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.
Showing posts with label George Schmidt. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Schmidt. Show all posts
Saturday, March 14, 2009
Wednesday, December 24, 2008
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.
__._,_.___
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.
__._,_.___
Friday, June 27, 2008
AFT Censorship of Substance
6/27/08
I hope you can share this as widely as possible among our friends who believe in
freedom of the press. As you know, AFT will be issuing press credentials to
many people, including representatives of some dubious regimes around the world
and individuals funded by the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation. AFT's
Public Affairs Office has already informed other Chicago news organizations, some
smaller than Substance, that their reporters will be issued credentials to
cover the convention.
Thanks. What I have below should help explain the situation in context.
George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance
June 27, 2008
Colleagues and friends:
Yesterday, Substance received the following e-mail:
"AFT will not be able to give your organization press credentials. We only
provide credentials to legitimate news organizations."
The e-mail was send by Janet Bass (jbass@aft.org), who is part of the staff
of what is called the "Public Affairs Office" of the American Federation of
Teachers in Washington, D.C. Ms. Bass's e-mail was in response to my repeated
requests to establish press credentials for Substance staff for the upcoming
convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Chicago.
As you know, the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers
is scheduled to begin in Chicago on July 11, with pre-convention activities
taking place beginning July 9.
As editor of Substance, I called AFT at least three times during the past
week, requesting the procedures for getting press credentials for those members
of our staff who would be covering the convention as reporters, videographers,
bloggers, and photographers (we intend to utilize all four media for this
event and have prepared a special section of the Substance Website for daily
coverage of both the National Education Association (NEA) convention (which begins
in Washington, D.C. July 1) and the AFT convention here in Chicago (beginning
July 11).
Traditionally, we inform organizations we will be covering in advance so that
their press people can prepare credentials and do any other necessary review
prior to the beginning of the news event. During the news event, we are all
too busy to revert to any bureaucratic necessities.
Ironically, the AFT is invoking a power (to determine what constitutes a
"legitimate news organization") which even President George W. Bush and the White
House Press Office would not invoke. As many of you know, in January 2008
(this past January), we received advanced notice that President Bush would be in
Chicago on January 7 to mark the anniversary of No Child Left Behind.
Although we generally don't cover national news events, if they take place in
Chicago we do. Several times during the past ten years, Substance has covered
figures from the U.S. Department of Education (including the now famous
former Deputy Education Secretary Susan Neuman and the current U.S. Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings) during media events which are held in Chicago. We
then routinely publish reports and analysis of these events. Even so finicky a
news manager as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has rarely tried to bar us
from news events, and our staff regularly go through the procedures established
by the Chicago Police Department to acquire Chicago Police press credentials.
Although it took three days, the White House Press Office eventually approved
three of our reporters (myself; Jackson Potter; and Joe Guzman) for coverage
of President Bush's visit to Chicago on January 7. What that meant was that we
had general access to several of the events of the day, although we (like all
of the TV stations and most other reporters) were barred from Bush's
seven-minute speech at Greeley Elementary School.
President Bush's No Child Left Behind anniversary speech was only covered by
the "Press Pool". This consists of two layers and is explained in our
Substance coverage (see our Home Page at www.substancenews.net) if you are interested
in this interesting detail of free press in the USA.
Interestingly, because of the terms under which "pool coverage" of the
President's visit are concerned, we were provided with all of the photos and reports
of the two Tribune people who were allowed into the main pool at Greeley,
Stephanie Banchero and a photographer. Both of these, as well as the White House
transcript of Bush's precise words, were published by Substance as news both
in our print edition and on the Web.
During the course of establishing our right to cover the President's Chicago
visit, we had to comply with a number of reasonable security concerns. The
three of us who covered President Bush had to provide the White House with our
personal information (including Social Security number) and submit to several
security checks. At O'Hare Airport (in a very secure part of the airport) we and
our cars were searched twice by Secret Service before we were driven out to
the tarmac by security (along with everyone else from the local press who had
been vetted) to cover the landing of Air Force One. You can see our photographs
from that part of the event at www.substancenews.net.
From O'Hare, we sped into Chicago, where we joined most of the press corps
outside a very secure perimeter around Horace Greeley Elementary School, while
President Bush, Mayor Daley, and Congressman Emmanuel were part of the NCLB
anniversary inside. That part of our coverage resulted in the front page
photograph of the mounted police cordoning off Greeley from the public (and, as I
said, "non pool" press). Our ability to report on what took place inside Greeley
existed because under the terms of the "Pool" coverage approach, other news
organizations are entitled to news reports and photographs from the events which
are restricted to "Pool." The Chicago Tribune followed these professional
rules precisely, and both the news reports and photographs from inside Greeley
were made available to us (you can read them in Substance, February 2008).
From Greeley, Joe, Jackson and I sped downtown to the Union League Club,
where Mayor Daley and President Bush were scheduled to meet with the Olympic 2016
committee before President Bush gave a speech on the economy (still one for
the books, in retrospect) to a select audience of wealthy Union League Club
members and family. At that event, we were again screened and admitted only after
security nodded. Our Chicago Police Press Credentials were necessary to get
through the police lines to get to the Union League Club (there were protesters
outside at Dearborn and Jackson, some of whom were later arrested). Inside, we
were screened again. But since we had already taken all the steps necessary
to cover the event, Jackson, Joe and I were led upstairs where we joined the
rest of the media awaiting (for more than an hour) the President of the United
States.
I could give 50 or 100 other examples of our experiences covering the news in
Chicago and elsewhere during the past ten years, but have shared that one
from January of this year because it goes to the fundamental First Amendment
nature of this business. Nobody in the USA -- including the President of the
United States -- has the power to say who is "legitimate news" media or
organizations. As you can see by reviewing our coverage of the January news from the most
powerful man (and office) on earth, by maintaining our professionalism and
providing the White House with reasonable information, we established our right
to cover one of the most important education news events to take place in
Chicago in the past year.
Viewed from the perspective of the news coverage Substance has provided on
education stories during the past 12 months, this current disagreement with the
American Federation of Teachers Public Affairs Office is something of a
tempest in a teapot.
However, we have to ask all of our friends to contact that AFT and demand
that the AFT Public Affairs Office immediately stop its attempt to censor
Substance's coverage of the AFT national convention this summer.
You can contact Janet Bass by e-mail at AFT (jbass@aft.org).
I would also ask that people who have the time write (snail mail) to AFT
President Ed McElroy demanding (or requesting if you think that's the best way to
do it) that AFT stop trying to censor Substance's coverage.
Ed McElroy
President, American Federation of Teachers (AFT)
555 New Jersey Ave. NW
Washington, D.C. 20001
I'm sorry that you and the staff of Substance have to waste time on this
rather silly exercise in the protection of our First Amendment rights, but I have
to ask that you do so. Neither the President of the United States of America
nor a couple of self important union bureaucrats has the right to declare who
or what constitutes "legitimate news organizations." To have allowed George W.
Bush to restrict our coverage of his No Child Left Behind visit to Chicago in
January 2008 would have been to surrender an important part of our precious
rights. To allow Ed McElroy, Janet Bass, or any other union bureaucrat to
restrict our coverage of the 2008 convention of the American Federation of Teachers
in July 2008 would also do violence to the freedoms and rights we all hold
dear.
I'll close with some words I memorized years ago and from time to time
repeat. Along with a few other part of our shared history (two by Abraham Lincoln --
the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural), they rings as powerfully
today as they did when they first became law more than 200 years ago:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech, or of the
press, or the right of the people, peaceably to assemble, to petition the
government for a redress of grievances." (First Amendment, from memory...).
Thank you for your help in this matter,
Solidarity Forever,
George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance
Substance
5132 W. Berteau
Chicago, IL 60641
773-725-7502
Csubstance@aol.com
www.substancenews.net
I hope you can share this as widely as possible among our friends who believe in
freedom of the press. As you know, AFT will be issuing press credentials to
many people, including representatives of some dubious regimes around the world
and individuals funded by the Milton and Rose Friedman Foundation. AFT's
Public Affairs Office has already informed other Chicago news organizations, some
smaller than Substance, that their reporters will be issued credentials to
cover the convention.
Thanks. What I have below should help explain the situation in context.
George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance
June 27, 2008
Colleagues and friends:
Yesterday, Substance received the following e-mail:
"AFT will not be able to give your organization press credentials. We only
provide credentials to legitimate news organizations."
The e-mail was send by Janet Bass (jbass@aft.org), who is part of the staff
of what is called the "Public Affairs Office" of the American Federation of
Teachers in Washington, D.C. Ms. Bass's e-mail was in response to my repeated
requests to establish press credentials for Substance staff for the upcoming
convention of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in Chicago.
As you know, the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers
is scheduled to begin in Chicago on July 11, with pre-convention activities
taking place beginning July 9.
As editor of Substance, I called AFT at least three times during the past
week, requesting the procedures for getting press credentials for those members
of our staff who would be covering the convention as reporters, videographers,
bloggers, and photographers (we intend to utilize all four media for this
event and have prepared a special section of the Substance Website for daily
coverage of both the National Education Association (NEA) convention (which begins
in Washington, D.C. July 1) and the AFT convention here in Chicago (beginning
July 11).
Traditionally, we inform organizations we will be covering in advance so that
their press people can prepare credentials and do any other necessary review
prior to the beginning of the news event. During the news event, we are all
too busy to revert to any bureaucratic necessities.
Ironically, the AFT is invoking a power (to determine what constitutes a
"legitimate news organization") which even President George W. Bush and the White
House Press Office would not invoke. As many of you know, in January 2008
(this past January), we received advanced notice that President Bush would be in
Chicago on January 7 to mark the anniversary of No Child Left Behind.
Although we generally don't cover national news events, if they take place in
Chicago we do. Several times during the past ten years, Substance has covered
figures from the U.S. Department of Education (including the now famous
former Deputy Education Secretary Susan Neuman and the current U.S. Secretary of
Education Margaret Spellings) during media events which are held in Chicago. We
then routinely publish reports and analysis of these events. Even so finicky a
news manager as Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley has rarely tried to bar us
from news events, and our staff regularly go through the procedures established
by the Chicago Police Department to acquire Chicago Police press credentials.
Although it took three days, the White House Press Office eventually approved
three of our reporters (myself; Jackson Potter; and Joe Guzman) for coverage
of President Bush's visit to Chicago on January 7. What that meant was that we
had general access to several of the events of the day, although we (like all
of the TV stations and most other reporters) were barred from Bush's
seven-minute speech at Greeley Elementary School.
President Bush's No Child Left Behind anniversary speech was only covered by
the "Press Pool". This consists of two layers and is explained in our
Substance coverage (see our Home Page at www.substancenews.net) if you are interested
in this interesting detail of free press in the USA.
Interestingly, because of the terms under which "pool coverage" of the
President's visit are concerned, we were provided with all of the photos and reports
of the two Tribune people who were allowed into the main pool at Greeley,
Stephanie Banchero and a photographer. Both of these, as well as the White House
transcript of Bush's precise words, were published by Substance as news both
in our print edition and on the Web.
During the course of establishing our right to cover the President's Chicago
visit, we had to comply with a number of reasonable security concerns. The
three of us who covered President Bush had to provide the White House with our
personal information (including Social Security number) and submit to several
security checks. At O'Hare Airport (in a very secure part of the airport) we and
our cars were searched twice by Secret Service before we were driven out to
the tarmac by security (along with everyone else from the local press who had
been vetted) to cover the landing of Air Force One. You can see our photographs
from that part of the event at www.substancenews.net.
From O'Hare, we sped into Chicago, where we joined most of the press corps
outside a very secure perimeter around Horace Greeley Elementary School, while
President Bush, Mayor Daley, and Congressman Emmanuel were part of the NCLB
anniversary inside. That part of our coverage resulted in the front page
photograph of the mounted police cordoning off Greeley from the public (and, as I
said, "non pool" press). Our ability to report on what took place inside Greeley
existed because under the terms of the "Pool" coverage approach, other news
organizations are entitled to news reports and photographs from the events which
are restricted to "Pool." The Chicago Tribune followed these professional
rules precisely, and both the news reports and photographs from inside Greeley
were made available to us (you can read them in Substance, February 2008).
From Greeley, Joe, Jackson and I sped downtown to the Union League Club,
where Mayor Daley and President Bush were scheduled to meet with the Olympic 2016
committee before President Bush gave a speech on the economy (still one for
the books, in retrospect) to a select audience of wealthy Union League Club
members and family. At that event, we were again screened and admitted only after
security nodded. Our Chicago Police Press Credentials were necessary to get
through the police lines to get to the Union League Club (there were protesters
outside at Dearborn and Jackson, some of whom were later arrested). Inside, we
were screened again. But since we had already taken all the steps necessary
to cover the event, Jackson, Joe and I were led upstairs where we joined the
rest of the media awaiting (for more than an hour) the President of the United
States.
I could give 50 or 100 other examples of our experiences covering the news in
Chicago and elsewhere during the past ten years, but have shared that one
from January of this year because it goes to the fundamental First Amendment
nature of this business. Nobody in the USA -- including the President of the
United States -- has the power to say who is "legitimate news" media or
organizations. As you can see by reviewing our coverage of the January news from the most
powerful man (and office) on earth, by maintaining our professionalism and
providing the White House with reasonable information, we established our right
to cover one of the most important education news events to take place in
Chicago in the past year.
Viewed from the perspective of the news coverage Substance has provided on
education stories during the past 12 months, this current disagreement with the
American Federation of Teachers Public Affairs Office is something of a
tempest in a teapot.
However, we have to ask all of our friends to contact that AFT and demand
that the AFT Public Affairs Office immediately stop its attempt to censor
Substance's coverage of the AFT national convention this summer.
You can contact Janet Bass by e-mail at AFT (jbass@aft.org).
I would also ask that people who have the time write (snail mail) to AFT
President Ed McElroy demanding (or requesting if you think that's the best way to
do it) that AFT stop trying to censor Substance's coverage.
Ed McElroy
President, American Federation of Teachers (AFT)
555 New Jersey Ave. NW
Washington, D.C. 20001
I'm sorry that you and the staff of Substance have to waste time on this
rather silly exercise in the protection of our First Amendment rights, but I have
to ask that you do so. Neither the President of the United States of America
nor a couple of self important union bureaucrats has the right to declare who
or what constitutes "legitimate news organizations." To have allowed George W.
Bush to restrict our coverage of his No Child Left Behind visit to Chicago in
January 2008 would have been to surrender an important part of our precious
rights. To allow Ed McElroy, Janet Bass, or any other union bureaucrat to
restrict our coverage of the 2008 convention of the American Federation of Teachers
in July 2008 would also do violence to the freedoms and rights we all hold
dear.
I'll close with some words I memorized years ago and from time to time
repeat. Along with a few other part of our shared history (two by Abraham Lincoln --
the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural), they rings as powerfully
today as they did when they first became law more than 200 years ago:
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or
prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging freedom of speech, or of the
press, or the right of the people, peaceably to assemble, to petition the
government for a redress of grievances." (First Amendment, from memory...).
Thank you for your help in this matter,
Solidarity Forever,
George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance
Substance
5132 W. Berteau
Chicago, IL 60641
773-725-7502
Csubstance@aol.com
www.substancenews.net
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
George Schmidt on Shanker and Response to Sean Ahern
Sean Ahern writes:
"He [Kahlenberg] specifically addresses the pamphlet written by George Schmidt in the
1980's and dismisses it saying that no evidence was offered to back up the charge that Shanker was working for the CIA. I guess it never occurred to Kahlenberg that the job of the historian is to dig out the information and not just present the official version based on facts handed to him by Shanker's acolytes."
George Schmidt responds:
June 10, 2008
He may dismiss Al Shanker's work on international affairs, but Shanker himself was always proud of it. I have a hunch that Shanker might even get a kick out of my Moe Berg baseball card (facsimile) and copy of "The Catcher was a Spy." I got the impression at one point that Shanker might even have gotten a kick out of seeing a book (a la the Moe Berg book) "The Teacher Was A Spy." Too bad the current hagiography can't do justice to the complexity of all that -- and of Shanker's Cold War "Liberalism". Someone might want to print up an Al Shanker baseball card and send it to Langley. These things, as Shanker knew, were always more complex than the silly Cliffs Notes versions of history that make others comfortable.
Another thing I've been thinking lately, and this one might roll your socks. Just as the 1968 restrospectives on Martin Luther King have unveiled some of the complexity of the final years of King's life (the Vietnam War opposition; the horrors of being a black sanitation worker in Memphis in 1967 and 1969) and counteracted some of the silly (and generally right wing) hagiographic historiography, I personally have a hunch that Al Shanker himself (not the newly emerging Shanker industry, which has a lot in common with the Martin Luther King industry) might have wanted a complete, nuanced, and dialectical appreciation of those years and that work -- and not this simplistic stuff that's being force fed into the next generation like stuffing into a soon to be Fois Gras'd goose.
One reason King comes to mind is that on certain Cold War issues (certainly Vietnam) King and Shanker landed on opposite sides. But in other ways, they are both examplars of the Liberalism of those years (and both descendents of the New Deal, with all that complexity).
One thing for sure. Al Shanker always knew himself to be in the mainstream of American Liberalism and was proud of that, too. To call him a "Conservative" (or "Neocon", whatever that might mean as history moves forward from the Bush nightmare) would doubtless have angered him. But to point out, accurately, his direct role in the Cold War didn't bother him a bit. Other people had "issues" with what we published back then; not Al Shanker.
I never said that Al Shanker was working for the CIA.
Didn't say it then, and haven't said it since.
I said that under Shanker cooperation with the CIA by the AFT was direct. It began as Shanker was ousting Dave Selden and continued for several years. The most dramatic (and in retrospect, horrifying) example was Chile in 1973, where a shadowy lady was down there somehow trading off AFT, AIFLD, and PTTI cover prior to the Pinochet coup, but there were dozens of others less dramatic (and deadly).
Shanker was not ashamed of those facts.
In 1977 or 1978 (I'm not going back to any notes), he and his team scheduled Irving Brown to address an "International Labor Luncheon" that Shanker had scheduled for the AFT convention. That was the Boston convention. Shanker's people scheduled Brown's address in opposition to the Black Caucus Luncheon that year. The Black Caucus luncheon was honoring Paul Robeson. Shanker and his people honored A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, and "everyone" knew that Robeson was a "Communist" and it was making them very very angry that the Black Caucus did that in their face during their convention.
So they got one of their Cold War heroes, Irving Brown, to speak at the same time in a different part of the hotel.
Irving Brown was CIA, proudly so. Now that everyone has Wikipedia, that's a no brainer.
And Irving Brown was there at AFT. He was there along with a pile of "international labor leaders", many of them CIA funded, or from company unions sponsored by their governments. Some had really murky background; my favorite that year was the one from the Philippines, where the "Free Trade Union" was friends with the Marcos people. There was a lot of "International" labor stuff that year for that convention. We had one of our people (a Marine combat veteran from the Vietnam War, for what that's worth) cover Irving Brown, and I published a transcript of Brown's speech in "The American Federation of Teachers and The CIA."
There were few unions in those days as deeply involved with that kind of "international" work, and none more deeply so than AFT. That's just a fact of history.
The AFT connections were through the International Trade Secretariats (like the PTTI that provided AFT for a time with Denise Thiery) and the regional groupings from those days (AIFLD for the Western Hemisphere was just the most famous, then and in retrospect; AALC for African and the Asian American Free Labor Committee for Asia were also in play).
Had the author of this latest Shanker book bothered to call, I would have helped him clarify what he put into his book on Shanker.
I've been in the Chicago phone book since the days I wrote about the AFT's CIA links back then.
But I never heard from him, and now people are asking me when I left the Communist Party, since our author seems to believe, also, that I was (or is) a "Communist" (upper case "C"). I have a hunch that my friends in the CPUSA, both locally here in Chicago and elsewhere, would have clarified that for him, too, had he or his editors bothered to ask. Anyway, with funding from the Broad Foundation to help write the new Shanker book, he could have afforded more careful fact checking, but that's a question for later.
As most people in New York know (but I was only beginning to learn when I began researching the study, since I was in Chicago), Al Shanker was proudly associated with the Schachtmanites and Lovestonites from New York City. Now that Lovestone's work is proudly proclaimed (and Irving Brown is clearly listed in the history books), maybe there can be some retrospective study of the impact of that crazed anti-Communism on the AFL-CIO for those 40 years or so, and the results today for the weakened labor movement in the USA. We can at least hope.
One other thing.
Shanker was very proud of that international work. At a "Wingspread" conference (Johnson Wax, Racine Wisconsin) 20 years ago on "Recruitment, Retention and Renewal" (20 years ago -- the same problem with getting and keeping new teachers we're all discussing today) Shanker and I wound up in the same place at the same time, and had a very calm (and private discussion) about all that stuff. By then, it was clear the USA had "won" the Cold War. It almost seemed like Shanker was interested in being precise about his places in history, and as people know he was always a stickler for accuracy. He made no secret about the Irving Brown connection (those old Cold Warriors idolized Irving Brown, as any of the survivors will tell you to this day), nor was he ashamed of the work with AIFLD or the other groups.
George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance
www.substancenews.net
Lois Weiner responds:
Where George and I AND Shanker part ways is that I advocate a consistent defense of political and economic rights throughout the world. The CP's defense of workers' rights was as one-sided as was Shanker's.
Shanker and his clique were furious when I spoke in defense of the rights of Soviet dissidents -- and linked these struggles to those of workers and activists in capitalist countries. I explain this in my chapter.
"He [Kahlenberg] specifically addresses the pamphlet written by George Schmidt in the
1980's and dismisses it saying that no evidence was offered to back up the charge that Shanker was working for the CIA. I guess it never occurred to Kahlenberg that the job of the historian is to dig out the information and not just present the official version based on facts handed to him by Shanker's acolytes."
George Schmidt responds:
June 10, 2008
He may dismiss Al Shanker's work on international affairs, but Shanker himself was always proud of it. I have a hunch that Shanker might even get a kick out of my Moe Berg baseball card (facsimile) and copy of "The Catcher was a Spy." I got the impression at one point that Shanker might even have gotten a kick out of seeing a book (a la the Moe Berg book) "The Teacher Was A Spy." Too bad the current hagiography can't do justice to the complexity of all that -- and of Shanker's Cold War "Liberalism". Someone might want to print up an Al Shanker baseball card and send it to Langley. These things, as Shanker knew, were always more complex than the silly Cliffs Notes versions of history that make others comfortable.
Another thing I've been thinking lately, and this one might roll your socks. Just as the 1968 restrospectives on Martin Luther King have unveiled some of the complexity of the final years of King's life (the Vietnam War opposition; the horrors of being a black sanitation worker in Memphis in 1967 and 1969) and counteracted some of the silly (and generally right wing) hagiographic historiography, I personally have a hunch that Al Shanker himself (not the newly emerging Shanker industry, which has a lot in common with the Martin Luther King industry) might have wanted a complete, nuanced, and dialectical appreciation of those years and that work -- and not this simplistic stuff that's being force fed into the next generation like stuffing into a soon to be Fois Gras'd goose.
One reason King comes to mind is that on certain Cold War issues (certainly Vietnam) King and Shanker landed on opposite sides. But in other ways, they are both examplars of the Liberalism of those years (and both descendents of the New Deal, with all that complexity).
One thing for sure. Al Shanker always knew himself to be in the mainstream of American Liberalism and was proud of that, too. To call him a "Conservative" (or "Neocon", whatever that might mean as history moves forward from the Bush nightmare) would doubtless have angered him. But to point out, accurately, his direct role in the Cold War didn't bother him a bit. Other people had "issues" with what we published back then; not Al Shanker.
I never said that Al Shanker was working for the CIA.
Didn't say it then, and haven't said it since.
I said that under Shanker cooperation with the CIA by the AFT was direct. It began as Shanker was ousting Dave Selden and continued for several years. The most dramatic (and in retrospect, horrifying) example was Chile in 1973, where a shadowy lady was down there somehow trading off AFT, AIFLD, and PTTI cover prior to the Pinochet coup, but there were dozens of others less dramatic (and deadly).
Shanker was not ashamed of those facts.
In 1977 or 1978 (I'm not going back to any notes), he and his team scheduled Irving Brown to address an "International Labor Luncheon" that Shanker had scheduled for the AFT convention. That was the Boston convention. Shanker's people scheduled Brown's address in opposition to the Black Caucus Luncheon that year. The Black Caucus luncheon was honoring Paul Robeson. Shanker and his people honored A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, and "everyone" knew that Robeson was a "Communist" and it was making them very very angry that the Black Caucus did that in their face during their convention.
So they got one of their Cold War heroes, Irving Brown, to speak at the same time in a different part of the hotel.
Irving Brown was CIA, proudly so. Now that everyone has Wikipedia, that's a no brainer.
And Irving Brown was there at AFT. He was there along with a pile of "international labor leaders", many of them CIA funded, or from company unions sponsored by their governments. Some had really murky background; my favorite that year was the one from the Philippines, where the "Free Trade Union" was friends with the Marcos people. There was a lot of "International" labor stuff that year for that convention. We had one of our people (a Marine combat veteran from the Vietnam War, for what that's worth) cover Irving Brown, and I published a transcript of Brown's speech in "The American Federation of Teachers and The CIA."
There were few unions in those days as deeply involved with that kind of "international" work, and none more deeply so than AFT. That's just a fact of history.
The AFT connections were through the International Trade Secretariats (like the PTTI that provided AFT for a time with Denise Thiery) and the regional groupings from those days (AIFLD for the Western Hemisphere was just the most famous, then and in retrospect; AALC for African and the Asian American Free Labor Committee for Asia were also in play).
Had the author of this latest Shanker book bothered to call, I would have helped him clarify what he put into his book on Shanker.
I've been in the Chicago phone book since the days I wrote about the AFT's CIA links back then.
But I never heard from him, and now people are asking me when I left the Communist Party, since our author seems to believe, also, that I was (or is) a "Communist" (upper case "C"). I have a hunch that my friends in the CPUSA, both locally here in Chicago and elsewhere, would have clarified that for him, too, had he or his editors bothered to ask. Anyway, with funding from the Broad Foundation to help write the new Shanker book, he could have afforded more careful fact checking, but that's a question for later.
As most people in New York know (but I was only beginning to learn when I began researching the study, since I was in Chicago), Al Shanker was proudly associated with the Schachtmanites and Lovestonites from New York City. Now that Lovestone's work is proudly proclaimed (and Irving Brown is clearly listed in the history books), maybe there can be some retrospective study of the impact of that crazed anti-Communism on the AFL-CIO for those 40 years or so, and the results today for the weakened labor movement in the USA. We can at least hope.
One other thing.
Shanker was very proud of that international work. At a "Wingspread" conference (Johnson Wax, Racine Wisconsin) 20 years ago on "Recruitment, Retention and Renewal" (20 years ago -- the same problem with getting and keeping new teachers we're all discussing today) Shanker and I wound up in the same place at the same time, and had a very calm (and private discussion) about all that stuff. By then, it was clear the USA had "won" the Cold War. It almost seemed like Shanker was interested in being precise about his places in history, and as people know he was always a stickler for accuracy. He made no secret about the Irving Brown connection (those old Cold Warriors idolized Irving Brown, as any of the survivors will tell you to this day), nor was he ashamed of the work with AIFLD or the other groups.
George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance
www.substancenews.net
Lois Weiner responds:
Where George and I AND Shanker part ways is that I advocate a consistent defense of political and economic rights throughout the world. The CP's defense of workers' rights was as one-sided as was Shanker's.
Shanker and his clique were furious when I spoke in defense of the rights of Soviet dissidents -- and linked these struggles to those of workers and activists in capitalist countries. I explain this in my chapter.
Sunday, March 23, 2008
George Schmidt on Alexander Russo and Social Promotion
March 21, 2008
Norm and friends:
Consider the following a quick and dirty draft. More to come if you need it. Feel free to share, as usual...
Russo quote:
This whole thing is typical Russo bullshit, and the quote above is typical of the way his brand of journalism does the propaganda for the ruling class.
More metaphors ("brawl")than facts. As usual.
Here are some facts.
At the time Chicago declared that dictatorship was the way to run an urban school system, the verdict was in about "ending social promotion." The New York Gates program had proved it didn't work, and nothing Chicago has done since has nullified that verdict. But there were tremendous pressures (and millions of dollars) behind the Chicago push, so it continued despite the facts (and ethics; and bona fide research).
Contrary to Russo's latest apologetic for Chicago style corporate "school reform", the issues were not as "complicated" as he tries to make them out to be (before simultaneously oversimplifying his version of reality to land squarely on the side of the lucrative status quo).
From the beginning, the "ending social promotion" mantra was a carefully crafted talking point, not a factual statement of history or policy.
Chicago at various times had "promoted" students who went overage in elementary school, and at other times didn't. The underlying triage of the school system, based initially on economic class, then (by the 1950s) on racial segregation had always resulted in a large number of "failing" students at the "bottom."
Each time Chicago didn't promote kids based on age, there grew a backlog of students in the elementary schools who either dropped out before high school or who eventually became too big for their desks in elementary school.
They were then eventually put into high school. Remember: by 1995, when Mayor Daley took over, Chicago had more than 300 segregated all-black public schools (out of 600). No other place in the Northern Hemisphere was nearly as segregated as Chicago, and most people from outside Chicago couldn't believe the extent of the segregation (or the viciousness with which the all-black schools were generally deprived of the resources to educate some of the most challenging children in the USA). Note, as this discussion evolves, how segregation is left out of the facts that are rendered. It was massively important to shift the discussion from white supremacy to "standards and accountability" and the times demanded guys like Alexander Russo to do the job on behalf of Mayor Daley and Chicago's corporate rulers.
Russo ignores this history, because his version of the histories (and Catalyst's for which he works) depends on ignoring many facts.
I'll leave aside the massive social contexts (especially racial segregation) and just deal with the actual versions (that's plural) of "standards and accountability". Just for starters, CPS announced it was "ending social promotion" in 1996 (not 1997, as Russo reports). By 1997, Mayor Daley was speking before the National Press Club in Washington D.C. that he had "successully" "ended social promotion" and repeating all of those right wing talking points about how all we need is firm "standards and accountability". This is long before No Child Left Behind. Chicago's children were the guinea pigs in all this.
By 1997, most educational researchers were warning Chicago that the retention policy would hurt the kids who were most at risk. The studies were conclusive. Many, as you know in New York, were based on the New York "gates" experiences. By 1998, Chicago was replicating the same dismal realities. In 1998, the Consortium (Melissa Roderick, ten years ago) admitted that the Chicago ban on "social promotion" had failed to improve things for the kids who were being held back (the more times they were held back, the more likely they were to drop out, which is what the pre-1990s research had already shown). But, Roderick wrote at the time, there was a possibility that keeping the "failing kids" back (even at the expense of their futures) had a salutory effect on the rest of the kids. The argument, which many people here challenged Roderick on at the time, was sort of like the one for torture -- or public executions. Even if they aren't good for the victim, they have a "good" social effect.
By 2000, even Roderick was no longer claiming the public execution version of why ending "social promotion" was OK. All of the data were showing that the policies of "ending social promotion" had failed by any reasonable statistical or educational measure. But the political insistence that the policies be in place were stronger than ever, because No Child Left Behind was about to launch the same series of lies across the USA, with Chicago as one of the supposed models for "success."
For two years in the early 00s, Roderick's work was compromised (and the work of the Consortium, perhaps fatally). In 2001 and 2002, she and John Easton (the other main person at the Consortium) went to work for the Chicago Board of Education and their neighbor Arne Duncan, a former professional basketball player and son of a University of Chicago professor who had been named "Chief Executive Officer" of Chicago's public schools (following Mayor Daley's ouster of Paul Vallas, who was sent to Philadelphia with the blessings of then Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge).
Roderick became, for a year, Arne Duncan's chief of strategic planning. John Easton became a chief research type (actual title and powers, unclear).
Ironically, this interregnum (Duncan had gotten rid of both of them by late 2002) was the last time Chicago actually had people at the top who understood the complex data and statistical realities that were underlying the CPS policies and praxis. Since then, CPS has settled for "research" chiefs whose degrees are in "public policy" and who know less about statistics and research than the average high school student who passes Advanced Placement Statistics.
What Russo is doing is recycling conservative talking points, then dressing them up with some twists as "fact." Note that he never actually talks about numbers, but froths into metaphor and some quips. The reason is that at every point, the numbers are nasty. The kids who are kept back are screwed -- just as the data showed from as far back as the New York Gates programs -- for life. The schools don't improve, either. What happens is a massive triage, with the minority of better scoring children (usually, middle class) slowly being siphoned off into magnet, charter and selective enrollment schools, while the remaining public schools receive the "leftover kids" (as they have been called in New Orleans, and in some schools here).
Russo has a way of dodging facts and ignoring data, except when he is cherry picking to fit his conservative biases. No mention is made, for example, of the fact that at every point CPS has been a moving target as far as its actual "standards" for promotion are concerned. The Board of Education has literally revised them every year for the past ten years. Until four years ago, the promotion "standards" were based on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (and the high school TAP tests), despite the clear warnings that these tests are not supposed to be used for such things. Prior to that, the Illinois tests (IGAP, for Illinois Goals Assessment Program) were used. Since CPS was finally forced to unload the ITBS and TAP, the ISAT (Illinois State Assessment Tests) have been used. But the ISAT have a funny kink in them. Two years ago, they were made easier (by extending the time kids had and changing some of the parts of the test) just in time for the Governor's election. Honest.
What's amazing about Russo's piece is that he can ignore what now amounts to more than ten years of history and information, then spin out the same lies about "ending social promotion" that were being served up by right wing pundits a decade ago, when Chicago was in the vanguard of test-based "standards and accountability" long before No Child Left Behind.
I could add more for you and friends, but I hope this gives you some flavor of what's taking place here. Anything published by Russo -- and not just stuff in obvious right wing venues -- should be carefully reviewed, because it's more likely than not propaganda for the "standards and accountability" corporate "school reform" crowd.
Thousands of children have been screwed by the policies Russo praises. The fact that most of them were poor and black just meant that they were easy to ignore while the dirty deeds were being done to them. We're working on making sure that the next ten years are not as easily lied about as the last ten years. And that "reporting" like the kind Russo does gets deconstructed as soon as possible with as many facts as possible.
George N. Schmidt
Editor, Susbtance
www.substancenews.net
Addendum:
3/21/08
Norm (and colleagues):
I really wish we had been able to get to New York this week for AERA and to spend some time with y'all. But just to have the time to look over this stuff you forwarded makes part of it fun. (I wish we had a conference and I could dissect Russo during a panel that included Russo).
But here's the most interesting.
If you read the Russo paragraph above, would you know that "G. Alfred Hess" (Northwestern Univesity) has been dead for 26 months? Fred died January 27, 2006.
Or would you know that Hess's "research" at Northwestern was completely financed by money from the Daley administration (most, to the tune of three quarters of a million dollars a year at one point) from the Chicago Board of Education?
Or that Hess's doctorate was in anthropology (or divinity) and that he really didn't know much about complex research -- either through formal training or later experience?
I knew "Fred" Hess (the Chicago one) long before he became relatively wealthy for slanting his research in the direction of the people who were paying for it: CPS and the Daley administration.
For a time, we worked together and I liked him. As he became more the spokesman for the official version of "reform" (and a proponent of Chicago's "ending social promotion" among many other nasty things), we had fewer and fewer things in common.
In fact, after he authored a truly mendacious "study" praising Chicago for the Bookings Institution (one that was unveiled, by the way, at a private briefing in Chicago where press people like me were explicitly barred), I had some back and forth with him about his funding and his methods. By the end of our review of what he had published, he was backtracking on just about everything, especially that nonsense about the benefits of public executions (quoted approvingly by Russo, above). Interestingly, by the time I was done going back and forth with him privately (but with an intention of utilizing it for Substance, which he knew about), he was being publicly criticized by others for the same problems with his "research." As Richard Elmore noted in one critique (published for Brookings): "Hess has written a kind of teleological paper, communicating a sense of manifest destiny. Things are essentially getting better in Chicago and progress is based on a rational, straight-ahead model..." Despite its academic politeness, Elmore's critique is as applicable to what Hess was doing as I would suggest we need to be to what Russo is doing, in the tradition of Hess. I would just be a bit unprofessorial and call both Bullshit, because that's what they are.
Now, from the dead Hess, to Russo, to the living Hess (there are two "Fred Hess" guys in ed research, and it's important to distinguish between them, even though both are (were) cheerleaders for top down "standards and accountability" reform).
As I noted earlier to you, CPS long ago shifted from using the ITBS (and TAP) to using the ISAT (and Prairie State). For some reason, Russo misses that fact, too.
So whether it's quoting dead professors as if they are alive or citing dead data long after they've been replaced, Russo's work is truly a piece of work.
Typical of the kind of "reporting" we face every day.
Anyone want to discuss the other Fred Hess, while we're on fact versus other.
George Schmidt
Norm and friends:
Consider the following a quick and dirty draft. More to come if you need it. Feel free to share, as usual...
Russo quote:
Student retention, one of several lightning rod issues that bring parents, union leaders, politicians, and academics together—to fight—is not a task for the faint of heart.
It’s thus fitting that the city of broad shoulders, guided by a mayor named Daley, should lead the way. Chicago’s pioneering program is now in its eighth year, having withstood its share of icy gusts from multiple directions. For those who have been paying close attention, the brawl that broke out last spring was just the latest in a rolling clamor to control one of education’s linchpin topics. The stakes are high; the questions, many and complicated.
This whole thing is typical Russo bullshit, and the quote above is typical of the way his brand of journalism does the propaganda for the ruling class.
More metaphors ("brawl")than facts. As usual.
Here are some facts.
At the time Chicago declared that dictatorship was the way to run an urban school system, the verdict was in about "ending social promotion." The New York Gates program had proved it didn't work, and nothing Chicago has done since has nullified that verdict. But there were tremendous pressures (and millions of dollars) behind the Chicago push, so it continued despite the facts (and ethics; and bona fide research).
Contrary to Russo's latest apologetic for Chicago style corporate "school reform", the issues were not as "complicated" as he tries to make them out to be (before simultaneously oversimplifying his version of reality to land squarely on the side of the lucrative status quo).
From the beginning, the "ending social promotion" mantra was a carefully crafted talking point, not a factual statement of history or policy.
Chicago at various times had "promoted" students who went overage in elementary school, and at other times didn't. The underlying triage of the school system, based initially on economic class, then (by the 1950s) on racial segregation had always resulted in a large number of "failing" students at the "bottom."
Each time Chicago didn't promote kids based on age, there grew a backlog of students in the elementary schools who either dropped out before high school or who eventually became too big for their desks in elementary school.
They were then eventually put into high school. Remember: by 1995, when Mayor Daley took over, Chicago had more than 300 segregated all-black public schools (out of 600). No other place in the Northern Hemisphere was nearly as segregated as Chicago, and most people from outside Chicago couldn't believe the extent of the segregation (or the viciousness with which the all-black schools were generally deprived of the resources to educate some of the most challenging children in the USA). Note, as this discussion evolves, how segregation is left out of the facts that are rendered. It was massively important to shift the discussion from white supremacy to "standards and accountability" and the times demanded guys like Alexander Russo to do the job on behalf of Mayor Daley and Chicago's corporate rulers.
Russo ignores this history, because his version of the histories (and Catalyst's for which he works) depends on ignoring many facts.
I'll leave aside the massive social contexts (especially racial segregation) and just deal with the actual versions (that's plural) of "standards and accountability". Just for starters, CPS announced it was "ending social promotion" in 1996 (not 1997, as Russo reports). By 1997, Mayor Daley was speking before the National Press Club in Washington D.C. that he had "successully" "ended social promotion" and repeating all of those right wing talking points about how all we need is firm "standards and accountability". This is long before No Child Left Behind. Chicago's children were the guinea pigs in all this.
By 1997, most educational researchers were warning Chicago that the retention policy would hurt the kids who were most at risk. The studies were conclusive. Many, as you know in New York, were based on the New York "gates" experiences. By 1998, Chicago was replicating the same dismal realities. In 1998, the Consortium (Melissa Roderick, ten years ago) admitted that the Chicago ban on "social promotion" had failed to improve things for the kids who were being held back (the more times they were held back, the more likely they were to drop out, which is what the pre-1990s research had already shown). But, Roderick wrote at the time, there was a possibility that keeping the "failing kids" back (even at the expense of their futures) had a salutory effect on the rest of the kids. The argument, which many people here challenged Roderick on at the time, was sort of like the one for torture -- or public executions. Even if they aren't good for the victim, they have a "good" social effect.
By 2000, even Roderick was no longer claiming the public execution version of why ending "social promotion" was OK. All of the data were showing that the policies of "ending social promotion" had failed by any reasonable statistical or educational measure. But the political insistence that the policies be in place were stronger than ever, because No Child Left Behind was about to launch the same series of lies across the USA, with Chicago as one of the supposed models for "success."
For two years in the early 00s, Roderick's work was compromised (and the work of the Consortium, perhaps fatally). In 2001 and 2002, she and John Easton (the other main person at the Consortium) went to work for the Chicago Board of Education and their neighbor Arne Duncan, a former professional basketball player and son of a University of Chicago professor who had been named "Chief Executive Officer" of Chicago's public schools (following Mayor Daley's ouster of Paul Vallas, who was sent to Philadelphia with the blessings of then Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge).
Roderick became, for a year, Arne Duncan's chief of strategic planning. John Easton became a chief research type (actual title and powers, unclear).
Ironically, this interregnum (Duncan had gotten rid of both of them by late 2002) was the last time Chicago actually had people at the top who understood the complex data and statistical realities that were underlying the CPS policies and praxis. Since then, CPS has settled for "research" chiefs whose degrees are in "public policy" and who know less about statistics and research than the average high school student who passes Advanced Placement Statistics.
What Russo is doing is recycling conservative talking points, then dressing them up with some twists as "fact." Note that he never actually talks about numbers, but froths into metaphor and some quips. The reason is that at every point, the numbers are nasty. The kids who are kept back are screwed -- just as the data showed from as far back as the New York Gates programs -- for life. The schools don't improve, either. What happens is a massive triage, with the minority of better scoring children (usually, middle class) slowly being siphoned off into magnet, charter and selective enrollment schools, while the remaining public schools receive the "leftover kids" (as they have been called in New Orleans, and in some schools here).
Russo has a way of dodging facts and ignoring data, except when he is cherry picking to fit his conservative biases. No mention is made, for example, of the fact that at every point CPS has been a moving target as far as its actual "standards" for promotion are concerned. The Board of Education has literally revised them every year for the past ten years. Until four years ago, the promotion "standards" were based on the Iowa Tests of Basic Skills (and the high school TAP tests), despite the clear warnings that these tests are not supposed to be used for such things. Prior to that, the Illinois tests (IGAP, for Illinois Goals Assessment Program) were used. Since CPS was finally forced to unload the ITBS and TAP, the ISAT (Illinois State Assessment Tests) have been used. But the ISAT have a funny kink in them. Two years ago, they were made easier (by extending the time kids had and changing some of the parts of the test) just in time for the Governor's election. Honest.
What's amazing about Russo's piece is that he can ignore what now amounts to more than ten years of history and information, then spin out the same lies about "ending social promotion" that were being served up by right wing pundits a decade ago, when Chicago was in the vanguard of test-based "standards and accountability" long before No Child Left Behind.
I could add more for you and friends, but I hope this gives you some flavor of what's taking place here. Anything published by Russo -- and not just stuff in obvious right wing venues -- should be carefully reviewed, because it's more likely than not propaganda for the "standards and accountability" corporate "school reform" crowd.
Thousands of children have been screwed by the policies Russo praises. The fact that most of them were poor and black just meant that they were easy to ignore while the dirty deeds were being done to them. We're working on making sure that the next ten years are not as easily lied about as the last ten years. And that "reporting" like the kind Russo does gets deconstructed as soon as possible with as many facts as possible.
George N. Schmidt
Editor, Susbtance
www.substancenews.net
Addendum:
As some observers have noted, student retention policies are not really about the students who are retained as much as they are about the way the rest of the school system operates when it knows that there is no social promotion. Researchers like G. Alfred Hess, an education professor at Northwestern University, are quick to point out that the justifications for retaining students should not be based solely on their impact on retained students, but rather on the effect of the threat of retention on all students and their families. “This dual intent for ending the social promotion policy is frequently ignored by its opponents and is rarely considered in evaluating the effectiveness of the policy,” Hess writes in School Reform in Chicago (2004).
3/21/08
Norm (and colleagues):
I really wish we had been able to get to New York this week for AERA and to spend some time with y'all. But just to have the time to look over this stuff you forwarded makes part of it fun. (I wish we had a conference and I could dissect Russo during a panel that included Russo).
But here's the most interesting.
If you read the Russo paragraph above, would you know that "G. Alfred Hess" (Northwestern Univesity) has been dead for 26 months? Fred died January 27, 2006.
Or would you know that Hess's "research" at Northwestern was completely financed by money from the Daley administration (most, to the tune of three quarters of a million dollars a year at one point) from the Chicago Board of Education?
Or that Hess's doctorate was in anthropology (or divinity) and that he really didn't know much about complex research -- either through formal training or later experience?
I knew "Fred" Hess (the Chicago one) long before he became relatively wealthy for slanting his research in the direction of the people who were paying for it: CPS and the Daley administration.
For a time, we worked together and I liked him. As he became more the spokesman for the official version of "reform" (and a proponent of Chicago's "ending social promotion" among many other nasty things), we had fewer and fewer things in common.
In fact, after he authored a truly mendacious "study" praising Chicago for the Bookings Institution (one that was unveiled, by the way, at a private briefing in Chicago where press people like me were explicitly barred), I had some back and forth with him about his funding and his methods. By the end of our review of what he had published, he was backtracking on just about everything, especially that nonsense about the benefits of public executions (quoted approvingly by Russo, above). Interestingly, by the time I was done going back and forth with him privately (but with an intention of utilizing it for Substance, which he knew about), he was being publicly criticized by others for the same problems with his "research." As Richard Elmore noted in one critique (published for Brookings): "Hess has written a kind of teleological paper, communicating a sense of manifest destiny. Things are essentially getting better in Chicago and progress is based on a rational, straight-ahead model..." Despite its academic politeness, Elmore's critique is as applicable to what Hess was doing as I would suggest we need to be to what Russo is doing, in the tradition of Hess. I would just be a bit unprofessorial and call both Bullshit, because that's what they are.
Now, from the dead Hess, to Russo, to the living Hess (there are two "Fred Hess" guys in ed research, and it's important to distinguish between them, even though both are (were) cheerleaders for top down "standards and accountability" reform).
As I noted earlier to you, CPS long ago shifted from using the ITBS (and TAP) to using the ISAT (and Prairie State). For some reason, Russo misses that fact, too.
So whether it's quoting dead professors as if they are alive or citing dead data long after they've been replaced, Russo's work is truly a piece of work.
Typical of the kind of "reporting" we face every day.
Anyone want to discuss the other Fred Hess, while we're on fact versus other.
George Schmidt
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
Chicago Rules for Firing Teachers
Chicago Public Schools Policy Manual
Title: REASSIGNMENT AND LAYOFF OF REGULARLY CERTIFIED AND APPOINTED TENURED TEACHERS
Section: 504.2
Board Report: 04-0623-PO5 Date Adopted: June 23, 2004
Policy:
THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER RECOMMENDS:
The Chief Executive Officer recommends amending Board Report 97-0723-P02 by adoption of the following amended policy for use by the Board and administrators, effective July 1, 2004.
HISTORY OF BOARD ACTION:
The Board approved Board Report 95-0814-P02, Reassignment and Layoff of Regularly Certified and Appointed Teachers Due to Changes in Staffing Needs on August 14, 1995 and amended the policy by Board Report 97-0723-P02 on July 23, 1997.
DESCRIPTION:
The Illinois School Code and other statutes permit collective bargaining on decisions regarding reductions in force. The merits of various options concerning the reassignment and layoff of regularly certified and appointed tenured teachers as a result of changes in staffing needs and the remediation, probation, or reconstitution of schools were the subject of collective bargaining with the Chicago Teachers Union. The policy set forth below reflects the agreements reached with the Chicago Teachers Union.
Section I - Scope of Policy
Whenever an attendance center or a program is closed, there is a drop in enrollment, the educational focus of the attendance center is changed such that available teaching positions cannot accommodate some or all current regularly certified and appointed teaching staff, or when an attendance center is subject to actions taken pursuant to Sections 34-8.3 or 8.4 of the School Code, tenured teachers will be reassigned or laid off in accordance with this policy.
Section 2 - Selection of Teachers for Removal
A. In Attendance Centers/Programs That Are Not Subject to Reconstitution
If changes in an attendance center or program require removal of some but not all teachers, teachers with appropriate certifications will be selected for retention based on system-wide seniority. Provisionals, Day-to-
Day substitutes, Cadre Substitutes, Temporarily Assigned Teachers ("TATs") and Probationary teachers within the attendance center or program will be removed before any regularly certified and appointed tenured teachers with the appropriate certification is removed, in that order. Within each group, system-wide seniority shall be the determining factor.
B. In Attendance Centers/Programs That Are Subject to Reconstitution
In attendance centers that are subject to reconstitution, tenured teachers will be removed based upon the criteria set forth in Section 34.18(31) of the School Code. The relative weight of such criteria shall be determined by the Chief Executive Officer or an individual attendance center basis according to the School Improvement Plan and the type of position to be changed or closed.
Section 3 - Notice of Position Closing
When a determination is made that a tenured teacher's services are no longer required at an attendance center, or in a program for the reasons described in Section I above, the tenured teacher will be so notified (hereinafter "notice of removal").
Section 4 - List of Vacancies
Upon notice to the tenured teacher of removal, the Department of Human Resources will immediately provide the tenured teacher with a list of all unencumbered vacant positions for which he or she is qualified and which are consistent with the Plan to Implement the Provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Department will also provide each tenured teacher who makes a written request to the Department with a copy of the list of vacancies in any area identified by the Department to be an area of systemic critical need.
Section 5 - Opportunity to Interview
During the first 30 school days after notice of removal, the tenured teacher will be permitted to interview at schools of his/her choosing without being assigned any additional duties. The Board will make available to affected tenured teachers lists of vacancies, job counseling and assistance with resume writing and interviewing skills.
Section 6 - Reassignment To A Permanent Position
Applications for vacancies shall be made to the principals with a copy provided by the tenured teacher to the Department of Human Resources. The tenured teacher will be interviewed by the principal unless the position is filled before an interview takes place. When a principal recommends appointment of a tenured teacher applicant to a vacant position, the teacher will be transferred to that position.
Section 7 - Interim Appointment
An appointment of a tenured teacher to a vacant position may be made by a principal on an interim basis, with written notice to the Department of Human Resources. An interim appointment will be no more than sixty school days during which the teacher's performance will be evaluated by the principal or a qualified designee. If the tenured teacher is removed from the interim position prior to expiration of the interim period or if the tenured teacher is not offered a regular appointment when his or her interim appointment expires, he or she will be reassigned to an Area cluster as provided in Section 9.
Section 8 - Permanent Appointment
If the principal, determines during the interim period that the tenured teacher is performing satisfactorily and should by appointed permanently, the principal will recommend such an appointment to the Department of Human Resources. The recommendation will be accepted and the tenured teacher will receive a regular appointment. If the tenured teacher remains in the interim position for more than 60 days, he or she shall be permanently assigned to the position.
Section 9 - Assignment to an Area Cluster
Following the 30 school day period after notice of removal and thereafter during any period when the tenured teacher is not in an interim or permanent appointment, the teacher will be assigned to an Area cluster as a day-to-day substitute teacher. The Department of Human Resources will make every effort to assign the tenured teacher to the Area cluster to which the tenured teacher was previously assigned or in which the tenured teacher resides.
Section 10 – Layoff
If a tenured teacher is unable to secure a permanent appointment within 10 school months after notice of removal, the tenured teacher shall be laid off and given an honorable termination from service and the opportunity to be placed as a cadre substitute in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement between the Board and the Chicago Teachers Union. When a layoff is required, the tenured teacher shall be notified at least 14 days in advance of the date the layoff is to take effect.
Section 11 - Recall
If after 10 school months the tenured teacher has not been appointed to a permanent position, he or she will be honorably terminated from service. If within two years after an honorable termination the tenured teacher is appointed by a principal to a permanent position, tenure and prior seniority will be restored to the teacher as of that date.
Section 12 - Plan to Implement Provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
If a removed tenured teacher's appointment to a vacancy would not be consistent with the Plan to Implement Provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the appointment will not be made unless there is no teacher who holds the appropriate certification available to be appointed consistent with the Plan.
Section 13 - Effective Date
This policy is effective only with respect to certified and appointed tenured teachers who receive a notice of removal on or after July 1, 2004. Non-tenured teachers removed pursuant to Section 1 prior to July 1,
2004, and to whom this policy applied prior to July 1, 2004, shall continue to receive the benefits of this policy.
Amends/Rescinds: Amends 97-0723-PO2; 95-0814-PO2
Cross References: Legal References: 115 ILCS 5/4.5, as amended
Title: REASSIGNMENT AND LAYOFF OF REGULARLY CERTIFIED AND APPOINTED TENURED TEACHERS
Section: 504.2
Board Report: 04-0623-PO5 Date Adopted: June 23, 2004
Policy:
THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER RECOMMENDS:
The Chief Executive Officer recommends amending Board Report 97-0723-P02 by adoption of the following amended policy for use by the Board and administrators, effective July 1, 2004.
HISTORY OF BOARD ACTION:
The Board approved Board Report 95-0814-P02, Reassignment and Layoff of Regularly Certified and Appointed Teachers Due to Changes in Staffing Needs on August 14, 1995 and amended the policy by Board Report 97-0723-P02 on July 23, 1997.
DESCRIPTION:
The Illinois School Code and other statutes permit collective bargaining on decisions regarding reductions in force. The merits of various options concerning the reassignment and layoff of regularly certified and appointed tenured teachers as a result of changes in staffing needs and the remediation, probation, or reconstitution of schools were the subject of collective bargaining with the Chicago Teachers Union. The policy set forth below reflects the agreements reached with the Chicago Teachers Union.
Section I - Scope of Policy
Whenever an attendance center or a program is closed, there is a drop in enrollment, the educational focus of the attendance center is changed such that available teaching positions cannot accommodate some or all current regularly certified and appointed teaching staff, or when an attendance center is subject to actions taken pursuant to Sections 34-8.3 or 8.4 of the School Code, tenured teachers will be reassigned or laid off in accordance with this policy.
Section 2 - Selection of Teachers for Removal
A. In Attendance Centers/Programs That Are Not Subject to Reconstitution
If changes in an attendance center or program require removal of some but not all teachers, teachers with appropriate certifications will be selected for retention based on system-wide seniority. Provisionals, Day-to-
Day substitutes, Cadre Substitutes, Temporarily Assigned Teachers ("TATs") and Probationary teachers within the attendance center or program will be removed before any regularly certified and appointed tenured teachers with the appropriate certification is removed, in that order. Within each group, system-wide seniority shall be the determining factor.
B. In Attendance Centers/Programs That Are Subject to Reconstitution
In attendance centers that are subject to reconstitution, tenured teachers will be removed based upon the criteria set forth in Section 34.18(31) of the School Code. The relative weight of such criteria shall be determined by the Chief Executive Officer or an individual attendance center basis according to the School Improvement Plan and the type of position to be changed or closed.
Section 3 - Notice of Position Closing
When a determination is made that a tenured teacher's services are no longer required at an attendance center, or in a program for the reasons described in Section I above, the tenured teacher will be so notified (hereinafter "notice of removal").
Section 4 - List of Vacancies
Upon notice to the tenured teacher of removal, the Department of Human Resources will immediately provide the tenured teacher with a list of all unencumbered vacant positions for which he or she is qualified and which are consistent with the Plan to Implement the Provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Department will also provide each tenured teacher who makes a written request to the Department with a copy of the list of vacancies in any area identified by the Department to be an area of systemic critical need.
Section 5 - Opportunity to Interview
During the first 30 school days after notice of removal, the tenured teacher will be permitted to interview at schools of his/her choosing without being assigned any additional duties. The Board will make available to affected tenured teachers lists of vacancies, job counseling and assistance with resume writing and interviewing skills.
Section 6 - Reassignment To A Permanent Position
Applications for vacancies shall be made to the principals with a copy provided by the tenured teacher to the Department of Human Resources. The tenured teacher will be interviewed by the principal unless the position is filled before an interview takes place. When a principal recommends appointment of a tenured teacher applicant to a vacant position, the teacher will be transferred to that position.
Section 7 - Interim Appointment
An appointment of a tenured teacher to a vacant position may be made by a principal on an interim basis, with written notice to the Department of Human Resources. An interim appointment will be no more than sixty school days during which the teacher's performance will be evaluated by the principal or a qualified designee. If the tenured teacher is removed from the interim position prior to expiration of the interim period or if the tenured teacher is not offered a regular appointment when his or her interim appointment expires, he or she will be reassigned to an Area cluster as provided in Section 9.
Section 8 - Permanent Appointment
If the principal, determines during the interim period that the tenured teacher is performing satisfactorily and should by appointed permanently, the principal will recommend such an appointment to the Department of Human Resources. The recommendation will be accepted and the tenured teacher will receive a regular appointment. If the tenured teacher remains in the interim position for more than 60 days, he or she shall be permanently assigned to the position.
Section 9 - Assignment to an Area Cluster
Following the 30 school day period after notice of removal and thereafter during any period when the tenured teacher is not in an interim or permanent appointment, the teacher will be assigned to an Area cluster as a day-to-day substitute teacher. The Department of Human Resources will make every effort to assign the tenured teacher to the Area cluster to which the tenured teacher was previously assigned or in which the tenured teacher resides.
Section 10 – Layoff
If a tenured teacher is unable to secure a permanent appointment within 10 school months after notice of removal, the tenured teacher shall be laid off and given an honorable termination from service and the opportunity to be placed as a cadre substitute in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement between the Board and the Chicago Teachers Union. When a layoff is required, the tenured teacher shall be notified at least 14 days in advance of the date the layoff is to take effect.
Section 11 - Recall
If after 10 school months the tenured teacher has not been appointed to a permanent position, he or she will be honorably terminated from service. If within two years after an honorable termination the tenured teacher is appointed by a principal to a permanent position, tenure and prior seniority will be restored to the teacher as of that date.
Section 12 - Plan to Implement Provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964
If a removed tenured teacher's appointment to a vacancy would not be consistent with the Plan to Implement Provisions of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the appointment will not be made unless there is no teacher who holds the appropriate certification available to be appointed consistent with the Plan.
Section 13 - Effective Date
This policy is effective only with respect to certified and appointed tenured teachers who receive a notice of removal on or after July 1, 2004. Non-tenured teachers removed pursuant to Section 1 prior to July 1,
2004, and to whom this policy applied prior to July 1, 2004, shall continue to receive the benefits of this policy.
Amends/Rescinds: Amends 97-0723-PO2; 95-0814-PO2
Cross References: Legal References: 115 ILCS 5/4.5, as amended
Sunday, September 16, 2007
George Schmidt on Eli Broad
I know y'all New Yorkers are impressed with how briefly Bloomklein have been around to wreak all this havoc, but let's not forget that the national model (until you guys took center stage) was Chicago, which is still the pioneer in totalitarian urban school systems. That thing about B-school grads and lawyers fits into what's been Chicago's "business model" for more than a decade. The last thing they want is experienced veteran teachers or principals running a school system.
One of the most interesting ways to track this havoc is to go back through the central administrative budgets and see how they've added titles like "Chief of Staff" and "Deputy Chief of Staff" (all requiring no education credentials) since deregulation. They are also -- here at least -- refusing to provide any information about the qualifications of the people they put into these jobs. We're being forced to go to court under FOIA to get the resumes and other information on the supposed qualifications of all these lawyers and MBAs to run the educational system.
Final note.
I had dinner three weeks ago with people from the Oakland area the last night I was out in Berkeley taking Danny (some of you remember him; he's now studying math and engineering at UofC) to school. The people in California have the most direct and ongoing experience with the Broads and Broad himself. We just need to coordinate more somehow.
Broad's gunning to get right up there with Gates as the leading fascist training camp for this crowd.
And in many ways he's worse than Gates and more insidious, because his "progressive" supporters include union people (like Andy Stern of SEIU, who teacher bashed in Chicago a year ago using Broad data) and "Democrats".
George Schmidt
Editor, Substance
www.substancenews.net
One of the most interesting ways to track this havoc is to go back through the central administrative budgets and see how they've added titles like "Chief of Staff" and "Deputy Chief of Staff" (all requiring no education credentials) since deregulation. They are also -- here at least -- refusing to provide any information about the qualifications of the people they put into these jobs. We're being forced to go to court under FOIA to get the resumes and other information on the supposed qualifications of all these lawyers and MBAs to run the educational system.
Final note.
I had dinner three weeks ago with people from the Oakland area the last night I was out in Berkeley taking Danny (some of you remember him; he's now studying math and engineering at UofC) to school. The people in California have the most direct and ongoing experience with the Broads and Broad himself. We just need to coordinate more somehow.
Broad's gunning to get right up there with Gates as the leading fascist training camp for this crowd.
And in many ways he's worse than Gates and more insidious, because his "progressive" supporters include union people (like Andy Stern of SEIU, who teacher bashed in Chicago a year ago using Broad data) and "Democrats".
George Schmidt
Editor, Substance
www.substancenews.net
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