As CPS prepares to close a record number of schools, the fate of students and communities is in question.
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In the News: Emanuel gets his grades—on education
By: Cassandra West / May 01, 2012
Catalyst Chicago Publisher Linda Lenz analyzes Mayor Emanuel’s education initiatives for a special issue of Crain’s Chicago Business on the mayor’s first year in office.
Former Mayor Richard M. Daley, in an interview Monday night on WLS-Channel 7 News, said he doesn't think a longer school is the answer to providing a better education for Chicago students.
Chicago Public Schools announced Monday that Barbara Byrd Bennett, a national education consultant, will take over as the district's chief education officer on an interim basis following the resignation of Noemi Donoso. CPS also announced on Monday a replacement for Barbara Bowman as Early Childhood Officer. Beth Mascitti-Miller worked with Brizard in Rochester, N.Y., where she was a deputy superintendent of teaching and learning. (Tribune) Here's Catalyst Chicago's story.
A South Side grade school student’s father is suing Chicago Public Schools, claiming faculty failed to keep his son safe from a bully who attacked him in gym class. Darryl L. Starks Sr. filed the suit Monday on behalf of his son, Darryl L. Starks Jr., who was a student at Adam Clayton Powell Academy when he was attacked on May 2, 2011. (FOX News)
A source with close ties to Chicago's public education establishment has confirmed that Mayor Rahm Emanuel may close 100 Chicago public schools, according to the Chicago Daily Observer.
IN THE NATION
Magnet schools today have been forced to evolve, given legal barriers that bar using race to determine school enrollment and increasing pressure to provide more public school choices. And many large districts like Chicago, Los Angeles, and Baltimore County have maintained high numbers of magnet schools, even amid the economic downturn, and others are using magnets as a strategy to meet new goals around improving school quality. (Education Week)
Enterprising teachers have long scoured the Internet for ways to improve on their textbooks or local curriculum. Now, though, lessons accessed via Google are proliferating in the classroom as never before and are challenging the position of the powerful education publishing industry in public schools. (Washington Post)
re: school closures
I too have heard this figure of up to 100 schools being closed. I have not heard that the Mayor would make a public statement on this issue and found that to be interesting. I am opposed to CPS promoting a "vast expansion of charter schools," due to Chicago's continuing declines in low income student populations I believe such a vast expansion will only lead to existing charter schools losing students.
The claims of waiting lists for various charters and for that matter CPS magnet schools do not take into consideration the multiple number times the same family appears on wait lists for different schools. I know of one family that was on the wait list for two magnet schools and five different charter schools for example. Until I see a serious statitical review of wait list data I will remain skeptical.
If CPS is going to close numerous schools they should be torn down or sold off very rapidly rather than just putting them into storage. If existing charter schools want to buy the facilities at market rate prices that may be a logical thing to do. Existing CPS facilities being leased to charter schools for very little and for which the charters are charged facility fees should be sold off and CPS should get out of the landlord business all together in my opinion.
I do think the actual school closing process needs to be driven more by community population analysis, community based decision making and not driven by the current academic performance status of these schools.
Schools in poor communities will over time be both higher performing and lower performing. It is completely unrealistic to believe any school, including charter schools, in low income communities will be consistently higher performing over a period of years. We can see this with the urban schools that the late Ronald Edmonds, then Director of the Center for Urban Studies at Harvard University, identified 30 years ago as being effective. Some of these schools academically collapsed with various leadership changes over the years.
I have seen no evidence so far that Oliver Sicat Chief Portfolio Officer has the actual demographic knowledge of Chicago or authority within the CPS bureaucracy needed to effectively implement a rational school closing policy. Mr. Sicat may have been a very good math teacher in Boston and a good principal at UIC College Prep - Noble Street Charter School, but he has never published or written a paper on urban demographics or planning that I know of.
I do not believe CPS can close 100 schools without doing real damage to the education of poor children. I do think that there are communities in Chicago that are rapidly becoming under populated and there are movements of poorer residents of these communities to equally impoverished largely racially segregated suburban communities. But school closures and charter or even traditional school openings require serious projective analysis based on both data and the needs of the communities impacted. Up to now this has not happened in my opinion. This is what the Illinois General Assembly and the Task Force has called for and it has yet to have meaningfully taken place.
Rod Estvan
100 Schools to Close?
Did I miss something? they want to close 100 schools?
Is this going to be a post NATO announcement? Please clarify?
re: 100 schools
There is a link to the article in the story by Cassandra West above. If you read the link it does not provide a great deal of information, I had never heard there was going to be any type of public announcement by the Mayor as the article implies, nor did I hear the 100 number was fixed in stone.
Rod Estvan
I read it
I read it! I bet if he did announce, he would do it after NATO summit. He wouldn't want to appear anti education, nor would he want to start a teacher mass protest. It could be true. That new Chief ed officer they say is from Detroit. They have demolished Detroit Public Schools....maybe this is all going to happen? These are scary times...too bad, beacuse I have to support a mortage and a family and pay my Urban Education loans back to De Paul!
Sicat is only a face--mancuso still consults and Despenza
still has the numbers, even for aldermen too.
the politics of demography and school closures
I have no doubt that Mr. Sicat will have contractual relations and advice from former CPS demographers. But up to now what CPS has been doing with demographic analysis is to justify a predisposed strategy. Chicago’s numerous elementary schools were built and designed to provide schools within walking distance of the homes of children in highly concentrated communities. Converting many of these schools to charters simply makes zero sense because they will be required to enroll students from far outside the existing intake areas in order to survive.
There is no doubt that there are simply too many school facilities in some communities that have been depopulated and also have aging populations without children. But the real question is creating community based consensus for the closures and that can not be done by simply picking the highest scoring school in a geographic area and closing the rest. Because in six years with various staff changes, leadership changes, that school could very well academically slip.
Chicago’s population is declining and the school district needs neither more charter schools nor traditional schools. It also does not need to attempt to fill every school within five or ten percent of design capacity. It also seems likely that with the exception of certain students with disabilities the ISBE and the Illinois General Assembly will eventually eliminate transportation mandates for students all together.
There do not have to be school closure wars in Chicago, the existing process for school closures is creating those wars. Mr. Sicat has exhibited no skill in reducing these closure wars and attempting to create some level of consensus in the communities impacted by closures. It is also clear that no community wants to see the elementary school many members of that community graduated from closed and this is always going to be a difficult thing.
I went to college in North Dakota as an undergraduate even though I am a born and raised Chicagoan. That state went through massive rural depopulation and closed down many rural schools. It was true as many communities argued that the state was killing the heart of many small towns by closing schools. Some of these towns now sit abandoned, but because of the increased size of the average farm in the state due to improved farm machinery this was going to happen anyway. However, with the rise of the oil and natural gas industry other towns have grown in the last ten years and schools are being built. Time does not stand still and no school probably will exist forever be it in rural North Dakota or Chicago.
Rod Estvan
Rod I have been hearing about
Rod I have been hearing about CPS 100 schools closing next year for about 3 months now. Although there has been no official word from the mayor regarding the closures.
What Chicago-ans and residents of other large urban school districts have to realize is that we are experiencing a nation -wide trend to gentrify urban cities. Basically, school destabilization, closings and severe policing are the tools of choice to accomplish this goal.
If you look at small cities in Iowa, Minnesota and other states bordering Illinois you will find a mass exodus of young Chicagoan who have relocated to small towns. Most of these young adults have school aged children and have opted to relocate for a better quality education and lifestyle for their children. I assume that the same thing is happening across the country in states that border large urban school districts.
To justify the rationale for this exodus out of Chicago and other large urban districts, , underfunding schools and imposing very stringent testing mandates on children are strategies that have been used. Of course, students with little family support and economic stability have found it increasingly difficult to master these standardized test that are simply aimed at proving that students, teachers and parents of these lower-income communities are failures, thus needing "something to be done".
To sum it all up, after 10 years of Turn-a rounds. There has been little or no improvement in student achievement. Even with the onset of charter schools, we are seeing the same trends. Basically all that has happened is that large urban school districts have fewer minority, parents teachers and students.
If 100 schools are to close and we analyze past trends, we cam assume that most of these schools will be in minority communities. Since 97 of the 100 schools that have already closed have been in the African American community, I'm pretty sure that this trend will continue.
Linda Lenz piece Worst Ed Journalism of the Year
Is she serious? Tone-deaf to the cacophany that surrounds actual schools? (She has far too many wrinkles to play the part of ingenue.)
How can someone possibly write a story on the Mayor's first year on the job vis-a-vis education without mentioning how he has poisoned the relationship between teachers and staff and their employer? It isn't hyperbole. The relationship is toxic, and it threatens the first time in a quarter century the closing down of all schools in this city.
Get a clue, Linda. Principals may, indeed, be important. But just imagine 20,000 teachers being creatively insubordinate because they are fed up with the disrespect the mayor has shown them.
Work to Rule
my view on this matter is that all union staff start following the contract, including only doing work while being paid, nothing more and nothing less.
Work-to-rule is an industrial action in which employees do no more than the minimum required by the rules of their contract, and follow safety or other regulations to the letter to cause a slowdown rather than to serve their purpose. This is considered less disruptive than a strike or lockout; and just obeying the rules is less susceptible to disciplinary action. Notable examples have included nurses refusing to answer telephones and police officers refusing to issue citations. Refusal to work overtime, travel on duty or sign up to other tasks requiring employee assent are other manifestations of using work-to-rule as industrial action.
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