Marshall High and other turnaround high schools, in Chicago and nationally, face a thorny dilemma. Higher-performing students are being siphoned off through competition, driving down enrollment and raising tough policy questions about the future of these schools.
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Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
By: Alexander Russo / April 08, 2008
This may be old news to everyone one but me, but I didn't know until I read this article that Edwin Eisendrath, the former classroom teacher and alderman who once ran against Governor Rod, quit teaching because of a violent incident at his school:
He left teaching when a 12-year-old boy was stabbed after school. “I ran over there,” he said morosely. “There was
plenty of blood. I looked carefully. There was a hole. I asked somebody
else to run in [and] grab blankets, tear down curtains, whatever it
would take to keep [him] from shock until the ambulance arrived.”
The ambulance didn’t arrive in time and the boy died in Eisendrath’s arms. The school system handled it poorly, he said. The
school panicked and handed the case over to lawyers because, Eisendrath
said, they were concerned about litigation. There were problems that
existed outside of the classroom.
“I knew that we couldn’t fix the schools from the
inside,” Eisendrath said. He taught for a little more than a year
before he left.
Anyone know what school this was, or anything else about Eisendrath's stint as a teacher?
Link: From boy alderman to ahead-of-his-time Blagojevich foe, Eisendrath reflects on public life
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
Yes. "Wicker Park" is now Pritzker.
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
where was Wicker Park Elementary? Is is now Pritzker?
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
where was Wicker Park Elementary? Is is now Pritzker?
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
"...There are a lot of people using teaching in the inner-city as a jumping off point for "bigger and better things," you may not like it, but I'd rather have public policy folks, lawyers and doctors out there who've had experience with education. If they take even an ounce of their experience in the classroom with them, they'll be better at whatever career they pursue after teaching..." (Charlie, yesterday).
Monday I was at that "RFP" thing hosted by CPS and the Renaissance Schools Fund ($44 million of private money, not available to real public schools, to set the privatization agenda under the dictatorship of Eden Martin). There was a young lady at the table where they were distributing the materials, and when I asked her a question, someone nearby said, "Don't pick on her, George, she's just an intern..." I asked her what she was majoring in (and at what school) and got "Public policy. Northwestern." I asked her whether calculus was required for an advanced degree in public policy and got the answer I expected ("No"), so I didn't pursue a dozen other questions.
I agree with you, Charlie, both about people having inner city teaching experience (like Eisendrath truly did) and carrying that experience into other areas of work later. Well, that was then, and this is now.
For more than a decade, Chicago has been the national center of teacher bashing and scapegoating. That's why CPS only hires FNGs with little or no teaching experience, and suburban wannabes (often, tall guys with minority cred but no real reality behind their "good stories") for their "Turnaround" dictatorships.
This "paradigm shift" has filled the ranks of departments like "New and Charter Schools" with young men and women with Starbucks glazed eyes and not a clue about what life is like in an inner city classroom the day after one of your kids gets "popped" (or whatever the new jargon is). But who let them take over, and who gives them continued power over reality -- and the definition of value. As long as the majority allow that "bottom line" (test scores as a measure of the value of what we do in classrooms and schools) to rule, the teacher bashing will continue and continue and continue.
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
I completely agree that career teachers are the true heroes, and I think a lot of those folks who've taught for a few years and have gone onto other work would completely agree. To say, though, that these folks aren't making a real difference is ridiculous.
You may not respect Jonathon Kozol's stint in the classroom, but his writing has brought an enormous amount of attention to the problems faced by inner city teachers and has, for better or worse, helped inspire countless younger teachers to teach in urban school districts. With someone like Eisendrath, the way he looks at public policy will be forever changed by his experience in the classroom and hopefully for the better. There are a lot of people using teaching in the inner-city as a jumping off point for "bigger and better things," you may not like it, but I'd rather have public policy folks, lawyers and doctors out there who've had experience with education. If they take even an ounce of their experience in the classroom with them, they'll be better at whatever career they pursue after teaching.
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
The school was Wicker Park Elementary, where Eisendrath taught and served as union delegate in the mid-1980s.
Few inner city teachers had the range of options that Eisendrath had when he decided to teach, for a couple of years, alongside the rest of us. He did a good job, both as teacher and union delegate, but that fact that he could walk away from a traumatic teaching experience said more about his family's massive wealth than about the trauma in and of itself. There are hundreds (perhaps thousands) of teachers in Chicago's inner city who've experienced similar reality, some of us dozens of times over. The difference is that Ed Eisendrath didn't have to worry about holding on to the job, or humping 30 or 35 years to a pension. That's nothing personal about the guy. At least he had the heart to spend a few years in the classroom, and doing decent union work. But it's as much a fact "outside the school" as the reality of those kids Eisendrath talks about who sleep in bathtubs because of the gangsters' shooting wars outside their homes.
Over the years, our more affluent brothers and sisters have come and gone through Chicago's inner city schools, just like Jonathan Kozol (similarly so to Eisendrath) went as quickly as a bad meal through the Boston public schools 40 years ago. Most pass through with no more mention than any of the other FNGs who were there and then not. Some write books (almost always the same, often coached by their professors) about their harrowing experiences in Wicker Park, or North Lawndale, or out south where the projects once were the only horizon line.
Those who remain, year after year, are the ones who make a differences to the children, generation after generation, not the one-shot-Johnny wannabe teachers and would-be authors fantasizing a Pulitzer for their grief's narrative. The coaches, teachers, and counselors who don't have the Lake Shore Drive condo to call home, and the networks at Temple or Church that include guys like Norman Bobins.
Over time, those veteran teachers can always be identified. They don't do Power Point to hype their "vision" and they grumble every time the latest "Mission Statement" is served up. They've scrambled for basketballs or books or used computers for their classrooms, and collected old clothes every year for too many years to remember. Eventually, they get a little slower, but always wiser, than those who shoot in and then right back out to tell us the latest sure fire "In you just use this state-of-the-art" lesson plan and strategy thingy during teacher staff development day (like many will be suffering through Friday).
Veteran inner city teachers used to be respected, including by guys like Ed Eisendrath. And you could tell a veteran, male or female, young or old, by asking for what I used to call the "Count Back."
The "Count Back" -- or "The Long Count" -- is a simple exercise.
Name the most recent child you taught or knew at school who died too young. You knew that kid through your job. Your job was your career -- not some year or two slumming exercise because of the "reality" of it before you went into your Dad's law firm or took on the challenges of executive leadership for which you had been groomed. Name those who died a violent (or premature) death before reaching the age of 16, 18, or 20. That's what separates the veterans of the inner city schools from everyone else. That count.
Now name the one before that...
And the one before that...
And the one before that...
Even though you once vowed you'd never forget any of them -- the smiles, maybe the one day they came in with their homework not wrinkled, even though there were a dozen kids living in that West Side apartment without heat and it was a Chicago January -- one day the day comes when you can't remember a name you swore you'd never forget, a smile you can still see, perhaps even a smell you bought soap and clothes to help change...
But one day, if you've been in this business long enough, you'll miss one dead kid in that long count. And you'll shake a little, probably not to shake it off, and then go back to work.
The difference between today and when Ed Eisendrath taught at Wicker Park in from 1984 to 1987 or so is the treatment you get. If you're a veteran teacher today, you're being blamed for everything including that child's premature death. Instead of being respected, your work is being humiliated every time Mayor Daley stands with Martin Koldyke and Arne Duncan to announce the latest "turnaround".
Dalety didn't turn around the Latin Kings or Imperial Gangsters in Wicker Park when he was State's Attorney, or the Black P. Stones, GDs, Vice Lords, Ambrose, Bishops, Latin Dragons, Gaylords, SCRs, or a dozen others since he's become mayor.
No. Heroes like Richard M. Daley, Arne Duncan, and Martin Koldyke earn their medals by teacher bashing and reciting insulting one-liners, then conjuring up irrelevant solutions to problems they are part of.
Somebody Monday asked Arne Duncan whether he was going to ask Springfield to ban baseball bats as well as guns when he goes down state on his latest crusade and media events. That kind of question can only come from someone who knows what it's like to reach that point in the line on the Long Count...
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
For four years, he taught elementary school children in a predominantly Hispanic west side neighborhood...
http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-6424709.html
This was all I could find on the net
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
More evidence that we pay football coaches way too much.
I lost students - though none died in my arms. I also stayed for years after those losses, but also lost heart in working against societal forces that were much stronger than I. While we introduce merit pay measures and re-consider the national push toward "standards" and quantitative reads of students' abilities, I think the point of this story is still to remember the human element at the heart of it all. It's good for me to remember that the toll of these evils is still hard to take for many.
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
Chicago Teacher Man says it best:
http://nachoteacher.blogspot.com/
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
Thanks 1.04
One day I will be able to say what I really feel and want to write. Without the fear of being attacked.
Thanks you are an inspiration!
HiHo
Student Death Prompted Eisendrath Departure
What’s the point ?
Should we feel a sense of guilt over this? Old silverbacks like me
Buried the dead and taught on. We also buried our emotions.
But the one thing we did not do is quit. An old football coach once
Said sympathy can be found in the dictionary between shit and
Shiftless.