Chicago Public Schools announced a list of 129 schools that may be closed. This is what reform looks like. You cure the disease by killing the patient. You bomb the village and reduce it to rubble to “save” it.
Shame on Rahm Emanuel.
This is a message from a CPS parent group:
Raise Your Hand is deeply disappointed that the city and Chicago Public Schools has ignored important feedback from the Commission on school utilization by placing 129 schools on the list for potential closure.
As pointed out in previous statements, the CPS utilization figures are based on a flawed mathematical formula that allows for large class sizes, doesn’t include enough space for ancillary rooms and doesn’t properly account for special education classrooms. In recent visits to so-called underutilized schools, which have been placed on this closure list, Raise Your Hand observed the following examples:
A school with a 37% special education population requires many more special education rooms with smaller class size than the average school.
A school with 3 autism rooms of 8 students and not one empty room.
A school with a thriving art program – dance, drumming, visual art, theater, with beautiful mosaics and other art projects around a thriving building ….and gang lines surrounding many streets around the school.
Schools that use a large portion of their title 1 money for reduced class size – something that CPS does not recognize in their standard utilization formula.
A school that uses one floor for a community partnership with the YMCA which allows students to be in the building from 7am-6:30pm
Based on their past handling of school closures, we do not believe that CPS has demonstrated the capacity or institutional knowledge to conduct closings in a fair and justified manner.
This is the same conclusion made by the task force formed to assess utilization.
We are deeply concerned for how the most vulnerable children in Chicago will be impacted by these closings, and how those schools that will receive displaced students will be impacted.
Receiving schools will likely have to contend with overcrowded classrooms and a loss of ancillary space for music, art, special education, etc.
It is unclear how CPS can find high-performing schools with enough space to allow for the addition of so many more students.
It is deeply disconcerting that CPS is willing to displace such a high number of special education, homeless, and students who are benefitting from reduced class.
If the schools on this list are closed, 1,938 homeless students will be displaced from their school. We believe closing this number of schools will not scratch the surface of the projected deficit for next year and will cause significantly more harm than good.
Here is the list of 129 schools:
Click to access SchoolUtilizationList_02122013.pdf
If you are a parent at one of these schools and want to connect with other parents, especially regarding the issue of special education, please email us: info@ilraiseyourhand.org
Support our Cause:
Help us combat special interest groups and bureaucracy that stand in the way of progress, and help ensure long-term, sustainable education funding.
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Raise Your Hand Coalition
Chicago, IL 60622
United States
Diane Ravitch's blog 
This makes me so sad, but my strongest feeling while reading this is ANGER. People who do not understand public schools are making decisions at will irrevocably and negatively impact the lives of students, parents, teachers, administrators and communities. These closing need to be overturned.
But I truly believe this is part of the scheme that is encouraged, supported and planned by the US Dept of Ed. It isa calculated effort to bring about the complete destruction of public education in this country.
I admit, I am losing hope. Diane once told me that I must hold on and fight these policies and I have done so. But it feels more futile with each new doom-filled story.
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Please remember this: It is always darkest right before the dawn.
Today and tomorrow, you will read stories on this blog about the closing down of public education in Philadelphia and Indianapolis. The beat goes on.
But bear in mind that everything these “reformers” have done has failed.
They can’t keep promising and failing to deliver forever.
At some point, the curtain falls away and they will be exposed as frauds.
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Whether it is Chicago or any of the other cities where this is on a fast track it tells us the same thing. The student populations that are first being discarded are those that cost too much, are not the “value added” global workforce candidates for tomorrow, part of a throw away society which is about success, greed, return on the dollar,
measurement of potential to success. Crush, ignore and abandon the federal mandates that are supposed to protect and serve these
voiceless powerless people and with the acceptance of those that say they care around them. Like charity instead of firm committment.
Not even their own organizations went out front to advocate for them.
Hmmm! Let’s see if there was another supposed civilized society that
discarded it’s mentally ill, disenfranchised and poor, disabled and dying, elderly, built prisons for a menial manufacturing workforce, were arrogant and elite in societal and world matters, so forth and so on. Long ago but alive in memory and a people who scream never forget for a reason!!! Well, life recycles itself, even the bad, and I believe we have arrived in full circle. What is unthinkable is that it could be here and now!
I just reread Kozol’s Death At An Early Age. The preface says it all
for where we are at and where we are going. For the millions of children, coast to coast and around the world, who live in the shadows of his words I weep!!!!!!
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Being a former CPS special education teacher, I find these actions by the CPS and the Mayor appalling but I am not surprised. The bureaucracy has been in action for many years now. I left teaching, something I felt was my calling, because I could not stomach what the Mayor (Daley II at the time) was doing to the children who really needed understanding and help the most. I pray that sanity will return to Chicago so we can make our schools the kind of institutions where all children have a fighting chance to succeed in whatever ways they are best suited to do.
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Looks like the same capacity formulas that are driving the proposed shutdown of 20% of Sacramento’s elementary schools. We’re fighting back. Vote in Sacramento is set for this coming Thursday, the 21st. Keep you posted.
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Rahm Emanuel is closing arts schools when Rahm Emanuel studied dance in college….
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Carol: you reminded me of how important a college education can be and how some of what we learn can stay with us for the rest of our lives.
Loh these many years later, and Rahm can still tap dance around simple truths of education with a subtlety [?] and grace [?] that has endeared him to every edubully from coast to coast and across party lines. As ArneRhee mighty say: happy feet, mayor, happy feet…
🙂
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Do CPS’s budget problems have anything to do with the push to close schools? I don’t see any mention of this in Diane’s post or any of the comments here.
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I dont live in Chicago,but this makes me mad. 129 schools being shut down because of issues that can be fixed. Its really troubling. They are talking about gangs. If you shut down more schools ,especially in lower class neighborhoods it will be more crime. Common sense will tell you that. So many politicians talk about crime, if you build more jobs in lower class neighborhoods ,build more colleges, have more strict laws on gun violence. It.will be less crime more people are going to be working
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I have worked at the public elementary “school with 3 autism rooms of 8 students and not one empty room.” That program for children with low functioning autism is very unique in Chicago, so I know I’m talking about the right school when I say that the observers were absolutely correct. The school is definitely not “underutilized.” As suggested, something is terribly wrong with the formula that is being used to determine “underutilization.”
According to what I’ve read, there are three primary issues with the way CPS is determining underutilization for elementary schools:
1.) They are using 30 as the average class size, which is higher than both city and state averages, when 87% of CPS students are low income and should have class sizes capped at 20
2.) CPS is using the same average class size to count self-contained special ed classrooms, when that number is not permitted by the state (so those three autism classrooms with 8 students would be counted as having 66 available seats)
3.) CPS is including ancillary rooms when counting classrooms, such as art rooms, science labs, teachers lounges, etc.(so each would be counted as having 30 available seats)
Can’t help but wonder if this is just about closing schools or of these might be indicators of a push to increase class sizes for BOTH special ed students https://dianeravitch.net/2013/02/26/illinois-no-class-size-limits-for-special-education/ and for general education classes?
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