Chicago Occupation Challenges Corporate School Agenda
Howard Ryan
Current issues of Labor Notes
| February 22, 2012
Parents raised the stakes in the battle over the corporate takeover of education when they occupied a Chicago elementary school Friday. They didn’t reverse the school board’s “turnaround,” but they did crack a wall of silence from city leaders. Photo: Howard Ryan.
Parents raised the stakes in the ongoing battle over school closings and the corporate takeover of education when they occupied a classroom inside a Chicago elementary school Friday night.
Brian Piccolo Elementary School, serving 550 black and Latino students in grades pre-K through 8 on the city’s west side, has been targeted for “turnaround” by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his appointed school board.
The plan includes firing all the staff—from principal to lunchroom workers—and reopening the school under control of a private contractor, Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL). The 13 occupying parents and allies, who held the site for nearly 24 hours, didn’t win a reversal of the turnaround.
But the occupiers did force all seven school board members to each engage a team of parents and community members in intensive discussions on the future of the school, cracking a wall of silence from city leaders and dramatizing parent and community opposition to the corporate education agenda sweeping the city—and the nation.
Piccolo is one of 17 Chicago schools targeted this year for turnaround, closure, or phase-out. The school’s occupation came amid a wider community and union fight against the city’s school privatization program. So far, two months of marches, rallies, school board presentations, and a five-day sit-in at city hall haven’t turned back the mayor’s plans.
Activists and officers from the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) came to support the occupation, though it was led by parents and the community group Blocks Together.
Scores of schools nationwide have closed or seen “turnarounds” in the past two years, including in Kansas City, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C.
Increasingly vocal protests have met the bid to privatize education. In New York City, thousands of parents, students, and teachers protested this month as the mayor’s hand-picked education panel approved another 23 closings, lifting the number of schools shuttered in the city to 117 in the last decade.
‘Bring Them to Us’
Chicago’s occupation was the brainchild of Latoya Walls, whose seven-year-old daughter and 12-year-old nephew attend Piccolo.
“They’re used to having rallies in front of downtown, just another thing going on,” Walls said. “I said no, bring them to us, and let’s occupy this building. I didn’t know it was going to turn out to be this big.”
The occupiers planned to hold the Piccolo site in rotating shifts. When the first shift hunkered down, police cars began arriving. Two dozen police gathered in the street watching as more than 100 supporters—parents, teachers, students, Occupy Chicago members—linked arms on the school’s front steps singing a version of “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around.”
The square in front of the school was filled with tents for a planned encampment, and big signs declared “We Do Not Need AUSL.”
AUSL isn’t a charter school operator. Instead, it operates schools within the district, and the teachers are covered by the CTU contract. Parents distrust AUSL, however, because like charter schools, it has a reputation for pushing disadvantaged or difficult children out of school.
AUSL’s backers include Boeing, Dell, Bill Gates, venture capitalists—and the U.S. Department of Education.
The police chose not to force matters Friday night, and a Chicago Public Schools representative advised the occupiers that they could stay. At the same time, CPS and police prevented the occupiers from getting food and medicines, and prevented other parents from entering the building to provide relief.
“Rather than arresting us, they took a strategy of starving us out,” says Ana Mercado, a youth organizer with Blocks Together, a community group that works with parents and students at Piccolo and other schools.
After intense negotiations with school board Vice President Jesse Ruiz, the occupiers exited the building Saturday afternoon—hungry, but satisfied.
CPS agreed to have the occupiers discuss the proposed turnaround of Piccolo and a neighboring elementary school, Pablo Casals, with each of the seven school board members individually Monday and Tuesday. Speedy action was essential because final decisions on all of CPS’s proposed school actions are due at Wednesday’s school board meeting.
While the one-hour consultations may not re-orient the board’s overall strategy toward closures and turnarounds, the Piccolo occupation won the community better access to decision makers.
As Blocks Together Co-director Cecile Carroll explained in a post-occupation press conference, CPS had ignored parents and community for two months.
Parents and allies had developed a counter-proposal to the Piccolo and Casals mass firings, drawing from a wider strategic school plan developed by the West Humboldt Park Community Action Council over the past year.
Latrice Watkins, a parent volunteer and school council chair at Piccolo, said their school plan includes keeping the new principal for a minimum of two years, increasing parent engagement, and funding more cultural programs and better security. They want to bring in a consulting organization, Strategic Learning Initiatives, to do a genuine turnaround.
Carroll noted that parents at both schools voted overwhelmingly against handing the schools to AUSL. The schools chief and board members each received the parents’ plan. “But no one ever got back to us,” she said.
Contractor Pushes Students Out
Chicago communities have fought school closings and corporate turnarounds for years, sometimes successfully, sometimes not.
About 100 of the city’s public schools have been shuttered since 2004, when former mayor Richard Daley unveiled the Renaissance 2010 school privatization plan, drawn up by Chicago’s corporate-driven Commercial Club.
All of the schools targeted this year are in Chicago’s predominantly black and Latino south and west sides. The transition from open-access neighborhood schools to selective-enrollment schools is tied to the goals of real estate developers, who seek to displace low-income communities of color to sell condos to more affluent, predominantly white buyers.
CTU President Karen Lewis observed that Chicago is entering an “era of educational apartheid.”
Parent opposition to the Piccolo and Casals turnarounds owes, in part, to AUSL’s bad reputation in the Humboldt Park community where the schools are located.
When AUSL was handed the nearby Orr High School in a 2008 turnaround, it promptly established a practice of pushing out struggling students, says organizer Ana Mercado.
Students told her that the school’s principal, addressing students at a fall 2008 orientation assembly, warned that “300 of you are not going to make it back this year.”
Many students, instead of receiving their class schedules, got notes directing them to see their school counselor. The counselors advised them: “This school is not for you anymore. Here is a list of alternative schools.”
The counselor would cite students’ behavioral problems from the year before, or lack of credits, poor grades, or poor attendance. AUSL denied that it was pushing out students.
Counselor Leslie Gordon, who came to Orr in 2009, estimates that 100 students were dropped by the school in November and December.
“The principal picks a random number of absences—20, 30, whatever it is—and instructs the attendance office to drop those students,” she said. “What really bothers me is that there’s no due process, no attempt to remediate.”
Students complain about the rigid discipline policies at Orr. “If you say a cuss word, you get two days’ suspension,” says 11th grader Malachi Hoye. “If you don’t have your ID, you get suspension.”
Says another Orr student: “The fights are almost every day. Many of us are homeless, in foster care. If you want us to learn, you have to try to understand us, not try to suspend us or turn us away.”
AUSL takes the “push out” and “counseling out” methods that have become so familiar within charter schools and applies them directly to traditional public schools. Students with special needs, difficult home lives, or other disadvantages are weeded out, and a military-like discipline imposed, in the attempt to boost the school’s test scores.
Despite such practices, AUSL is politically favored by the mayor, who appointed former AUSL board chair David Vitale as school board president. The organization currently operates 19 schools within CPS, and hopes to double that by next year, according to the Chicago Tribune.
Yet opposition to corporate turnarounds goes beyond the problems with AUSL.
Watkins, school council chair at Piccolo, says teachers are communicating more with the parents, and the parents are communicating more with teachers. She ticked off improvements: better attendance, a more respectful culture, a more responsive principal, parents involved in hallway patrols and invited into the classrooms.
“We do not want AUSL to come to our school,” Watkins said, “because we are already doing our own turnaround.”
A Chicago-based writer and organizer, Howard Ryan is writing an organizing book for teachers.
Community leadership key to school turnaround
Posted on Monday October 31, 2011
Tina Dove, Director, National Opportunity to Learn Campaign
The nation is not going to improve the educational outcomes and lifetime opportunities of its neediest citizens until we turn around our lowest-performing schools. The question has been – and remains: How do we do that?
Under the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, the answer is for schools that are targeted for the grants to adopt one of four school improvement models, ranging from a purge of school leadership to closing the school.
Communities for Excellent Public Schools (CEPS) and a growing list of community-based organizations in low-income communities of color across the country have signed a petition urging Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to consider a different solution to turn around schools and sustain improved performance.
That solution, called the Sustainable Success Model, requires school districts to go through a comprehensive needs assessment involving the local community, implement research-based instructional reforms, and address social, emotional and physical needs of children.
Perhaps most important of all – and the most overlooked and undervalued step of all – is the Sustainable Success Model’s recognition that parent, student and community leadership is key to sustainable student success.
The National Opportunity to Learn Campaign signed the petition because we agree with CEPS that current intervention models lacking critical community involvement are not adequate to produce the dramatic improvements needed to close opportunity gaps and graduate all students prepared for college and a meaningful career.
The lesson for the U.S. Department of Education and Secretary Duncan: The public needs to be involved in public education.
Cuomo Fails Public Schools
By Billy Easton
Published on The Nation
Created 2011-09-07 15:55
As nearly 50 million students return to public school classrooms across the country this month, most of them will find larger class sizes, less music and arts, reductions in college preparatory Advanced Placement classes, cuts in the numbers of guidance counselors and librarians. In all, thirty-four states have cut public school budgets.
Republicans like Wisconsin’s Scott Walker and Michigan’s Rick Snyder have been lightning rods for progressive organizing in response to Tea Party–inspired budgets, which slash social spending while letting corporations and the wealthy off the hook. But are Democrats getting a pass on the same policies?
New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, already being hailed as a potential Democratic presidential front-runner for 2016, wants to position himself as a progressive leader. In his sweeping State of the State address earlier this year, he declared that he was going to restore New York’s great progressive tradition.
But his budget is hard to distinguish from Walker’s or Snyder’s. He rammed through $1.3 billion in school cuts and a roughly $4.5 billion tax cut for the wealthiest 3 percent of New Yorkers—a plan praised by the state’s Tea Party leadership. As a result, more than 10,000 educator jobs were eliminated from schools, along with cuts in arts, sports, music, Advanced Placement, pre-kindergarten, and career and technology courses.
Though Cuomo campaigned on a pledge to take from rich school districts and give to the poor, his cuts per pupil were actually twice as large in poor districts as in wealthy ones. He gutted New York’s commitment to the Campaign for Fiscal Equity—plaintiff in the landmark school-funding lawsuit that had led to a commitment to invest $5.5 billion to close the funding gulf between rich and poor classrooms.
While starving schools from above, Cuomo is also choking off local funding by instituting a property tax cap. In California such a cap, enacted via Proposition 13, caused that state’s schools to plummet from among the best in the nation to among the worst. The cap, like the Cuomo funding cuts, will increase existing educational inequities and reduce students’ opportunity to learn. This is why it is so hard to square the word ―progressive‖ with Cuomo’s budget, much less with the governor himself—same-sex marriage success notwithstanding.
Setting the stage for Cuomo’s agenda has been a growing movement of ―market based‖ school reformers. The wind is at their backs thanks to Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s Race to the Top and Davis Guggenheim’s one-sided film Waiting for Superman. Groups like Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) and Stand for Children, representing hedge-fund managers, venture capitalists and private equity investors, provide campaign cash to Democrats nationwide. This enables Democrats like Cuomo to slash funding for schools in poor communities and cash in on political contributions while wrapping themselves in the mantle of ―progressive school reform.‖ DFER, which now has branches in ten states, pumped $17 million into political and advocacy campaigns in its first three years—giving momentum to its agenda and providing Democrats with a new source of funds as an alternative to the teachers unions.
The group’s reform platform includes a heavy emphasis on test scores, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, top-down school closings and pay for performance. The market reformers also want government to help expand the role of educational entrepreneurs.
Governor Cuomo’s crowning achievement, by DFER’s estimate, was to increase the role of standardized test scores in teacher evaluations (a policy that a state court has since overturned). As with many of the changes promoted by market reformers, there is scant research to justify the use of test scores to evaluate teachers—in fact, pay-for-test-score performance was shown to be a failure by a 2010 study by Vanderbilt University. Cuomo’s next proposal is to force school districts to compete with one another for scarce resources—ensuring that some students are winners while others are losers. It makes a catchy sound bite, but it runs counter to what is being done in nations like Finland, Japan, Singapore and our neighbor Canada, all of which are international leaders in educational outcomes. In these countries they value teachers, promote and fund equity, and ensure all students access to a high-quality curriculum.
The Cuomo cuts were enacted despite vigorous opposition by community organizations and teachers unions, which collaborated to organize dozens of rallies, press events and grassroots lobbying efforts. As the cuts hit classrooms this fall, these same groups are planning a barrage of actions to focus the public’s attention on how the cuts are affecting students. Ultimately, progressive education activists in New York and across the country will have to translate this into electoral action in 2012’s state legislative elections and beyond in order to demonstrate that school cuts have political consequences. Forging a unified approach to fighting budget cuts is a first step; taking on the larger frame of ―market reforms‖ is a bigger challenge. One key opportunity will present itself in 2013, when New York City elects a new mayor and the legacy of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s nationally touted market reforms of schools will be a central issue.
The Tea Party threat is real, but the future of our public education system could rest in the hands of Democrats like Cuomo. It’s time to remind them, and their constituents, what the word―progressive means.
We need AAA vision for education
By: John H. Jackson, President and CEO of Schott Foundation for Public Education
Originally posted on The Hill’s Congress Blog
September 14, 2011
The U.S. economy has a flat tire. Our economy is flagging and our infrastructure is crumbling. One way to get the nation back on the road to prosperity is to articulate a new national vision for education and investment in our public schools.
That’s exactly what nations who haven’t lost their AAA credit rating are doing. And it’s also what the United States is not doing. Instead, our elected officials continue to kick the proverbial can down the road while these countries – such as Canada, Finland and Singapore – swiftly pass us by.
Congress has the opportunity help us catch up through the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). But instead of tackling the big issues, members of Congress are again looking for tweaks and ways to maintain the status quo. When asked about Congress’ approach to addressing ESEA, House Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-Minn.) has repeatedly noted that he’d like to get up to three smaller bills done over the summer before tackling bigger issues. But this congressional proclivity to punt on big issues is matched only by the Department of Education, which announced recently that that Secretary Arne Duncan would use his waiver authority to relieve some states of ESEA’s Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) mandate, if they are willing to accept more of the Department of Education’s conditions.
This is a dangerous course.
First, it relieves Congress of the pressure needed to address and fix ESEA and chart a comprehensive course for our nation’s schools. If no waivers are granted and every school district doesn’t reach proficiency by 2014 as required by the No Child Left Behind law (NCLB), it’s likely that most Congressional representatives will have a failing school in their district – something that wouldn’t sit well with their constituents.
Second, it allows the Executive Branch to arbitrarily bypass Congress and place new conditions on fulfilling NCLB. The waiver authority was not written into law to create a window for the Executive Branch to insert new accountability burdens. It was added to relieve states of existing ineffective or burdensome mandates that impeded a state from achieving high quality outcomes. When using the waiver authority, the Secretary must show how “the waiving of these requirements will increase the quality of student instruction and improve student academic achievement” and not how new conditions will achieve the goal. Based on the Department’s approach, we could see a new cycle of conditions imposed on states every election cycle. This is far too frequent for the stability in both policy and practice that states and localities need for accountability measures to be effective.
If the waiver is used, it should be applied to all states because the Department believes that the existing policy is ineffective. If the Department by admission of granting the waiver believes that the policy it is waiving is ineffective, then it would be bad public policy and immoral for that same Department to leave students in any state subject to that ineffective policy only because the state leaders have yet to kiss the ring.
Finally, and more emblematic of federal officials’ small solutions for big problems, the waiver doesn’t fix our national education policy. It is another kick down the road, leaving states, parents, teachers and students to find their own path to providing all children an opportunity to learn.
Our peers with AAA ratings will tell us that the U.S. democracy and economy will not grow with approaches that celebrate structural changes over substantives changes. We must honestly assess what is keeping us flat.
A nation’s education system provides the long-term fuel for economic growth. AAA nations understand this and have focused on comprehensive approaches to address issues of equity and excellence through the system that touches the futures of just about every one of their citizens: the public education system.
So here’s what needs to be done here:
Institute a more equitable federal tax system by following billionaire Warren Buffet’s advice and raising taxes on him and those like him.
Reauthorize NCLB to articulate a comprehensive federal 2020 plan to provide all students a fair and substantive opportunity to learn.
As a part of a three-prong fiscal accountability plan, a) evaluate how states are distributing existing resources to ensure smart and educationally sound spending, b) ensure the equitable distribution of existing resources, and c) target a substantive percentage of new tax revenues specifically toward investments in our education and job-creation infrastructure.
If we ever get beyond our arrogance of power, we will see the downgrade of our credit rating for what it really is: not just an economic indicator, but a signal of our country’s declining capacity to solve the big issues that will affect generations to come.
John H. Jackson is the President and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education a former Senior Policy Advisor in the Office for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education
National Council of Churches’ Videos Promote Opportunity To Learn for all Children
The National Council of Churches invites you to view and share four web videos focused on equal and quality education for all children that are embedded with a study guide on the Council’s website.
The four films, each six or seven minutes long, feature Dr. Diane Ravitch, education historian at New York University and author of the best-selling book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System; and Dr. John Jackson, President and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education.
Jackson and Ravitch discuss foundational values that have historically defined society’s commitment to public education but which the Council believes have become controversial:
- Educational Opportunity for All
- Public Schools and the Common Good
- Public Schools, Part of the Community or Marketplace?
- Supporting Our Teachers
The films, created by the NCC’s Committee on Public Education and Literacy — chaired by Jan Resseger– were designed to stimulate conversation about issues raised by the Governing Board of the National Council of Churches in a May 18, 2010 Pastoral Letter that was sent to the President, Congress, and the Secretary of Education.
In the letter, the Governing Board declared, “At a moment when childhood poverty is shamefully widespread, when many families are under constant stress, and when schools are often limited by lack of funds or resources, we know that public schools cannot be improved by concentrating on public schools alone…In this context we must address with prayerful determination the issues of race and class, which threaten both public education and democracy in America.”
