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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 “school
reform”. 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 “reforming education.”
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 – with a
small d – 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 – 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

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INDEX OF OUTRAGES

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