Report Questions Duncan’s Policy of Closing Failing Schools

First is an article in the NY Times, followed by Ed Week


Report Questions Duncan’s Policy of Closing Failing Schools
By SAM DILLON

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan presided over the closing of dozens of failing schools when he was chief executive of the Chicago public schools from 2001 until last December. In his new post, he has drawn on those experiences, putting school turnaround efforts at the center of the nation’s education reform agenda.

Now a study by researchers at the University of Chicago concludes that most students in schools that closed in the first five years of Mr. Duncan’s tenure in Chicago saw little benefit.

“Most students who transferred out of closing schools re-enrolled in schools that were academically weak,” says the report, which was done by the university’s Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Furthermore, the disruptions of routines in schools scheduled to be closed appeared to hurt student learning in the months after the closing was announced, the researchers found.

The reading scores of students in schools designated for closing “showed a loss of about six weeks of learning” on standardized tests in the months after the closing announcement, the report said. Math scores declined somewhat less, it said.

Partly because of the disruption caused by the closings, Mr. Duncan changed strategy after 2006. Instead of closing schools permanently, or for a year, and then reopening with a new staff, he shifted to the turnaround approach, in which the staff of failing schools was replaced over the summer but the same students returned in the fall.

The new report focused only on the elementary schools closed permanently from 2001 to 2006, and thus offers no conclusions about the effectiveness of the turnaround strategy.

Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for Mr. Duncan, noted that the report also found that students who ended up in higher-achieving schools showed more gains on standardized tests.

“Clearly, the students who transferred to better schools did better, but the ones who went to similar schools did not,” Mr. Hamilton said. “That’s why we worked in parallel to create more new high-quality learning options.”

Still, the report’s findings are likely to provoke new debate about Mr. Duncan’s efforts to encourage the use of Chicago’s turnaround strategy nationwide. He has set the goal of closing and overhauling 1,000 failing schools a year nationwide, for five years, and Congress appropriated $3 billion in the stimulus law to finance the effort.

A review of the history of school reform efforts, published in the current issue of Education Next, a journal published by Harvard University, argues that school turnaround efforts have failed more often than not.

“This leaves reform advocates in a pickle,” said Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. “The Obama administration’s solution is that we’re going to make all the lousy schools better, but that’s harder than the administration has let on. The next most attractive alternative is to shut them down, and let the kids go to other schools, but this Consortium report has found that that brought little benefit to students in Chicago.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/29/education/29schools.html?_r=1&ref=todayspaper&pagewanted=print

LEONIE HAIMSON COMMENT:

More depressing news about how little gains were made in Chicago schools, due to Arne Duncan’s failed policies, which he has now taken to DC and is imposing nationally.

Though the article claims that the district “moved in 2006 toward more frequent use of a turnaround strategy that keeps students in their current buildings but replaces principals and teachers”, Julie Woestehoff, a Chicago parent advocate who is also quoted in the article, has convincingly shown that the student body enrolled in Chicago’s so-called “turn around” schools also undergoes a dramatic shift, with many of the high-needs students transferring out or pushed out of the school.

http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/10/28/10chicago.h29.html?tkn=SXWFQX%2FwsDDVW%2Fqu%2ByYwiefTbPsBARgn3RhA

Published Online: October 28, 2009

Chicago School Closings Found to Yield Few Gains

John Madigan, from left, his daughter Melanie, and his wife Holly visit a classroom at Polaris Charter Academy last year. The school, located in the former Samuel Morse Elementary School, was launched with a $500,000 contribution from the Madigan Family Foundation.
— John Zich for Education Week

By Dakarai I. Aarons

A majority of Chicago students affected by school closings were sent to schools that were low-performing, just like those they left behind—moves that had no significant impact on performance for most students, a study released today finds.

The study, by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research, examines the academic effects of the closings on students at 18 elementary schools shut down between 2001 and 2006. To measure the impact, the researchers compared students age 8 and older with their counterparts in schools that had similar characteristics but continued to operate. The schools had a combined enrollment of 5,445 students at the time of their closing.

“Certainly, when schools were closed for academic reasons, the idea was to try to change their educational prospects and what they might obtain. Unfortunately, we didn’t find that,” said Julia Gwynne, a senior research analyst with the consortium and the report’s co-author. “The main reason why that seems not to have occurred was because most students did not attend schools that were substantially better than the ones that were closed.”

A Chicago-style strategy is a feature of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s push for the nation to turn around its lowest-performing schools. Mr. Duncan was the chief executive officer of the Chicago public schools from 2001 until December 2008, when President Barack Obama nominated him as education secretary. School closings are one element of the so-called “turnaround” plans Mr. Duncan has promoted as secretary, which also include measures that would replace principals and teachers in persistently failing schools.

John Washington picks up his great-grandson, Rayshaun Cates, at Samuel Morse Elementary School in Chicago in January 2006. The school was closed and reopened as a charter school during U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s tenure as the city’s schools chief.

—Charles Rex Arbogast/AP-File

The 405,000-student district still closes and consolidates schools, but moved in 2006 toward more frequent use of a turnaround strategy that keeps students in their current buildings but replaces principals and teachers.

Among the students displaced, 40 percent were enrolled in schools that were on probation, and 42 percent were enrolled in schools where Iowa Tests of Basic Skills scores were in the lowest quartile in the city, according to the study. Just 6 percent of displaced students were enrolled in schools with itbs scores in the highest quartile, it says.

“If the findings are correct­—for Chicago, at least—we have to question the value of closing schools and creating the dislocations that would attend those school closings for little or no constructive result,” said Daniel L. Duke, a professor of educational leadership at the University of Virginia, in Charlottesville.

Mr. Duke, who runs a university program that prepares leaders to turn around low-performing schools, said placing strong leaders who are supported by teacher-leaders and central-office employees has proved to be an effective strategy for many of the schools the program has worked with.

Payoff Questioned

While students who went from one low-performing school to another did not see achievement gains, the study says, those who transferred to some of the district’s highest-performing schools did show progress.

The announcement that specific schools were closing had a negative impact on student achievement, the study suggests. The announcement was often made in January, a few months before students took standardized tests. In the year that closings were announced, students in schools slated to close fell 1½ months below the expected achievement level in reading and more than a half-month below the expected level in math, based on an analysis of itbs scores.

That negative effect was temporary, however. A year later, the displaced students were achieving again at their expected levels, the study says.

Julie Woestehoff, the executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education, a Chicago advocacy group often critical of Mr. Duncan’s initiatives as district chief, said the study’s findings are more evidence that the district’s reform strategies are not working. The group has called for the end of Renaissance 2010, a district program that closes low-performing schools and replaces them with charter and charterlike schools run by private groups.

“When Arne Duncan announced this program, he said it was going to lead to dramatically better education for the children. We were hoping that would be true,” Ms. Woestehoff said. “There hasn’t really been any payoff from all the money that has been spent and all the disruption that has been caused to communities and especially to students.”

Chicago’s school closings returned to the spotlight this fall after a high school student was brutally beaten and killed in a fight near a South Side high school. Local activists have contended that the school closings created a dangerous mixture of students from rival neighborhoods. Mr. Duncan said earlier this month that blaming school closings for the uptick in violence was “absolutely ridiculous.” ("Outcry Against Violence," Oct. 14, 2009.)

Chicago school spokesmen did not respond to requests for comment about the study.

Can They Be Fixed?

The displacement of students after school closings also had an impact on student-mobility rates and participation in the district’s summer school programs, according to the study.

Students were more likely to switch schools again not only in the summer after that first year in the new school, the researchers found, but also during the school year. Third, 6th, and 8th graders were less likely than their peers in similar schools to attend summer school in the summer after their schools had closed.

Rebecca Herman, a managing research analyst for the Washington-based American Institutes for Research, said policymakers should especially focus on making sure that students affected by closings are being placed in higher-performing schools, and ensuring that those schools are equipped with supports to help them take on the new students while maintaining quality.

Particular attention should also be paid to the transition period after announcements of school closings are made, she said.

Ms. Herman, who was the lead author of a federal guide on school turnarounds, said the Chicago study leaves some questions unanswered. For example, were there “differences in [students’] motivation and support for excelling in school that would help explain these findings?” she said.

“If you wanted to apply this policy broadly,” she added, “how would you motivate those 94 percent of students [who did not enroll in top-scoring schools] to go to a school farther away and provide support for them?”

Andy Smarick, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute and adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, both in Washington, said the study shows the complexities of school turnaround efforts.

“What really jumps out is what school you go to after the school closes is extraordinarily important. The important lesson here is that closures are only one piece of a broader strategy that a city has to develop,” he said.

School administrators must take into account student-transfer policies, geographical considerations, and the impact on the grade levels affected, he said. Successful school administrators are able to show parents and the larger communities the closings are part of a bigger improvement plan, Mr. Smarick said.

“I think a lot of people mistakenly think turnarounds are easy or that turnarounds often succeed. Sometimes there are institutions, whether they are schools, businesses, or nonprofits, that are just broken, low-performing, and they can’t be fixed,” Mr. Smarick said. “That is unsettling for people to think about when we are talking about schools.”

Vol. 29, Issue 10

Published on Black Agenda Report (http://www.blackagendareport.com) Home > Obama's Public Education Policy: Privatization, Charters, Mass Firings, Neighborhood Destabilization http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obamas-public-education-policy-privatization-charters-mass-firings-neighborhood-destabilizat Obama's Public Education Policy: Privatization, Charters, Mass Firings, Neighborhood Destabilization By Bruce A. Dixon Created 07/01/2009 - 10:01 by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon Last weekend in Chicago, US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan delivered the keynote address at Rainbow PUSH's annual conference and education roundtable. Duncan is the premiere executor of corporate instpired policies that have closed dozens of neighborhood public schools in Chicago without substantially improving educational outcomes and at vast cost to neighborhood stability and the careers of hundreds of good teachers. But are African American organizations standing up for their own interests, for public education? Or are we paralyzed because the corporate policies issue from the administration of a Black President? Obama's Public Education Policy: Privatization, Charters, Mass Firings, Neighborhood and Family Destabilization by BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon “The education policies of America's First Black President Obama's education policies are not discernibly different from those of his Republican predecessor.” Six months into the Obama administration, its stand on public education could not be clearer. Obama and his Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have bought the entire bipartisan set [1]of anti-democratic and corporate friendly line that “failing” public schools are problems best solved by firing tens of thousands of perfectly competent and experienced teachers, and reorganizing them as charter and other institutions in which organized parents and teachers have no say whatsoever. The education policies of America's First Black President Obama's education policies are not discernibly different from those of his Republican predecessor. Despite the unpopularity of school privatizations and the wholesale replacement of public schools with charters wherever this has been tried, the administration of the First Black President seems able to push the corporate line on privatizing education almost without significant public challenge from large sectors of black and progressive America, including what remains of traditional civil rights-style organizations and teachers unions. It's no coincidence that African Americans and black organizations have been the biggest beneficiaries and the most prominent defenders of public education. It was the political power of newly freed slaves, for whom literacy had been a criminal offense, that created the first public schools in the South. When Reconstruction was violently suppressed after the Civil War, hundreds of black schoolhouses along with their white and black teachers were among the prime targets of white mob violence. Even so, the shadow of progress remained in the form of a commitment to public education, even if a separate and unequal one, on the part of state and local governments, which had never been the government's job before emancipation. This idea, that every child is entitled to a quality free education at public expense is a new and revolutionary notion. Like all revolutionary ideas, it has powerful enemies. Enemies in corporate America, in corporate funded think tanks and foundations, and enemies in high office. But those who should be defending public education are unaccountably silent. The Rainbow-PUSH Coalition has been under considerable pressure in Chicago to take definite stands against the neighborhood-destroying drive to privatize education. Rev. Jesse L. Jackson deemed the drive to close and privatize a hundred Chicago pubic schools “a dangerous plan” and demanded a moratorium on it [2] back in March. But last week Rainbow PUSH held its annual conference in Chicago, at which Arne Duncan was the keynote speaker [3]. We don't know exactly what Arne said in that keynote, but we are unaware that any challenges to his policies were voiced at that event. If so, a priceless public opportunity to demand a real accounting for these corporate-inspired policies of educational privatization was blown. We don't know why. We do know that Rainbow PUSH issued a ten point “civil rights agenda for the 21st century which fails even to mention public education, let alone the Secretary of Education's threats to withhold education stimulus money from states and school districts nationwide who do not sign on to the Chicago, New York, and New Orleans style policies of mass school closings and firings, and the adoption of private “partners” to remake their schools. “...black organizations... dependent themselves on funding from some of the same corporate philanthropy that lies behind the privatizations, are falling silent...” Not to be outdone, Rev. Al Sharpton has taken a half million dollar bribe [4], laundered through friends of the chancellor of New York City's public schools to become an active advocate of charter schools. Even teachers unions in places like Chicago, Los Angeles and New York have utterly failed to stand up for teachers, for parents or for students. The pattern is clear. Leading black organizations in cities and states across the country, dependent themselves on funding from some of the same corporate philanthropy that is behind the privatization, are falling silent on the big lies of school privatization and the constellation of small and medium size lies it rests upon. They are failing to point out the argument that school “failure” is fundamentally misdefined as the inability to score on a par with predominantly white schools on standardized tests which themselves have been notoriously biased and have little to do with the quality of education. As Robert Rothstein pointed out in a 2007 American Prospect article, “Leaving No Child Left Behind Behind [5]” Schools have many goals for students: basic math and reading skills but also critical thinking, citizenship, physical- and emotional-health habits, arts appreciation, self-discipline, responsibility, and conflict resolution. Schools threatened with sanctions for failure in only one goal will inevitably divert attention from others. One NCLB consequence has been less social studies, science, art, music, and physical education -- particularly for low-income children, whose math and reading scores are lowest and for whose teachers the consequences of spending time on, say, history, rather than more math drill, are most severe.lowest and for whose teachers the consequences of spending time on, say, history, rather than more math drill, are most severe. When inner city schools are punished for scoring poorly on tests, they are stripped of their music, sports, arts and other elective programs, as if this will somehow make more kids come to school. It doesn't, and in reality it isn't intended to. Improving education is not the goal. Privatization is the goal. The targets of school privatization are not supposedly underperforming students and teachers. The target is democracy itself. Private interests are just that – private. Turning public schools over to private interests frustrates even the possibility of democracy. Charter school apologists often claim that greater parental involvement is a hallmark of their model. But to the extent that it is true at all, it's involvement of a select group of parents, and not open to those of the entire community. Charter schools undermine what is left of community. Gutstein, Lippman and Rico, in a recent Rethinking Schools [6] article, explain that charter schools are often on different grade levels than the schools they replace, and since they no longer draw from the areas immediately around them, do not serve as anchors of the community in the ways that publics schools, in the best of times, do. And they spin out the fundamental conflicts between school privatization, democracy, and community: “In a democratic society, instruments of engagement allow citizen voice in decision-making processes. In Chicago education, that instrument is Local School Councils (LSCs). The most powerful parent, community, and teacher, local-school, decision-making structures in the country, LSCs' responsibilities include hiring principals, monitoring budgets, and developing school improvement plans. With support, LSCs have demonstrated that they are effective models of local school decision-making. A 2005 Designs for Change study of 144 of the most successful neighborhood schools in Chicago serving primarily low-income students listed effective LSCs as a key reason for success. Despite this and other evidence documenting LSC effectiveness, CPS, under Duncan, has worked tirelessly to weaken LSCs by whittling away at their authority. “The LSCs came out of the grassroots movement to elect Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor, in 1983. Parents and community members across the city made alliances and worked with school reformers to fight for local school councils, which the state legislature created when they passed the 1988 Chicago School Reform Act. Chicago's LSCs are probably the most radical school reform in the country and are the largest body of elected, low-income people of color (especially women) in the United States. In implementing Renaissance 2010, CPS ignored LSCs in the decision-making process. In many instances, the LSC at a school targeted for closure played a major role in the resistance to the school being closed. Why is CPS working to eliminate LSCs? Consider this: Chicago has almost 7,000 LSC members. If they were organized, they would be a major force in the struggle for equity in education. In fact, CPS has worked extremely hard to underserve LSCs. When LSCs started in 1988, CPS provided all the training to LSC members. However, over the years, literally thousands of LSC members have complained about that training. CPS provides no information on the general history of Chicago school reform, nor specifically how LSCs came into being as we explain above. CPS also does not provide any specific training to students on LSCs (each high school has one student member). In response, a number of community organizations have done their own, independent LSC training for years. “Duncan publicly stated in April 2007 that he wanted to break the "monopoly" of the LSCs, and in October 2007, Board of Education president Rufus Williams, in a speech to the City Club of Chicago—a major grouping of business people—likened LSCs running schools to having a chain of hotels being run by "those who sleep in the hotels." School privatization is about robbing parents, teachers and communities of the power to dtermine their educational destinies. The general paralysis of progressive movements that has resulted from the election of our first black president stands squarely in the way of a generalized movement against the Obama administration's continuation of Bush era policies, as does the reliance of traditional “civil rights” organizations and many black politicians upon corporate handouts. A further obstacle to building local and national movements against educational privatization is the lack of local news and the disappearance of local news gathering organizations in most cities and towns across the nation. As Dr. Robert McChesney has pointed out, the lack of reporters to tell the story, and news outlets to print or broadcast it has opened the way to a golden age of corruption in which corporate thieves can steal with impunity, and the public is none the wiser. It's a bad place. But it's where we are. Later this year the No Child Left Behind legislation will be up for reauthorization. Will we stand up before then? Only time will tell. ShareThis [7] No Child Left behind. privatization public education Source URL: http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obamas-public-education-policy-privatization-charters-mass-firings-neighborhood-destabilizat Links: [1] http://openleft.com/diary/13962/charter-schools-another-failed-bipartisan-policy-obama-is-in-love-with [2] http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=667&section=Article [3] http://www.rainbowpush.org/news/5-1.htm [4] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2009/04/01/2009-04-01_rev_al_sharptons_500g_link_to_education_.html [5] http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=leaving_nclb_behind [6] http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_03/arne233.shtml [7] http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/obamas-public-education-policy-privatization-charters-mass-firings-neighborhood-destabilizat

Duncanian lies, bigger lies, and liarest realities

George N. Schmidt
ARN2 Strategy
2009-03-13
http://susanohanian.org/show_atrocities.php?id=8457

The Chicago Plan wasn't stopped in its viral infancy here, and now it's going

to infect the entire USA.

Four years ago, I got a Q and A interview with Arne Duncan, a tradition we
have been following for 25 years with CPS top officials. The deal is that we do
the Q and A and provide the transcription back for corrections, and that we
then run it as is with a note saying it was agreed to by both sides to give our
readers the information about those who run the Chicago school system.

The first time I did an interview in this format was with Harold Washington
when he was running for mayor the first time.

The interview with Duncan never ran.

It was filled with lies, an amazing number. The guy will make up "facts" as
quickly as Ronald Reagan used to, and I finally spiked the project.

Over the years after that, he lied, lied more, and lied most about everything
from CPS budgets to sports to shootings. He was always on some kind of
script, and even then he would just slip in a lie or two, almost like a kid seeing
if he could get away with it.

During those years, I covered dozens of press conferences which included
Duncan.

We would quote him, then quote the facts or quote something he said earlier
the opposite of what he was saying now.

Finally, when people would ask me about Duncan, I would say: "You know when
Arne Duncan's lying when his mouth opens and words come out."

Welcome to CHICAUSA...

The Chicago Plan wasn't stopped in its viral infancy here, and now it's going
to infect the entire USA. Every piece will be tried, from un-accountable
clout-heavy charter school to "merit pay" run by TSA or "National Board Certified"
hacks. Plus scripted curricula for everybody, privatization of everything
possible (they'll probably start with food services), and a proliferation of
University of Chicago style "experts" who are even more ready to make up "facts"
than their protege, Arne Duncan.

The Chicago Boys have arrived.

Duncan's Last Move: Close 25 Schools

25 schools set for shakeup
6 CLOSING | Parent-teacher forum rips CPS chief Duncan's last move
Comments
January 11, 2009

BY MAUDLYNE IHEJIRIKA AND CHERYL JACKSON Staff Reporters

In his last major act before heading to Washington as President-elect Barack Obama's pick for education secretary, outgoing Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan wants to close or consolidate 25 "underperforming" or under-enrolled schools, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

The proposal -- which Duncan plans to unveil Wednesday -- would be the largest wave of school closings in Chicago in one year since Mayor Daley gave the schools chief the authority through the "Renaissance 2010" initiative to replace 70 underperforming schools with 100 new schools by 2010.

As expected, Duncan's plan has ignited community protest.
"This reform is not about education. It's about regentrification," angry parent Virgil Crawford said Saturday at a Malcolm X College forum on Duncan's strategy called by the Chicago Teachers Union.

Six schools would be closed under Duncan's plan, details of which were obtained from information provided to parents groups and the CTU.

Five more schools would be consolidated, or merged into other schools. Five would be phased out. And nine would become "turnaround" schools, where students remain but staff replaced.
Many of the 400 parents, students and teachers attending Saturday's forum ripped Duncan's appointment to a national post.

"He's unqualified for the job," charged moderator Karen G.J. Lewis. "I'd like to know what his vision is. What's he going to do without Daley telling him what to do?"

Poor academic performance or under-enrollment generally are being cited as Duncan's reasons for the changes, but some schools also were given new criteria for being targeted, union reps said.

"We were informed [Friday] as classes were beginning," a union source at Peabody Elementary on the Northwest Side said. "Our principal told us, 'We're on the list.' And there's brand-new criteria. The rules change as they go along."

Central school administration officials would not comment on the targeted schools except to call briefings to those schools "preliminary conversations."

"Our position is pretty clear that president Marilyn Stewart and the officials of the Chicago Teachers Union really oppose any closing of schools," CTU spokeswoman Rosemaria Genoa said Saturday .

On Thursday, word that Duncan would move to close Carpenter Elementary -- where the student body is 97 percent low-income -- and turn its building over to Ogden, a Near North Side elementary approved for a new high school, sparked outrage.

"They [CPS] put money where they want to put money," student teacher Terry Rudd complained.

Since taking the leadership of CPS in 2001, Duncan has aggressively pushed the Renaissance 2010 plan over protests from some parent groups and the teachers union. With 61 schools closed and 75 new ones opened, Duncan will have met the mayor's closings goal if his swan song list is approved. Earlier, he had proposed 20 new schools to the Board of Education, but only 13 were approved in October.

"We must take a stand and make a statement about why Mr. Duncan's model is not the model for America," former CTU president Deborah Lynch said Saturday.

TARGETED SCHOOLS
These 25 Chicago schools are targeted for closing, consolidation, "phase out" or "turnaround" in 2009, under plans by schools chief Arne Duncan:
CLOSING
* Las Casas Occupational High School
* South Chicago Elementary
* Peabody Elementary
* Carpenter Elementary
* Nia Foundation Elementary
* Princeton Elementary
CONSOLIDATION
* Abbott Elementary (Hendrix)
* Schiller Elementary (Jenner)
* Medill Elementary (Smith-Joyner)
* Global Vision High School (New Millennium)
* Davis Developmental Center (Hughes)
PHASE OUT
* Key Elementary
* Lathrop Elementary
* Hamilton Elementary
* Best Practice High School
* Reed Elementary
TURNAROUND
* Dulles Elementary
* Johnson Elementary
* Bethune Elementary
* Ross Elementary
* Holmes Elementary
* Yale Elementary
* Curtis Elementary
* Lavizzo Elementary
* Fenger High School

Did Barack Obama Just Appoint an Underqualified Political Hack & Privatizer to be Secretary of Education?

Audio Version: http://www.blackagendareport.com/newsite/sites/all/sound/interviews/20081222bd_george_schmidt_interview.mp3

http://oxdown.firedoglake.com/diary/2618

Did Barack Obama Just Appoint an Underqualified Political Hack & Privatizer to be Secretary of Education?

By: bruce.dixon Tuesday December 23, 2008 6:38 pm (This is a transcript of a 24 minute interview broadcast on WRFG Atlanta 89.3 December 22, 2008)

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.
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 ninetten 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 ChicagoPublic 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.
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 earmakr speicifically 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 rooad 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?
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.
__._,_.___

Is Obama Getting Bad Advice on His Appointments?

By Greg Palast, Huffington Post. Posted December 11, 2008.

Joel Klein is being considered for secretary of education, which would make as much sense for our schools as Michael Brown did for disaster relief.

Has Barack Obama forgotten, Michael "Way to go, Brownie" Brown? Brown was that guy from the Arabian Horse Association appointed by President George W. Bush to run the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Brownie, not knowing the south shore of Lake Pontchartrain from the south end of a horse, let New Orleans drown. Bush's response was to give his buddy Brownie a thumbs up.

We thought Obama would go a very different way. You'd think the studious senator from Illinois would avoid repeating the Bush regime's horror show of unqualified appointments, of picking politicos over professionals. But here we go again. Trial balloons lofted in the Washington Post suggest President-elect Obama is about to select Joel Klein as secretary of education. If not Klein, then draft choice No. 2 is Arne Duncan, Obama's backyard basketball buddy in Chicago.

Say it ain't so, President O.

Let's begin with Joel Klein. Klein is a top-notch antitrust lawyer. What he isn't is an educator. Klein is as qualified to run the Department of Education as Vice President Dick Cheney is to dance in "Swan Lake." While I've never seen Cheney in a tutu, I have seen Klein fumble about the stage as chancellor of the New York City school system.

Klein, who lacks even six minutes experience in the field, was handed management of New York's schools by that political Jack-in-the-Box, Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The billionaire mayor is one of those businessmen-turned-politicians who think lawyers and speculators can make school districts operate like businesses. Klein has indeed run city schools like a business -- if the business is General Motors. Klein has flopped. Half the city's kids don't graduate.

Klein is out of control. Not knowing a damn thing about education, rather than rely on those who actually work in the field (only two of his two dozen deputies have degrees in education), Klein pays high-priced consultants to tell him what to do. He has blown a third-of-a-billion dollars on consultant "accountability" projects, plus $80 million for an IBM computer data-storage system that doesn't work.

What the heck was the $80 million junk computer software for? Testing. Klein is test crazy. He has swallowed hook, line and sinker Bush's idea that testing students can replace teaching them. The madly expensive testing program and consultant-fee spree are paid for by yanking teachers from the classroom.

Ironically, though not surprisingly, test scores under Klein have flat-lined. Scores would have fallen lower, notes author Jane Hirschmann, but Klein "moved the cut line." That is, he lowered the level required to pass. In other words, Klein cheats on the tests.

Nevertheless, media poobahs have fallen in love with Klein, especially Republican pundits. The New York Times' David Brooks is championing Klein, hoping that media hype for Klein will push Obama to keep Bush schools policies in place, trumping the electorate's choice for change.

Brooks and other Republicans (hey, didn't those guys lose?) are pushing Klein as a way for Obama to prove he can reach across the aisle to Republicans like Bloomberg. (Oh yes, Bloomberg's no longer in the GOP, having jumped from the party this year when the brand name went sour.)

Choosing Klein, says Brooks, would display Obama's independence from the teacher's union. But after years of Bush kicking teachers in the teeth, appointing a Bush acolyte like Klein would not indicate independence from teachers but their betrayal.

Hoops versus Hope

The anti-union establishment has a second-stringer on the bench waiting in case Klein is nixed: Arne Duncan. Duncan, another lawyer playing at education, was appointed by Chicago's Richard M. Daley to head that city's train-wreck of a school system. Think of Duncan as "Klein Lite."

What is Duncan's connection to the president-elect? Duncan was once captain of Harvard's basketball team and still plays backyard roundball with his Hyde Park neighbor Obama.

But Michelle Obama put a limit on their friendship: Barack Obama was one of the only state senators from Chicago to refuse to send his children into Duncan's public schools. My information is the Obamas sent their daughters to the elite Laboratory School where Klein-Duncan teach-to-the-test pedagogy is dismissed as damaging and nutty.

Mr. Obama, if you can't trust your kids to Arne Duncan, why hand him ours?

Duncan is proud to have raised test scores by firing every teacher in low-scoring schools. Which schools? There's Collins High in the Lawndale ghetto, with children from homeless shelters and drug-poisoned 'hoods. They don't do well on tests. So Chicago fired all the teachers. They brought in new ones -- then fired all of them, too: The teachers' reward for volunteering to work in a poor neighborhood.

It's no coincidence that the nation's worst school systems are run by non-experts like Klein and Duncan.

Obama certainly knows this. I know he knows, because he has chosen, as head of his education department transition team, one of the most highly respected educators in the United States: Professor Linda Darling-Hammond of Stanford University.

So here we have the ludicrous scene of the president-elect asking this recognized authority, Darling-Hammond, to vet the qualifications of amateurs Klein and Duncan. It's as if Obama were to ask Michael Jordan, "Say, you wouldn't happen to know anyone who can play basketball, would you?"

Classroom Class War

It's not just Klein's and Duncan's empty credentials that scare me: It's the ill philosophy behind the Bush-brand education theories they promote. "Teach-to-the-test" (which goes under such prepackaged teaching brands as "Success for All") forces teachers to limit classroom time to pounding in rote, low-end skills, easily measured on standardized tests. The transparent purpose is to create the future class of worker-drones. Add in some computer training and -- voila! -- millions trained on the cheap to function, not think. Analytical thinking skills, creative skills, questioning skills will be left to the privileged at the Laboratory School and Phillips Andover Academy.

We hope for better from the daddy of Sasha and Malia.

Educationally, the world is swamping us. The economic and social levees are bursting. We cannot afford another Way-To-Go Brownie in charge of rescuing our children.


Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy.

http://www.alternet.org/story/111806/is_obama_getting_bad_advice_on_his_appointments/?page=entire