Suppose you were mayor of Chicago and had complete control of the public schools.
Suppose one of your high schools had an outstanding record by any measure.
Suppose it had an excellent IB program.
Would it occur to you to make the entire school an IB school?
Would it occur to you to get rid of some of the veteran teachers, just to shake things up?
Probably not.
But it did occur to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and today there was a mass student walkout to protest the mayor’s autocratic effort to break what was working.
Thanks to Ben Joravsky for a great article, and to Fred Klonsky for blogging Ben’s article, and to Chaya R for bringing it to my attention.
Ben J. proves that great journalism is alive and well.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Fugees: “warn the town. The beast is loose”
I just want to say that the sabotaging of excellent public, high-performing public schools is as central to the corporate education reform agenda as is closing so-called low-performing neighborhood schools in distressed neighborhoods.
Science Park High School in Newark, New Jersey, is nationally ranked (http://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/new-jersey/districts/newark-public-schools/science-high-school-12677) and has recently been approved for an IB program.
Since TFA alum Cami Anderson arrived as Superintendent, the school has founght off two co-locations (2010-2011 and 2011-2012) and threatened with a draconian budget cut (this year). Furthermore, the admissions process, which had been handled in-house for decades, has been hi-jacked, maipulated, and obscured.
The clear agenda is to destroy the school. It will be lucky to survive another five years. Nothing “public” can be allowed to succeed.
Rahm Emanuel and Chris Christie will both win re-election with the support of the Democratic Party.
Neither politician needs to give a damn what educators think, believe, say, or how they will vote!
Maybe not right now. But in time, they will.
Because now, PARENTS are becoming aware of this attempt by wealthy elites to seize our school dollars and slip them into the accounts of private companies.
Whether you’re progressive or conservative, you want to be in control of YOUR tax dollars that fund YOUR schools.
The Privatizers have pushed us—as far as we’re going to be pushed. We’re now up against the wall, liberal city dweller, suburban centrist and small town conservative alike.
Now comes the pushback…
Not sure about Rahm…too many abhor him.
Linda,
Perhaps,you are correct.
I suggest Rahm has the support of those that “matter” in the Democratic Party: educators are taken for granted.
Diane, why didn’t you ask Albanese, Liu, de Blasio, and Thompson why they don’t support the complete repeal of mayoral control?
Tim, with so many people on a panel, it is hard to ask a follow up or get into detail. NYC had mayoral control for most of the 20th century, and the board was appointed by others with a set term. There were checks and balances
Diane, while I appreciate your point about not forcing ideas on everyone, IB is actually designed to BE a whole school model, at least EYP and MYP (elementary and middle school, specifically). IB philosophies (not curricula) work pretty well with all kinds of kids. I’ve taught ELL and Special Ed kids in IB and it’s worked pretty well.
Lucky for us in California mayoral control is state constitutionally illegal as “King Tony” found out. You have “King Emmanuel the Sociopath.” Is there anyway you can get on the ballot some procedure in your state to take back control of the district to an elected board of education. LAUSD is the last large school district still under board control. During the attempt in California for mayoral control (AB 1381) both Duncan and Feinstein wrote letters to the Calif. legislature stating that those before Daley took over the Chicago Schools had run the district into $1,8 billion in debt which Daley, Vallas and Duncan had to clean up. Fact, I have the pertinent financial pages from the 1994 Chicago Schools Budget and amazingly enough there was a surplus. How can that be? You mean that he could not check and a senator with that much power cannot check? You must be kidding. The fact is that they both lied. Rod Paige, under Bush 1, lied to get his job and then lost it when the fact that dropout in Houston was not 0% but 50% and that he drove students out of the schools. Why not Duncan? Duncan lied to us also before he came to L.A. last year. He asked us to bring everyone we knew to Pico Rivera. We got to work and got people from San Diego, San Bernadino, Santa Barbara and all over. About 1/4 to 1/3 were people we got to that event he said he wanted to listen to everyone. I was in line when he stated after 15 minutes of a 2 hour event that he was going to leave. I did not let him even move his eyes or feet before I said load enough for everyone to hear “He does not care about you, he is going to go get money.” I was correct. He was scheduled at a fundraiser and was going there in his helicopter. He had one before the event in a private room we know because one of our people was there early and watched it all. All of a sudden there were police, T.V. cameras and his staff attacking me. They asked to go outside and I said yes and the security was so bad that I was out the door and they were still standing there. A lot of people, especially students, came outside and listened to me rip his staffer with the facts of his boss. He did not know a thing about the guy. Even the cops started laughing. They left and the interested students had questions and we stayed late with the students and Duncan and his staff ran away. Later they apologized to a friend. So what. Let’s get rid of Duncan. Give me an email address and I will send the goods meaning Duncan’s and Feinsteins letters and the budget pages from the 1994 budget. Why not publish this? You all say you are tired of Obama and Duncan so let’s do something about it.
You’ve got the goods on him, George. Nothing will happen, however. There isn’t enough backbone in the public school teaching corps to make up a jellyfish. They are all government bureaucrats. What can you expect? To a government bureaucrat the only thing that matters is maintaining their cynosure. And to do that they have to prove their party allegiance every day by being as politically correct as possible. There will be jobs lost, but those who stay will be champions—oh no, that was Bo Schembechler—those who stay will be zombies who can quote you the CCSS for their teaching level as quickly as they can tell you what they’ll get for their defined benefit pension. Illinois is broke, but they won’t give them mother suckers up. NO 401K, NO 401K, NO 401k
I don’t believe Edward Kennedy, stupid, drunken, murderer though he was, set out to destroy the public school systems when he put the NCLB circumcision knife in George Bush’s hand. But then because a generation of voters had been incompetently educated by the public school systems, the knife was handed to ObamaDuncan, and with the RTTT knife in hand, he being an inexperienced mohel, he “accidentally” cut too much. So, reform for improvement becomes destruction. Too late you discovered it was not a good thing.
Idealistic socialism ALWAYS leads to bureaucracy, which ALWAYS leads to tyranny, which ALWAYS leads to warlords, and that’s who you’ve got running the charters and promoting vouchers now. But Nooooooooo, you had to be snotty about McCain because he picked a babe as a running mate, and then, you rejected Romney and Ryan, a much better pair, because you believed Obama/Axelod’s lies about them. Well, you’ve got your Plan B on demand now and no jobs. Unfortunately a period of anarchic free-market piracy will be necessary to restore sane costs in education, but it may all right itself in the long run as competition—dreaded word—works its way through the entire education system.
As long as education is infected with the HIV virus of utopian equalitarianism, it will be a sick puppy. COST is king, no matter what would be “just” and “right.” Pity though.
I certainly will not be voting for Rahm, and as this is a union town, nor will many union members, including members of the Chicago Teachers Union, which has already begun a campaign against our local tyrannt, “CTU president launches effort to oust Rahm” http://www.suntimes.com/news/19499822-418/ctu-president-starts-effort-to-oust-mayor.html .
And don’t forget to NOT vote for the Tea Party/Koch brothers, which believe just as strongly in corporate “reform” and privatization as the neo-liberals in the mainstream Republican and Democratic parties.
It’s time to abandon all of these parties, which only represent the 1%/ monied interests, and establish a Labor party that represents the working people, who make up the majority of the 99% but are currently represented by virtually no one.
So, idealistic socialism ultimately leads to vulture capitalism. Exactly. Extremism in either way will eventually eat itself.
And yes, turns out voting for Obama is getting the same disastrous educational results as if we would have voted Romney/Ryan. They would have just gotten us there quicker.
You picked the wrong teachers to target with the claim that, “There isn’t enough backbone in the public school teaching corps to make up a jellyfish.” Since this blog post references Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, your remarks just show how ignorant you are of the activities of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, which have been covered heavily in media across the country. Your elitism and disdain for public school teachers has become increasingly more evident ever since you were outed as having spent your career as a private school teacher.
The Democrats are not “socialists” and they have not been for a very long time. It was “centrist” Clinton who did away with “welfare as we know it”, not socialists, liberals or the GOP/Tea. “Socialist” is an inaccurate moniker that GOP/Tea tag Democrats with, in order to scare voters. Democrats are just as supportive of neo-liberalism as the GOP/Tea, who believe that free-markets are the answer to virtually everything, and charters and vouchers are prime examples of that, not of socialism.
Just about everything described in this rant is your own ideological nonsense, HU. Score another one for public school teachers.
From a Fellow Private School Teacher
So, 2 things.
Can you document that the firing of experienced teachers is directed towards hiring younger thus lower paid employees?
Also, it’s common to ease out middle aged workers to save on health care costs. Is there a pattern there in city schools run by mayors?
What about the neighborhoods where Duncan or Emmanual closed schools? What’s the effect of the destabilization on things like crime rate? Did it go up in the neighborhoods Duncan “reformed”? That would seem to.me to be a very big deal for all residents of these areas, not just teachers and the parents of public school students. Can you make the case that the “churn” reformers create is actually damaging the cities they run, outside of or in addition to public education?
Because I think if you WERE able to find a consistent pattern, where mayor-run districts were firing middle aged employees not to improve schools but to cut costs, in NY and Chicago and Philadelphia and New Orleans that would be a politically powerful argument to make that would resonate with people outside education.
People complain about it constantly in the private sector. They say they’re let go when they reach higher pay scales. It’s something people understand.
Is that what’s happening in the mayor-run cities?
It’s well documented, including here, from April 22, 2013, “Market-oriented education reforms’ rhetoric trumps reality: The impacts of test-based teacher evaluations, school closures, and increased
charter school access on student outcomes in Chicago, New York City, and Washington, D.C.” (all mayoral controlled cities): http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bba-rhetoric-trumps-reality.pdf
I’m amazed that parents support firing experienced teachers. It’s not true where I live (rural).
Parents here show a preference for more experienced teachers, informally, when we talk to one another. “She’s new” is not a selling point. How is that persuasive in the areas where TFA comes in? How are they selling churn to parents?
Parents don’t support teacher churn or school closures, but in mayoral controlled cities, there is little, if any, democratic representation of parents, so parents are most often ignored.
For example, Chicago has been under mayoral control for 18 years and the school board is appointed by the mayor, as is the superintendent, so the mayor has total control over the schools. Only teachers are held accountable though, not the mayor and his cronies for their 18 years of failed business-oriented school “reforms.”