schools. Wirth would lose a grade (6th) in order to house the influx of 7th and 8th graders from feeder schools and be renamed Miriam G. Canter Middle School.

The Board of Ed promised to invest $1.5 million into the school, and $500,000 in Tax Increment Financing (TIF) funds were promised for a new science building. Of the promised $2 million, only $300,000 (half of that TIF money) found its way to Canter, according to those involved in the transition.

Despite reneged promises and lack of CPS support, Canter built an excellent program and attracted stellar teachers. As The Nation article and four hours of testimony have demonstrated, under the guidance of Dr. Collen Conlon they have carried out exactly the remit of a Middle School: it is a safe environment sensitive to the needs of kids transitioning into high school with high academic standards.

But according to CPS, Canter is “underutilized” at 58 percent with 228 students in a building that they say should house 390 (as per their 30 students in a classroom and special needs kids in a closet formula). Seventy-nine percent of its students are reading at or above state level, while 78 percent are at or above state math levels. Enrollment levels are on the rise, and the mobility rate is relatively low at 10 percent.

The relevant fact for Canter is that Barbara Byrd Bennett has decided that the K-8 model is what CPS should be following, similar to the way Arne Duncan did the opposite just ten years ago. And, since we’ve had five CEOs in just four years, does it make sense to instigate this massive upheaval in the lives of these middle schoolers because she is the flavor of the month?

Further, it’s not clear whether the trend to eliminate middle schools for K-8 schools is based on sound research. A five-year longitudinal study of 40,883 eighth-grade students in the Philadelphia City School District in the concluded that the “higher student achievement in math and reading associated with K-8 schools has more to do with student demographics, grade size and the school transition issue than with the K-8 grade structure.”

Bennett was brought here for the scorched earth policy she initiated in Detroit, where 124 school district properties languished on the market at the end of 2012. Beyond Chicago’s deplorable policy of revolving door CEOs, why should our children suffer such a massive change when it’s unclear she will even stick around (especially since she’s still registered to vote in Cleveland.)

We need to slow down the trend from middle schools to K-8 as much as stop the massive closures due to be wrapped up May 22.

Busy week for education in the news….

At long last, it seems that education is making headline news across the country. Unfortunately, it’s not good news. Perhaps we can thank Rahm Emanuel for his insistence on closing a record 54 schools while “turning around” 11 even though schools CEO Barbara Byrd Bennett thought the system could only handle 40 closings, according to Newstips‘ Curtis Black. WBEZ reports that school closings will not save money and in fact will cost $25 million a year for the next 30 years, while research continues to demonstrate that school closings in fact do more harm than good. (See the Washington Post and Education Weekly.) Ironically, the Education Weekly article is headlined “Proceed with Caution,” a statement Emanuel does not understand.

Standardized testing is also in the news, and fingers are once again pointed to schools’ chief Arne Duncan. His “Race to the Top” put more emphasis on test scores, despite continued evidence that social issues like poverty contribute more to a failing system than inadequate teaching. Headlines are not only lumping President Obama’s policies with Bush, but Duncan’s much touted Chicago method of closing schools is now proven to be a failed policy.

Are you listening Mr. President?

Divesting in Neighborhoods IS Racist

The first comment Rahm Emmanuel had about school closings was that he wasn’t going to get pulled into name-calling and “schoolyard taunts.” The intent of that was to further polarize the city by throwing it back to Chicago Teacher’s Union president Karen Lewis. Further, it allowed Barbara Byrd Bennett to get all indignant as a “woman of color.” But as Curtis Black points out, institutionalized racism is a whole other ballgame. We all know that BBB is taking the hit for Rahm, and her attempts to downplay the impact on the community by staging her a counterwalk to the “Walk the Walk” campaign shows she is far removed.

Perhaps he didn’t count on the organization of parents citywide who are arming themselves with facts. The recent protest walk conducted by Leif Ericson Elementary Scholastic Academy in Garfield Park highlighted questionable CPS planning. Pegged for closing, Ericson is at 3600 W. 5th. The receiving school, Charles Sumner Math and Science Academy, is at 4320 W. 5th Avenue, just sic blocks away, right? Wrong! Fifth Ave. is intersected by both Garfield Park and the Eisenhower Expressway. The sidewalks crossing these busy intersections have no parkways, and cars entering and leaving the expressway are mere inches from the sidewalk. The thought of primary school children prancing along or dawdling and daydreaming or running along the curb would give any parent nightmares.

Parents and students walk past one of the many abandoned buildings on the proposed CPS route to the “welcoming” school.

Further, the remaining blocks are lined with abandoned buildings, and according to parents, as many as four gangs intersect in this area. On the map it may look short as the bird flies, but it’s well over a mile. I’m a hardy walker – I can easily do a mile in 15 minutes. I walked briskly for 20 minutes and found myself two blocks shy of Sumner when I realized I had to turn around to get back to my car or I’d miss a meeting.

CPS bounces back from their position: first it’s about lack of funds, then underutilization and poorly performing schools. So why close Ericson? Ericson’s reading scores have been on the rise since 2007 – from 41 percent reading at or above state levels to 77 percent. In Math they’ve gone from 58 percent to 79 percent. Ericson is at 65 percent capacity (according to CPS, whose utilization calculations would have autistic kids in a closet and no art rooms, libraries, or computer labs), and while the receiving school appears to have a low enrollment (28 percent utilization) and higher test scores (94 percent in reading and 83 percent in Math) the mobility rate is twice that of CPS average at nearly 34 percent. This means that test scores are unreliable since they don’t necessarily reflect the same students. Ericson’s mobility rate is 16.5 percent and below the CPS average. This reflects a stable school.

The decisions made by CPS do not make sense when looking at these schools on the ground. We have food deserts in these neighborhoods, and now we are creating education deserts. Strong schools make for strong neighborhoods, and if we continue to remove them people will eventually stop sending their kids to overcrowded schools and start clamoring for “choice,” thus allowing Rahm to open more charter schools. Or they pick up and move to Aurora or Kenosha, but Rahm doesn’t care about that because it’s clear from the 250 people marching in Garfield Park amid a cacophony of horn-blowing support – firefighters, CTA bus drivers, lone drivers in cars – his approval rating of 19 percent will only go down. I go back to my point … is this racist or whose interests does he have at heart?

Rahm and Bennett have posited that they will not “short change” CPS students by leaving them with the status quo. However, no one has pointed out that investing in education – a logical principal in a democratic society – is an option as well. Let’s make sure that his education policies become synonymous with the blizzard of ’79 that bounced Bilandic out of office.

Wal-Mart Funds Charters While Running CPS School Closure Hearings.

Note: This post was from February25, 2013

How hypocritical is it that CPS says that school closings have nothing to do with charter schools – yet the Walton Family Foundation (who have made CPS the largest recipient of funds for charter schools in their massive funding around the country, according to the Daily Kos) are running the community outreach hearings on school closings?

I attended last Monday’s hearing for the Burnham district (my district) and it was somewhat surreal. The church at 60th and Michigan was packed, including the balcony, and it was standing room only. Three CPS officials sat at a table while two representatives from the 44 schools in the district were called to the microphone alphabetically where their pleas were met with raucous cheers from the audience.

Suddenly, about halfway through the school list, the moderator announced that if your school had spoken they should retire to the basement for “break-out” sessions. Now, not only was this diluting the support for schools most at risk, but these “break-out sessions” were nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation informing the community that the process for “right-sizing” these schools (I hate it when people create new verbs) was going to be done in a way that addressed everyone’s concerns. CPS would protect children from gang crossfire as well as preserve every special program in the school. (And if you believe that ….)

Beyond the chaos of people speaking over each other to one of the two “session leaders” – who by the way don’t work for CPS and were allegedly taking notes and trying to hear above the din, was the acceptance that schools are closing. It quickly then became every school for himself/herself. “Here’s why you shouldn’t close MY school” became the theme.

My favorite part of the night when was when Joy Clendenning, a member of Hyde Park Community Area Residents Empowering Schools (HPCARES) and parent of four children who attend three different CPS schools, stood up and outshouted everyone to urge parents not to fall prey to the Board’s divide and conquer strategy.

It’s also likely that CPS is strategizing by starting with a big list and hoping people will be relieved when they cut it in half.

DOE Faces Pressure Nationwide on School Closings

On Monday, the U.S.. Department of Education confirmed it will investigate complaints that school closings are discriminating against black and hispanic students and students with disabilities, the New York Times reports. While the Philadelphia city council just voted to enact a moratorium on school closings, community activists from 18 cities will meet with Education Secretary Arne Duncan this week to protest widespread school closings. This comes at a time when the Chicago Board of Education will hold hearings around the city on its school utilization plans. Mike Klonsky reports on a particularly rowdy meeting at Truman College in Uptown and Substance News details the failure of the Duncan’s “Chicago Plan” to replace public schools with selective Charter schools.

For more about Chicago’s plan to shutter over 100 neighborhood schools read Ben Joravsky’s Reader article here.

I’ve posted this video before but it’s a moving clip from the student’s perspective:

Do They Really Want to Hear the Voice of Parents?

Hannah Hayes

Freelance writer and editor