This is an astonishing story.
In 2002, Arne Duncan began his infamous policy of shutting down schools in Chicago with low test scores.
Among the schools he closed was Dodge.
Dodge parents were outraged that their school was handed over to a private turnaround operator, but Duncan assured them it was for the best.
Fast forward to 2008, when President-elect Obama announced that he had picked Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.
The event was held at Dodge Renaissance Academy, which the President praised as a “perfect example” of a turnaround school, an exemplar of Duncan’s great success.
Sadly, Chicago Public Schools is now closing Dodge Renaissance Academy as a failing school, along with Williams, another of Duncan’s “turnaround” schools.
What do you think this does to the children, the parents, and the community?
When is it okay to say that it is better to help struggling schools than to close them?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Churn❢ Churn❢ Churn❢
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How apropos. The lyrics say it all.
Songwriters: WORDS FROM THE BOOK OF, ECCLESIASTESFRENCH, GEORGE ABER ADAPTATION AND, PETE SEEGER
Words-adapted from The Bible, book of Ecclesiastes
Music-Pete Seeger
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
A time to be born, a time to die
A time to plant, a time to reap
A time to kill, a time to heal
A time to laugh, a time to weep
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
A time to build up,a time to break down
A time to dance, a time to mourn
A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace, a time to refrain from embracing
To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)
There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)
And a time to every purpose, under Heaven
A time to gain, a time to lose
A time to rend, a time to sew
A time for love, a time for hate
(** A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late **)
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I think this is part of our mentality as a nation. We don’t want something built to last — we’d rather have something new and shiny, which will be thrown out to be replaced by something new. That’s our approach to businesses, durable goods, or housing, which leaves folks in other industrial nation astonished at our short-sightedness (why build a wooden-framed house in a tornado zone? Why spend extra thousands of dollars on heating instead of weatherproofing?). This has been true of housing since the very beginning of the US (Thomas Jefferson lamented it), but has only recently shifted to schools, too. How can we change this attitude? That’s the real question.
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Duncan and Obama are shameless public officials relentlessly advocating for the private sector. Both have richly earned the booing Duncan got at AERA in SF. Both ignore research disproving their policies and simply push forward with the plunder of the public sector and the enrichment of their private supporters like Penny Pritzker. Duncan failed the kids of Chicago and is now failing the kids of the whole country. The imposition of CCSS testing this spring is one of the cruelest, stupidest, and authoritarian abuses in the history of American schooling. Many districts, kids, and families are already deeply disrupted by CCSS and by RttT with its closures, turnarounds, transfers of kids to unfamiliar schools, and displacement of career teachers with TFA 5-week wonders. The failure of govt. at any level to prosecute Rhee despite Merrow’s disclosures and the failure of the mass media to focus on Rhee as much as on Hall in Atlanta, mean that opposition from the bottom-up is being stonewalled from the top-down, putting us in a DIY situation—do-it-yourself(ourselves)–govt. will not act, media will not cover. This blog by Diane and the NPE, as well as the many other opposition bloggers like Mark Naison, Tim Slekar, Bob Valliant, Barbara Madeloni, Julie Gorlewski, Bill Bigelow and Rethinking Schools, Mercedes Schneider, Opt-Out United, Jesse Turner, etc., all enable doing-it-ourselves. Opportunities to confront major players like Duncan at AERA are good chances to break the media/policy blockad. The deep damage to public education already done means there is no middle ground as DiCarlo or Jennifer or others pretend. The billionaires and their operatives in govt are severely damaging public schools, and will continue doing so until we DIY a coalition to coordinate protest, boycotts of failed state and federal policies, boycotts of consumer goods and services marketed by the billionaires financing the plunder of schools, wildcat strikes where possible, parental opt-out, and more.
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Re: “boycotts of consumer goods and services marketed by the billionaires”
That’s the only thing that will really stop it. If destroying public schools is no longer profitable, the billionaires and corporations will move on. Walmart and Netflix are easy to boycott. Gates and Broad, not so much.
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I too feel that the federal government has pulled a fast on on the American public. They really don’t understand where all the pressure is coming from. I feel it began with Duncan and his love of Charter Schools. The new teacher evaluation system is another piece of the continued pressure being placed on teachers. The strings of the race to the top money were the longest and worst I have ever experienced. The president has proven to not understand the problems of poverty. He has no idea of how to help any students but especially the poor.His programs have hurt education and it will take a long time to heal perhaps never.
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It’s not that he doesn’t know how, it’s that he doesn’t care. He got into “education” because his billionaire hedge fund buddy set him up as a tutor with an after school program. A couple years down the line, the school where that program was housed was one of the first that he shut down – he doesn’t even care about kids he met face-to-face and interacted with over an extended period of time. What would make anyone think he cares about any other kids?
Not to mention, he works for the guy who cut back on heating oil subsidies in the middle of one of the coldest winters.
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Yes, Helen is right above. The deep material damage already done to public schls is a fact which makes it impossible to find a middle ground of people of good will on both sides–an illusion. The corporate reformers are on a rampage across America, shattering public schools and communities, grabbing every asset for their own profit. This is a rampage based on lies like schools have failed, Amer students are not internationally competitive, etc., and bullying by govt authorities forcing failed policies down our throats. It’s the cultural equivalent of war and the sooner we DIY a fighting coalition of the many folks being attacked and damaged, the sooner we’ll stop the rampage and rescue what’s left of public schooling.
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If I were a member of those schools I would be fired up and ready to hit the streets. I’ve been failed twice. Once when you declared my school: ‘failing’ and then when you ‘failed to turn it around’, what ever that means.
I have some advice for Arne and others. Hold a community meeting and ask the parents, residents, and students what it would take to make them and the school a success. What would need to be done. You never know what sage advice may come from those most affected by your reform/privatization policies You never know. Just try it- once. One time and see what happens. You may be surprised.
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They already know the kinds of answers they would get, and they don’t want to hear those answers. Same reason they ignore decade on decade of research — they do not like what honest research says, so they cook their own to suit their tastes.
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Did the Chicago papers make this front-page news? Will Oprah comment on it??? Will Obama have to answer to this at his next press conference???
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My Guess
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Jon–Thanks for this. Saved it. Will be able to use it many times over!
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This is a national disgrace. I agree with the commenters. We Americans want quick fixes. First Bush knocked us down with NCLB and then Arne with Charters and Renaissance and Turn arounds and EMOs are poised to finish us off. Whatever you call it, it’s for profit. One more thing: American loves the exceptional story, the few poor that rise to the top by pulling up their bootstraps. Most families and kids cannot overcome the grinding poverty, crime, lack of job opportunity and the understaffed and underfunded school they went to.
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In the debate over “research-based” practices it’s often very curious which research gets the spotlight and which does not. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a quantitative approach to the decision making process? If there were, does it not seem intuitive that it might garner some attention in #edreform circles? Have you ever heard of this study?
Connell (2010) – Apples to Apples- Comparing Replacement and Conversion Approaches to High School Turnaround found that, depending on variables (Granny Smith apples, or Macintosh? But not oranges) it would take between 11 and 29 replacement schools to match the results of one well-effected restoration.
Click to access Apples_to_Apples.pdf
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Arne Duncan’s assurances that Dodge would “turn around” and be saved are as trustworthy as the past and current claims made by all the leading charterites/privatizers and their accountabully underlings.
By his deeds shall a man be known. The proof is in the pudding. Don’t just talk the talk; walk the talk.
Since when did this country become so steeped in hypocrisy and mediocrity that the country as a whole can’t hold edubullies to even the simplest aphorisms?
Which is why this blog is so important. Somebody has to hold the feet of the irresponsible educrats and edupreneurs to the fire. Somebody has to tell the emperors and empresses that they have no clothes.
Is anybody listening? Consider that less than three weeks after this blog hit four million views, it is almost a third of the way to five million.
Keep reading, keep posting, keep the discussion going, keep organizing. Rheeal is slowly, but surely, giving way to the real.
🙂
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Though cruel and wasteful, there is a (perverse) logic being applied here.
The smash and grab tactics of the so-called reformers are largely about maximizing throughput – speed and volume of production – throughout the education market space. That mindset and practice is fast becoming endemic in the political economy of education, and is systematically pursued by the corporate/philanthropic/academic/advocacy complex that covets the public education budget.
Speed (“Transformational Change! Disruptive Innovation! The Kids Can’t Wait!”) and volume (public schools closing, expansion of politically-juiced charter chains, tests and test-based curricula, rapid commodification of personal student data, etc.) are the fundamental drivers here.
There’s also more than a little of the corrupt broker who enriches himself by churning and overtrading your account. Aside from basketball, Duncan has never really been anything other than a salesman and tout.
The teachers are factors of production to be efficiently managed and replaced if possible, and the kids are data sets to be monetized, with a little workplace preparation (“informational texts”) thrown in.
Open ’em, close em,’ open ’em again, and get a little more throughput and skim (contracts, fees, consultancies) each time. It’s a racket deserving a series of RICO investigations.
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So sad, so sad. Arne, you will live with this as your legacy, as will President Obama. I am so sorry I believed, because I do not anymore.
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michael fiorello is right. it is like a broker churning an old lady. they connect into every institution with BS and start skimmming. same deal with regionalism and sustainable development scam bankrupting california and all over the country, just like common core, smash n grab til ya get caught. the hoo haa is the distraction, what is going on behind the scenes and hidden in legeslation? they double dip. like smash n grab but leave a devise that steals credit card numbers remotely.
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We are still waiting for the Chicago papers to cover this update on the sad Dodge story, and the Arne Duncan/Barack Obama ironies around it all. I took photographs at Dodge after Duncan announced the original proposed turnaround, which that year took place in two phases. In the first phase, the school was emptied out and one year of “planning” was supposedly implemented.
The kids were scattered to the winds, especially the homeless one and those whose families could not afford the new $200,000 townhouses that were being built down the street from Dodge. (A photograph putting Dodge in its geopolitical perspective would be taken from the United Center, less than a mile to the east, to depict accurately the displacement of poor and working class black families from the area…).
Fewer than half the original Dodge kids returned to the “new” Dodge the following year. And for those who were sent hither and yon, the results were bad. The Dodge kids who tried to go to Grant Elementary School (where many of them were sent) were beaten up by the (then) Grant kids. The Grant kids didn’t want the “Dodge Dummies” to lower their school’s scores. (That was ironic because there really wasn’t that big a difference between Grant and Dodge, but perception is reality…).
Eventually, Duncan’s versions of school reform got around to Grant, too. With the help of then Congressman Rahm Emanuel (who bragged he got a one million dollar earmark for the job) Grant became a “military academy.” First, the Phoenix (Army) high school was put in the Grant building. Then the “Marine Military Academy” was put in there, too. As a result, the remaining kids who had been at Grant elementary school were scattered to the winds, just like the Dodge kids had been.
The ability of Duncan, Obama, and Emanuel to get away with this stuff, decade after decade, rests on the failure of the corporate news media in Chicago to cover the tragedies of the poor and working class families who become, over and over, the voiceless victims of these policies. Their voices — thousands of them — are drowned out every day by the screaming of Rahm Emanuel’s PR machinery (only part of which is the multi million dollar “Mayor’s Press Office,” which daily issues commands to the media to cover a media event starring Rahm and some corporate chieftains). It is a choice made for more than a decade by Chicago’s corporate reporters to focus on the official party line of the “School Reform” crowd and ignore the tragic facts, year after year, school after school and child after child.
And this year, we’re facing the largest and most tragic assault of all. But we can’t ever forget that this attack on children and truth was part of the program of Arne Duncan, Barack Obama and Richard M. Daley long before Rahm Emanuel returned to Chicago to purchase four years on the fifth floor of Chicago’s City Hall…
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I don’t disagree with the sentiments expressed here, but, if you look at the original story (http://www.wbez.org/news/education/cps-wants-close-first-renaissance-schools-107072), Willams school (http://schoolcuts.org/schools/125?locale=en) would make the better argument.
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In my school district, we have several “turnaround schools” (formerly known as “reconstituted” which are being turned around for the second time for low test scores. I guess it worked so well the first time…
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