Clear Cutting of Our Schools - and Sacramento

by Editorial Board. Rethinking Schools

No single policy reflects the bankruptcy of current education reform politics more than the mass closings of public schools. From Chicago to Washington, D.C., to New Orleans, Detroit, and Philadelphia, these mass closings lay waste to communities, negatively impact children's lives, and help to dismantle not just public education but also the broader public sector, weakening organized labor and opening up the public space to commercial penetration and profit.

Ed. Note:  And Sacramento- See event below. 

City by city, any number of excuses have been employed to justify these attacks. Private foundations, including Broad, Dell, and Walton, wield their enormous wealth and influence. Broad's School Closure Guide has made its rounds through the education reform movement with cities like Chicago lifting its recommendations almost wholesale. Along with budget cuts, testing, and charters, school closings are part of the corporate reform playbook assaulting our schools.

Once school closings start, they simply do not stop. New York City has closed more than 140 public schools since 2002. Chicago capped almost a decade of closing more than 100 schools with its 49-school closure this year. After closing 23 schools, Washington, D.C., is closing 15 more. Pittsburgh has had four rounds of school closures in the past decade, amounting to a total decrease of 41 percent.

Parents Protest over school closures - school "reform"

http://www.thenation.com/article/175532/are-street-protests-next-fight-over-education-reform#axzz2b9Kf7lwT

Amy Dean, The Nation

"As it stands now, if nothing changes, the schools are going to have to open without any adults in the large spaces where kids gather," predicted Philadelphia public schools parent Michael Mullins in late June….

As the showdown in Philadelphia indicates, the ongoing battle over education "reform" and school funding--topics often discussed in think tanks, political campaigns or Waiting for "Superman"-style media productions--is moving into the streets. 

Chicago and Seattle, too, have seen vigorous protests against austerity, privatization, high-stakes testing and union-busting. Such demonstrations together represent a forceful challenge to the corporate-financed push for "education reform" undertaken by the likes of Michelle Rhee, the former schools chancellor of Washington, DC. But these movements are more than mere isolated acts of resistance; in their demands, the outlines of a coherent policy agenda can be discerned--one that looks honestly at what it will take to bring quality education to America's least privileged communities.

One thing this movement has already accomplished is exposing how the education "reform" movement provides cover to Republicans and neoliberal Democrats who are starving the public school system. In championing privately run charter schools, the (self-described) reformers paint traditional schools as failures that should be defunded--even if those traditional schools outperform charters. By bashing teachers unions, figures like Rhee have helped politicians scapegoat the unions for fiscal woes, even as many of those lawmakers advocate cutting taxes. And by claiming that those who cite poverty's impact on student achievement are merely making excuses for sub-par teaching, the "reform" camp has played down the devastating effects of ruthless budget cutting.

Chicago Fires More Than 2,000 School Staff as Crippling Cuts Deepen

On closing schools

By Josh Eidelson and Sarah Jaffe - Summer 2013 

  

In 2010, a slate led by Karen Lewis ousted the incumbent leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union, promising deeper community engagement and a more aggressive defense of teachers and public education. In 2012, with Lewis as president, CTU mounted the city’s first teachers’ strike in a quarter-century, and the most dramatic recent challenge to the bipartisan education reform consensus. For the inaugural episode of Dissent magazine’s podcast series, labor journalists Josh Eidelson and Sarah Jaffe sat down with Lewis to discuss teaching and gender discrimination, professionalism and solidarity, unions and the Democratic Party. An edited version of the transcript appears below. The full interview can be heard on the Dissent website. The interview was conducted in April, before the Board of Education voted to close fifty public schools in Chicago. —Eds.

Dissent: How does the current fight over school closures in Chicago fit into the larger aims of the union?

Karen Lewis: The school closures are one symptom of a really bad school policy that we as Chicagoans have been struggling with for over ten years. The leaders of No Child Left Behind came around and said, “Oh, if the school’s bad, we’re going to close it down because, you know, it’s bad.” As if the building makes something bad. And what’s happened is, as schools close, they destabilize other schools that are close by. So there’s this domino effect they never took into consideration.

Children don’t do better when schools close. They lose anywhere from three to six months on their learning or at least on their testing.

I kept saying, “Why are they continuing to close schools, open up charter schools that don’t do any better, and not even taking the kids that were in the schools that were closed?”

But that was never good enough for the “reformers,” so they started stepping it up. Instead of closing just one or two schools, they would close seven, eight, nine, ten. And they weren’t keeping up with the children. So when schools would close, if kids didn’t go to the school they were sent to, there was no way to find out where those kids went.

Not all of them went to private school, not all of them went to charters, and not all of them left town. So where were these kids going?

Chicago Teachers Union oppose school closings

This is what austerity looks like.

Chicago Teachers Speak Out Against School Closings - CTU President Karen Lewis Statement on CPS School Closings CTU Communications March 21, 2013 Chicago Teachers Union   Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscience will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design.     Mahalia Jackson Elementary second- grade teacher Tamara Faggins passionately condemns the CEO's recommended school closings., Photo by Nathan Goldbaum, CTU Communications.,     Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said the following at a news conference regarding proposed school closings:   "We are standing here today in the beautiful Mahaila Jackson elementary school in our city's Auburn-Gresham neighborhood. This school was named for one of the greatest gospel singers in our nation's history, a woman who sang at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s funeral, a woman who was instrumental in our Civil Rights struggle. Unfortunately, we are gathered here today not to talk about this pioneer or even about how this school does an outstanding job of providing a great learning community for some of our special needs students. We are standing here because this school, along with scores of others, has been targeted for closure by Mayor Rahm Emanuel's Chicago Public Schools district.   "Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscience will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design.     "Closing 50 schools is not grand or glorious. This is nothing to celebrate or marvel.   "These actions unnecessarily expose our students to gang violence, turf wars and peer-to-peer conflict. Some of our students have been seriously injured as a result of school closings. One died. Putting thousands of small children in harm's way is not laudatory.