Katie Osgood spoke at a rally on July 4 outside Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s home.
This is part of what she said:
“My name is Katie Osgood and I am a teacher. I teach at a psychiatric hospital here in the city, working with students from all over the Chicagoland area and of all ages including hundreds of CPS students. And in my hospital, I have seen directly the impact of Rahm Emanuel’s terrible school policies. We are seeing higher rates of depression, suicide attempts, school refusal, family conflict, anxiety, and aggressive behaviors all directly related to current school policies in this city.
“To put it bluntly, CPS’s policies are hurting children. When you viciously close schools, slash budgets-including taking money for social workers, smaller classes, arts, music, and gym, when you fire trusted teachers and staff, all these things hurt kids. And in the middle of all this, our mayor has the gall to cut mental health services and close mental health facilities. But you see, the chaos of our system is intentional. The people in charge call it “creative disruption,” a business term…..
“This is madness. Children need stability, they need connection, they need strong ties to their neighborhoods and communities. They need schools that are funded to work and be successful. They need fully certified, experienced teachers! ”
Read it all.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Children NEVER need CREATIVE DISRUPTION related to their homes, families, schools, teachers, communities, churches, temples, their pets, neighbors or their futures. Nothing about it is creative and healthy for our children. This is chaos and traumatic for kids and their families. They also know why it is done TO THEM! They’ll remember! Don’t we have enough rage, crime and dysfunction in our society? We know so much, but we choose to ignore it for the ALL MIGHTY BUCK. Today’s decisions give new meaning to the saying: THE UGLY AMERICAN! And, the world is watching and taking nots.
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Agreed H.A. Hurley! The kids already have TOO MUCH disruption in their lives, they NEED stability more than anything!
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It saddens me to hear stories like this. Charters don’t favor stability – they favor their version of progress at whatever cost – who cares if it disrupts communities – so long as students learn basic literacy and math.
I really think that a large part of our jobs as teachers is NOT about math and literacy, but also teaching students to become caring active citizens in a greater society – stuff like this though makes students isolated and alone. They’ll see friends moved out of their school for small things or at the least, forms of social torture (think of wearing a different embarassing shirt, having to be ignored by classmates, etc.).
What students learn is that they can only count on their families and if they don’t have those, then the teachers at their school will be transient and new – so many of my students came to me at the end of this school year (I’m a High School Librarian) and they actually tried to make sure I was coming back next year. They kept checking with me – several times – at the end of the school year. I was humbled so much by this.
Our kids crave community and structure – this type of disruptive destruction to boost average test scores is beyond sickening and destroys the very purpose of school not to mention those that get hurt trying to serve that noble purpose or those who are served BY it.
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People who are protesting at Rahm’s home might also consider asking for a tour of the University of Chicago Lab School where the Emanuel children go to school (as did the young Obamas before their family moved to Washington, D.C. and their parents put them in another private school). Chicago should use the Lab School (which is unionized, by the way) as a model for what every child should get. Class sizes rarely go above 20. Standardized tests are rarely used, and never for the kind of vicious student, school and teacher “accountability” that Rah, and his billionaire buddies prattle about.
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Are lab school teachers required to be state certified? I don’t know the rules in Illinois.
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Should Chicago use also the Lab School union’s contract as a model for its contracts with the CTU?
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Katie Osgood is right on the point. I was just going through the LAUSD line items in the budget and ran across the numbers for funding psychiatrists and psychologists and almost fell over at the lack of funding. I called some friends with 40+ years in special education and they could not believe it. These particular people are needed for IEP’s for special education and for normal students who need help from minor to serious. This is how you have “Creative Disruption.” Or is it “Destructive Disruption?” I prefer “Destructive” as this is what they are really doing with full intent and premeditation. That is why I call them “Sociopathic.” It is on purpose with bad intent for the future of multiple people by design. For six months I am going to try to work with the new board at LAUSD and give them a chance as they deserve to show us who they are and what they are going to do with policy and action. Within six months the signs will be there as to what they are about. Let us all assist them in being the board of education all deserve with thought out, real data driven responses which are also legal decisions and policy and that they will pay attention to the teachers and parents who are in the trenches daily with the problems and the results of the previous boards bad decisions and policies. With proper decisions and policies parents and teachers will once again become the true partners all school districts need for real advancement in the intellectual process which schools are supposed to be.
Many students today have psychological problems which can be solved with some attention from the proper adults. This starts with the teacher and parent being able to go to the proper psychological services and getting rapid assistance with the problem. This stops much future tragedy as Katie is describing in her daily work with young people. LAUSD has last year over 117,000 students who did not come to school everyday. We believe they are driven away through psychological tricks. think about it. Low performers do not raise test scores. If you drive away the low performers on tests your scores will go up. Wonder why charter schools do this? There is the answer. Now districts have figured it out also. Both LAUSD and Inglewood have 17% of their enrollment who do not come to school everyday. This is a serious revenue problem, psychological and criminal justice problem along with a serious state budget problem as to the related high costs in the long run. If you start to run these outlying numbers you will certainly get scared with what you will see or imagine they have to be next to helping students having trouble. This is how you change lives. Thank You Katie Osgood for bringing up this very important subject which we at CORE-CA spend a lot of time on and I know Sheriff Baca of L.A. County also does as we have had a long discussion on this very thing. Sheriff Baca is the president of the national Sheriff’s Association studying the
“School to Prison Pipeline” which we call the “Pre-Birth to Prison Pipeline.” Many in the criminal justice system understand that the criminal justice system is largely driven by K-12 failures. The K-12 system is saying “Not my Problem.” And yet really, it is their problem and it needs to be fixed soon.
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I think that CPS has been hurting children for a long time. This is not news, certainly not recent news. Not sure what or how change will be implemented, but it will start to be come important when the education of someone’s children who aren’t directly connected to you become as important as the education of someone’s children who is directly connected to you. That is the same level of education for all US children, no matter where they live.
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Kids don’t thrive in a for-profit business model hastily slapped on over a public school system? Now there’s a shocker.
Why would these idiotic adults assume kids would appreciate “creative destruction”? Seriously. Are they insane?
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I read a principal’s statement on the back of one of Jonathan Kozol’s books–I believe it was Savage Inequalities–which said something like this (and there was more):
“One day my children are going to meet your children on the street.”
He was talking about children from his school meeting “more privileged” children.
It has already happened–one shooting in a high income suburban shopping mall, another drive-by in a fairly well-to-do suburb. One killed, one badly wounded. Will many more of these–in 1% neighborhoods–be what it takes to make people care and take action, rather than refer to “other peoples children?”
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Two takes on “creative destruction.” The Atlas Shrugged zombies who prattle such stuff have usually only fantasized about the “creative” part — and never seen much of the destruction. During my last years as a public school teacher (before Paul Vallas was able to get rid of me, amid great slandering and all that other kind of stuff), in addition to teaching English at Bowen High School, I was “security coordinator.”
When I got that additional job from the principal, the job description was relatively simple: “Know every gang banger in the school and work to reduce the gang violence in and around the school.” One of the reasons I got the job, in South Chicago, was that I knew the gangs. Another was that my home is across town, on the far side of town near O’Hare Airport. As my principal told me: “The Latin Kings won’t blow up your kitchen if they get mad at you…” I live in a part of town where most of my neighbors were armed — legally — and the bad guys (and ladies) know it. Chicago police. National guardsmen. Etc. Etc. So our crime rate in “Portage Park” and “Jefferson Park” is lower than most suburbs to begin with. My own kids can walk to the park for baseball and walk to the local fast food joints with their friends. And I don’t have to worry about drive-bys.
Now to the “creative destruction” nonsense from guys like Barack Obama and Arne Duncan (and Rahm and all the rest of those neoliberal ideologues).
Working in South Chicago we got to see all the destruction. It was like “The Wire” — only not fiction. Kids whose fathers and grandfathers had good union jobs in the steel mills now had little or no future thanks to the destruction wrought by the owners of steel and other industries where their families had worked for generations. The most lucrative “work” for energetic teenagers was no longer a summer in “the mills” (where union vacation policies always made work for strong guys — and after Alice Peralta, gals — in the mills, hellishly hot though they were…), but on the streets. One of my brightest kids at Bowen High School, Steve Wilborn, didn’t live to be age 19, gunned down after a “party” near the school. But for a couple of years before then, he had a “job” — he was the coordinator of sales for the Black P. Stones at “South Cs” — the corner of 87th and Colfax in Chicago. The reasons “South Cs” was so lucrative was it was near the Chicago Skyway exit where the “rich (i.e., white suburban) kids from Indiana could jump off the Skyway, cop their party favors for the weekend, and jump right back out to the ‘burbs loaded with whatever.
Our “kids” understood the political economy of all that, without some of the finer points made by Shumpeter and the rest of those guys. The destruction had hit South Chicago as completely as Youngstown (now eloquently described for all in the “Unwinding” by Packer), but because we were within Chicago (which also includes some of the wealthiest places between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the Youngstownization was harder to see at first.
Now back to the destruction part.
The Atlas Shrugged crowd (Fountainhead; We the Living; all that drivelish I am John Galt slliness that Arne Duncan and the rest of them get cooey over) believes in their souls this stuff because they are brainwashed just as any religious zealots are. When I used to stand on 89th St. with Frank Arias and Dave Stallard ending my work day, Paul Vallas once or twice sat in his limousine down the block watching. The cops asked me what that was all about and I said, “He’s a me wannabe…” We had developed a union-based program to deal with the drug gangs and other things, and it was working. But it was anti-privatization, and “reform” fads, etc. Vallas had to push nonsense, but since he had the media in his pocket, that was the way the story read.
Anyone who hasn’t see “The Wire” needs to review all five seasons. More than once. But those of us who have been living it know it’s much more than that.
For the kids, generation after generation, there’s nothing creative about all this destruction.
I am still the only public school teacher in the USA ever to have been fired for the “crime” of “copyright infringement” (and to have one of those smarmy “public intellectuals”, in this case Richard Posner, turn me into an adjective in his Seventh Circuit decision ripping apart the First Amendment on behalf of the testing industry…) and to have called in a real “187” as part of his job. (The murder of Antwan Jordan outside the Bowen High School annex in December 1997).
What Katie is describing here is so much more real than anything that can be depicted for outsiders. A bullet hole through a person’s forehead had an entry point that looks like a small volcano, the force of the entry trauma creating the rim. But one of the most memorable things is the smell of death if the victim had eaten recently. The only movie I ever saw that depicted that part was a Spike Lee film where the police turn over a guy who’d been shot… and…
Well, let’s just say if you’re going to get shot dead, done have a couple of fish sandwiches before you check out.
Please don’t play word games about the guys from South Chicago (or their fictional counterparts from “The Wire”) catching up with the kids in the suburbs, though. While that may make some believers out of people who privilege gives them permission to preach to the rest of us, I for one wouldn’t wish those childhoods on anyone’s child. Even Rahm Emanuel’s family should life safely and happily. They should just stop trying to make the rest of our lives worse…
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