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Thursday Morning News Extras

The Austin Weekly commentary, although somewhat simplified, hits at least one nail on one head.

The participation of all those "West Side" leaders in the TAC process to create the "new schools" for "East Garfield Park" and "West Garfield Park" somehow left out the fact that Austin High School has been closed to the majority of high school age students from the Austin community since September 2004. (The last class from Austin graduated, as the Weekly notes, in June 2007, but the first 9th graders were excluded by Arne Duncan by September 2004).

The Austin reality, more than any other in Chicago (and there are several) demonstrates just how hypocritical the entire "New Schools" process is. Duncan is pushing an agenda of privatization behind a smokescreen of novelty. It is not an agenda of education.

Take the example of last year, when Duncan began talking about "underserved communities". Now the average person would think that Austin would qualify at the top of anybody's list as an "underserved community."

But that's not what Arne Duncan and the "New Schools" crowd meant. "Underserved, it turns out, is any wealthy community that can claim it needs a public private schools for its use. Irving Park Middle School was closed down and its (middle class and working class) students shipped east to Thurgood Marshall Middle. "Old Irving Park" got "Disney II". There is not one home within three blocks of "Disney II" (even in these tightened times) that the families of the Irving Park Middle School could have afforded. The pricey community was established by Arne Duncan as "underserved" and got the right to evict people from their school, then a "new" school for their children.

The same was done with Andersen, down in Bucktown. Declare the aspiring middle class (mostly white) people of the "new" community as the "underserved" and evict the others.

"Underserved" does not mean a community that needs improvements in its public elementary and high schools.

This week, the same crude crud was on display at the Board of Education meeting. Parents and others from Ogden elementary and Alcott elementary (again, two elementary schools in areas where the average home costs more than a half million dollars) are claiming that they need "new" high schools for their children because there are no viable options in the public school system. And Arne Duncan promotes this kind of logic! The expansion of Ogden (the Gold Coast's elementary school, at State and Oak) and Alcott (one of the two elementary schools serving the east end of Lincoln Park) has now been approved. Alcott and Ogden will become "high schools" under "New Schools" and "Renaissance 2010."

Meanwhile, the kids from the Austin community who want to go to "their" neighborhood public school can head four miles to the east. Last year, CPS quietly voted on one of the most ridiculous gerrymanders since Jim Crow. Manley High School (at Sacramento and Polk) is now the "neighborhood" high school for Austin (which has a perfectly good high school building, albeit a privatized one, at 219 N. Pine). Some of the Austin kids would have to travel five miles to get to their neighborhood high school under this program. And the Austin TAC (along with the two "Garfield Park" TACs) gets away with ignoring a reality that at any time between 1960 and the early 1990s would have been called racist and segregationist.

But, as Duncan will tell you, moving kids from Austin to Manley will have "no impact" on the demographics. Why? Because in both cases the kids who are getting hurt by "New Schools" and "Renaissance 2010" are poor and black, while those who have been discovered as "underserved" are among Chicago's most affluent (or all colors, by the way).

Chicago needs an Ambrose Bierce ("The Devil's Dictionary") or George Orwell ("Politics and the English Language") to do justice to the way in which Arne Duncan butcher's language, logic, history, and fact in the interest of pushing Renaissance 2010. Duncan (and his master, the mayor) are acting as if buying enough tall black guys to stand alongside them at media events will keep the public from noticing the fact that thousands of black children are being destroyed (and, in the case of Austin, have been destroyed) by these policies.

Thursday Morning News Extras

Meeks "extorting" money for Chicago Public Schools? Why is this crud worth publishing, Russo?