Atrocities (Susan Ohanian Speaks Out)

Atrocities

Federal Court Defendants Joel Klein & Ray Kelly: Our Education Mayor remains silent about police abuses of students in public schools
 Hentoff, who for decades has chronicled school abuses, says that not until the Bloomberg/Klein regime has he seen such flagrant dereliction of accountability at the very top of the school system for frequent abuse of students by police agents. By Nat Hentoff While Joel Klein was among those being seriously considered by Barack Obama for Secretary of Educationâ€”Chicago Superintendent Arne Duncan won outâ€”a civil rights complaint, demanding a jury trial, was filed in U.S. District Court here. The defendants include Chancellor Klein, Police Commissioner Kelly, the City of New York, and School Safety Agent Daniel O'Connell. The plaintiff is Carlos Cruz, father of Stephen Cruz, an 11th-grade student at Robert F. Kennedy Community High School in Flushing, Queens. Klein is a defendant in the lawsuit, which was filed by attorney Jeffrey Rothman, because he "is and was at all times, the Commissioner of Education . . . and is responsible, in whole or in part, for the creation . . . and enforcement of the policies and practices . . . herein. He is sued individually and in his official capacity." I have reported often here on the documented abuses of students, and even some teachers, by the School Safety Agents deployed in this city's schools under Kelly, Klein, and Michael Bloomberg (the latter two praised around the country as champions of "school reform"). Since the 1950s, I've written in columns and books on our schoolsâ€”and their chancellors from the worst to the best. But not until the Bloomberg/Klein regime have I seen such flagrant dereliction of accountability at the very top of the school system for frequent abuse of students by police agents. This Stephen Cruz case will be followed in next week's column by the even more outrageous treatment of 16-year-old Rohan Morgan at Hillcrest High School in Queens. Teaching fear of the police is part of the curriculum in the school systemâ€”of which Bloomberg is so proud that he is striving (with the help of the City Council) to control the schools permanently. On September 19, 2008, Stephen Cruz entered one of the stalls in the second-floor bathroom of his school and, as he leaned over to unbuckle his pants, School Safety Agent Daniel O'Connell â€”known as "Robocop" by the studentsâ€”smashed open the door without any warning, let alone justification, cutting Stephen's head below the hairline. Bleeding, dizzy, the lump on his head swelling, Cruz showed his blood to the attacker, who said, "That's life. It will stop bleeding"â€”and left to do his safety rounds. A fellow student in the bathroom helped Cruz to the principal's office to get medical help. Cruz's parents were called to the school and told by the principal that since "Robocop" was an employee of the NYPD, he had no power to discipline the SWAT man. But why had O'Connell knocked down the door? Stephen's father kept trying to find out, but was told that the Safety Agent didn't even have to submit a report to school officials. His immediate boss was School Safety Agent Supervisor Anthony Pelosi at the 107th Precinct. The impotent principal did schedule a meeting at the precinct to discuss the violence, but Pelosi abruptly canceled itâ€”with, of course, no explanation. Rothman said (as reported by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has been trying to teach Klein and Bloomberg the Bill of Rights for years, concerning these cases): "It is appalling that the system is so broken that the only way for a parent to stand up for his sonâ€” and to prevent the same things from happening to other childrenâ€”is to file a lawsuit and an Internal Affairs complaint." He added: "We shouldn't need attorneys to hold this man accountable for his shocking misconduct." But not only Robocop should be held accountable. (Place your bets on whether he'll even be chided in an NYPD Internal Affairs "investigation.") Where was the chancellor of this city's public school students? Where was the Education Mayor? Not shockedâ€”and not heard from. If there are civics classes in our schools, then teachersâ€”despite any fear of retaliation from the chancellorâ€”should be reading to students from Rothman's suit during the testing-for-tests time of the No Child Left Behind Act: "School Safety Agent Daniel O'Connell, acting under color of law and without lawful justification, intentionally, maliciously, and with a deliberate indifference toâ€”or a reckless disregard for the natural and probable consequencesâ€”caused injury and damage in violation of the plaintiff's constitutional rights . . ." As for the creepy cover-up, the lawsuit continues: "By their conduct and actions in covering up the conduct and actions of the School Safety Agent," the other culpable defendants include "Raymond Kelly and Joel Klein," who also scorned the constitutional rights of Stephen Cruz. This lawsuitâ€”and others are comingâ€”also focuses on the failure "to properly train, screen, supervise, or discipline" O'Connell and others in that chain of command. Most clearly accountable for that failure is, of course, Police Commissioner Kelly. Aside from what your flack may conjure up, what say you directly, Commissioner? Even more ultimately responsible for not bringing accountability and badly needed discipline to all of the potential defendants in this and other such lawsuits is the New York City Council leadership. As I've detailed in previous columns, the Student Safety Act, which has long been before the council, would finally compel transparency and accountability for these and other police practices in the schools. Only 28 of the 51 council members support the Act, but there has yet to be even a hearing. Council member Melissa Mark-Viverito, a co-sponsor of the Student Safety Act, emphasizes: "What happened to Stephen is a disturbing reminder of the deep flaws in our Student Safety model. Ensuring students' safety is not a controversial matter. We all want safe schools, and this bill helps us meet that goal." Of all big school systems in the country, only in New York does student safety also have to be protected from agents of the police. Why is there no hearing on the bill by the City Council? In the past, I've blamed Speaker Christine Quinn, but I now know that blocking this peril to the safety of students, especially in mainly black and Hispanic schools, is Queens Councilman Peter Vallone Jr., chairman of the Public Safety Committee, a majority of whose members support the Student Safety Act. Mr. Vallone has yet to respond to my calls to him and to his aides. An assistant has told investigative reporter Vladic Ravich of the Queens Chronicle that there aren't enough funds for the Civilian Complaint Review Board to handle the additional casework of parent complaints about the Robocops among the Safety Agents. To hell with these parents and their children?! Vallone has two daughters in the public schools. I guess they're safe, too. School Safety Agent O'Connell is now patrolling a middle school nearby.

— Nat Hentoff
Village Voice
2008-12-31

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower
 The idea that a university education is for everyone is a destructive myth. An instructor at a "college of last resort" explains why. This is a troubling essay. by Professor X . . . There seems, as is often the case in colleges, to be a huge gulf between academia and reality. No one is thinking about the larger implications, let alone the morality, of admitting so many students to classes they cannot possibly pass. The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forcesâ€”social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal studentsâ€”that have coalesced into a mini- tsunami of difficulty. No one has drawn up the flowchart and seen that, although more- widespread college admission is a bonanza for the colleges and nice for the students and makes the entire United States of America feel rather pleased with itself, there is one point of irreconcilable conflict in the system, and that is the moment when the adjunct instructor, who by the nature of his job teaches the worst students, must ink the F on that first writing assignment. . . . The Atlantic denies permission to post the whole article. You can read it by going to the url below. This essay raises issues few people want to talk aabout. Professor X teaches at a private college and at a community college in the northeastern United States.

— Professor X
The Atlantic
2009-01-01
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/college

Did Barack Obama Just Appoint An Underqualified Stooge and Privatizer Secretary of Education?
 Black Agenda Report's Bruce Dixon interviews Chicago educator and activist George Schmidt. The short answer seems to be "yes." Before being appointed CEO of the Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan never saw the inside of a classroom as a teacher. This is probably a good thing, since Duncan does not possess the academic qualifications to be even a substitute teacher. Worse still, Duncan's idea of improving inner-city schools in Chicago is handing them over to corporate-run charter schools or converting them to military academies. This, says longtime Chicago educator and activist George Schmidt, is not the change we voted for. This is a transcript of a December 22, 2008 Bruce Dixon interview with longtime Chicago educator and activist George Schmidt broadcast on WRFG 89.3 FM Atlanta. BD: Our next guest George Schmidt was a Chicago Public School teacher for 28 years. A longtime union activist, he was once a candidate for presidency of the 28,000 member Chicago Teachers Union, one of the largest union locals of any kind in the nation. He is a founding member of Substance and Substance News, an organization and a newspaper originally founded to represent the views of Chicago's substitute teachers. Substance News, which you can find online at substancenews.net is still required reading for anybody who wants an unfiltered view of the road public education has taken in Chicago and nationwide over the last two decades. How you doin' Mr. Schmidt? GS: It's been a fun week, to be sure. "This is not the kind of change we needed or we hoped for." BD: We've got a lot to cover. Can you tell us about your own background for the first minute or so of this? GS: Well, I spent almost all my public school teaching career in the inner city high schools of Chicago, starting at Dusable in the upper grade center, and teaching at schools like Manley, Marshall, Collins and Tilden. My last years of teaching were at Bowen High School on the city's far south side near the Indiana border where I taught English and where I also served as union delegate and what we called the school security coordinator. During those years I was also very active in the union, as you pointed out. At one point I got over 40% of the vote in a race for president of the Chicago Teachers Union, but I didn't win. BD: Yeah, it takes a little more than 40%. Well, we're talking to Mr. Schmidt because last week president-elect Barack Obama tapped Arne Duncan, who heads the Chicago Public Schools to be his Secretary of Education. Now Chicago has the third largest school system in the nation, so if you can make it work for the citizens of Chicago maybe you ought to get a chance to do it nationwide. So how's it workin' in Chicago, man? GS: Basically, it's not. It's not working for the majority of children in the city and it's certainly not working for the majority of teachers. In order to understand how that particular sentence can be nuanced, you have to understand two things. The first is the dominance of the corporate narrative of â€œschool reformâ€. In 1995 democratic control of the Chicago Public Schools was taken out of the hands of parents, teachers and citizens and put into the hands of Chicago mayor Richard M. Daley. A new law which was passed by the all- Republican state government at the time gave Mayor Daley the power to appoint a seven member school board eventually --- at first he appointed a five member thing that was called the School Reform Board of Trustees --- and the power to appoint a newly created chief executive officer based on the corporate model to run the Chicago Public Schools. Daley was also given power over the entire school system's budget, and for the first time in 17 years, the school system was freed from the oversight of an outside entity called the School Finance Authority. What Daley did since then was basically massively increase the public relations spin that was put on every activity performed in Chicago, to the point where the gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet. BD: We hear a lot about â€œreforming education.â€ I'm from Chicago, and back in the 80s when I was involved in school reform, school reform meant giving more power to parents and to rank and file teachers, power to determine curriculum, even to let parents evaluate the performance of teachers and programs and principals. You talked about the corporate narrative of school reform. Just what is that? GS: The corporate narrative is the dictatorial model that you get in any corporation under a chief executive officer or CEO. And just as it's failed now miserably in corporate America, with the collapse of Wall Street and the finance industry, it's failed in the public schools as well. But just as a year ago you would find very few dissenters on the private sector analogy so today we still find not a loud enough voice for those who dissent against the claims that the corporate model (of education reform) has succeeded. Basically what you're talking about by the late 1980s we had one of the most democratic models â€“ with a small d â€“ of school improvement anywhere in the United States. In 1988 Illinois passed a law which gave an elected Local School council of ten or eleven members the power at every school to hire and fire the principal to set curriculum and to have an enormous say over the budget. The majority of those Local School Council members were parents. Those of us who were active at the time participated in those elections and those processes. BD: So that was school reform in the eighties. GS: That was school reform in the eighties, and that grew primarily out of the work of Harold Washington who we elected mayor of the city of Chicago in 1983 in a mass movement that locally rivaled the mass movement which just elected Barack Obama president of the United States. BD: So now we've replaced democratic school reform that gave parents the power with what exactly? I understand one of Arne's pet things is giving public high schools over to the US military. GS: Yeah, that's one example of several and it's a very good one. Beginning in the first days of the 21st century, literally Chicago instituted military high schools. And we're not talking about high schools that have ROTC programs, we're talking about high schools that are run by and for the military. The first of those was established in the heart of Bronzeville, the south side community at 35th and Giles, in the old armory there. It's now the Chicago Military Academy. Since then they've set up two more army high schools. Carver and Phoenix, a Marine high school and a naval academy which is named the Hyman Rickover Naval Academy inside Senn High School. BD: Except for the naval academy operation inside Senn High School all of these are in African American communities, are they not? GS: Yes they are. HG: George this is Heather Gray. Is this a model that's in other parts of the country as well? Are other cities doing this? GS: No. HG: So this is unique to Chicago. GS: This is unique to Chicago. GS: Most places where you have more democracy, even where you have this CEO type dictatorship now, the citizens are better positioned to resist it than we are here in Chicago. BD: In chicago, for the benefit of our audience, we're in Atlanta GA now, the mayor is Richard Daley. 2009 marks his 20th year in office. His father was the mayor too for almost as long, from about 1956 if I remember right to 1975, I think, eighteen or nineteen years. So out of the last fifty or so years, for forty of them the city of Chicago has been run by the Daley clicque, the Daley Regime, or as we call it in Chicago, the Machine. Arne Duncan, is he a product of the Machine. GS: Exactly, Daley as I pointed out, in 1995 was given dictatorial power over the Chicago Public School system. It was based upon the lie that the system as a whole had failed, and the repetition of that lie from the eighties on. Daley has appointed two CEOs and roughly two school boards since then. Both of the CEOs have been white non-educators who replaced African American educators. Both of the CEOs had no experience in education or in corporate America. This is an important point since it's supposedly a corporate model. They were funamentally political puppets who would do his bidding. BD: The predecessor to Mr. Duncan (in Chicago) he's a guy named Paul Vallas, isn't he? GS: That's true. Mr. Vallas came to the chief education job in Chicago through his position as budget director at City Hall under Mayor Daley. HG: George, just going back to the military model (of education) again. What have been Barack Obama's comments about this, if any at all. "The gap between the reality of the public schools we have in our city and the claims that have been made about them is as great as any between fact and fiction anywhere on the planet." GS: I haven't heard comment from Barack Obama himself, and I've known him since he was in the Illinois State Senate, and I was working for the Chicago Teachers Union. Never to my knowledge, and that may be contradicted by something on the record, did he comment on this assault on the openness of Chicago high schools. But his newly incoming chief of staff Rahm Emanuael has been a proud proponent of the military academies and even bragged on one occasion I was covering a press conference and he was with Mayor Daley that he got a million dollar earmark specifically for the military academies while he was in the US House of Representatives as my congressman. BD: So it does say something that out of all the superintendents of school systems, CEOs or whatever nationwide, Barack Obama reached around and found one that not only liked the corporate model but liked the military model too. Since we're talking about Chicago's unique contribution to education on the national stage, let's stick with Paul Vallas. You said Paul Vallas got his start just an average guy on the budget team on the City Hall budget team. Where did Mr. Vallas go after leaving the Chicago Public Schools> GS: After Daley dumped Vallas in 2001, he was picked up by Tom Ridge, the governor of Pennsylvania who was trying to privatize the Philadelphia school system. Vallas was made head of the Philadelphia school system in mid 2002 after a failed attempt to get himself elected governor of Illinois. He ran Philadelphia for four years I believe, the chronology may be a little off. Presently he's been sent to New Orleans where the public school system has been obliterated after Hurricane Katrina and replaced by a system of primarily charter schools, many of which have been modeled on the charter school privatization plans originally hatched here in Chicago. BD: Arne Duncan is going to be the nation's number one guy on education. Surely this guy must have years and years of classroom and administrative experience. GS: Wrong. He has none. BD: So he's never been in a classroom? GS: No. BD: Except as a student, perhaps. GS: He talks now, as he tries to brush over his resume, about how when he was a student at the very privileged University of Chicago Lab School where his father was a professor at the University of Chicago, that after school he would go to a tutoring program his mother ran in that area north of the University of Chicago called Kenwood, where he apparently, according to Arne's narrative, helped poor black children with their homework. That's the extent of Arne Duncan's actual educational experience or praxis. His career after Harvard, where he supposedly got a BA in Sociology, I've never got to see a resume, was in professional basketball... HG: What do you mean you haven't been allowed to see a resume? Why do you say that? You've asked for a resume and you've never seen one? GS: For the past 14 years we've asked for the curriculum vitaes and resumes of top officials of the Chicago Public Schools under the Freedom of Information Act. And the answer we get every time we repeat this request is that this is classified privileged personnel information. BD: Of course the new Obama administration is pledged to openess and transparency everywhere, so I'm sure that Arne's resumes and cv's and all that will surface really soon. GS: If that's the case, people are going to find out that he spent most of his adult life either playing basketball or working with some very wealthy financiers from his old neighborhood of Hyde Park in Chicago. BD: Since we are talking about applying this Chicago model of public education nationwide, what has the regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that don't meet testing goals which is now national policy thanks to No Child Left Behind meant to Chicago â€“ oh, and one other thing I'd like to see if I can get your comment on is that Hillary Clinton at one point said let's repeal No Child Left Behind while Barack was saying, well, he didn't quite say mend it but don't end it, but something like that. So what has the regime of high stakes testing done for African Americans in Chicago and public education in Chicago? GS: Basically the vast majority of the schools that have been closed for supposed academic failure, which means low test scores, have been those schools which served a populaiton of 100% poor black children via a staff that was almost always majority black teachers and usually a black principal. Since Arne Duncan took over in 2001, he has closed over 20 elementary schools. Most of them have been privatized into charter schools, and he's closed six high schools. In all the cases I know of, the majority of the staffs of those schools who were then kicked out of union jobs and forced on the road to try to get new jobs, were majority black teachers and principals, many of which I knew personally. The six high schools he closed, Austin HS, Calumet HS, Collins HS, Englewood HS, Orr HS, and Harper HS, were either all black, in the case of five of them, or majority black and Latino in the case of Orr. That's the active record of what Arne Duncan has done in his school closings for which Barack Obama has praised him. BD: We're not seeing much of any criticism of Barack Obama's nominations, especially not this nomination...I understand there was a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education soon after the nomination was announced, and some people who were at that meeting took issue with the nomination. Can you tell us about that? "More than a dozen teachers and community activists from seven schools got up and exposed Duncan's public record of sabotaging public education." GS: If you don't mind I'll give you a six day backup of that. The teaser stories began on December 11. On that day, Margaret Spelling, who's George Bush's Secretary of Education, came to Chicago to stand on stage with Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley and praise the (teacher) merit pay plan that they'd introduced jointly, and to say that Arne Duncan was the same type of educational leader that she and George Bush favored. By Monday the 15th, word was out around Chicago that Duncan was probably the front runner for the Secretary of Education... BD: He plays ball with the president-elect. GS: Exactly. On the night of the 15th it was made official. Barack Obama held a press conference with Joe Biden at Dodge School on the 16th. On the 17th, the Board of Education had its regular monthly meeting scheduled for downtown Chicago. Even though they apparently, expected it to be a love fest for Arne Duncan, what happened was that more than a dozen teachers and community activists from seven schools got up and exposed Duncan's public record of sabotaging public education, of privatizing schools, of union busting, and of fraudulently cooking the educational statistics books. By the middle of the meeting Duncan had walked out for an hour and these testimonies continued to go on. By the end of the meeting members of the board were heatedly arguing with the teachers, and after the meeting two of the teachers were threatened. Members of Duncan's staff called their principals demanding to know why they had been allowed to take the day off work to talk about Arne Duncan's crimes (against public education) before a school board meeting. BD: Now I haven't been to a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education in a long time, but it's hard to believe that the day after Duncan had been tapped to be Secretary of Education, it's hard to believe that room wasn't full of corporate media. We haven't seen or heard anything about this. Have we? Or did I miss it? GS: No, the dog and pony shows were on the 16th, at Dodge School where Barack Obama made the announcement with Duncan sitting there. At the Board of Education (meeting), one of the most interesting things that happened... was that not one of the TV stations was there to film or video any of this activity during the board meeting. The only photographer there besides me, because I cover every board meeting for Substance, was a woman from the Chicago Tribune and the only photograph the Tribune did was of Barbara Easton Watkins, who according to speculation here, is in line to succeed Duncan here in Chicago. The TV stations boycotted the meeting completely, the story in the Tribune was a wacky one that ignored most of what happened in the meeting. The Sun-Times which is our other major daily newspaper, covered the meeting slightly accurately, and NPR had a reporter there who missed 98% of what was actually going on, typical for the way Chicago Public Radio has been covering this type of story. BD: The regime of high stakes testing and closing schools that came into national prominence which became national policy with No Child Left Behind, then is going to be with us for a while. What does that do to public education? Does it work? GS: First of all, it has gradients. As soon as I say this you'll know what I am talking about. Public education in the United States is not a unified system of equal access for all children. It's a highly stratified system of at least four or five components. In the wealthy suburbs of any major city you'll find some of the best public schools anywhere on the planet. In Chicago we're talking about Wilmette, Winetka, the north shore, Glen Ellyn in the western suburbs, where the high schools are just everything you could want for your children if you could only afford a home in those areas. BD: OK. GS: You move from there and you have rural schools in some of the most challenging schools in some of the most desolate parts of rural North Dakota or Montana. When you get to our cities and the immediate suburbs which have declined industrially too, right now what we have is a three part system, Chicago is the exemplar of that. We have a magnet school system which selects kids on the basis of IQ scores and test scores in kindergarten or the first grade, and keeps them in that magnet school system for twelve years, and that's one of the best school systems you'll find anywhere. Michelle Obama is a graduate of Whitney Young High School which is a part of that system, the magnet and elite schools in Chicago... BD: We're down to our last minute and a half... GS: Well then, basically... the place where the impact of high stakes testing has been most devastating has been in those schools which serve the poorest children with the fewest resources and in the most challenging environments. In that area, the schools have not been improved, but instead the teachers and schools have been under attack for failing at things the society has never taken responsibility for. BD: Last question, if you can do this in ten or twenty seconds or so, people in their millions or tens of millions voted for change. Insofar as education goes, are we gonna get it? GS: If this the kind of change we needed, then I am still glad I voted for Barack Obama. I'm proud I was able to publish pictures of him and our colleagues. But this is not the kind of change we needed or we hoped for here in Chicago, we the people who supported that man, and who've known him and his wife for years and years. Black Agenda Report's managing editor Bruce Dixon is himself an exiled Chicagoan now living in suburban Atlanta. he can be reached at bruce.dixon(at)blackagendareport.com. George Schmidt is the editor/publisher of Substance, the only education newspaper of resistance. Subscribe by sending $16 to: Substance 5132 W. Berteau Avenue Chicago, IL 60641-1440

— Bruce Dixon and George Schmidt
Black Agenda Report
2008-12-23
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=944&Itemid=1

Arne Duncan and Neoliberal Racism
 Readers of <a href="http://www.substancenews.net"> Substance</a> have had a close up examination of Arne Duncan's tenure as the mayor's right-hand man in running Chicago's schools. Barack Obama likes to play basketball with his friend Arne Duncan, but does that make Duncan worthy of the nation's top education spot? If Obama's appointees are a reflection of the president-elect's own world view, this one is quite disturbing. Paul Street writes: "Privatization, union-busting (charter and contract schools operate union-free), excessive standardized testing, teacher-blaming, military schooling, and the rollback of community input on school decisions - these are the interrelated hallmarks of private school graduate Arne Duncan's six and a half years at the helm of" the Chicago Public Schools. This article previously appeared on <a href="http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/20050"> ZNet</a> on Dec. 25, 2008. by Paul Street "NO SCHOOL LEFT UNSOLD" Educational justice advocates are understandably displeased with President Elect Obama's appointment of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Arne Duncan to the position of Education Secretary in the next White House. As the Chicago public school teacher Jesse Sharkey notes, "In the past couple years, Duncan has been turning public schools over to private operators - mainly in the form of charter and contract schools - at a rate of about 20 per year. Duncan has also resuscitated some of the worst â€˜school reform' ideas of the 1990s, like firing all the teachers in low-performing schools (called â€˜turnarounds'). At the same time, he's eliminated many Local School Councils (LSCs) and made crucial decisions without public input...Charter schools and test-score driven school â€˜choice' have been the watchwords of Duncan's rule in Chicago" (Sharkey 2008). [1] University of Illinois at Chicago education professor Kevin Kumashiro notes that Duncan's Chicago policies have been "steeped in a free-market model of school reform" that feeds the drop-out rate, increases segregation, and does little if anything to increase student achievement. "Duncan's track record is clear," says Kumashiro: "Less parental and community involvement in school governance. Less support for teacher unions. Less breadth and depth in what and how students learn as schools place more emphasis on narrow high-stakes testing. More penalties for schools but without adequate resources for those in high-poverty areas." (Kumashiro 2008). Privatization, union-busting (charter and contract schools operate union-free), excessive standardized testing, teacher-blaming, military schooling, and the rollback of community input on school decisions - these are the interrelated hallmarks of private school graduate [2] Arne Duncan's six and a half years at the helm of CPS. It's all very consistent with the legacy of his predecessor and mentor, the roving urban schools chief and leading privatization enthusiast Paul Vallas [3]. It is little wonder that Duncan recently won the support of the leading Republican New York Times columnist David Brooks (Brooks 2008). "EXAMINATION SOLDIERS" AND "DEAD WEIGHT" Under Duncan as under Vallas, teachers in Chicago's predominantly black and Latino and highly segregated [4] schools have experienced relentless pressure to gear instruction towards all-powerful standardized examinations. Those tests determine which schools are honored as successful and which are shamed as "failures" and sanctioned - often with severe budgetary consequences - and even closed outright. The "high-stakes testing" regime that has prevailed in Duncan's CPS often makes the inner-city classroom experience unimaginably oppressive. It privileges the authoritarian, mind-dulling search for the narrow-spectrum right answer over the democratic and mind-opening pursuit of the good question. It emphasizes rote, quasi-vocational memorization over the cultivation of intelligent, well-rounded citizenship capacities and creative vision. As Jonathan Kozol notes, it subordinates "critical consciousness" to the "goal of turning minority children into examination soldiers - unquestioning and docile followers of proto-military regulations" (Kozol 2004). In Chicago as across the nation, test-based "skill and drill" instruction is offered mainly in impoverished Latino and black schools. "Affluent public or private schools," Asa Hillard III has noted, "rarely if ever use the scripted non-intellectual programs. This is the new segregation" (Hillard 2004). Beyond its deadening impact on children's passion for engaged learning and critical thought, the testing regime drives many teachers away from urban schools. Those teachers prefer (richer and whiter) places where students and parents would never tolerate the "teacher-proof" curriculum that predominates in inner-city schools. The testing regime is also intimately related to an ongoing black and Latino graduation rate crisis [5] in Chicago's public schools. High-stakes testing creates a powerful school incentive to raise scores in the easiest possible way - by pushing low-scoring students out. Early in the Duncan era at CPS, an assistant principal of one inner-city Chicago high school told reporters that his school was "penalized for these [poorly performing, that is, poor] kids. We want quality more than quantity. If that means removing dead weight, we will remove dead weight'" (Moore 2003). One frequent practice in Chicago high schools under Duncan has been to drop students from the school's roster for poor attendance and then refuse their request to be reenrolled. Another common method for eliminating "underachieving" students is simple expulsion (Orfield et al., 2004). Another major test-score booster is educational gentrification - the closing of neighborhood schools serving primarily poor and minority students and their re-opening as "new schools" with more privileged students recruited from upscale blocks and across the city (a topic to which I turn in greater detail below). "A NEW FORM OF TRACKING" The CPS under Vallas and Duncan has maintained "a variety of differentiated programs, schools, and instructional approaches" that reflect and deepen sharp divisions of race and class. As post-industrial "global Chicago" has increasingly seen its labor market bifurcated between privileged, higher-end knowledge workers tied to the world economy and an expanding mass of low-wage service workers (Sassen 2004), the city's public schools have provided one type of educational experience for children from the disproportionately white first group and another for children from the disproportionately black and Latino second group. The elite category of educational programming includes "elementary magnet schools," "regional gifted centers," "grade seven to twelve Academic Centers," "traditional magnet high schools," "International Baccalaureate Programs," College Prep Regional Magnet High Schools," and "Math, Science and Technology Academies." These more privileged schools and programs within CPS enjoy superior resources and practices. They commonly exhibit a relaxed and open pedagogical environment that encourages free inquiry, critical and experimental thought, autonomous and democratic expression, and the collective sharing of ideas and knowledge. Often permitted to bypass desegregation rules in picking their selective and disproportionately white student base, they are predominantly located in and draw from upper-income and often gentrifying areas where "good schools" are considered critical "real estate anchors" required to keep and to attract middle- and upper-class residents. "One of the major complaints of teachers in regular high schools," DePaul University (Chicago) education professor Pauline Lippman finds, "is that the magnets and specialty programs have drawn away most of the high-achieving students, leaving everyone demoralized as neighborhood high schools are perceived to be â€˜for losers' (as one teacher put it)." The non-elite category includes vocational high schools deploying "scripted direct instruction" methods using "teacher-read scripts" and teaching "mastery of a fixed sequence of skills" in accord with "behaviorist" teachings on the supposed limited capacities of "economically disadvantaged students." It also includes "Education to Career Academies" with a strong "vocational" emphasis, and highly regimented military schools that enforce extreme discipline and are run by officers from the United States Armed Forces. The second and inferior category of "military and prison prep" schools and programs are disproportionately located in low-income black and Latino neighborhoods. They are characterized by constricted, monotonous, and deskilled teaching and learning methods, repressive "Zero Tolerance" discipline approaches that produce extreme levels of suspension and expulsion, a ubiquitous police-state presence (replete with metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs), high teacher burnout and turnover, and the steering of students along a narrow "basic skills" track designed to place them in entry-level positions at the bottom of the city's occupational pyramid. There is little place in the city's black schools and its expanding number of remedial and vocational programs for "learning self-determination, collectivity, and critical analysis of the world and one's place in it, or self-control for ethical ends." It all amounts to a "new form of [racialized] tracking" in which "the academic track is more differentiated from the other tracks and more spatially separate than in the old comprehensive high school" (Lippman 2004, 42-57). "I LOVE THE SENSE OF DISCIPLINE" Here is a recent newspaper account of military-style public schooling in Chicago: "Samantha Acevedo stands at attention while the chief yeoman stares her down and orders her to recite the Navy's 5th General Order from memory." "Dressed in a uniform of black pants and a crisp, white button-down shirt, she answers in a near-whisper: â€˜To quit my post only when properly relieved.'" "She is no raw Navy recruit being put through basic training, but a 15-year-old freshman at Hyman G. Rickover Naval Academy, one of Chicago's five military-style public schools. About 1,800 students in all are enrolled in the schools." "The nation's third-largest district embraced the concept in 1999, and now has more such academies than any other school system in the nation. "The Chicago district runs the academies, and the curriculum is similar to that of regular high schools. But the students are required to enroll in Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps, operated by the Pentagon, and the regimen includes uniform inspections, drills, and lessons in military history." "...At Rickover, named for the admiral considered the father of the nuclear submarine, a student â€˜watch' is posted at the entrance, standing attention when the principal passes. Students wear military-style JROTC uniforms and are called â€˜recruits' until they earn the title â€˜cadet.' Each class starts with a roll call in which students answer â€˜On board, sir!'"(Tareen 2007). Chicago's five military high schools, located in black ghetto neighborhoods and Latino barrios, are dedicated to molding youth into obedient citizens who know how to take directions and display a strong "work ethic" and a related eagerness to please employers and customers. The military schools, Lippman notes, "single out some youth for their successful accommodation to a system of race and class discipline and set them apart from others criminalized" by the CPS' "Zero Tolerance" policy and by the city's anti-gang law (which permits the police to forbid the gathering of more than three black youth in one place). "Those newly disciplined by the army" in the city's military high schools "are explicitly defined by their difference from others like them whom are, by implication, out of control and menacing." By Lippman's significant observation, "the fact that the military programs can turn [black Chicago] youth into models signifies that it is the youth (and their families and communities), not racism, not economic policies of disinvestment, not real estate developers, not demonization in the media, that are responsible for their lack of a productive future." By targeting black and Latino youth for special authoritarian discipline, the military schools help make Chicago seem "safe" for growing white "upscale enclaves" (Lippman 2004, 57-60, 69) - another reflection of a highly racialized white-suburban "moral panic over the city" (Macek 2006) that helps drive the long march of urban black and Latino youth into mass incarceration facilities that function as leading job-providers in predominantly white rural communities (Street 2002). At the same time, Chicago's military high schools function as a recruitment tool for Pentagon authorities. The Armed Forces are under pressure to find human chattel for Superpower's colonial wars and to staff a giant global empire that includes more than 770 bases located in more than 130 countries. And the military calculates (with reason) that many inner-city youth have nowhere better to go than the military to make a living. We can be sure that the Pentagon high schools' "military history" courses refuse to tell basic truths about the long record of U.S. imperial criminality, including (for example) the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Filipinos at the turn the century, the murder of 2 to 3 million Indochinese in the 1960s and 1970s, and the killing of more than 1 million Iraqis since March of 2003. By the fall of 2009, Chicago will become the first school district in the country to host military high schools from all four branches of the U.S. military: Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines (Tareen 2007). Chicago has more military high schools than any school district in country (Sharkey 2008). Duncan, who claims to "oppose war" in accord with a Quaker upbringing in the liberal Chicagop university neighborhood of Hyde Park, has refused to heed teachers and parents who protest the militarization of public education (Sharkey 2008). Speaking of his Pentagon high schools after the briefly protested introduction of the "Rickover Naval Academy" in Chicago's North Side Senn High (largely Latino), Duncan said that "These are positive learning environments. I love the sense of leadership. I love the sense of discipline" (quoted in Tareen 2007). Duncan's military high schools could contribute many recruits to Obama's promised expansion of the criminal U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and to related deadly U.S. incursions into Pakistan. "REN 2010": ABANDONING "UNDERPERFORMING" (POOR) KIDS "WHO NOBODY WANTS" As part of the drive to help make Chicago "safe" for the business and professional class, Duncan closed thirteen predominantly black neighborhood schools (seven elementary schools and six high schools) between 2002 and 2006. He fired those schools' unionized teachers and staff as punishment for low test scores - the core definition of "poor school performance" under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. His initial closings anticipated the 2004 unveiling of what the city labeled "Renaissance 2010" - an ambitious plan to close 75 "underperforming" neighborhood schools and replace them with 100 smaller and "restructured," non-union charter and contract schools. "Underperforming" is code language for poverty-afflicted. As serious educational researchers have known since at least the federal Coleman Report, released more than thirty-three years ago, concentrated student poverty is by far and away the main predictor of low marks on standardized examinations (Rothstein 2004). The "Ren2010" plan was immediately embraced by the city's longstanding downtown corporate "leadership" organization the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, which pledged to raise $25 million on its behalf. Renaissance 2010's board, appointed by the city's business-friendly Mayor Richard M. Daley, was loaded with big-time corporate class chieftains, including the Chairman of McDonald's and the CEO of Northern Trust. These and other leading capitalists are drawn to Chicago "school reform's" promise to hand public education over to supposedly all-knowing masters of the so-called "free market," shorn of obnoxious input from teacher unions, parents, students, and community members. Numerous local parent, education, and community activists have claimed that the city's much touted "school reform" plan advances racial displacement and real estate and commercial gentrification. Consistent with this charge (or observation), the new and purportedly "improved" schools that have replaced closed ones cap the number of students who can attend from the local communities in which they are often set. Of the 52 new charter and contract schools Duncan opened (even as total city enrollment fell) between 2003 and early 2006, the great majority emerged in neighborhoods where upper-end real estate development was coming in and low-income residents were being priced out. Most of the new schools were and remain open to applicants across the city and do not reserve seats for local students displaced by closings. Unlike neighborhood schools where any child residing in the local attendance area can enroll at any point during the school year, Duncan's new schools limit the number of community students who can be admitted and set an enrollment deadline. Once local enrollment targets are met, the new charter and contract schools are not obligated to let any more local students attend. As the educational monthly journal Catalyst Chicago has noted, poor and "troubled families are less likely to research and apply for the new â€˜choice' schools." Their children end up back in a shrinking number of old and relatively neglected neighborhood schools that are loaded down with what one Chicago high school principal calls "those kids who nobody wants'" (Paulsen 2004; Catalyst Chicago 2005; Lippman 2005; Lippman 2006; Duffrin 2006; Mullman and Hinz 2006). This and other selective forms of socioeconomic "creaming" help explain how some of Duncan's charter and contract schools have been able to score modest standardized achievement gains in recent years. "I'M TRYING TO IMPROVE THE PORTFOLIO" Anyone who doubts that Duncan is fully on board with the corporate schools agenda should read a recent essay by Left education professors Henry Giroux and Kenneth Saltman. The essay, which merits lengthy quotation, includes some remarkable reflections on a chilling speech that Duncan delivered to business elites and privatization activists on "Ren 2010" last May. According to Giroux and Saltman, (at least one of whom appears to have infiltrated the top-down gathering where Duncan spoke last spring): "One particularly egregious example of Duncan's vision of education can be seen in the conference he organized with the Renaissance Schools Fund. In May 2008, the Renaissance Schools Fund, the financial wing of the Renaissance 2010 plan operating under the auspices of the Commercial Club, held a symposium, â€˜Free to Choose, Free to Succeed: The New Market in Public Education,' at the exclusive private club atop the Aon Center. The event was held largely by and for the business sector, school privatization advocates, and others already involved in Renaissance 2010, such as corporate foundations and conservative think tanks. Significantly, no education scholars were invited to participate in the proceedings, although it was heavily attended by fellows from the pro-privatization Fordham Foundation and featured speakers from various school choice organizations and the leadership of corporations. Speakers clearly assumed the audience shared their views." "Without irony, Arne Duncan characterized the goal of Renaissance 2010 creating the new market in public education as a â€˜movement for social justice.' He invoked corporate investment terms to describe reforms explaining that the 100 new schools would leverage influence on the other 500 schools in Chicago. Redefining schools as stock investments he said, â€˜I am not a manager of 600 schools. I'm a portfolio manager of 600 schools and I'm trying to improve the portfolio.' He claimed that education can end poverty. He explained that having a sense of altruism is important, but that creating good workers is a prime goal of educational reform and that the business sector has to embrace public education. â€˜We're trying to blur the lines between the public and the private,' he said. He argued that a primary goal of educational reform is to get the private sector to play a huge role in school change in terms of both money and intellectual capital. He also attacked the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), positioning it as an obstacle to business-led reform..." "...[Duncan's] statements and those of others at the symposium belied a deep hostility to teachers unions and a desire to end them (all of the charters created under Ren2010 are de-unionized)...Duncan effusively praised one speaker, Michael Milkie, the founder of the Nobel Street charter schools, who openly called for the closing and reopening of every school in the district precisely to get rid of the unions." It "became clear," Giroux and Saltman ad, "that Duncan views Renaissance 2010 as a national blueprint for educational reform." Sadly, the next Education Secretary's "vision" portends "the end of schooling as a public good and a return to the discredited and tired neoliberal model of reform that conservatives love to embrace" (Giroux and Saltman 2008). "IF THE ONE WOULDN'T TRUST HIS KIDS TO DUNCAN..." The record of class- and race-based educational apartheid in Richard M. Daley's Chicago is incomplete without reference to the special advantages enjoyed by the disproportionately white children who attend the city's elite private schools. The educational privileges granted to children in Chicago's best public schools are probably slight compared to those bestowed upon students in the Near North Side's "baby Ivy" schools (Francis Parker and the Latin School) and in the South Side's University of Chicago Laboratory School (in Hyde Park), where parents pay $30,000 and up each to prepare their children for elite private college careers. Interestingly enough, Obama has not enrolled his children in the Chicago Public Schools, even though some of the district's "better" (high-scoring/higher socioeconomic status) public schools are located in his Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood. As Greg Palast notes, Obama "refused to send his kids to Duncan's public schools. (The Obamas sent Sasha and Malia to the Laboratory School, where Duncan's [inner-city skill-and-drill] methods are derided as dangerously ludicrous)...If The One won't trust his kids to Duncan," Palast asks, "why is he handing Duncan ours?" (Palast 2008) [6] Part of the answer is that Duncan is a friend of Obama's - a regular basketball buddy for the nation's first gym-rat president. Duncan is also a good pal of one of Obama's closest companions and sponsors - the leading investment capitalist John W. Rogers, founder of Ariel Capital Management Inc. (Prior to working for the CPS under Vallas, Duncan ran an educational policy foundation for Rogers.) Cronyism aside, Duncan fits the broader centrist and corporate- and military-friendly agenda that Barack "Empire's New Clothes" Obama has been hired to advance under the cover of pseudo-progressive rebel's clothing (Street 2008). Presidential candidate Obama consistently sought to curry favor with the business elite and to win crossover Republican support by trumpeting school "choice" and proclaiming his willingness to scapegoat teachers for impoverished students' poor test scores. He embraced teacher-blaming "merit pay" schemes and spoke with pride of how his embrace of charter schools showed that was not beholden to "ideology" and his liberal base (Fitzgerald 2007; Politico 2008). Obama has never called for repeal of the widely hated No Child Left Behind Act, which sets poor and minority schools up for privatization by mandating absurdly unattainable test-score improvements. Like Duncan, he criticizes the bill only as an "unfunded mandate," generally ignoring the deeper problem that it reinforces pedagogical apartheid (test-based instruction for poor and mostly minority kids and critical thinking for privileged children at elite private and public schools) and denies the primary role of concentrated poverty (Rothstein 2004) in producing low student achievement. Progressives should be miffed but NOT surprised at the Duncan appointment. It fits perfectly well with the "deeply conservative" [7] Obama's corporate-friendly and centrist nature, something he has been making clear to careful observers not just during the imperial transition but across his entire political career (Street 2008A; Reed 1996; MacFarquhar 2007). Paul Street's books include Empire and Inequality: America and the World Since 9/11 (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2004); Segregated Schools: Educational Apartheid in the post-Civil Rights Era (New York: Routledge, 2005); Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007), and, most recently Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008), order at <a href="http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987"> http://www.paradigmpublishers.com/Books/BookDetail.aspx?productID=186987</a>. Paul, a K-6 graduate of the University Chicago Laboratory School (it was all public schools after that), can be reached at paulstreet99@yahoo.com. NOTES 1. "Charter schools" are designed and managed by independent non-profit organizations. "Contract schools" are run by for-profit corporations. In both cases, management generally operates without union contracts (for teachers and service workers) and without interference from Local School Councils (LSCs). Under the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act, the city's K-12 publish schools were required to set up governing LSCs made up of the principal, teachers, parents and community members. Elementary school LSCs consist of 11 voting members: Principal (1 vote), Parent Representatives (6 votes), Community Representatives (2), Teacher Representatives (2). High school LSCs consist of 12 voting members: Principal (1), Parents (6), Community (2), Teachers (2), Students (1). 2. Duncan is a graduate of the elite University of Chicago Laboratory Schools (K-12) and Harvard University (bachelor's degree). 3. After leaving the CPS (with his protÃ©gÃ© Duncan installed in his old job) in the spring of 2001, Vallas became public schools chief in Philadelphia, where he presided over the largest U.S. experiment ever in privatized management of schools. He turned 40 schools over to outside management by for-profits (especially to Edison Schools, Inc.), nonprofits, and universities. Vallas is currently superintendent of the Recovery School District of New Orleans, Louisiana, where Hurricane Katrina was viewed by civic authorities as a great opportunity for school privatization. 4. Fifty years after the nation's highest court held (in the famous Brown v. Board of Education decision) that "separate is unequal" and forty years after local civil rights activists held large demonstrations against segregated schooling in Chicago, the average black Chicago K-12 student attended a school that was 85.5 percent black. Two hundred and seventy four Chicago public schools, equaling nearly half (47 percent) of the city's 579 public elementary and high schools (excluding the small number for which race data are unavailable) were 90 percent or more African American and 173 of those schools - equaling 30 percent of all public schools in the city - were 100 percent black. Just 112 or 19 percent of the city's public schools were technically "integrated" (15-70 percent white) and just 57 or 10 percent were a third or more white. More than half (51 percent) of the city's schools were "predominantly black" by the city's definition of 70 percent and above. See Street (2007), pp. 177-180. 5. four-year graduation rates for Latino and black Chicago high school students two years in 2003 were 51 and 42 percent, respectively. Nearly 6 in 10 African-American 9th graders did not graduate with a regular high school degree within four years in Chicago Using various deceptive statistical practices to spin his system's drop-out problem in a more favorable light, Duncan and the CPS have never acknowledged the depth and degree of the minority graduation crisis in Chicago - a crisis his policies have served to exacerbate. See Orfield et al. 2004. 6. In the late summer of 2001, then state senator Barack Obama appeared with Arne Duncan at The Chicago Urban League (CUL, where I was then employed) on the first day of the public school year. Speaking to a cadre of reporters, Obama, Duncan, and CUL CEO James W. Compton lectured inner-city parents on their personal responsibility for taking their children to school and for encouraging and staying involved in their children's educational lives. The black Chicago Third Ward Alderman Dorothy Tillman stood up to say that she had put all of her children through the city's public schools. Tillman than angrily noted that (a) Duncan was a private school graduate from the University of Chicago Laboratory School (K-12) through Harvard; (b) that Obama was a private school graduate from the elite Hawaiian Punahou Academy (high school) through Columbia University and Harvard Law; and (c) that Obama was spending tens of thousands of dollars each year to send his daughters to the elite and private University of Chicago Laboratory School in Hyde Park. Obama, Tillman argued, "has no business lecturing anyone on the need to take their kids to the public schools." Tillman's outburst was much appreciated by the CUL's clerical staff, many of who had been forced to attend the event. 7. For a carefully researched portrait of Obama as "deeply conservative," see Larissa MacFarquhar (2007). For an early (at the very beginning of the President Elect's political career) account of Obama's ideological orientation as "vacuous to repressive neoliberal," see Adolph Reed, Jr. (1996). SOURCES David Brooks 2008. "Who Will He Choose?" New York Times, December 5, 2008. Catalyst Chicago 2005. "First Renaissance Schools," Catalyst Chicago (February 2005) Elizabeth Duffrin 2006. "Promise of New Schools Not Met" and "Slow Progress Amid Strife," Catalyst Chicago (March 2006). Thomas Fitzgerald 2007. "Obama Tells Teachers he Supports Merit Pay," Philadelphia Enquirer (July 5, 2007), read at <a href="http://www.philly.com/philly/news/8335627.html"> http://www.philly.com/philly/news/8335627.html</a>. Henry A. Giroux and Kenneth Saltman 2008. "Obama's Betrayal of Public Education? Arne Duncan and the Corporate Model of Schooling," Truthout (December 17, 2008), read at <a href="http://www.truthout.org/121708R"> http://www.truthout.org/121708R</a>. 11 Asa Hillard III 2004. Comments in "Beyond Black, White, and Brown," The Nation (May 3, 2004) Jonathan Kozol 2004. "Educational Apartheid Fifty Years After Brown," The Nation (May 3, 2004). Kevin Kumashiro 2008. "Duncan Wrong Education Choice," Atlanta Journal-Constitution (December 23, 2008). Pauline Lippman 2004. High Stakes Education: Inequality, Globalization, and Urban School Reform (New York, NY: RoutledgeFalmer, 2004). Pauline Lippman 2005. "â€˜We're Not Blind. Just Follow the Dollar Sign.'" Rethinking Schools, volume 18, no. 4 (Summer 2005). Pauline Lippman 2006. "Educational Ethnography and the Politics of Globalization, War, and Resistance," Substance, The Online Edition: The Newspaper of Public Education in Chicago, retrieved October 10, 2006 at <a href="http://www.substancemews.com/mambo/content/view/203/79"> www.substancemews.com/mambo/content/view/203/79</a>. Stephen Macek 2006. Urban Nightmares: The Media, the Right, and the Moral Panic Over the City (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) Larissa MacFarquhar 2007. "The Conciliator: Where is Barack Obama Coming From?" The New Yorker (May 7, 2007). Don Moore 2003. "Crisis" (Chicago, IL: Designs for Change, October 2003). Jeremy Mullman and Greg Hinz 2006. "Mayor Daley's School Plan Falls Behind," Crain's Chicago Business (February 06, 2006). Gary Orfield et al. 2004. Losing Our Future: How Minority Children Are Being Left Behind by the Graduate Rate Crisis (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Civil Rights Project, 2004), Greg Palast 2008. "Obama Slam-Duncans Education" (December 16, 2008) InfoClearingHouse, read at <a href="http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21481.htm"> http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21481.htm</a>. Amanda Paulsen 2004. "Chicago Hopes: â€˜Maybe This Will Work,'" Christian Science Monitor, 21 September 2004. Politico 2008. Interview with Barack Obama by Politico (February 12, 2008), read at <a href="http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=0B213312-3048-5C12-000E0262A76D6B18">http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=0B213312-3048-5C12-000E0262A76D6B18</a> . Adolph Reed Jr. 1996. "The Curse of Community," Village Voice (January 16, 1996), reproduced in Reed, Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New York, 2000). Richard Rothstein 2004. Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Educational Achievement Gap</a> (Washington D.C.: Economic Policy Institute, 2004). Saskia Sassen 2004. "A Global City," pp. 15-35 in Charles Madigan, ed., Global Chicago (Chicago, IL: Chicago Council of Foreign Relations and University of Illimnois Press, 2004). Jesse Sharkey 2008. "Arne Duncan's Privatization Agenda," CounterPunch (December 18, 2008), read at <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/sharkey12182008.html"> www.counterpunch.org/sharkey12182008.html</a>. Paul Street 2002. The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago, IL: Chicago Urban League, 2002). Paul Street 2007. Racial Oppression in the Global Metropolis: A Living Black Chicago History (New York, 2007). Paul Street 2008. "Barack Obama: The Empire's New Clothes," Black Agenda Report (November 12, 2008), read at <a href="http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=879&Itemid=1"> http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=879&Itemid=1</a> Paul Street 2008A. Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics (Boulder, CO: Paradigm, 2008) Sophia Tareen 2007. "Chicago Leads in Public Military Schools," USA Today, November 2, 2007, read at <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-02-2738760309_x.htm"> http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-02-2738760309_x.htm</a>. Comments Follow up By Street, Paul The CPS school he has mentioned most in the campaign is Dodge Elementary, which closed and re-opened (with previous teachers and staff fired) pretty much in the mode that Saltman, Giroux, Lippman and other left education scholars talk about in their critique of the corporate schools agenda. It is not my sense that Duncan is a high-road progressive waiting to flower once he gets out from under of Boss Daley, but if that's what evolves...fine. There are things in BO's policy book I'd like to see happen, including the Employee Free Choice Act. The education agenda is way too mild; same for health care (which leaves far too much power to the insurance companies, as Bob Kuttner recently noted ) and much more. True progressive change will have to be pressed for and to no small extent forced from below and that will involve some real independent progressive thrust beyond supervision of Obama and his network, which can be expected to try to undermine the left, such as it is. If the liberal-progressive Washington-watcher David Sirota is right, Obama's threat to the left could be more than merely collateral or inadvertent. "With Obama considering converting his campaign e-mail list into something of a state-directed advocacy apparatus," Sirota recently wrote in In These Times, "he may have a grassroots machine specifically designed to thwart independent progressive pressure against his government. That's not as far-fetched a possibility as it sounds," Sirota ads, "considering congressional democrats' explicit declaration of war against â€˜the Left.'" (D. Sirota, In These Times, January 2009, p. 19). We shall see.

— Paul Street
Black Agenda Report
2009-12-31
http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=951&Itemid=1

Chicago School Reform Could Be a U.S. Model
 Let the spin begin. By Maria Glod CHICAGO -- At Cameron Elementary School west of downtown, most kids don't know the alphabet when they start kindergarten, nearly all are poor, and one was jumped by a gang recently, just off campus. But the school this year posted its highest reading and math scores ever -- a feat that earned cash bonuses for teachers, administrators, even janitors. City schools chief executive Arne Duncan, President-elect Barack Obama's choice for education secretary, pushed that performance- pay plan and a host of other innovations to transform a school system once regarded as one of the country's worst. As Duncan heads to Washington, the lessons of Chicago could provide a model for fixing America's schools. "Obama chose Arne Duncan for a reason, and part of that reason is the experimentation that Duncan has done in Chicago and his real attention to data and outcomes," said Elliot Weinbaum, assistant professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. "Duncan's willing to try new things and see if they work, hopefully keep the ones that do and drop the ones that don't. I expect that experimentation to continue on a national scale." With a 408,000-student system, smaller than only New York's and Los Angeles's public schools, Chicago has become a laboratory for reform in Duncan's seven-year tenure. Officials here court new charter schools, teacher training is being reinvented, and some low- performing schools have been shuttered and reopened with new staff. Officials are also offering some students cash for good grades and seeking proposals for boarding schools. In addition, Duncan backed a plan to start a gay- friendly high school. For the most part, the changes came with little organized opposition, except for some skirmishes with the teachers union. Duncan, a longtime Obama friend and basketball buddy, helped shape the incoming administration's education platform. As education secretary, he will be Obama's point man for carrying out the No Child Left Behind law and negotiating revisions with Congress. Through regulatory power, federal funding and a pulpit he can bring to classrooms nationwide, Duncan will be able to push for changes in schools. Duncan, appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley in 2001, has shown unusual longevity for a big- city school leader, cultivating ties with unions, nonprofit groups and other stakeholders. The wide-ranging reforms he has pushed appeal to struggling school systems and highly regarded suburban districts looking to boost performance. Many educators in Chicago say Duncan's efforts have upended school culture, building a record of progress, although the high-poverty system has far to go. "This is no utopia. It's no Candy Land," Cameron Principal David B. Kovach said one day this month. "But teachers enjoy their job more, because they are learning and getting better at it, and the kids are able to do things that they weren't able to do before." Across the city, educators point to improvements. At Noble Street College Prep charter school, every senior graduated last school year, and the class logged nearly $2 million in college scholarships. The flexibility given to independently operated charter schools means a longer school day, with a class dedicated to helping seniors complete college applications, navigate financial aid and write rÃ©sumÃ©s. At the National Teachers Academy, another Chicago school, Erin Koehler Smith did a better job teaching fourth-graders to estimate centimeters and meters with help from a mentor teacher. Next year, the former theater major and other trainees will take on classes of their own in struggling schools. Little more than half of Chicago students graduate on time. But since 2001, fewer students are dropping out and more are heading to college. The number taking Advanced Placement classes has tripled. Chicago students lag behind the statewide average on Illinois tests, but the gap has narrowed. Cameron's Kovach said the 1,040 students at the red-brick schoolhouse come from a high-crime, high-poverty area in West Humboldt Park. Teachers, worried about the safety of neighborhood parks, agreed to work an extra 20 minutes each day to ensure that kids can have recess and to maximize class time. "Our kids come in two steps behind," Kovach said. "We can't control what happens to them on the outside -- drugs, gangs, an incarcerated parent." Cameron Elementary is using powerful tools to jolt teaching and boost achievement: money, coaching and collaboration. With the overwhelming approval of teachers, the school last year began a performance-pay pilot program now in place at numerous city schools. Much of the money for the program has come from a federal grant and private foundations. Teachers earn extra cash for taking on additional responsibilities and are judged in a series of evaluations. Entire staffs get bonuses when state test scores rise. Slightly more than 50 percent of students passed the latest state reading exam, but the trend is up. The gains meant about a $1,000 bonus for most teachers, about $250 for janitors and $625 for the principal. Teacher Erin Montana, 33, fresh out of education school and a three-month student teaching gig, took over a class in chaos two years ago. Students cursed, fought, even threw desks. "Every day I came in thinking I was doing the worst job ever," she said. One afternoon last week, Montana's fifth- graders huddled quietly, reading a story about a boy who destroys a neighbor's garden in a vegetable-throwing fight. The students then built "story mountains," identifying characters, plot and theme. "They trash Mr. Bellavista's garden," said Shanygne, 11, a slight girl with a ponytail. She scrawled the sentence on a Post-it note and added it to her "mountain." Montana, crouching to check the group's progress, pointed to a picture of the glum boy. "What do you think is happening here?" she asked. "Do you think it's important?" Eleven-year-old Shawnell, nodding at her teacher, began writing that the boy "felt sorry because he looked at the garden and the mess he made." Montana said the isolation of her first year has disappeared. Her class is well-behaved, thanks partly to her growing experience and partly to advice from colleagues, including the "doing the right things raffle" she started at the suggestion of a mentor teacher. Teachers meet weekly to discuss the best way to reach kids. Master teachers pinpoint where students fall short, study research and script lessons to target weak spots. They try lessons on a handful of kids, and when they find an approach that works, the school takes it to all kids. "It's not like pulling something out of a book," Montana said. "We know that it's really thought through specifically for our kids." Washington area schools have launched experiments similar to Chicago's. Charter schools are multiplying in the District, and D.C. schools are trying cash incentives for students. A Fairfax County initiative bumps salaries for some teachers who work a longer year and take on extra tasks, such as coaching colleagues. Pay for performance is underway in Prince George's County, tying some teacher bonuses to test scores. What sets Duncan apart, education experts said, is his willingness to embrace a range of reforms and his ability to work with people who hold diverging, often conflicting views on how to fix schools. He has straddled the reform divide: On one side are advocates of dramatic shake-ups and tough accountability, and on the other are teachers unions and some educators who want more flexibility, support and money. Chicago Teachers Union President Marilyn Stewart said that the union clashed with Duncan when he closed failing schools and replaced staff but that school and union leaders teamed up on performance pay. "He had my home phone number," Stewart said. "He always returned my calls, and I returned his. You can't not talk when you need something done." Consensus-building will prove critical as Congress considers an overhaul of the 2002 education law, which spotlighted the failings of schools as well as deep rifts among unions, civil rights groups and education advocates. From his on-the-ground perspective, Duncan has praised the law's "high expectations and accountability" but pushed to give credit to schools that make gains even if they fall short of state academic standards. He also has called on Congress to double federal funding over five years. The next challenge is reaching agreement on a new blueprint for school reform. Obama has said he wants to add $18 billion in annual federal education funding (equal to nearly a third of the Education Department's $59 billion discretionary budget), reduce high school dropout rates and improve math and science education. He also has vowed to double federal funding for successful charter schools to $400 million a year and promote alternative teacher training. "There will be disagreements, but Duncan's personality is going to minimize the negativity," said Jack Jennings, president and chief executive of the Center on Education Policy in the District. "You get a feeling of somebody who is willing to listen and be open to ideas."

— Maria Glod
Washington Post
2009-12-30

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