Tuesday Morning News Students escorted back to high school after shooting Chicago Tribune
Only 53 percent of the school's 1,400 students were in class, said Chicago Public Schools spokesman Mike Vaughn, similar to the 55 percent attendance averaged in the week between the shooting and spring break.
Crane half full despite escortCrane half full despite escort Chicago Sun-Times
Rosita Anderson was on a train traveling home from work March 7 when her daughter -- crying ...
School’s Attendance Still Low, Security Tight WBEZ
More than two weeks after a student’s murder nearby, many parents are keeping their kids home from Chicago’s Crane High School. We report from our West Side bureau.
CPS appointments face court test Chi-Town Daily News
That's because the Board of Education voted last year to allow CPS chief Arne Duncan to appoint council members at alternative schools, small schools and ...
Digg
Del.icio.us
Wed Mar 26, 2008 at 4:47 AM
Tuesday Morning News
"...A student couldn't ignore the three or four police officers posted at each street corner, more than double on duty before Ivy's shooting. Or the many community leaders and organization members who patrolled the streets before and after school, offering handshakes and counseling. Or the television cameras stationed across the street, and the reporters asking them how they felt..." (Tribune report on reopening of Crane High School after the Spring vacation).
Any cheap and transparently scripted publicity stunt that can be replayed several times over 12 years deserves an Oscar. This is one of those...
Observations on this nastiness:
A lot of the current wave of gang problems in the general high schools could not be happening today if CPS and the Daley administration hadn't begun flipping general high schools into the hands of privatizers (the charters) four years ago. CPS was warned at both the Austin High School (June 2004) and Collins High School (February 2006) that closing and privatizing those schools would result in a spillover effect across the West Side (just as CPS was warned about the same impact from the closings of Calumet and Englewood on the South Side).
The results are hurting every remaining general high school between Division St. and 103rd St. today, and some publicity stunts aren't going to change that.
The first photos we have of these publicity stunts (adults, usually subsidized by City Hall or CPS, "escorting" kids to some school) data back more than ten years, to when Paul Vallas deployed half the sixth floor from the old Pershing Road CPS headquarters to "escort" kids from The Hole (the old Mickey Cobra buildings on State St.) to the old Terrell Elementary School (now some kind of charter thingy).
James Deanes will remember that one, because (like so many other things) he was in charge of making sure the "community" not only showed up looking appropriate (denin for the working class; suits for the preachers) but that everyone said their talking points as clearly as if Karl Rove had scripted them.
Well, CHA tore down "The Hole" and left behind a depression in the land out there. Terrell was privatized while its children were dispersed.
But meanwhile, the MCs needed a new location adjacent to an expressway (you don't serve up on a corner in Beverly or Portage Park, because there is no quickie in and out for the suburban party crowd to pull over and cop quickly, children of urban studies), and basic market forces were at work.
So the MCs colonized Dearborn Homes (and, less so, Ickes) and created the shooting war that caused the 2001 test score drop at Williams Elementary School. Despite all the test prep and perfect lesson plans, in the real world kids can't concentrate on those ITBS (yes, back then it was the Iowa tests, remember?) bubble sheets if there is that constant pop pop popping outside their classrooms by day and their bedrooms by night.
And that was reality at Dearborn in April, May and June 2001. No naturally, shock doctrine style, the next year Arne Duncan, like a pimp discovering sin in the whore house he was running six days a week, and preaching from on Sundays, declared that both Terrell and Williams had "failed" and had to be "renaissanced."
Somehow, just like this week, my colleagues at the Tribune and Sun-Times missed most of the context in their urge to be cool and track down ghetto gang stories. And, again as usual, the Duncanian publicity stunt worked, even to the point of having some of the same understudies and scriptwriters making sure everyone knew their places.
To the point:
If CPS and CHA hadn't been massively shifting around populations of poor people and privatizing everything in sight, a lot of these tragedies would not be playing out on the evenings news and elsewhere. But as long as the public's eye can be so easily and naively distracted by cheap publicity stunts, CPS will continue showing the replay of a show it first produced in 1996 and telling the audience that the whole thing is new, innovative, and every so cool...
Any cheap and transparently scripted publicity stunt that can be replayed several times over 12 years deserves an Oscar. This is one of those...
Observations on this nastiness:
A lot of the current wave of gang problems in the general high schools could not be happening today if CPS and the Daley administration hadn't begun flipping general high schools into the hands of privatizers (the charters) four years ago. CPS was warned at both the Austin High School (June 2004) and Collins High School (February 2006) that closing and privatizing those schools would result in a spillover effect across the West Side (just as CPS was warned about the same impact from the closings of Calumet and Englewood on the South Side).
The results are hurting every remaining general high school between Division St. and 103rd St. today, and some publicity stunts aren't going to change that.
The first photos we have of these publicity stunts (adults, usually subsidized by City Hall or CPS, "escorting" kids to some school) data back more than ten years, to when Paul Vallas deployed half the sixth floor from the old Pershing Road CPS headquarters to "escort" kids from The Hole (the old Mickey Cobra buildings on State St.) to the old Terrell Elementary School (now some kind of charter thingy).
James Deanes will remember that one, because (like so many other things) he was in charge of making sure the "community" not only showed up looking appropriate (denin for the working class; suits for the preachers) but that everyone said their talking points as clearly as if Karl Rove had scripted them.
Well, CHA tore down "The Hole" and left behind a depression in the land out there. Terrell was privatized while its children were dispersed.
But meanwhile, the MCs needed a new location adjacent to an expressway (you don't serve up on a corner in Beverly or Portage Park, because there is no quickie in and out for the suburban party crowd to pull over and cop quickly, children of urban studies), and basic market forces were at work.
So the MCs colonized Dearborn Homes (and, less so, Ickes) and created the shooting war that caused the 2001 test score drop at Williams Elementary School. Despite all the test prep and perfect lesson plans, in the real world kids can't concentrate on those ITBS (yes, back then it was the Iowa tests, remember?) bubble sheets if there is that constant pop pop popping outside their classrooms by day and their bedrooms by night.
And that was reality at Dearborn in April, May and June 2001. No naturally, shock doctrine style, the next year Arne Duncan, like a pimp discovering sin in the whore house he was running six days a week, and preaching from on Sundays, declared that both Terrell and Williams had "failed" and had to be "renaissanced."
Somehow, just like this week, my colleagues at the Tribune and Sun-Times missed most of the context in their urge to be cool and track down ghetto gang stories. And, again as usual, the Duncanian publicity stunt worked, even to the point of having some of the same understudies and scriptwriters making sure everyone knew their places.
To the point:
If CPS and CHA hadn't been massively shifting around populations of poor people and privatizing everything in sight, a lot of these tragedies would not be playing out on the evenings news and elsewhere. But as long as the public's eye can be so easily and naively distracted by cheap publicity stunts, CPS will continue showing the replay of a show it first produced in 1996 and telling the audience that the whole thing is new, innovative, and every so cool...
