CPS and Further De-stabilization

"We're stabilizing our district so we can build the academic performance" 

- Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennet on the closing of 52 schools in one year

We've recently discussed how a mayor who is quickly undermining the public sector and removing funding from anti-violence measures in the city has also blamed residents for the gang-centric violence in their own neighborhoods.

And now he closes down more than 50 schools in these same high-poverty, high-crime, underresourced, segregated neighborhoods. In one shot. In one year. Without adequate research, cost-analysis. Just decides it needs to be done. Tells us it needs to be done. Holds some hearings, wherein parents come out in droves to voice, loudly, their disapproval. Where parents protest, where parents and students testify that shutting down their schools is dangerous and destabilizing, where parents hold mic-checks to send signals to CPS that CPS needs to listen to us.

And CPS ignores us. They send out proxies, but the proxies are bored. Rahm is nowhere to be seen. No, wait, he's riding the slopes when this announcement is made. On his behalf.

What effect will all this have? There are some things we can guess. But for the most part, we've already seen the effects of closing down several schools simultaneously. It's violence. Kids having to choose between gangs. In a highly-segregated city replete with racialized violence against young people, do you really believe that something horrible won't happen? Just as the shooting numbers are decreasing, children and care-givers will begin the new year at the tail end of a lethal summer running from gangs? Thanks, Rahm and Barbara.

In the meantime, hundreds of Chicago residents have been summarily fired. So much for stabilization, Byrd-Bennett!

The Infantization of Chicago (Schools in Crisis II)

As a new parent with some of my upbringing stuck deep inside me, I found the idea of an incredulous toddler maddening. I had to learn to break the habit of spanks and taps – all of which hurt my daughter incredibly more than any other act of hurting. She trusted her parents, I learned, and I was given the gift of her trust. So I learned in the process that I couldn’t just pick her up and do my will. She would have to make up her mind of her own volition. This would take a lot of patience on my part, a patience that I didn’t always want to sacrifice.

But, she was worth it. The trust she endeared in me was worth it. Her dignity and humanity was worth it. And the chance to retain a leadership status into the future is worth it.

Contrast that to this skeezbag of a pastor, who claims to pick his wife up everyday just to show her who's boss.

The amount of abuse that happens in that household and within his congregation is unfathomable, for sure. But what happens when a mayor and his staff does that to an entire metropolis? Is this not systemic abuse?

Let's look at Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Barbara Byrd-Bennett.

Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett are positive that the best things for Chicagoans are what Emanuel and Byrd-Bennett insist are the best things for us. And then they tell us that we will thank them for it in the future, but that their austerity plans are the best for us now. They may even try to convince us that we like their plans right now.

Byrd-Bennett, in fact, never once showed at one of the loud, cantankerous school closing hearings held throughout the city. I was involved in one, and heard from several friends and media reports in the majority of others. Parents were irate. Parents were upset. They did not want their children's schools shut down and they overwhelmingly asked for more resources, not less.

But then there's Byrd-Bennet, treating us like confused children

Everybody got it, that we really needed to close schools, that we really needed to consolidate.

Whereas Rahm has previously worked hard to attack teachers and other union workers (including those dreadful, evil librarians and bus drivers) as being shiftless and out of touch - as being enemies of the public rather than members of it, at least Byrd-Bennett had the good sense to stay out of it, at least in public. And now that she's been so far removed from public that she doesn't even show up in public, she decides that we're gonna need a corrective.

So she pictures parents as being pliable, compliant, willing to listen to her suggestion/ultimatum: That we need to close down schools (which we don't; it will not save money in the long or short run). And, according to her account, that's what we all learned. Even as it wasn't.

How does she document this since she wasn't there? She has binders full of parents.*

She who tried to ban the graphic novel Persepolis from the libraries and classrooms of Chicago Public Schools. High Schools like Lane Tech, one of the consistently top-ranked schools in the city. But then she slightly retracted, saying it was too mature for seventh graders. The same graphic novel on coming of age in Revolutionary Iran that is stocked in the YAL section of my local library - without adult supervision?

As Kenzo Shibato put it:

Persepolis is the story of a young girl growing up during the Islamic revolution in Iran. She is an inquisitive girl who speaks truth to power and refuses to believe the lies of a tyrannical government. She suffers censorship and austerity at the hands of powerful ideological bureaucrats.
Maybe it hits a little too close to home for CPS.

And he has the audacity to pretend that he knows perfectly well about raising children in poverty and the temerity to blame parents - when he's not blaming teachers - for the failure of kids in the classroom? 

“The real problem is not just the education of our children,” he said. “We have parents that can’t be parents.
“We have too many kids, literally, from a broken home.”
The mayor said the city is making headway in connecting parents to their kids’ academic success, pointing to an initiative sponsored by Walgreens that rewards parents with $25 gift cards for picking up their child’s report card.

Tell me in what ways he doesn't sound like Mitt Romney here?* Oh yeah, he's willing to "give free stuff" to parents who pick up report cards (despite the fact that many just can't get out of work in time to pick up report cards regardless of a gift card). 

Sure Rahm, some parents of school children need to be dressed down for not taking responsibility for their children's well-being. But by people who know what they're going through. Not by some silverspoonin', North Shore, Austerity-promoting, anti-working poor mayor closing schools in our neighborhoods. Not only do you and can you not know what those parents are honestly going through that they can't or choose not to be at every meeting, you don't even listen to the ones who do involve themselves to the breaking point, who show up, who put in the time and volunteer, who know very well the cost of shutting down their children's schools or their neighboring schools. Who vigorously and pointedly protested and yet were dismissed like cantankerous children. What would make the already-beyond-taxed think that you'd be ready to do anything for them anyway, that things will go great for them if those who have been applying by all the rules can't even catch a break in your system?

This is not the first time Rahm's been to this rodeo, though. Shortly before, while visiting the West Side to introduce some new plan of reshuffling police officers in high-crime areas, he offered that it wasn't as much the job of the police to shut down crime as it was the job of community members. Rather than encouraging partnership, though, he is actually shutting down one of the only resources that has effectively connected community members and their beat cops, CAPS. Which means that the resources that we have to fight the effects of poverty and crime (in the form of working community schools or programs that connect police officers with the neighborhoods that they are often estranged from), as little as they are, are actually being taken away from us during the times when we most need them.

And you have the audacity to tell us your plans for us are for our own good? The obnoxiousness to carry us over your shoulders until we stop our temper tantrums? That's how you treat us?

And we're supposed to accept that, Chicagoans, as being better for us. But we know better than that. We're smart and aware. And grown-ass folks to boot.

-----------------------------------

*There are several other ways that Rahm and his administration remind me of Romney. Romney said in that meeting in a West Philadelphia school that classroom size doesn't affect performance, hinting that more students per class should be all right in an overly-crowded system. Guess what other non-educators with children in small classes have been saying such terrible nonsense?

The Racist, Classist Failure of a Public Schools System (Schools in Crisis I)

A few things seem obvious to me as I sink my teeth into trying to understand the behavior of the official City of Chicago (the politicians) towards its own public school system. For this edition (the first of several on Chicago Public Schools and its racist, classist, anti-worker, poverty-enhancing displacement of students and closings of resources), I'm going to look at the forest. And the outlay of the forest from a widespread and historical view says a lot about City Hall's priorities. And despite the best Orwellian attempts at manipulating language, the powers-that-be at City Hall and the Chicago Public Schools, clearly, are not thinking of the children.

And that's the problem. The primary priority isn't to aid  or mature or set students on a course for success. I don't think they're trying to fail them, either. It's just that the students that are in the crossfires are looked upon as cannon fodder. They choose these schools because they figure it will be easier to push them around because they're already on the margins anyway. 

It's nothing less than racism and classism. The same kind of racism and classism that has been institutionalized in the industrial North since Ford made his cities for White and Black workers around Detroit and since the Chicago Housing Authority was pushed by Daley, Sr., to segregate between white and and "encroaching" black citizens. Not to mention the redlining, the highways, the so-called urban renewal projects of the University of Chicago, the buffer area that protected the 1st Ward's white residents from the growing black population. The fact that King said he'd never approached the type of racism he encountered in Chicago.

And then decades upon decades of disinvestment from, marginalization of, and criminalization of the black population (as is seen in our War on Drugs that disproportionately affects black males at rates of nearly twenty-to-one in Chicago in terms of police harassment, arrests, and sentencing, with much stiffer fines and imprisonments tending to go towards people of color when they are charged) leads us to today's situation. It's a tale that can probably be best overseen with maps.

Map courtesy of Chicago Sun-Times

The map here (that we showed on the topic of guns and race in Chicago) shows an outline of where murders in Chicago have happened in one year. Just one year. Notice that there are huge swaths of areas largely unaffected by homicidal violence - and others where streets are overrun by it. This isn't a sign of moral failure of the population - but of moral failure of City Hall and of a society that allows for and supports racism and economic apartheid.

Notice the trends, again.

Map courtesy of Horizon Mapping (which is another issue for another day, but...)

Look familiar?

Check out the map of schools that have been closed down over the last ten years (off site. Sorry) 

Now look at the map of the elementary schools on the chopping block for closing. (If somebody could teach me how to search googlemaps for these images and bring them here, much obliged)

Now, if those schools were closed down for better schools, there may be something happening here. But they weren't. They were closed down for the same reason this next wave of schools will be closed down: To make way for privatized public schools with non-union and lower-paid teachers (charter schools). Not all charter schools are evil, but then again, not every person working in City Hall is evil either. The overall effect of charter schools, on the other hand? That's what we'll get into later. 

But for now, recognize that the goal is to take money and wages from the workers and give them to the wealthy and connected through the process of privatizing public schools. The fact that it's happening and negatively affects black and poor neighborhoods is an after-thought to City Hall. The fact that - once again - thousands of black and poor students will once again be displaced, and put in harm's way (traveling through several gang territories) while traveling further to other underresourced schools for the whims of the powerful is a price to pay, according to downtown. The fact that hundreds upon hundreds of students with special needs will have to get acclimated to new schools and new teachers and further be robbed of their agency and decisions as to how their lives are affected is of little consequence for the heads at Chicago Public Schools, the bosses at City Hall, and their monied friends with benefits.

And that is evil. Unmistakable and unpardonable social evil.

Chicago Tuesdays - Co-op Review, Shadow Budget and Pursed Lips

• First off, I finally made it to my friendly neighborhood Co-op, the Dill Pickle (blog here). My take: It's a local haven for people who crave a nearby Whole Foods, yet want more community involvement, ownership, and less of the SUV set.

It has many elements that we are currently looking for: It's almost completely organic and/or local (or some variant thereof. To register as 'organic' can be costly and time-consuming. But, say that your cows are grass-fed, free-range, free of antibiotics and steroids, etc, etc. That's the important stuff to me); it's definitely community-based, with community ownership (community members are asked to buy shares into the market) and volunteers staffing the store; they carry products from the weekly farmer's market and from local bakers; and it's got yummies (organic chocolate chips and some sublime apple granola in the big dispensers along with various seeds, grains and trail mix). It also has many of the same products I find when I go to Trader Joes - but at a significantly higher price.

Which brings me to the sad reality: This stuff is expensive. It's already nearly impossible for working class and even lower-middle class cats to eat healthily, especially if they're not

convinced that it amounts to too much just yet. Food, Inc. has made it clear to me that the cost of food is truly hidden, that we are paying in visits to the doctor, in bad health, in sluggishness, and in taxes for this cheap, highly-processed, twice-frozen, corn-fed, diseased, steroid-injected, yadda, yadda, yadda food. So, who gets hurt worse than the poor, who can't afford anything but such food? My hope is that as more people buy organic and pressure the government to subsidize less corn and more small, organic farms (rather than the big businesses that they are. I'm looking at you, Monsanto...), then the prices will drop and healthier options will be available for all.

So, as a result, I think I'm going to lift the budget for food by fifty bucks and buy most of our food as organic, local or at least as fresh produce (which is a spin from nine months ago where I budgeted in 2/5's for same. Now it's more like 5/6's).

Video on the grand opening (including a Pickle Parade. Crazy Hippies) viewable here:

• If you live in Chicago and have yet to read Ben Jarovsky and Mick Dumke's take on TIF's, please do yourself a favor and read, oh read Shedding Light on the TIF Budget.

• 

This chart, for example, helps to illustrate the point that the areas should receive the most TIF funds - as the original intent of the Tax Increment Funding is to help blighted areas redevelop businesses - receive the least amount.

However, as the article notes, the mayor has too much power to lose if people would understand how this all works out for his - and the Chicago Machine's - benefit.

In the case of the market, the City Council, at Daley's urging, voted in 2006 to spend a total of $12 million in taxpayer money on construction of a new shopping area in the Ogilvie Transportation Center; $8 million of that sum went to the French Market. The project happens to be headed by a well-to-do, politically connected developer who's contributed thousands of dollars to the mayor's campaign coffers. And the city plans to spend another $23 million in the River West TIF district through 2011.

The more TIF districts are created, the more money goes into the TIF accounts and the more powerful the mayor becomes.

Back in the 1980s, in the early days of Chicago's TIF program, Mayor Harold Washington said he would limit TIF districts to paying for specific projects in blighted communities that truly needed them. But the program has expanded over the years, and the administration and City Council have held almost no discussion of its evolving goals; now virtually any project in any community can qualify for subsidies. According to a TIF primer city officials distributed to aldermen this fall, TIF money can be used for program administration costs, property acquisition, rehabs of existing public or private buildings, construction of "public works or improvements," job training, business relocation and financing subsidies, planning studies, marketing, building demolition, and the services of architects, engineers, lawyers, and financial planners...

As we like to say here at LeftCheekopia, and further, etcetera, etal...

• Another point of interest for me, at least, is the Reader's story on the seemingly secretive CPS press agency. Yeah, if the last eight or so years have taught us anything, being opaque and secretive is the way to destroy your credibility and government.