Rahm Emanuel wants to privatize public education as much and as fast as he can. Aside from closing down 50 schools in one fell swoop, the mayor privatized custodial services to two companies for $340 million over three years, promising cleaner schools and cost savings.
But, as reported by Catalyst, a respected journal that covers education in Chicago, principals complain that their schools are filthy and rodent-infested. The corporations have promised to improve.
Sarah Karp of Catalyst wrote, in an article titled “Dirty Schools Now the Norm Since Privatizing Custodians: Principals”:
“The $340 million privatization of the district’s custodial services has led to filthier buildings and fewer custodians, while forcing principals to take time away from instruction to make sure that their school is clean.
“That is the finding from a survey done by AAPPLE, the new activist arm of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association.”
The leader of AAPPLE, principal Troy LaRiviere, is an outspoken defender of Chicago’s public schools and its students.
Valerie Strauss summarizes responses from principals to the new arrangement:
“Principals reported serious problems with rodents, roaches and other bugs, filthy floors, overflowing garbage bins, filthy toilets, missing supplies such as toilet paper and soap, and broken furniture — issues they said they didn’t have before. Now, many said, they spend a lot of time trying to clean their buildings.”
One of the companies, Aramark, announced recently that it would lay off 476 custodians, 20% of the custodial workforce. This may improve its profits but is likely to worsen its services.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Aramark has a horrible reputation in Ohio and Michigan. I guess the mayor didn’t know:
“However, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction director told lawmakers yesterday that its food-service vendor must clean up its act — and its food — or face the loss of its contract.
Director Gary Mohr revealed that Aramark Correctional Services was fined $130,200 last week — on top of a previous $142,100 fine — for ongoing problems including lack of cleanliness, food shortages and other contract violations.
The result: the most food-service problems in state prisons in the past decade, said Joanna Saul, director of the Correctional Institution Inspection Committee.
Officials also have banished 96 Aramark employees from working in prisons for “serious misconduct” that includes “relationships” with inmates, security violations and contraband smuggling.”
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/local/2014/07/30/0730-prison-food.html
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Wonder how much they contribute to the Republican campaigns?
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And Democratic campaigns??
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Oh come on now, they contribute to both but more to Republicans because they hold the purse strings in OH.
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Michigan:
“I’ve written extensively about Aramark, the for-profit prison food vendor that supplies food services to prisons across Michigan. They’ve experienced repeated food shortages, employees bringing drugs and contraband to prisoners, employees having sex with prisoners, and most recently, maggots in multiple food preparation areas.
The state started cracking down on Aramark last March when they imposed at $98,000 fine for food shortages and unauthorized menu substitutions. Things didn’t get better, however, and, in August, they got hit with another fine, this one for $200,000.”
http://www.eclectablog.com/tag/aramark
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Thanks for the amazing range of facts and references in your posts. I had long ago mentally filed some other problesm with Ohio’s for-profit prisons. As I recall the contractor got paid even if there were empty cells, and that pay was not just for overhead.
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Laura, there are some websites that report on the malfeasance when public services are privatized. I wrote about this in “Reign of Error.” Hospitals, prisons, preschool special education services. When greed is unleashed, it is a powerful force.
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I’m always amazed when people get upset when private companies do a crappy job at public services. Private companies exist to make a profit. When service comes into conflict with profit guess which one wins?
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Let me be angry and then reply…
Catalyst is not a “respected journal” but rather a foundation supported apologist for corporate school reform for the past quarter century, as their record shows. Substance (at substancenews.net) reported this story first in February and March. That’s when the Board voted on the $300 million plus re-privatization contracts (most of the custodial work had already been privatized; this just took it out of the hands of local small businesses and gave it to Rahm’s huge corporate budeis) with Aramark and Sodexo. At the time, we also reported that the claims made by Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley during his February 27 Board Power Point and presentation was ridiculous.
By June, we reported, with pictures, that the earlier cuts in school custodial workers was creating a mess in the schools. We shared photos from inside school washrooms showing human excrement on the walls — uncleaned because of the Aramark cuts.
By August we were reporting that a major fire at Dawes Elementary School was caused when unsupervised new custodial workers placed rags filled with solvents into a waste container and left them in the middle of the gym, causing extensive damage (but to date covered up by Catalyst, CPS, and Chicago’s corporate apologists in the media).
Sorry… If you believe that we should wait until one of Rahm Emanuel’s corporate media partners shows the reality, we cannot easily continue to take your reporting and sharing from elsewhere seriously either. This story has been out now for more than half a year — no thanks to your “respected journal…”
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“By August we were reporting that a major fire at Dawes Elementary School was caused when unsupervised new custodial workers placed rags filled with solvents into a waste container and left them in the middle of the gym, causing extensive damage (but to date covered up by Catalyst, CPS, and Chicago’s corporate apologists in the media).”
That’s lovely. Any concerns about a fire in an elementary school? Any “safety” warning bells going off there, in the mayor’s office?
Filthy classrooms and rip-off contracts may end up being the least of their problems.
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‘Sorry… If you believe that we should wait until one of Rahm Emanuel’s corporate media partners shows the reality, we cannot easily continue to take your reporting and sharing from elsewhere seriously either. This story has been out now for more than half a year — no thanks to your “respected journal…” ‘
Who are you angry with? I’m glad you have cleared up who first brought this story to light. Is there reason to think that harm was intended here? I’m missing something.
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George,
You’re doing the Lord’s work.
Keep it up, and don’t let up… ever,
Jack
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Sorry, George Schmidt, I only learned about the privatization of the Chicago custodians jobs today. If I had learned about it six months ago, I would have written about it then. As for Catalyst, I am not as familiar with every issue as you are, but I have read stories there that were fair and not aligned with corporate control.
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Outsourced, privatized janitorial services have proven to be less efficient than the business or school owned custodial services that used to exist in the 1990s and prior to that time in my experience. As buyouts continued in the industry where my husband worked, they continued to provide dirtier buildings with poor maintenance and no one available to do things correctly. And, workers weren’t allowed to fix things themselves, except for specific industry instruments. They couldn’t change light bulbs or fix locks. They had to wait on the service to bring in the appropriate person to do the jobs.
During my first years as a teacher, the janitorsswept, turned up the chairs, erased boards, cleaned chalk trays, windowsills, and dumped trash. Recently the teachers do everything except sweep. They put their trash outside the door. Custodians begin dumping them an hour before school is out, although we continue to put things in the trash can the last hour of the day, so it is already half full when the next day begins.
At our school, we put in requests for furniture repair, water fountain repair, toilet repair, playground equipment repair, etc. on a computer for repair orders. They get repaired in order of request unless there is a major emergency. This isn’t a contracted service. It is our over-worked custodians that we have to accommodate.
It may be true that they are over-worked. The odd thing is that no one seems to think a thing about adding another job to the teachers’ day. I gladly do whatever I must. But, is there never an end to what is expected of teachers in addition to the job of teaching and test prep?
I agree that Aramark has a really bad reputation in Ohio, esp in prison food service.
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It may be true that they are over-worked. The odd thing is that no one seems to think a thing about adding another job to the teachers’ day. I gladly do whatever I must. But, is there never an end to what is expected of teachers in addition to the job of teaching and test prep?
One reason no one thinks anything of adding extra duties to teacher’s day is that so many teachers will “gladly” do whatever they are asked to. Why should anyone think about it if we don’t even complain? We need to speak up and refuse unreasonable duties if we want to be treated like professionals.
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I agree. But at our school, the principal evaluates the condition of the room as part of the teacher’s evaluation. I gladly do what I must in order to have a good evaluation. That is the dilemma of being a unionized professional.
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This is emails from the Aramark scandal in Michigan, which is going on right now:
http://www.progressmichigan.org/2014/09/progress-michigan-foia-reveals-aramark-scandal-reaches-top-levels-snyder-administration/
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Another example of blatant corporate (with collusion and cooperation from CPS & City Hall) incompetence, & truth in the statement “if you can’t dazzle them w/your brilliance, baffle ’em w/your b.s.” Just as Mike Millken lost his brokerage license (after being imprisoned for his junk bond deals), he goes into the…education business (where, in reality, he has no business). Aramark & Sodexho (both already doing such terrible jobs in the food service industry) are now relied upon for competency in the cleaning service?
Next, I guess, they’ll merge with Pearson to publish text (I should actually call them “test”) books & computerized, “standardized” (quotes used because NOT standardized–neither valid nor reliable) tests. So, not only will students and prisoners be physically sickened by their food services and uncleanly classrooms & school buildings, Aramark & Sodexho can join with Pearson in making students psychologically ill, as well.
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A good source for news about outsourcing and privatization is “In the Public Interest,” a regular online bulletin that covers education, hospitals, prisons, and every book and cranny where entrepreneurs are moving in. Subscribe by writing donald@inthepublicinterest.org
It is free.
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Parents, teachers, and principals should be calling the board of health over unclean conditions. If the schools are not sanitary, they should be closed down until they ARE sanitary ad supplied with necessities such as soap, paper towels, etc. PTA’s and the
union should be able get some resolution pretty quickly if they get the Board of Health involved.
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And how about the privatization of school bus service? How widespread is that and what are the effects on bus drivers and on students?
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Our district has privatized bus service with First Student,a company tied to Margaret Thatcher’s cronies. Cost to rent a bus for a field trip: roughly $250. Bus drivers make about $10 per hour.
More on First Student, courtesy of Chris Hedges article “Sweatshop on Wheels,” published April 15,2013 on Truthdig,org
“This process of destroying our public transportation system is largely complete. Our bus and rail system, compared to Europe’s or Japan’s, is a joke. But an even more insidious process has begun. Multinational corporations, many of them foreign, are slowly consolidating transportation systems into a few private hands. Of the top three multinationals that control transport in the U.S. only one, MV Transportation, is based here. FirstGroup, a multibillion-dollar corporation headquartered in the United Kingdom and a product of Margaret Thatcher’s privatization of British mass transit, now owns First Student, which operates 54,000 school buses in 38 states and nine Canadian provinces and has 6 million student riders. FirstGroup also has a controlling stake in Greyhound. Veolia Transportation, a subsidiary of Transdev, a conglomerate headquartered in France, has 150 contracts to run mass transit systems in the United States. It was Veolia, after Hurricane Katrina, that took over the New Orleans bus system. And Veolia did what it has done elsewhere. It stripped bus workers of their pensions. New York’s Nassau County bus service, once part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA), was turned over to Veolia after the French corporation hired former three-term Sen. Al D’Amato of New York as its lobbyist. Veolia—which when it takes over a U.S. property, as in New Orleans or Nassau County, refuses to give workers a defined-benefit plan—is partly owned by a pension fund that covers one-third of French citizens. U.S. workers are losing their benefit plans to a company created to provide benefit plans for the French. Veolia is currently lobbying Rhode Island and Atlanta to privatize their bus services. “
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What is so frustrating, too, is that an unglamorous but steady public-sector job like school janitor used to be the kind of employment that families — often recent immigrants — could rely on to help feed and shelter their children, who might then go on to get better educations and better-paying jobs. Private contractors don’t offer the reliable work schedules and decent benefits that can help families become more stable and successful over time. So it’s not just about the schools, but about the communities in which the schools are situated — people are laid off and then, if they are lucky, re-hired in some kind of part-time / temporary arrangement by the contractor. But it’s not really good luck when their chances of finding a foothold in the working/middle class are reduced or eliminated.
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Privatization of custodial services is not a new idea and, like privatization of food services and privatization of busing, at least has SOME logic to it. As noted in this post, every minute a school superintendent or principal spends on a non-instructional issue is a minute he or she cannot spend working on teaching and learning… and every dollar spent on non-instructional functions is a dollar that cannot be spent on students.
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In theory, yes, but reality for the past 20+ years has shown the privatization often means that principals have to spend more time on such issues, as in this case, because the privatized services are so much worse than those provided by direct employees who have a stake in the school.
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But if the custodial services are inadequate, there is no one to take charge and inspect the building, other than the principal, who has no real control over a contracted company.
Besides, principals aren’t truly “instructional leaders” in many cases, esp when they spend the entire year “evaluating” teachers to some meaningless rubric.
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There is a rationale for schools contracting for non-instructional services, but each case needs to be examined on its own for fit, expertise, and efficiency. The size of the school system also plays a role.
Custodial services is not a good fit for contracting. School custodians do so much more than routine cleaning. They help with supervision and student behavior, perform light maintenance work, are available as needed to clean up after sick children, and are often lead contacts for school safety and emergency response. That’s a different set of requirements than coming in on a schedule for routine cleaning. Food service, general IT, and pupil transportation can be a better fit.
Expertise, one of the stronger arguments is noted above. Is it a good use of a school administrator’s time to manage food service or transportation and do school administrators have the background to do it well? However, vendor management is its own skill too. Vendors need to make a profit and if they are a publicly held company have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. If a district doesn’t manage the contract well, both in procurement and ongoing management of performance in the partnership, then bad results like the ones noted in Chicago are likely to ensue. It’s true that the pool of good program managers and business managers is shallow and those are usually the administrators with skill in vendor management.
Both public and private sector organizations can deliver services efficiently if the service is in an area of competency and they can achieve economies of scale. The smaller the district, the more likely contracting out for some non-instructional services is an reasonable option.
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A blog by a historian (and I think I have every Diane Ravitch book going all the way back to the “School Wars”) should provide not only facts, but historical context. So this story continues to grow and resonate. As usual, the facts matter and the myths and lies of corporate reform and privatization have pushed out the facts from most histories since corporate reform was launched a decade after the first attack in “A Nation at Risk” and “Chicago’s Schools — Worst in America.”
What was traditional made sense and worked.
Prior to 1995, when Chicago began corporate “reform” under Chicago’s first education Chief Executive Officer (Paul G. Vallas), the division of labor at each school was straightforward. The school engineers supervised the custodial workers, and the principal was in charge of the instructional side of the building. At most schools, there was rarely a conflict because principals and engineers had learned over decades that this was the best way to get all the jobs done.
Beginning in the early 1990s, some “progressives” (including Catalyst, the corporate mouthpiece for corporate reform) began a campaign to expose the pay of engineers, who were required to be in the buildings (and on overtime) whenever anything was going on. The “scandal” was pumped up by corporate media, and hyped by many “progressives” (including some infamous pundits who later became school reform “edupreneurs” via things like the “Small Schools” scams — to the tune of about a million dollars!).
Whenever schools had after-hours events, an engineer has to be in the building to supervise the custodial worker(s) who would clean up following the events. The most utilized was the old Jones Commercial High School, because it was located in the South Loop, so the engineer would often work seven days a week, with extra hours each day. This became a scandal because the engineer at Jones was working more hours in the building and being paid (because of the overtime rules) more than the principal. But the principal rarely had to be near the building (even though she lived nearby) on Saturday, Sunday, or holidays — when the Jones building was rented out.
School buildings have been rented out in Chicago for various activities for as long as anyone can remember. This weekend, for example, CORE (the Caucus of Rank and File Educators, which has been leading the Chicago Teachers Union since 2010 when we elected Karen Lewis, Jesse Sharkey and the rest of us to lead the union….) is renting Whitney Young High School for Friday night and Saturday for our annual CORE convention (I’m on the CORE 11-person steering committee, so have been in the middle of this planning). We are paying rent.
When I was union delegate at Amundsen High School two decades ago, that northside high school routinely rented out its auditorium on Sundays to an evangelical church, which filled the auditorium for services. During those same years, various other groups (including a bunch of Romanians against the dictatorship that I worked with) also rented portions of the school. The outside groups paid, the engineer supervised, the principal didn’t have to be near the building, and when we returned to class Monday the building was clean and ready for its primary purpose: Amundsen High School.
“Reform” has had the same trajectory in each of its iterations. The attack on the unions (and public workers) always begins with a contrived “scandal”, using rigged “data” and contorted “facts” (like the engineers’ pay at a few schools out of 600). Then corporate media (often aided and abetted by “progressives” and “independent” corporate mouthpieces like Catalyst) luridly repeats the scandals that aren’t. Next thing you know, you get a “reform” like the current privatization mess in Chicago in cleaning schools.
First they argued that the dual leadership model was dysfunctional: the principal should have ALL the power, without sharing with the engineer. So the principals eventually got all that power (even though the majority did NOT want it, but were ignored).
Next, there was the privatization of some of the custodial work.
This latest nonsense (Aramark and Sodexo MAGIC), the “re-privatization” of custodial work in CPS, is the result of a history of lies, half truths, and ongoing attacks behind those smokescreens of mendacity on unionized engineers and unionized school custodial workers. This time, however, thanks to AAPPLE having given a voice to some principals, the nonsense is exposed (without the historical background I’m sharing here). But the whole story of all of this year’s lies hasn’t yet been told. At least that clown Power Point from the February 2014 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education is still available on line, as well as the ridiculous claims by Chicago’s “Chief Administrative Officer” Tim Cawley at the same meeting that this plan was going to make the lives of principals easier, the schools cleaner, and save millions.
Without one inconvenient fact to get in the way because the job of the seven dwarfs on Rahm’s appointed Board of Education is to rubber stamp each latest privatization initiative no matter how stupid…
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Thank you for the background.
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You’re welcome.
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You’re right about custodial services… In my 29 years we never contracted for it because it became clear it was an integral service… transportation and many maintenance functions lend themselves to sub-contracting.. and you’re also right that the size of the district is a crucial variable: small districts generally do more contracting than large ones . In ALL districts, though, a strong business official can unburden the principals’ from dealing with non-instructional headaches. They are unsung heroes!
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Educators say that corporate tactics are a disaster, but let’s not throw the baby out with the bath water. Reformers who look to business models aren’t all wrong to take pointers from what works in capitalism. However, in a toxic atmosphere of politics and finger pointing, their vision is cloudy. Here’s what they miss: high-stakes testing and a competitive rewards system isn’t what makes a company’s products innovative, its markets expand, or its service excellent. Any veteran manager will tell you that relationships, up and down the org chart and in every link of the supply chain, will make or break the corporate bottom line. This is also, and especially, true in education.
As Professor Kirp states in the NY Times, “Every successful educational initiative of which I’m aware aims at strengthening personal bonds by building strong systems of support in the schools…The process of teaching and learning is an intimate act that neither computers nor markets can hope to replicate.”
The power of relationships in school reform is familiar to the growing number of educators across the country that use home visits to build trust between schools and their communities. With a methodology that leads participants to question their assumptions and look for strengths, trained teachers and other school staff visit their students’ families at home, and then continue the relationship formed there to support the student. The Parent Teacher Home Visit Project, which started the model in Sacramento, CA, serves as a training and policy advocate for a national network of affiliates using this method. Affiliates are advised to partner with the local school district, teachers’ unions, and community groups.
This collaborative approach builds both trust and expertise within families, communities and educators, making the system more responsive, accountable and effective for students in public schools. This model was featured in a best practice case study in the U.S. Department of Education’s report “Partners in Education: Dual Capacity Framework for Family Engagement,” and is considered an example of “high-impact” family engagement.
Schools and districts across the US, from inner-cities to rural reservations, have adopted and adapted our model. Home visits work for families. They work for educators. And, most importantly, they work for students.
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Not only was our building dirtier when custodial services were contracted out, things started disappearing. Food was even taken out of the fridge in the office areas. There was no way to know who had done it, because their turnover was terrible, and you never knew who was going to be in the building. Often if I was working after school hours, “friends” would walk in looking for someone–so there was no real accountability.
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As the songs says: “When will they ever learn, when will they ever learn”?
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx I left this response at W Gersen’s blog post rationalizing privatization of school system’s building responsibilities:
You have expertise in running schools, and I understand the points you have raised.
But speaking as a onetime industry procurement supervisor, I disagree with your premise. ‘Privatizing’, despite the lingo, does not delegate responsibility for results. It is akin to subcontracting work formerly performed in-house– the sort of thing one does when the overall enterprise exceeds one’s manpower, so one assumes the role of contract manager rather than contractor. It is done with some misgiving, because it places the responsible party at one remove from authority over day-to-day operations. Many new headaches crop up, due primarily to the difficulty of exercising authority over another corp’s internal culture.
Most contractors will tell you it can’t be done without strict monetary sanctions for non-performance. It is simply not possible for a school district to ‘contract out’ building services and thereby free up admin for academic duty: you’ll have to hire competent overseers of the subcontractors. When the rats are running in the halls of Chicago schools, it is the school district which is responsible.
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xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx Privatization will never make sense as an efficient option for providing a public good. That is because the very sense of ‘public good’ implies a quality of life issue which has enough importance to all to justify collecting sufficient money from all quarters of society to ensure it is delivered.
In a socialist society, this is less problematic. The nation-group as a whole has already agreed to contribute unequally– each according to ability to pay– in order to provide for a basic quality of life for all. Discussions ensue over which items are part of that pot.
Recently in our capitalistic, individualistic society, the very notion of ‘public good’ is being tested in national and state legislatures. Must we all pitch in, each according to ability, to ensure for example public education? And if we agree on that, do we agree that those public schools shall be free of rats roaming in the halls?
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S&F,
I am curios about what you consider a “public good”. For economists, a “public good” has a pretty specific meaning. A public good is not rival, that is your use of a public good does not I pare anyone else’s use of a public good. A public good is also not excludable, that is that you can not be prevented from using the good. Clean air is a public good by this definition, but education is not. What do you mean by a public good?
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