Rethinking Schools on Common Core

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/06/26-2?nocache=1

Corporate Education 'From Above' and the Trouble with Common Core

by Rethinking Schools Editorial

(Cartoon: Ethan Heitner / More at: freedomfunnies.wordpress.com)It isn't easy to find common ground on the Common Core. Already hailed as the “next big thing” in education reform, the Common Core State Standards are being rushed into classrooms in nearly every district in the country. Although these “world-class” standards raise substantive questions about curriculum choices and instructional practices, such educational concerns are likely to prove less significant than the role the Common Core is playing in the larger landscape of our polarized education reform politics.

We know there have been many positive claims made for the Common Core:

• That it represents a tighter set of smarter standards focused on developing critical learning skills instead of mastering fragmented bits of knowledge.
• That it requires more progressive, student-centered teaching with strong elements of collaborative and reflective learning.
• That it equalizes the playing field by raising expectations for all children, especially those suffering the worst effects of the “drill and kill” test prep norms of the recent past.

We also know that many creative, heroic teachers are seeking ways to use this latest reform wave to serve their students well. Especially in the current interim between the rollout of the standards and the arrival of the tests, some teachers have embraced the Common Core as an alternative to the scripted commercial formulas of recent experience, and are trying to use the space opened up by the Common Core transition to do positive things in their classrooms.
"Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. Unless we dismantle and defeat this larger effort, Common Core implementation will become another stage in the demise of public education."
We'd like to believe these claims and efforts can trump the more political uses of the Common Core project. But we can't.
For starters, the misnamed “Common Core State Standards” are not state standards. They're national standards, created by Gates-funded consultants for the National Governors Association (NGA). They were designed, in part, to circumvent federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum, hence the insertion of the word “state” in the brand name. States were coerced into adopting the Common Core by requirements attached to the federal Race to the Top grants and, later, the No Child Left Behind waivers. (This is one reason many conservative groups opposed to any federal role in education policy oppose the Common Core.)
Written mostly by academics and assessment experts—many with ties to testing companies—the Common Core standards have never been fully implemented and tested in real schools anywhere. Of the 135 members on the official Common Core review panels convened by Achieve Inc., the consulting firm that has directed the Common Core project for the NGA, few were classroom teachers or current administrators. Parents were entirely missing. K–12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards—and lend legitimacy to the results.
The standards are tied to assessments that are still in development and that must be given on computers many schools don't have. So far, there is no research or experience to justify the extravagant claims being made for the ability of these standards to ensure that every child will graduate from high school “college and career ready.” By all accounts, the new Common Core tests will be considerably harder than current state assessments, leading to sharp drops in scores and proficiency rates.
We have seen this show before. The entire country just finished a decade-long experiment in standards-based, test-driven school reform called No Child Left Behind. NCLB required states to adopt “rigorous” curriculum standards and test students annually to gauge progress towards reaching them. Under threat of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their standards and began testing every student, every year in every grade from 3–8 and again in high school. (Before NCLB, only 19 states tested all kids every year, after NCLB all 50 did.)
By any measure, NCLB was a dismal failure in both raising academic performance and narrowing gaps in opportunity and outcomes. But by very publicly measuring the test results against benchmarks no real schools have ever met, NCLB did succeed in creating a narrative of failure that shaped a decade of attempts to “fix” schools while blaming those who work in them. By the time the first decade of NCLB was over, more than half the schools in the nation were on the lists of “failing schools” and the rest were poised to follow.
In reality, NCLB's test scores reflected the inequality that exists all around our schools. The disaggregated scores put the spotlight on longstanding gaps in outcomes and opportunity among student subgroups. But NCLB used these gaps to label schools as failures without providing the resources or support needed to eliminate them.
The tests showed that millions of students were not meeting existing standards. Yet the conclusion drawn by sponsors of the Common Core was that the solution was “more challenging” ones. This conclusion is simply wrong. NCLB proved that the test and punish approach to education reform doesn't work, not that we need a new, tougher version of it. Instead of targeting the inequalities of race, class, and educational opportunity reflected in the test scores, the Common Core project threatens to reproduce the narrative of public school failure that has led to a decade of bad policy in the name of reform.
The engine for this potential disaster, as it was for NCLB, will be the tests, in this case the “next generation” Common Core tests being developed by two federally funded, multi-state consortia at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Although reasonable people, including many thoughtful educators we respect, have found things of value in the Common Core standards, there is no credible defense to be made of the high-stakes uses planned for these new tests.
The same heavy-handed, top-down policies that forced adoption of the standards require use of the Common Core tests to evaluate educators. This inaccurate and unreliable practice will distort the assessments before they're even in place and make Common Core implementation part of the assault on the teaching profession instead of a renewal of it. The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core's “college and career ready” performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college.
This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation's urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.
Nor are we exaggerating the potential for disaster. Consider this description from Charlotte Danielson, a highly regarded mainstream authority on teacher evaluation and a strong supporter of the Common Core:

I do worry somewhat about the assessments—I'm concerned that we may be headed for a train wreck there. The test items I've seen that have been released so far are extremely challenging. If I had to take a test that was entirely comprised of items like that, I'm not sure that I would pass it—and I've got a bunch of degrees. So I do worry that in some schools we'll have 80 percent or some large number of students failing. That's what I mean by train wreck.

Reports from the first wave of Common Core testing are already confirming these fears. This spring students, parents, and teachers in New York schools responded to administration of new Common Core tests developed by Pearson Inc. with a general outcry against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in reading passages. Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared—meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children to opt out.
Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. Unless we dismantle and defeat this larger effort, Common Core implementation will become another stage in the demise of public education. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we should defend our students, our schools, our communities, and ourselves by telling the truth about the Common Core. This means pushing back against implementation timelines and plans that set schools up to fail, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping and benefiting from this false panacea for the problems our schools face.
Rethinking Schools has always been skeptical of standards imposed from above. Too many standards projects have been efforts to move decisions about teaching and learning away from classrooms, educators, and school communities, only to put them in the hands of distant bureaucracies. Standards have often codified sanitized versions of history, politics, and culture that reinforce official myths while leaving out the voices, concerns, and realities of our students and communities. Whatever positive role standards might play in truly collaborative conversations about what our schools should teach and children should learn has been repeatedly undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests.
Unfortunately there's been too little honest conversation and too little democracy in the development of the Common Core. We see consultants and corporate entrepreneurs where there should be parents and teachers, and more high-stakes testing where there should be none. Until that changes, it will be hard to distinguish the “next big thing” from the last one.

© 2013 ReThinking Schools

Resistance to Teach for America Grows

http://www.orchestratedpulse.com/2013/07/why-resist-tfa/

Why Are So Many People Resisting Teach for America?

By RobtheIdealist on July 2, 2013 | Leave a response

Earlier this week, a group of educators in MN who opposed Teach for America’s (TFA) efforts to partner with the U of MN posted a letter summarizing their critiques of the program. They, and many others, represent a burgeoning resistance movement to TFA that is comprised of community members, educators, and former TFA members all united against TFA’s brand of “education reform”. In fact, July 11-14^th there will be an education summit in Chicago that will include a session titled “Organizing Resistance to Teach for America and its Role in Privatization”.
The resistance has even extended into politics. In May 2013, the governor of MN vetoed a bill provision that would have given TFA $1.5 million over two years.  In his letter to the legislature, he justified his veto on the basis that (1) TFA has financial assets in excess of $350 million dollars and don’t need this state grant, (2) “No competitive grant program was established; no other applications were solicited; and no objective review was made by an independent panel of experts”.
I decided to write about TFA because I recently got into a huge fight with a few of my college friends over the program. I went to Carleton College, a fairly prestigious institution, and one of the “elite” feeder-schools into TFA, so I have a fair share of peers that are TFA members. I posted some criticisms of TFA, and some of my peers were incensed.  So, I want to take this time to break down what TFA really is, and why I and many others oppose this type of “education reform”.
For a detailed review of how TFA was founded and the organization’s mission, please read Andrew Hartman’s article for Jacobin Magazine: Teach for America: The Hidden Curriculum of Liberal Do-Gooders.

TFA’S CORPORATE ROOTS

Research shows that structural conditions or “out-of-school factors” determine at least two-thirds of students’ academic performance, but TFA treats teacher quality as the key variable in remedying inequality. Why would TFA and the education reform movement emphasize “value added” and “accountability” models over comprehensive strategies that attack the structural reality of poverty?
Teach for America’s corporate roots give us some clue. The program’s corporate sponsors directly benefit from the existing economic structure, and have no interest in radically altering that system .  The links between TFA and the banking sector offer a particularly cynical picture.
Wells Fargo is a core sponsor of Teach for America, an organization which purportedly seeks to uplift poor people of color.  Wells Fargo is the same bank that just paid $175 million dollars to settle allegations of racial discrimination in its mortgage lending. Do you really think that Wells Fargo, one of TFA’s biggest financial backers, is interested in the empowerment of poor people of color?
TFA also has the financial support of Goldman Sachs. This is the same financial institution that has consistently preyed on ordinary people and speculated on shaky financial investments, and after the bubbles burst, saddled the public with the losses.
To persist in thinking that TFA and its corporate backers are genuinely interested in remedying the plight–both personal and structural–of poor people, is to ignore the mounting evidence and embrace well-meaning– but misguided–fantasy. Substantively confronting poverty is nothing short of a revolutionary aim.  Goldman Sachs and Wells Fargo will not be funding that revolution. Is it not possible—if not probable—that financial institutions that collapsed the housing market for their own gain, would also look to profit from the dismantling of the public education system?

EDUCATION REFORM: PAVING THE WAY TOWARDS A FOR-PROFIT TAKEOVER OF EDUCATION

TFA’s goal has never been to create long-term teachers, as evidenced by the nearly 80% who stop teaching before year 4.  Instead, the purpose is to situate their alumni in positions of power where they will act as “advocates” for education reform.  In fact, Teach for America has crafted relationships with numerous investment firms and elite postgraduate schools who recruit directly from the program’s pool of second-year teachers. TFA calls this process the “second half of the movement”.

One new program, for example, coaches alumni in how to run for political office. Their goal is to get 100 leaders into elected office by 2010. “We have to have advocates in every sector to work on educational inequity,” Elissa Clapp, T.F.A.’s senior vice president for recruitment, told me in June… “Our alumni,” Clapp said, “are living proof that these two years could actually be a career accelerator.” Negar Azimi, Why Teach for America

Teach for America’s movement has trained a generation of policy advocates that is opening the door for private investment to exploit public education. One former TFA member, John White, was involved in a Florida education reform organization that, according to emails obtained via public records requests, “wrote and edited (state education) laws, regulations and executive orders, often in ways that improved profit opportunities for the organization’s financial backers”.
For years the education market was a notoriously difficult industry for private firms to penetrate. However, due to the strides that education reform has made in policy circles (in part the result of TFA’s alumni network), for-profit firms are beginning to make serious progress in education.  Venture capital firms are racing to invest; “transactions in the K-12 education sector soared to a record $389 million last year (2011), up from $13 million in 2005”.  Many of these investors are not looking to increase educational quality; rather, they want to cut cost and maximize profits.

Education entrepreneur John Katzman urged investors to look for companies developing software that can replace teachers for segments of the school day, driving down labor costs. ‘How do we use technology so that we require fewer highly qualified teachers?’ asked Katzman, who founded the Princeton Review test-prep company and now focuses on online learning. Stephanie Simon, Privatizing Public Schools: Big Firms Eyeing Profits From U.S. K-12 Market

Education reform advocates, including TFA, see standardized testing as the optimal means for evaluating student performance and teacher quality. These beliefs have in turn been codified into law, including at the federal level where No Child Left Behind (2002) and Race to the Top (2009) have tied school funding and evaluations to high-stakes testing.

The entire country just finished a decade-long experiment in standards-based, test-driven school reform called No Child Left Behind… Under threat of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their standards and began testing every student, every year in every grade from 3–8 and again in high school. (Before NCLB, only 19 states tested all kids every year, after NCLB all 50 did.) Rethnking Schools Editorial, Corporate Education ‘From Above’ and the Trouble with Common Core

As a result of these reforms, the corporate testing industry—made up of test makers, exam scorers, and test prep agencies—grew by the billions.  In 2009 alone, the K-12 market generated $2.7 billion dollars, and by 2013, the market had increased to over $4 billion.
It’s not just the for-profit test industry gaining from education reform; for-profit firms are beginning to directly control public schools.  In many of the nearly 5,500 charter schools in the nation, “private management companies — some of them for-profit — are in full control of running public schools with public dollars“. TFA alumni are not only championing these corporate investment opportunities, but current TFA members are being used to staff many of these newly opened charter schools. These privately-managed charter schools are an emerging market for investors to make substantial profits.

Wealthy investors and major banks have been making windfall profits by using a little-known federal tax break to finance new charter-school construction. The program, the New Markets Tax Credit, is so lucrative that a lender who uses it can almost double his money in seven years. Juan Gonzalez, Albany Charter Cash Cow: Big Banks Making a Bundle on New Construction as Schools Bear the Cost

Many of these for-profit managed charter schools put profits before students, further exploiting the children’s vulnerability.

FOCUSING ON THE INDIVIDUAL, IGNORING THE STRUCTURE

Most liberal initiatives are designed to help individuals compete in what liberals believe is a system that, if neutral, is fundamentally just and desirable.

“The traditional liberal mentality conceives of society as being made up not of competing economic classes and ethnic groups, but rather of competing individuals who confront a neutral body of law and a neutral institutional complex”. Norman Podhoretz

I’m not saying that members of TFA are bad people, or that they’re not intelligent. Of course, not everyone in TFA shares the same opinions. However,I believe that they are being conditioned by a program that ignores the systemic nature of poverty and its affect on differently situated groups both in and out of the classroom, and therefore sees the individual as the problem to be corrected. According to the program, closing the achievement gap is about improving student performance, not changing economic structures. From my interactions with my  TFA friends that are angry at me, I suspect that they don’t notice the corporate exploitation behind the scenes because they’re not encouraged to question their assumptions about the economic system as a whole.

 Although 16 million American children face the extra challenges of poverty, an increasing body of evidence shows they can achieve at the highest levels. TFA

According to TFA, poverty is an extra challenge that individual children face. They don’t see poor children as a class, and so there is no need to challenge the structural conditions that afflict the group as a whole.  Poverty is merely an individual challenge, not a fundamental feature of a class society.  Personal effort is all that is required to overcome personal challenges, and so the weight falls on individual students and teachers to try their way out of poverty.  This mentality only serves to strengthen the organization’s corporate backers who are not only exploiting the larger economy, but are now taking advantage of the new opportunities that TFA and the education reform movement are providing these wealthy investors.
Finally,  I’m not uncritical of the public school system’s largely repressive and obtuse approach to learning, development, and humanity. However, instead of changing those practices, I believe that TFA’s emphasis on testing and competition only serves to reinforce the worst elements of the existing educational system. Worse yet, TFA’s brand of reform is opening the education system up to the same corporate forces that  collapsed the economy and left the public holding the bag. That’s why we need resistance movements.
TFA is right about one thing, “poverty is not a destiny”. It’s structural.

Valerie Reidy, Ding Dong

Note how the article talks about student scandals but ignores the fact that Reidy wiped out entire departments of teachers at Bronx High.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/14/education/principal-at-bronx-high-school-of-science-is-leaving.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=2&pagewanted=print&

Principal at Bronx High School of Science Is Leaving

By AL BAKER

The longtime principal of the Bronx High School of Science has decided to retire at the end of summer, even as the public school, one of New York City’s most prestigious, is mired in an investigation into allegations of hazing on the boys’ track team. 

The principal, Valerie J. Reidy, who took over in 2001 after 23 years of teaching and managing at the school, said she was under no pressure from city education officials and was “not under investigation” in connection with the arrests of three track team members, all juniors, in March. 

“Was I happy about the track debacle? No,” Ms. Reidy said in a telephone interview on Thursday. “But is there ever going to be a perfect time?”

Ms. Reidy cited her age — she will turn 65 on Nov. 28 — and financial and family concerns for her decision. Her husband, James, retired two years ago from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, and one of her sons is set to wed in September. She wants to sell her house in Westchester County and travel more. Furthermore, she said, after factoring in differences in tax deductions, and savings on commuting costs, she will come out ahead by taking her pension instead of her salary, which is $150,926.

“I sort of had to grow up this year, and think with my head and not my heart,” she said. “Because if I thought with my heart, I would stay here forever. At some point in time, you have to say, ‘This is foolish.’ That is what my accountant told me.”

Her departure means that for the second straight year, the city’s Education Department will have to fill the leadership post at one of the system’s elite high schools.

Last August, Stanley Teitel, the principal of Stuyvesant High School, abruptly announced his retirement as the school was still reeling from a test-cheating scandal; he was succeeded by Jie Zhang, former leader of a specialized high school in Queens.

Lisa Rocchio, who graduated from Bronx Science in 1987 and is now its assistant principal for language and music, called Ms. Reidy “one of the strongest principals” she had ever seen at the school. “I think Valerie worked very, very hard to make sure that every child was educated and treated fairly and evenly,” she said.

But Ms. Reidy clashed fiercely with some teachers, including the chapter leader for the United Federation of Teachers. Turnover was high in recent years in the social studies and math departments, as teachers complained of what they felt was an overly critical administration. The union chapter leader declined to comment on Thursday.

Adam Stern, co-president of the parents’ association at the school, said he felt that any “bad feelings anyone has about her” were based on sexism against a strong, experienced woman who demanded excellence.

“A man exhibiting the same qualities, in a similar position, is labeled a great leader,” he said. “Hopefully one day this will change.”

More recently, the special commissioner of investigation for the Education Department has been looking into the school’s handling of hazing complaints. In February, three juniors on the track team were arrested after being accused of forcibly touching the genitals of a freshman teammate. An internal e-mail written last year by one of the athletic directors noted that the team had previously had a hazing episode, and urged coaches to keep watch over the locker rooms.

The misdemeanor cases are still pending, and Ms. Reidy said on Thursday that her supervisors had told her she had “handled it exactly right.”

Corporate Education 'From Above' and the Trouble with Common Core

Published on Wednesday, June 26, 2013 by ReThinking Schools

Corporate Education 'From Above' and the Trouble with Common Core

by Rethinking Schools Editorial

(Cartoon: Ethan Heitner / More at: freedomfunnies.wordpress.com)It isn't easy to find common ground on the Common Core. Already hailed as the “next big thing” in education reform, the Common Core State Standards are being rushed into classrooms in nearly every district in the country. Although these “world-class” standards raise substantive questions about curriculum choices and instructional practices, such educational concerns are likely to prove less significant than the role the Common Core is playing in the larger landscape of our polarized education reform politics.

We know there have been many positive claims made for the Common Core:

• That it represents a tighter set of smarter standards focused on developing critical learning skills instead of mastering fragmented bits of knowledge.
• That it requires more progressive, student-centered teaching with strong elements of collaborative and reflective learning.
• That it equalizes the playing field by raising expectations for all children, especially those suffering the worst effects of the “drill and kill” test prep norms of the recent past.

We also know that many creative, heroic teachers are seeking ways to use this latest reform wave to serve their students well. Especially in the current interim between the rollout of the standards and the arrival of the tests, some teachers have embraced the Common Core as an alternative to the scripted commercial formulas of recent experience, and are trying to use the space opened up by the Common Core transition to do positive things in their classrooms.
"Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. Unless we dismantle and defeat this larger effort, Common Core implementation will become another stage in the demise of public education."
We'd like to believe these claims and efforts can trump the more political uses of the Common Core project. But we can't.
For starters, the misnamed “Common Core State Standards” are not state standards. They're national standards, created by Gates-funded consultants for the National Governors Association (NGA). They were designed, in part, to circumvent federal restrictions on the adoption of a national curriculum, hence the insertion of the word “state” in the brand name. States were coerced into adopting the Common Core by requirements attached to the federal Race to the Top grants and, later, the No Child Left Behind waivers. (This is one reason many conservative groups opposed to any federal role in education policy oppose the Common Core.)
Written mostly by academics and assessment experts—many with ties to testing companies—the Common Core standards have never been fully implemented and tested in real schools anywhere. Of the 135 members on the official Common Core review panels convened by Achieve Inc., the consulting firm that has directed the Common Core project for the NGA, few were classroom teachers or current administrators. Parents were entirely missing. K–12 educators were mostly brought in after the fact to tweak and endorse the standards—and lend legitimacy to the results.
The standards are tied to assessments that are still in development and that must be given on computers many schools don't have. So far, there is no research or experience to justify the extravagant claims being made for the ability of these standards to ensure that every child will graduate from high school “college and career ready.” By all accounts, the new Common Core tests will be considerably harder than current state assessments, leading to sharp drops in scores and proficiency rates.
We have seen this show before. The entire country just finished a decade-long experiment in standards-based, test-driven school reform called No Child Left Behind. NCLB required states to adopt “rigorous” curriculum standards and test students annually to gauge progress towards reaching them. Under threat of losing federal funds, all 50 states adopted or revised their standards and began testing every student, every year in every grade from 3–8 and again in high school. (Before NCLB, only 19 states tested all kids every year, after NCLB all 50 did.)
By any measure, NCLB was a dismal failure in both raising academic performance and narrowing gaps in opportunity and outcomes. But by very publicly measuring the test results against benchmarks no real schools have ever met, NCLB did succeed in creating a narrative of failure that shaped a decade of attempts to “fix” schools while blaming those who work in them. By the time the first decade of NCLB was over, more than half the schools in the nation were on the lists of “failing schools” and the rest were poised to follow.
In reality, NCLB's test scores reflected the inequality that exists all around our schools. The disaggregated scores put the spotlight on longstanding gaps in outcomes and opportunity among student subgroups. But NCLB used these gaps to label schools as failures without providing the resources or support needed to eliminate them.
The tests showed that millions of students were not meeting existing standards. Yet the conclusion drawn by sponsors of the Common Core was that the solution was “more challenging” ones. This conclusion is simply wrong. NCLB proved that the test and punish approach to education reform doesn't work, not that we need a new, tougher version of it. Instead of targeting the inequalities of race, class, and educational opportunity reflected in the test scores, the Common Core project threatens to reproduce the narrative of public school failure that has led to a decade of bad policy in the name of reform.
The engine for this potential disaster, as it was for NCLB, will be the tests, in this case the “next generation” Common Core tests being developed by two federally funded, multi-state consortia at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. Although reasonable people, including many thoughtful educators we respect, have found things of value in the Common Core standards, there is no credible defense to be made of the high-stakes uses planned for these new tests.
The same heavy-handed, top-down policies that forced adoption of the standards require use of the Common Core tests to evaluate educators. This inaccurate and unreliable practice will distort the assessments before they're even in place and make Common Core implementation part of the assault on the teaching profession instead of a renewal of it. The costs of the tests, which have multiple pieces throughout the year plus the computer platforms needed to administer and score them, will be enormous and will come at the expense of more important things. The plunging scores will be used as an excuse to close more public schools and open more privatized charters and voucher schools, especially in poor communities of color. If, as proposed, the Common Core's “college and career ready” performance level becomes the standard for high school graduation, it will push more kids out of high school than it will prepare for college.
This is not just cynical speculation. It is a reasonable projection based on the history of the NCLB decade, the dismantling of public education in the nation's urban centers, and the appalling growth of the inequality and concentrated poverty that remains the central problem in public education.
Nor are we exaggerating the potential for disaster. Consider this description from Charlotte Danielson, a highly regarded mainstream authority on teacher evaluation and a strong supporter of the Common Core:

I do worry somewhat about the assessments—I'm concerned that we may be headed for a train wreck there. The test items I've seen that have been released so far are extremely challenging. If I had to take a test that was entirely comprised of items like that, I'm not sure that I would pass it—and I've got a bunch of degrees. So I do worry that in some schools we'll have 80 percent or some large number of students failing. That's what I mean by train wreck.

Reports from the first wave of Common Core testing are already confirming these fears. This spring students, parents, and teachers in New York schools responded to administration of new Common Core tests developed by Pearson Inc. with a general outcry against their length, difficulty, and inappropriate content. Pearson included corporate logos and promotional material in reading passages. Students reported feeling overstressed and underprepared—meeting the tests with shock, anger, tears, and anxiety. Administrators requested guidelines for handling tests students had vomited on. Teachers and principals complained about the disruptive nature of the testing process and many parents encouraged their children to opt out.
Common Core has become part of the corporate reform project now stalking our schools. Unless we dismantle and defeat this larger effort, Common Core implementation will become another stage in the demise of public education. As schools struggle with these new mandates, we should defend our students, our schools, our communities, and ourselves by telling the truth about the Common Core. This means pushing back against implementation timelines and plans that set schools up to fail, resisting the stakes and priority attached to the tests, and exposing the truth about the commercial and political interests shaping and benefiting from this false panacea for the problems our schools face.
Rethinking Schools has always been skeptical of standards imposed from above. Too many standards projects have been efforts to move decisions about teaching and learning away from classrooms, educators, and school communities, only to put them in the hands of distant bureaucracies. Standards have often codified sanitized versions of history, politics, and culture that reinforce official myths while leaving out the voices, concerns, and realities of our students and communities. Whatever positive role standards might play in truly collaborative conversations about what our schools should teach and children should learn has been repeatedly undermined by bad process, suspect political agendas, and commercial interests.
Unfortunately there's been too little honest conversation and too little democracy in the development of the Common Core. We see consultants and corporate entrepreneurs where there should be parents and teachers, and more high-stakes testing where there should be none. Until that changes, it will be hard to distinguish the “next big thing” from the last one.

© 2013 ReThinking Schools

Principal to Teach For America NY Hiring: Please delete me from this email list

...That is the message one NYC principal sent in response to this email:

Dear Principal,
I hope your school year went well!
I'm so excited to reach out regarding opportunities to connect with the new members of our incoming 2013 Teach For America corps. We are interested in partnering with you  and want to be sure you have an opportunity to meet our new folks. If you are interested in interviewing corps members for any available special education vacancies, in particular, I'd love to set up a time for you to speak with me or a member of my team to talk about your needs and the hiring progress.
At the bottom of this message, please find a few questions to get us started. We're arranging interviews for this week (tomorrow, June 26 and Friday, June 27), as well as in days following July 9. If you're interested, please do respond straight away and you'll be top of the list to speak with a member of my team.
My team and I are looking forward to working with you!
Ron Augustin
Director, District and School Partnerships
Teach For America ·   New York

Counterpunch: The ISO, Caterpillar and Democratic Accountability

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/24/the-iso-caterpillar-and-democratic-accountability/

The ISO, Caterpillar and Democratic Accountability

by PHAM BINH

I was dismayed to see a spat over Angelina Jolie’s surgery quickly degenerate into an idiotic war, with the International Socialist Organization (ISO) issuing an open letter warning the world about the degenerates running CounterPunch as if they had done something serious, like cover up a rape allegation, a crime that elicited only a lukewarm protest from the ISO as it ripped the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) apart.
Rather than privilege-bait the ISO’s leadership as Jeffrey St. Clair did or meander aimlessly over the irrelevant as Louis Proyect did in his “Inside the International Socialist Organization,” I thought I’d inject a bit of substantive criticism of the group’s inner workings based on my seven years as an ISO member. Like everyone else, I thought Proyect was going to bring some misdeeds to the light of day given the title of his piece. What follows is an excerpt from a lengthier critique (http://www.thenorthstar.info/?p=9055) of the ISO’s practices and methods.
On paper, the ISO seems to be democratic. The highest decision-making body is its yearly convention, made up of elected delegates from local branches. Any member can submit a resolution or a position paper for consideration. The Steering Committee is elected by the convention to lead and run the organization between conventions.
What these democratic forms amount to in practice is a different story.
There are no horizontal channels of communication between branches and the general membership; information and political arguments at the rank and file level therefore move in only one direction – vertically, upwards, through branch leadership committees, citywide leadership committees, the national committee (an advisory body to the Steering Committee elected by the convention), and the Steering Committee. Someone with an idea or proposal has to either fight for their view through these successive administrative layers either on their own as an individual or wait until the yearly pre-convention discussion period to propose it before the organization, but they cannot form a faction to fight for their viewpoint at convention because ISO members do not have a constitutionally guaranteed right to form factions. The most they can do is caucus.
This is a major reason why change in the ISO comes from above, not below.
Dissidents and deviationists face not an uphill battle but a veritable cliff to break through hardened groupthink just to gain a hearing; often an idea or proposal that is generally dismissed or derided when it comes from a rank-and-file member will be readily and eagerly adopted when that same idea or proposal comes from the Steering Committee or other leading personnel.
The organization’s conformist political culture is both a blessing and a curse, allowing it to persist and grow in the Reagan-Obama era while preventing it from fully prospering now that objective conditions are favorable for a mass-based radical left. Given the current political climate, there is no reason the ISO shouldn’t be growing exponentially and qualitatively to become a hegemonic force not only over the far left but the broad left. Thriving not surviving is the order of the day.
The ISO continues to use the British SWP’s closed slate system to elect its leadership, meaning the previous year’s Steering Committee submits the coming year’s Steering Committee to the convention as a single bloc for an up-or-down vote by a show of hands rather than a secret ballot. This makes it impossible for the membership to hold even one Steering Committee member accountable unless they can assemble 12 or more additional names for an entirely new slate. This practice is winner-take-all run amok, and the result is not a one-party state but a one-slate party; as far as anyone knows, the ISO has never had a competitive election for its Steering Committee since it was founded in 1977. Conventions are exercises in unanimity rather than a place where substantive differences are aired and ironed out in a vigorous and above-board manner.
The easiest way to understand any institution or organization in capitalist society is to do just one thing – follow the money. Doing so reveals how power and status is really distributed and how organizations actually function.
What is remarkable about the ISO in this regard is its lack of transparency. Dues are paid, money is raised, merchandise (books, magazines, and newspapers) is sold, but rare is the ISO member who knows that the organization’s 501(c)(3) – the Center for Economic Research and Social Change (CERSC) – bought and sold thousands of dollars in Caterpillar stock in 2010 in spite of the ISO’s support for the Palestinian boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) campaign’s targeting of Caterpillar for selling Israel the bulldozers it uses to demolish Palestinian homes and kill activist Rachel Corrie.
Whether or not buying and selling Caterpillar stock in defiance of the BDS campaign is right or wrong is not my place to decide, it is for the ISO’s membership to decide, and they cannot do so when they have no clue what the organization’s assets or liabilities consist of and are denied any formal control over CERSC. They cannot discuss and decide how best to spend CERSC’s $1.5 million in yearly revenue on organizing projects when these matters are handled internally as a state secret and questions about them from members are viewed as a sign of disloyalty to socialism rather than what they actually are – a principled commitment to the basic democratic norms working-class people are entitled to in their organizations.
Unions run in this manner are criticized by the left for disempowering the rank and file thereby undermining labor’s ability to fight capital, but how does wrong become right when the same methods are employed by a self-styled revolutionary organization aiming not just to fight capital but to end it?
Pham Binh is co-founder of The North Star. His writings on the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street, and socialism can be found at PlanetAnarchy.net.

Counterpunch: Inside ISO

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/06/14/inside-the-international-socialist-organization/

Weekend Edition June 14-16, 2013

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Putting the Sect Into Sectarian

Inside the International Socialist Organization

by LOUIS PROYECT

Whenever I reflect back on my decade-long experience in the American Socialist Workers Party during the Vietnam War epoch, I feel like I am auditioning for the lead role in Samuel Beckett’s “Krapp’s Last Tape”:

Just been listening to that stupid bastard I took myself for thirty years ago, hard to believe I was ever as bad as that. Thank God that’s all done with anyway. (Pause.) The eyes she had! (Broods, realizes he is recording silence, switches off, broods. Finally.) Everything there, everything, all the– (Realizing this is not being recorded, switches on.) Everything there, everything on this old muckball, all the light and dark and famine and feasting of . . . (hesitates) . . . the ages! (In a shout.) Yes! (Pause.) Let that go! Jesus! Take his mind off his homework! Jesus (Pause. Weary.) Ah well, maybe he was right.

I suppose that the one benefit derived from my misspent youth was learning enough about “Marxist-Leninism” first-hand so that I could be credible to young people today about avoiding my mistakes. Fortunately, the weight of history makes it much more difficult for groups like the SWP to attract new members since the “Russian” paradigm that they are based on is extinct.

One of the more dynamic and attractive groups on the far left is the International Socialist Organization (ISO). The ISO’ers made a splash recently by going on a campaign to expose the editors of CounterPunch as a bunch of sexist frat boys in the “Animal House” vein with Jeff St. Clair and Joshua Frank reprising Bluto and Otter. My intention here is not to reopen the brouhaha but to take a look at the ISO from the perspective of Jeff St. Clair’s recent article on the Silent Death of the American Left. I will argue that there is a relationship between a left so badly in need of resurrection now and transcending the type of sectarian divisions associated with the “Russian” paradigm.

The ISO was born in 1976 as a result of a faction fight in a group called International Socialism (IS). Ideologically the IS rested on a theory called “bureaucratic collectivism” cooked up by Max Shachtman and that regarded the USSR as a kind of new society ruled by bureaucrats who were exploiting the workers in the name of socialism. Later on, there was a conversion to “state capitalism”, a theory that looked just as askance at the USSR but through a somewhat different ideological prism. For those with a taste for these kinds of Talmudic disputations, I would refer you to Barry Finger’s article “Bureaucratic Collectivism” as well as my own dissection of state capitalism. It is the sort of thing that I used to find interesting, when disco was king.

That was when I first encountered “state capitalist” theory–in the early 1990s. I had trouble understanding how the term capitalist could be applied to the USSR since the lash of market relations was nowhere to be seen, especially for a labor force that had little to worry about runaway shops and unemployment. If you read the Communist Manifesto, it will be clear that capitalism was ruled by a bourgeoisie that “cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.”

But what in the world did this have to do with a Soviet Union that moved at a snail’s pace, particularly when it came to high technology? I was always reminded of Spalding Gray’s “Monster in a Box” monologue where he describes a visit to Russia. In attempting to explain in his own off-kilter manner why the USSR collapsed, he compares the communications system on an American battleship to its Soviet counterpart. It turns out that the Russian admiral uses an old-fashioned tube to speak to his men down in the engine-room.

The people who left the IS to form the ISO were given substantial support by the British IS’ers, who were in the process of forming the British SWP, a group now embroiled in controversy over a top leader not being punished for raping a young female member, a result of his crony ties to the investigating committee.

The British SWP was the mother ship of a worldwide movement in the mold of Leon Trotsky’s Fourth International, which was itself modeled on the Comintern. While Leon Trotsky was a very astute critic of Stalin, his party-building methodology yielded nothing but sects and cults. By the 1950s there were almost as many “Fourth Internationals” as Elvis imitators in Las Vegas, each with its own batty pretender to the throne. For example, Juan Posadas was the genius at the helm of his own International based in Latin America. He argued that UFO sightings were an indication of advanced socialist societies in outer space and advocated a preemptive nuclear strike against the USA by the USSR, so that socialism could arise out of the nuclear ashes.

Tony Cliff was the founder of the British SWP. Born Yigael Gluckstein in 1917, Cliff was a charismatic figure with a particular appeal for intellectuals such as Christopher Hitchens who joined the movement during the Vietnam antiwar movement. One major intellectual who has stuck with the party through thick and thin is Alex Callinicos, the author of 30 books and countless articles and now Professor of European Studies at King’s College London.
Jim Higgins, who died in 2002 at the age of 72, was a chastened ex-member of the British SWP and author of “More Years for the Locust: The Origins of the SWP”, a witty and knowing account of what it was like to belong to such a sect, especially its tendency to live in the past:

It does not require a particularly profound knowledge of the Trotskyist tradition to notice certain similarities between Marxist obscurantism and an addiction to Christian arcana, together with shared fissiparous tendencies. There is Trotsky, like Peter, the first and the best of the disciples and then there is the ever-growing proliferation of sects, sectlets and insects claiming direct descent from the master. Each one of them has a cast iron reason for standing against the rest. If the class nature of Stalinist Russia seemed of vital import to Trotsky in 1940, then it must be at the centre of our thoughts in 1996. Never mind that country no longer exists; the maintenance of the argument is the maintenance of the tradition, it has become an end in itself. So powerful is this yearning for the certainties of the past that even the way some of us talk and write is redolent of Comintern jargon of the 1920s, freshly translated from the Russian by an incompetent.

Somewhere along the line friction developed between the ISO and the mother ship. In early 2001 there was a bitter divorce between the two groups over a number of issues, with the British SWP accusing the Americans of not understanding “the lessons of Seattle”, which meant having a different take on the anti-globalization protests of 1999. How dare they? Plagiarizing Dreiser, Callinicos referred to his former comrades as an “American Tragedy” in a 2001 article that complained among other things about how his tiny group of his supporters were being treated by the party’s overwhelming majority: “The ISO’s December 2000 convention in any case marked a further qualitative stage in the group’s sectarian degeneration. In an almost hysterical atmosphere, a minority within the ISO that defended the analysis of the anti-capitalist mood shared by the rest of the IS Tendency were subjected to vilification, bullying, and intimidation.”

This of course is par for the course in such organizations. When you are in the minority, you get bullied, vilified and intimidated for not recognizing the brilliance of the leadership of the moment. A couple of months ago a sizable minority of the SWP walked out after realizing that trying to bring the leadership to account over the rape scandal and overcome a general lack of democracy would lead to them being treated like pork-eaters in a Mosque. Among the dissidents were the gifted Verso author Richard Seymour and science-fiction maven China Mieville. I strongly suspect that any left organizing they’re involved with will bear fruit and serve as an inspiration for the left in the USA. That’s just my opinion.

Once the ISO was unmoored from the SWP, it went from strength to strength. It threw itself into the antiwar movement as well as many campus-based struggles. During my 21-year tenure at Columbia University, I ran into them at a campus literature table on many occasions. Their success was an inspiration to two old friends who like me had broken from the Trotskyist movement. One was Sol Dollinger, the husband of the UAW Flint Women’s Auxiliary leader Genora Dollinger. The Dollingers followed Harry Braverman and Bert Cochran into the Socialist Union of the mid to late 1950s. Known as the “Cochranites”, the group had the audacious idea that unity rather than sectarian divisions on the left was necessary. As anybody old enough to remember the 1950s can attest, these were not good times to start any kind of new left group—sane or batty. So they fell apart in 1959. Braverman, of course, went on to write “Labor and Monopoly Capital”, a classic study of changes in the American economy.

Peter Camejo was another old friend who grew to respect the ISO’s work on the Nader campaign and what he regarded as their respect for democratic rights. Peter had problems with any group that adhered to the “Russian” model but saw them as a kind of butterfly struggling to break through the confines of the chrysalis they had inherited from the British SWP.

To some extent, the ISO’s growth must be attributed to the sorry state of the competition. My own group—the American SWP—had 2000 members in the year that the ISO was formed but drove most of them out over the next thirty years because they were not “Bolshevik” enough to go from one crappy factory job to another in search of a revolutionary proletariat, like Captain Ahab looking for Moby Dick. The only other sizable group on the left was the Workers World Party that suffered a walkout from the people who went on to form the Party for Socialism and Liberation. They were far more important to the antiwar movement than the ISO but have failed to capitalize on their accomplishments, probably because of the generally crude nature of their party organs that read like they were written for a kindergarten class and their ingrown culture.

In 2008 Lars Lih wrote a book titled “Lenin Rediscovered: What Is to Be Done? In Context” that posed a fundamental challenge to the way that groups like the ISO was organized. Lih claimed that Lenin did not create a party of a new type but simply tried to copy the example of the German Social Democracy of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, a pluralist and transparent organizational model that had little to do with the “vanguard” conceptions that allowed Alex Callinicos to give the boot to his American comrades.

If you are not that familiar with the German socialist movement of 100 years ago (who can blame you?), it might make more sense to think in terms of Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party or the IWW, organizations that sprang from the native soil. There is little question that once groups in the USA began imitating Lenin’s party in a mechanical fashion, the road to ruin was guaranteed.

The ISO is trying to give Lih his proper due (Haymarket Books, their publishing house, has put out a paperback version of his book) but continues to insist that a new type of party did come into existence in 1917. This involves putting a positive spin on the questionable initiatives of the Kremlin (mostly cooked up by Gregory Zinoviev, who was played to perfection by Jerzy Kosinski in Warren Beatty’s “Reds”).

Paul Le Blanc, an ISO member who has made explaining the Comintern as relevant to our tasks today a high priority, has twisted himself into a virtual pretzel trying to make its early history look sensible. At a conference sponsored by Historical Materialism that took place at NYU in April, Le Blanc tried to put a positive spin on the “21 Conditions” that had to be met in order for a working-class organization to get stamped as kosher by the Kremlin in 1919. Condition number ten called for the formation of “Red Trade Unions”, a totally idiotic measure that would have divided the working class and made it more vulnerable to attacks by the bosses and the cops. Condition twenty-one made sure that anybody sitting on the fence would get the message: “Those party members who fundamentally reject the conditions and Theses laid down by the Communist International are to be expelled from the party.”

After Peter Camejo had been expelled from the American SWP along with hundreds of others including Le Blanc, he went to Venezuela to read Lenin and figure out what went wrong. When he returned, he met with me and pointed out that in the entire history of the Bolshevik party, only a single person had ever been expelled—namely Bogdanov, the author of a third-rate science fiction novel and some distinctly odd philosophical notions. Who knows, maybe Edmund Wilson was right that things went downhill from that point?

Le Blanc went even further out on a limb on May 31 at the “Dangerous Ideas for Dangerous Times” conference in London organized by Tariq Ali and other independent radicals, and even seemed ready to saw it off. Speaking on the topic of “Leninism for Now”, he tried to somehow make Morris Lewitt seem reasonable. Lewitt was a top leader of the American SWP who died at the age of 95 in 1998 and was some kind of inspiration to Le Blanc. Goodness knows why.

In 1944 Lewitt gave a report to the American SWP that included this super-sectarian formulation: “We can tolerate no rivals. The working class, to make a revolution can do it through only one party and one program… We are monopolists in politics and we operate like monopolists. Either through merger or irreconcilable struggle. We have proved this by the whole history of our movement.” When I first came across this howler in the early 1980s, everything fell into place. No wonder the SWP went from 2000 members to about a hundred. But why would anybody see it as anything else except a sectarian rant? Le Blanc justifies it, or at least tries to put it into context, by stating that the Trotskyists were up against “authoritarian Stalinism”.

Well, yes and no. Just three years later in 1947 Bert Cochran and Harry Braverman would defend working with the Communist Party in the UAW against the Walter Reuther bureaucracy that was about to impose a loyalty oath on the union. The “Stalinists” were ready to join forces with the Trotskyists, who had sizable auto union representation in Detroit and Flint, including Ernie Mazey who would eventually become part of the union bureaucracy along with his Socialist Party brother Emile. For the time being, the radical members of the UAW believed that anti-Communism had to be resisted. There had to be a united front against the gathering McCarthyite tide.

However, James P. Cannon, the leader of the SWP, and his top lieutenant Morris Lewitt would have none of this. They ordered the UAW members to bloc with Walter Reuther. Since Stalinophobia ran so deep in the Trotskyist movement, the Cochranites felt that they had no other recourse except to form their own organization based on a more inclusive approach.
In May 1954 Bert Cochran wrote an article titled “Our Orientation” that includes words as germane today as they were back then:

Our purpose is to bring our ideas into the mass movement, and to gradually raise the consciousness of the ranks to the historic tasks. But the last thing in the world we should attempt is to inculcate the ranks with the necessity of adopting our specific tradition, and impressing upon them the truth of all the evaluations and proposals broached by Trotsky from 1923 on. The thought that in the coming period of our activity we have to go out of our way to mention the name and work of Leon Trotsky, and the name and the existence of the Fourth International, shows how far all of us have become infused with narrow group thinking, and organizational fetishism, how far we have traveled from the outlook of Frederick Engels, who warned the Socialists in America not to publish the Communist Manifesto, as it was based on old-world experiences, and that the American labor movement, developing under different conditions, would not understand it, and would not know what Marx and Engels were talking about. Why isn’t it possible for us to take this simple thought of Engels and apply it to ourselves and our work? If Engels didn’t think this was putting a question mark over his revolutionary integrity, why should we?

Probably I am the last person in the USA that the ISO wants to take advice from. But I will give it anyway. To start with, I think they should really think about using a new name. Practically anything would be better than International Socialist Organization. It would also be a good idea to dump the visual clichés like the clenched fist. I suppose that they have a handle on these sorts of problems inasmuch as nary a hammer-and-sickle can be found on their website. Smart people internationally are beginning to think hard about these questions. Naturally the folks who left the British SWP are on the leading edge as indicated by Tom Walker’s contribution on May 2^nd:

Intervene. Build. Cadre. Recruit. Centralism. Discipline. Indiscipline. Smash. Oppositionist. Comrade. Purge. Bourgeois. Layer. Expel. Vanguard. Front. Turn. Propaganda.
All these words and more are part of the very particular jargon we have been used to, both in the Socialist Workers Party and on the wider revolutionary left. Taken together, they are certainly evocative – and not in a good way.

Now I have no ideas on what words should replace this hoary lexicon but I am sure that the bright young things in the ISO can come up with something better.

Finally, and on somewhat of a more challenging basis, there really has to be a rethinking of the whole “democratic centralism” question. I think that most people understand that the ISO develops its strategy and tactics internally and then “intervenes” with them in the mass movement as indicated in Tom Walker’s note above.

I think that ideas have to be considered on their own merit in the mass movement independent of who is articulating them. My own experience in the American SWP is that people hated our guts even when they agreed with our ideas. It was quite off-putting to see every single SWP’er at an antiwar conference in the late 60s voting in the same way no matter what other people had to say. What was the point of having a conference? You could just invite one SWP’er to the conference who had been assigned 5 or 6 hundred votes and put an end to the charade.

On my own Marxism mailing list of 1500 subscribers, I have debated Cuba over the years with ISO’ers (they think it is a totalitarian dungeon) with an ever-increasing sense of futility. Even if what I say makes sense, they won’t buy it. The simple truth is that intellectual conformity in such groups is not a function of bureaucratic measures such as expulsion (although it obviously comes into play during sharp debates). It is all about peer pressure. Who would want to get on the other side of a heated debate with the people you hang out with all the time and who you consider to be the smartest people on earth? Of course, there are people like Jeff St. Clair, Joshua Frank, and me who don’t mind thinking and speaking for ourselves.

Just call us CounterPunchers.

Louis Proyect blogs at http://louisproyect.wordpress.com and is the moderator of the Marxism mailing list. In his spare time, he reviews films for CounterPunch.

Salon: Rahm Emanuel, the Murder Mayor

http://www.salon.com/2013/06/16/rahm_emanuel_is_losing_control_of_his_city/

Rahm Emanuel is losing control of his city

As his disapproval rating soars, he’s getting tagged with names like the “murder mayor.” Here’s how it fell apart

By Mark Guarino

Topics: Rahm Emanuel, Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, Chicago, Scott Walker, Morgan Stanley, Teachers, Teachers Unions, The Labor Movement, Austerity, Budget cuts, Democrats, Transparency, Editor's Picks, Business News, Politics News

(Credit: Benjamin Wheelock/Salon/Reuters/Jeff Haynes)

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel cakewalked into office, from his former position as the White House chief of staff to President Obama, to succeed the two-decade reign of Richard M. Daley. Like Daley, Emanuel faced weak opponents who grumbled at his supersize war chest, thickly padded by financiers from Hollywood to Wall Street. But unlike Daley, Emanuel promised two things Chicagoans do not hear often: pledges for more government transparency, and to make “tough choices” to fix the city’s ballooning budget deficit.
Now, midway into his inaugural term, the honeymoon is over. Emanuel faces scrutiny from groups Daley never alienated: public sector unions, liberal progressives and minority coalitions on the city’s South and West side. Since his election, Emanuel’s approval numbers started dropping, and some are charging him as racist — a “murder mayor” deaf to the marginalized swaths of Chicago suffering from escalating street violence, inadequate transit and the largest mass school closing in U.S. history. While he reigns as mayor in a city traditionally ruled by Democrats, many consider him a Republican in donkey blue clothing, who, like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R), swept into office and immediately hauled out the budget cleaver.
“Daley didn’t make enemies of labor unions, but now, the police, the fire, everybody essentially is now in opposition to Rahm and that didn’t have to happen,” says Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman who now teaches political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
To the surprise of no one familiar with his Washington reputation, many see the mayor as combative, refusing to take public input seriously, and allied so closely to his tight pool of corporate benefactors that the nickname “Mayor 1%” and Twitter hashtag #OneTermMayor have gone viral. Even some members of his party — a tribe that rarely breaks ranks — are scratching their heads in public. Most notable: Cook County board president Toni Preckwinkle, who told the Chicago Reader two weeks ago that his decision to close so many schools was “a terrible idea” and “demoralizing.”
“The closings are going to take place almost entirely within the African-American community, and given the problems we already have with violence, I think it’s very problematic,” she said.

In any other city, the insurgency might suggest Emanuel’s chances for reelection are in trouble, especially with two more years of drumbeating by his opponents. But this is Chicago, where term limits go to die, and where incumbents luxuriate in the home rule advantage.
Still, a Chicago Tribune/WGN-TV poll from early May shows a growing unrest. On the bright side, a healthy 50 percent of Chicago voters still approve of his job performance versus 40 percent who disapprove. But, a year ago, those numbers were 52-29. And among black voters, the problems are more acute. Just 40 percent approve of his performance while 48 percent disapprove; last year, that disparity was the other way around, at 44-33.
The numbers reflect the many confrontations Emanuel has faced these past two years: his proposal to reduce public library hours and staff; a contentious teacher strike that was the city’s first in 25 years; escalating gun violence that entered national headlines since last summer; a five-month renovation project that will shut down a major transit line on the South Side, primarily affecting black commuters; lackluster efforts to better the city’s unemployment rate that remains above 10 percent; and conflicting agendas on spending priorities, like the controversial announcement that 50 public schools will be shuttered in the city’s neediest neighborhoods to help shore up funds. That announcement happened to come the same week as another to spend $300 million in public money to build a new basketball arena and renovate Navy Pier, projects Emanuel promises will create 10,000 construction jobs, but others are calling white elephants in the making.
“He’s been an excellent CEO, he gives orders and things happen,” says Dick Simpson, a former Chicago alderman who now teaches political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “His weakness is that he’s not so good on democracy.”
In his campaign for mayor, Emanuel was scrutinized by his opponents as not being “from Chicago,” a technicality that his legal team ultimately dismantled, but a contention that still lingers as the mayor strives to show that he feels the pain of his constituents, even if a growing number may not fully believe he feels as sharp a sting.
Example: Daley left office on the heels of a $1.15 billion privatization deal involving selling the city’s 36,000 parking meters to a consortium owned, in part, by Morgan Stanley. The deal was not only later debunked as a financial catastrophe for the city — the city’s inspector general later said it was valued for $974 million more — but one that became a hot button issue for residents, as it cost them nearly triple to park on city streets, and made parking costly in some neighborhoods where meters previously didn’t exist. Since day one in office, Emanuel made it clear he understood the political liability of not doing something to rectify the situation. But critics say what he is proposing feels shaky.
After Morgan Stanley delivered the city a bill for an extra $49 million in fees — it turns out few city council alderman read the fine print that mentioned being charged for lost revenue from street festivals or disabled parking — Emanuel is proposing a new deal that once again made Sunday parking free, in exchange for allowing the company to extend parking hours, up to 10 p.m., in some neighborhoods. Emanuel’s talking point for selling the swap is “trying to make a little lemonade out of a big lemon.” But many aldermen, spurred by local media reports that Emanuel’s numbers were flawed — and worried their constituents will run them out of town on a rail — are demanding hard data from city hall to determine if, indeed, the numbers add up in their favor.
It doesn’t look good: A recent Tribune analysis concluded that Morgan Stanley would actually reap more under Emanuel’s new deal, to the tune of $517 million in additional revenue above meter fees. John Arena, a freshman alderman in the city’s 45th Ward, has been one of the few in the city council to demand accountability for the new deal, and he says the parking meter fight is an example of the mayor not coming clean about whose side he’s ultimately on.
“Transparency is the one thing the mayor was very vocal about in his campaign, and that’s been something he’s not fully lived up to,” Arena says. “Of course, when you’re in power, some of those promises may change, but my point of view is, transparency is more important now after the Daley years when it was a very closed circle of confidants and advisers and it’s led us into a bad place.”
Politically, the swap has the potential to test the patience of an electorate that the Tribune/WGN-TV poll shows is already on the wane: 52 percent of voters believe Emanuel has not kept his campaign pledge to rid government of insider deals, an increase from 39 percent last year.
If there is a legacy issue that may determine whether Emanuel’s reform agenda is best for Chicago, or a debacle in the making, it’s likely his decision in May to permanently shutter 50 public schools. Among his top reasons why: The school district must close its $1 billion deficit and the number of schools is disproportionate to the district’s population loss.
Again, many dispute his data. Between 2000 and 2013, the city says it lost 145,000 students according to census data, an 18 percent drop; however, school enrollment dropped much less, just 6 percent. Also, the $1 billion in savings the city says it will generate from the school closings is not likely to happen considering the district admits that the majority of that money will get redirected into the receiving schools as capital investments — which means the budgetary nightmare will still remain as frightful.
“The numbers are certainly going to be debated because we have different resources coming up with different data and that certainly is going to fuel both the defense and the distrust that some are feeling the system is putting forward,” says Steve Tozer, a professor of education and director of the Center for Urban Education Leadership at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
While Tozer agrees with Emanuel that the school district is woefully underfunded by the state, he says that Emanuel’s solution to close so many schools was unusually bold, given that he could have looked elsewhere for deep cuts — such as programs, personnel or operating costs.
“Any time you’re talking about closing even 10 percent of schools in any district, that’s pretty significant. No doubt this is going to be deeply disruptive,” he says.
Politically, the situation is disastrous, and some are (perhaps wishfully) taking it as the first real sign of vulnerability for his reelection chances. The Chicago Teachers Union is already spearheading a registration drive to turn a constituency that is already against the mayor into voters, and union president Karen Lewis labeled Emanuel “the murder mayor” because of all his cuts to vital services. Multiple lawsuits are also pending from families and the union who both say the mayor is violating the civil rights of special needs children and those living in poorer, marginalized neighborhoods. They say the closures are really a veiled attempt to weaken the union and expand the privatized charter school system.
No matter who wins the public relations war, the fight is ultimately rooted in how Chicago governance operates. On paper, the school board is an independent body, armed with the power to bypass city hall politics and do what it perceives as right for the children — even if it means raising taxes, which the board also has the right to do.
But this is Chicago. And no sitting mayor is going to let a group of appointee hacks stifle his chances at reelection. Which means that although the school district is in a separate building, operates under different rules, and is chartered to serve the children first, the reality is that, under Emanuel, the board is a politicized body that serves at his bidding.
“Chicago Public Schools pays a lot of money for benefits for board members and salaries for public administrators whose real job seems to be answering the phone when city hall calls and try to find a way to implement the dictated policy. They’re not setting the agenda so far as following the agenda,” says David Morrison, acting director of the Illinois Campaign for Political Reform, an advocacy group. “They don’t seem to play an independent role, so why are they there? Again, it comes back to the control that the fifth floor mayor’s office has.”
Business leaders are more forgiving of Emanuel’s no-nonsense style because they perceive him as a strong leader emboldened to do whatever it takes to drag Chicago out of the red, and develop long-term strategies to curb its financial crisis. Summing up this perspective is a quote by United Airlines CEO Jeff Smisek, in a current Time magazine cover story on the mayor, who described Emanuel as “just what the doctor ordered.”
Lawrence Msall agrees. As president of the Civic Federation, a government research organization in Chicago, Msall says Emanuel “has begun a lot of the heavy lifting that’s been needed in Chicago,” considering it faces a financial crisis largely compounded, he says, by an unfunded liability of $32 billion in the 10 Chicago-area public employee pension funds.
Msall blames much of the bungling of deals like the parking meters, not on the mayor’s office, but on the city council — which he says is too big, and lacks the authority to effectively analyze complicated financial legislation. The solution, he proposes, is an Office of Independent Budget Analysis that will vet all contracts and provide the council the analysis needed to make smart budgetary decisions.
So far, Msall says Emanuel is showing he is serious about confronting areas Daley hesitated to touch. One example is his plan to phase out the city’s subsidy of retiree healthcare by 2017 and moving the coverage under the Affordable Care Act.
“Whether we have any money for more government services, it is directly related to these legacy issues of unfunded pensions and other areas that continue to put financial pressure on the city,” Msall says. “That’s why a strong leader like Mayor Emanuel is attractive in dealing with the issues that were avoided or viewed as unworkable.”
Whatever its merit, this kind of talk is unusual in Chicago, where Republican challengers are extinct and mayors have traditionally maintained power through their patronage armies — which have consisted mainly of city workers and unions, the same groups that complain they are feeling the squeeze under Emanuel.
But in recent years, the Democratic Party in Chicago has operated much differently from its counterparts in other cities. Having zero opposition from Republicans has allowed it to adopt some core Republican principles, and push back harder against traditional constituent groups without fear of retaliation. In essence, this hybrid Chicago boss — corporate-friendly and anti-union, but progressive on traditional social issues like gay marriage — seems to thrive here, making it quite difficult for a serious challenger to rise up, either from the corporate sector or among the progressives, and pose a serious threat.
“So there is this remarkable void on the left and the right, which allows mayors like Emanuel and Daley to steer this middle of the road course. There isn’t much of a risk, even if Emanuel is seen as broadly unpopular,” says Larry Bennett, a political scientist at DePaul University in Chicago. “Chicago has been a one-party city for so long that there’s very little infrastructure for running against an incumbent.”
Indeed, while more in his party feel emboldened to publicly criticize Emanuel than they had Daley, none are likely to mount a serious campaign to knock him out of his seat in two years. One reason is political: He still rules what remains a rubber stamp council. The second is money: He has way more than they ever will see in their lifetime. The third is time: For progressives, a traditionally unorganized group, two years to coalesce into a political majority is slim to none.
“You can’t be somebody with nobody. You have to have a viable candidate and they have to have a movement behind them and some fundraising capacity,” Simpson says. “Most aldermen aren’t there yet.”
Still, while Emanuel’s war chest may ensure his political future, money can’t buy him love. “Daley had a charm to him that endeared him to residents of Chicago, even though he was making decisions that hurt their interests,” Arena says.
“But Rahm is different. He wants to squeeze. But the problem is, the more you squeeze, the more things run through your fingers. That’s going to be a challenge for him. You have to keep the city. The city has to love you.”

Mark Guarino is a staff writer with the Christian Science Monitor. He lives in Chicago.