Greg Michie is a teacher in Chicago and a published author. Michie is fed up with the hypocritical incantations of “students first,” when the reality is that the “reformers” put students last.
In this post, he explains what is really happening.
“I see our school’s only computer lab — which should be a student resource — closed for weeks at a time (a total of nine this past year) so it can be used to administer board-mandated standardized tests.
I see revamped teacher, principal, and school evaluation policies that assign heavy weight to gains on standardized test scores. This will likely turn the screws of pressure further on school-based educators, and mean an even narrower curricular focus and a more intensified push for larger gains.
I see dozens of schools closing in low-income African American neighborhoods — despite the protests of parents and community members, despite warnings that children will have to cross potentially dangerous gang lines to get to their “receiving” schools. Can anybody imagine these closings being proposed — much less approved — if 90 percent of the children impacted were white?
I see the mayor’s pet reform initiative, the longer school day, turning out to be what many critics feared: simply a longer day. Not “better,” not “fuller,” and not supported with appropriate resources. The recent layoffs will only make this situation worse.
I see the board laying off nearly 2,000 experienced teachers (and over 1,000 other school-based staff), while at the same time hiring up to 325 recruits from Teach for America, an organization which provides its “corps members” with only five weeks of preparation for teaching in Chicago classrooms. To make matters worse, at a time when CPS claims to be cash-strapped, it will be paying TFA a mind-blowing $1.6 million in “finder’s fees” for its services.”
And more:
“I see principals across the city scrambling to make ends meet with dramatically reduced budgets while the mayor turns a deaf ear, blaming funding issues solely on Springfield’s pension reform impasse. Blaine Elementary principal Troy LaRaviere blasted the budget cuts at a protest at City Hall last week. “When people ask me, ‘How did you achieve the results that you did?’ I give them a list,” he said. “And almost everything on that list has been decimated by this budget… We’ve lost music, we’ve lost our reduced class sizes, we’ve lost our intervention specialists, I’ve lost my ability to recruit and retain and hire the most effective teacher.”
“I could go on, but it would be begging the same question: How does any of this put students first?”
You would never know that Rahm is even aware of what is happening in the schools. Every once in awhile you hear a reformer blame greedy teachers and their Cadillac pension fund. Chicago and Springfield, the refrain is the same, neatly skipping over the city and state’s use of pension earmarked funds for their pet projects rather than for meeting their contractual obligations. The school funding solutions are staring politicians in the face, but their wealthy benefactors would be displeased.
Looking to share some info about some interesting stuff happening in RI, where Dem Treasurer is a poster child for Manhattan Institute/Pete Peterson crowd, taking money from ed reform industry and vastly increasing pension fund exposure in hedge funds. All while promoting an online financial literacy tool in RI schools–EverFi–run by some of her former venture capital pals who are contributing to her campaign. Priceless.
Peter Kerwin
I am a retired CPS teacher who is planning to speak on several issues at the CPS budget hearing on Thursday. Where in the budget is the line for Teach for America? I want to state my facts accurately. Thank you!
Here we see the game plan for the national destruction of public schools, laid out stroke by stroke. The “studentsFirst” jackals are at the apex of the insidious pyramid of corporate takeover of any valid form of education. The planners of this monstrosity are of one mind and purpose. It has nothing to do with improving education BUT has the abject servitude of the work force into a compliant, voiceless populace as its goal. A populace trained NOT to be “critical thinkers” as that would pose a threat to rulers’ Orwellian existence.
That may seem paranoid, but facts are pesky, prescient harbingers of the future. “Dumb luck” or “well meaning,” but destructive results from forced curriculum fly in the face of reality. They KNOW, just as Michele knew in Chicago, the ultimate results of their
vicious constructs. Time has proven the rotten fruit these degenerative designers relentlessly sought.
It is a campaign enabled by the usual jackals of the press. Without their Trojan horse
accolades to Gates, Bush, Walton perpetrators, this could never have reached the national educational demise it has. I hope educators will not forget who greased the wheels of destruction: they do it all the time on all national/international issues. Money is their only master, and the corporate cabal keeps them well fed.
wait a minute…….finder/s fees for teach for America??? Is this a widespread phenomenon, which has already been adequately covered?
I too am hearing that with all these layoffs, TFAs are getting jobs. How is this possible??
Teach for America was an organization that was supposed to service schools that were understaffed. Chicago isn’t that place. TFA is now infiltrating our school system and politicians are using layoffs and closings as a way to sneak them in.
Can members of TFA be this gullible? Do they have a soul and realize they are being used as pawns? Can they sleep at night knowing that are stealing jobs away from fellow Americans? I suppose if your student loan can be reduced, then ethics go out the window!! So sad….
I was just watching this from Chomsky (who I generally think is detestable as an individual) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7ADdBAT7h0 – it’s a good lecture overall (granted it’s targeted towards a pro-labor crowd) – but the part pertaining to public education is really around 0:44:00 – prior to this he makes a good talk about how “efficiency” in industries favors businesses offloading costs onto individuals.
TFA members aren’t guillible…they’re indoctrinated to believe that the reason schools are failing is lazy teachers. They are taught that they are the solution. They are also dangled enticing carrots that they can be part of the solution for society and profit wonderfully personally.
Chomsky has another nice little bit about student loan debt and how it’s designed to be punishing while providing students with as little as possible vs. a former view of college as benefiting society as well as the individual. When you beat people with student debt, give them an easy way out that torches public institutions, then it kills 2 birds with one stone. You can profit from student debt that’s insured by the government (and from which no individual can escape), and then offer ways out that serve an ideological agenda.
Almost none of these moves are accidental – things that deprive students and make the only way a classroom can be constructed be via strict disciplinarian policies, while breaking unions, while breaking public employees, while profiting the plutocratic (or perhaps kleptcratic) classes, while destroying opportunity for people to move up an economic ladder – these are the rope-a-dopes of our age and an age of particularly increasingly desperate people.
Coincidentally, almost none of them have to do with student learning yet directly impact it and also impacts students’ future opportunities for which they are supposedly being trained (those elusive 21st century jobs that don’t seem to materialize outside of retail and restaurants)
What’s so “detestable” about Chomsky?
I take issue with his anti-semitic stances, support of Hezbollah, and his support of Holocaust Deniers which is outside the scope of his points here except to say that I can legitimately understand his arguments in the aforementioned areas, reject them, and find them repugnant while agreeing with him largely here and respecting him in other areas that he speaks in.
Here’s an interview with Noam Chomsky that addresses some of the claims made by “M” in the comment above: http://www.chomsky.info/books/dissent01.htm
I’m not an expert on the subject, but readers might want to check out the interview before taking those claims at face value.
I have commented before that I would be ashamed to take a teaching position knowing that most likely a good teacher was let go from.
TFA knows what it is doing and is agreeing to be involved with the privateers in education. They don’t care about public education This their mission from the beginning. Just like we initially thought people like Gates,Broad,Walton and Bloomberg wanted to help public education, it was a money grab from the beginning.
Greg writes an excellent post. One detail that strikes me is that you can count on one finger the number of principals willing to speak up in the press about the atrocities happening here in Chicago. Very few of them will utter anything publicly because they know their paychecks are controlled by a vindictive cult of yes-people.
At the sham community hearings on the recent closures, one principal basically pleaded, “Close any school but mine,” and just today her still-open school was graced with a visit from Rahm Emanuel.
The “CEO,” Barbara Byrd-Bennett, is in the press today for having awarded a $20m “consulting” contract to a crony’s firm in the suburbs. A quick background check of the crony would have stopped this contract in its tracks in any school district where honesty is still an operative value.
In any event, it’s a $20m boondoggle. What the CPS management layer is going to get for our money is simply more exposure to other members of the silent, never-criticize-the-policy cult. It’s a far-flung network of management layer people who have never one uttered a controversial word in public.
What Greg describes is accurate; what the Blaine principal reports is accurate. When they pressure him out, I hope he’s picked up by a district that actually cares about what kids need, rather than what the cult needs to keep the grift rolling.
schooltechconnect, may I share your comment on fb? I am in agreement. We need more folks to speak out. http://www.wbez.org/news/chicago-principal-rips-cps-school-budgets-emanuel-108108
The first two Chicago Public School 2014 budget hearings were held tonight. Yes, I spoke. In the long range (2013-2018 Action Plan) budget there is $3.6 million earmarked for “aspiring principal preparation programs” that are “four of the nation’s strongest principal preparation programs”. I asked what were these four institutions. While the Chief Financial Officer answered other questions I had, he did not answer that one. A teacher who spoke after me related that she had spoken with a few principals who had attended the principal session earlier today. The principals reported that the principal preparation academy was useless.