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.

Teachers Are Bad, M'kay?

There's a new PR battle going on in town (really, across the nation). It involves spoiled teachers and their thuggish unions and how lazy and selfish they are.

Or at least these are the facts as we're presented them via administrators who are in charge of education but don't have to deal with anything actually related to education - classrooms, learning, small wages for incredible amounts of work, students, parents, or first-hand appreciation for the adverse effects of poverty on the charges.

Rather, this group tries to remember what didn't work when they were in school (or really, what worked well for them, specifically, but left others marginalized and labeled 'special' and "stupid") and then amp that to eleven.

Finding out that they could put the onus of the responsibility of failing poor and minority students on the teachers while neglecting fundamental structural cracks and necessary changes, leaders and admins also found that they could score political points by portraying teachers as layabouts who are afraid of accountability. After all, if there's nothing to hide, then there's nothing to fear, amirite?

President Bush gave the best soundbite, of course. "If you're teaching to the test, at least you're teaching something, right?"

It's a shame very few really questioned the intents and inferred meaning of that phrase. While seeming to be helpful and concerned about the state of underserved st's, the teaching-to-the-test rhetoric proves the priority of the standardized test as both a means of production (something to profit from) and as an end- product itself. It further demonstrates how out of touch admins and pols are with how learning actually works.

Finally, it's an incendiary accusation against teachers: Teaching poorly is better than not teaching at all.

Which may not be a true assessment even if it were a true accusation. Teaching poorly has a poor reputation of discouraging further learning. Kids demand education. If they were to learn that it only added up to meaningless bubbles about some worthless and irrelevant questions that were drilled into them through most of the school year, then of course they'd find it all ridiculous and worthless.

Wouldn't you?

And that's exactly what's happening. Rather than find and apply meaningful and relevant curriculum, inner city grade schools are under enormous pressure to succeed according to the rubrics of test-makers and their arbitrary questions. Ironically, the more time spent trying to prepare students for these standardized tests, the less time is left to teach the students critical (and critical-thinking) skills.

Image from Off K Street blog

So, while the proposed idea is "no child (especially poor and minority) left behind", the reality is that the education gap is widening. Instead of equipping young black Americans to succeed in the business world,
we are only preparing them for a life of meaningless and humiliating bubble-filling and questions.

Meanwhile, politicians and their education 'czars' (who usually have no actual experience in education or the classroom) are leveraging the widening gap as a means of reigning in teachers and destroying whatever power they've been able to amass these last few decades.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in Chicago. Mayors Daley and now Emanuel have been gutting the public schools for over a decade now, flying against the face of research and the frontline workers to make some quick bucks for friends while looking good, tough, challenging, and moral in the process.

But, as Ben Joravski notes at the Chicago Reader, it's largely an image battle. And that is one that the teachers - shockingly - are losing. As long as teachers remain shocked at the shift of public opinion against them, however, they'll continue to lose this front.

Weekly Links We Like to Link to - misc.

No theme today, except for themelessness.

From the trusted LarkNews, a megachurch with satellites transforms into a coffee chain. Attendance skyrockets.

Interim principal tells juniors at an all-girls Catholic school that they cannot go to the prom without a male date (with only weeks to go).
h/t to YPulse

MarkO raves about a documentary focusing on a high school in Indiana. American Teen tells the stories of "the school queen bee, the top jock, the dreamboat guy, a unnoticed geek, and an artsy girl who doesn’t fit in." Yes, it sounds like the Breakfast Club in a very White America. And it sounds wonderful. Can't wait to see it.

Oh, and there's these Muppet movie posters (there were a lot of good ones, but I thought these were five of the most iconic. What do you think?):


Though the movie poster (while definitely not the movie itself) is an instant classic, the riff on it here seems timeless.

And definitely not least...


h/t to Peter Chattaway.

Update

• Yes, the Bulls lost the first two games to Detroit in some doozies. And without a brawl to write home to mommy about. Yet, we still have faith in 'em in Chicago. Win tonight, or start a fight. I don't care if Zeke is in NY now.
• We're looking for a new apartment in the range of two-to-three bedrooms for under a thousand a month -which is difficult in Chicago. This would save us a lot of money that we'll need once the baby is born and we switch to a one-income family. It's too bad, though, since we really made this little cozy place our own and fallen in love with it. And the move will probably happen a couple weeks after the baby's born. Yeah, I know, I know. Not cool. Dread these summer-babies, though. Should've planned the pregnancy around the lease.
  
• Taking a grad school program for teachers nearby. Like the saying goes, "Takes money to make money to burn money."
  
• I'm also looking for a new school to teach at (more on that in the next month or just after).
  
• Summer blockbusters (or semi- or pseudo-blockbusters) that I've seen without the wife so far: 2. Watch the tally rise. But for now, all I'll say is, a little disappointed in both Spider-Man III (as you're probably aware by now, too much happening; but then again, I plan on seeing it again and maybe again) and in Hot Fuzz (which I thought was a tad disrespectful to the genre it was trying to pay hommage to by interspersing it with a genre the filmmakers had already masterfully spoofed - goredom). If you missed the first, you're dead. Or my wife. According to the box office returns at least. If you missed the second, and can handle a bit of gore-ish violence (actually, not too much), you need a good laugh. Watch it (and while you're at it, rent Shaun of the Dead. Again.)