For many years, parents and education activists in Chicago have warned that the deliberate destruction of neighborhood public schools was causing a rise in violence. The city, first under Arne Duncan, now under Rahm Emanuel, ignored the critics, and made a virtue of closing public schools, opening charter schools, and sending kids long distances to new schools. Mayor Emanuel recognized that the critics’ complaints had some validity. He didn’t stop the school closings–in fact, he closed 50 public schools in a single day, an unprecedented action in American history. But to assuage the critics, he established “safe passages,” supposedly to assure students’ safety as they adapted to new and longer routes to their new schools. In 2013, a student was raped while walking to school on a “safe passage” route.
Nonetheless, murders and violence in Chicago are at a 20-year high this year.
Arne Duncan expressed his sorrow about the spike in violence, but still sees no connection between his policies as City Superintendent and Secretary of Education and the nasty consequences of destabilizing neighborhoods and communities.
Duncan was first to use school closings as “reform.” The first school he closed and restaffed was Dodge Elementary School. He was proud of Dodge, which was his first turnaround. When President Obama announced that he was appointing Duncan as Secretary of Education in 2008, he did the announcement at Dodge. The president said Duncan had the “courage” to close the school and start over. A few years later, Dodge was rated a failing school and closed again. https://www.wbez.org/shows/wbez-news/cps-wants-to-close-first-renaissance-schools/16f619df-5820-464d-bbcb-5fc308daf1a0
Opening schools, closing schools, breaking up neighborhoods and communities. Making children walk through unfamiliar neighborhoods and gang territory to get to school. Not a recipe for safety or success.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yes. President Obama and Arne Duncan have blood on their hands.
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Katie,
Please write it up for readers here. You are on the scene. You see the damage.
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Sure thing, Will write up more hopefully soon, but for now let me say this: I work at a school on the South Side of Chicago that was a receiving school during the 2013 School Closings debacle (a culmination of Obama/Duncan policies.) We have faced a level of chaos and cuts that has driven many families to bounce around the city/suburbs in search of some stability. This mess of a choice system has split communities as one of the few places left where people could meet and organize-the neighborhood community school-has been essentially dismantled.
The spikes in violence no doubt have a multitude of reasons, from a housing crisis (public housing here was mostly torn down in the early 2000s and there is no alternative affordable housing for many families), an economic crisis (the neighborhoods experiencing school closings were also the hardest hit by the foreclosure crisis), a mental health and health care crisis (half the mental health clinics were closed leaving mostly private facilities that can choose who to serve), and mass incarceration/police brutality (as youth are scattered throughout the city, many turn understandably to gangs or underground economies in midst of the hopelessness.)
Now, we are in a situation where we had multiple lockdowns at my school last year due to gun violence directly outside our building during the school day. Kids come to school telling me they couldn’t sleep the night before because of the shots. There was a 15 year old boy shot just houses away in the neighborhood where I live-in the middle of the afternoon out on the street. There is a hopelessness in this city that is palpable. People who can, are fleeing Rahm’s Chicago.
School policy is a giant piece of the problem, though the problems intersect. Fundamentally, this is about moving public funds away from those who need it into the pockets of the wealthy and connected. Charters and the instability inherent in “school choice” are just one piece of that reality. The neediest are getting the least under these neoliberal policies.
However, there is some hope. People are mad enough to start taking action. Of course, there is my union, the Chicago Teachers Union, and we are gearing up for a major work action. But there are other pockets of resistance from the Dyett Hunger Strike, to Freedom Square, to the Black Friday shutdown of Michigan Avenue, to student activism, to BLM Chicago/BYP100, and more.
Watch Chicago in the coming weeks. I suspect and hope that our strike may possibly be a catalyst for the some of the change we need.
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Katie, I look forward to reading whatever you submit.
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Katie,
I take it you won’t be buying and living in one of those new condos that developers — buds and campaign backers of Rahm & perhaps buds of Arne, too — have been creating after rehabbing those closed Chicago schools: (not that you could afford it on a CPS teacher salary)
http://chicago.curbed.com/2016/9/1/12750594/cps-chicago-public-schools-apartments
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There’s another part of the reason why Arne, Rahm, the unelected CPS school board, and others closed so many schools.
Call this an epilogue of sorts to the 2013 school closings in Chicago: (free market capitalism marches on!).
Developers connected to Rahm Emanuel have been buying up the land and school buildings at cost. This helped drive out lower income residents, thereby gentrifying certain neighborhoods.
And the latest is, according to the article below, is that the school buildings — some a century old, many several decades old — are being renovated for residences. Classrooms in the former schools are being turned into expensive Yuppie condo lofts for the new well-to-do residents:
http://chicago.curbed.com/2016/9/1/12750594/cps-chicago-public-schools-apartments
The new residents can brag, “I live in a school classroom, and walk to and from work every day and night, up the steps, and through the hallways that Chicago school children used to walk for decades.”
Weird.
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The number one policy that contributes to the high murder rates in some communities in America is the war on drugs. We’ve created the black markets that lead to criminal gangs and violent competition between those gangs. Decriminalizing and regulating many illegal drugs would ultimately lead to a lower homicide rate across the nation. Alcohol is a drug, but its prohibition just led to more crime. Same with the war on drugs. Also, ending the drug war would lead to much lower incarceration rates.
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That is not the primary or even a secondary cause of the spike in gun violence in Chicago. Drug dealers know that such violence is bad for business as it attracts even more attention from law enforcement. It is also bad for business since the majority of the money spent on drugs comes from wealthier people who come into the community from elsewhere to buy what they need, the inner city communities themselves have far less disposable income available for drugs. Turf wars are bad for business, a thing the old school mafia also knew. Those with wealth and assorted opportunities for gainful employment don’t need the income or the risk from selling drugs, that is relegated to the poor who at the very best have minimum wage employment which all too often does not permit them to provide for their most basic needs. The cost of living is still high in poor, inner city communities.
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The homicide rate in the US was higher in the early 90’s in Chicago than it is now. Same for LA. Law enforcement attributed much of this to gang violence caused by competition in the illegal drug market. Same thing happening again. Plenty of drug users and addicts in poor communities. Dealers set up shop near their customers.
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The hidden NCLB/R2T agenda of NO CHILD LEFT IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD is maybe not so hidden as more and more activists are waking up to the get-rid-of-and-gentrify game. There are even those calling it a “new colonialism.” http://www.ciedieaech.wordpress.com/2015/10/12/no-child-left-in-the-neighborhood
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While the destabilization of communities already under the generational duress of poverty certainly didn’t help, with the destruction of their schools based on false portrayals of the problems being but the latest part of all that, the actual cause of the spike in violence is found elsewhere, in policing and law enforcement strategies and in negatives uses of social media. A while back, CPD and the city decided to target the leadership of the cities gangs and did so very effectively, putting them all in prison. The result of this was that the command structure of the gangs which once had to give permission for any actions against other gangs or individuals, especially violent ones, was removed and anarchy ensued. This was exacerbated by social media which allowed a huge increase in taunts, threats and a generalized war of words that would then result in additional violence. Essentially, vicious circle of malevolent trolling and reprisals via gun violence. All of this is further exacerbated by the easy access to guns that flow in from surrounding areas that have what can only be called lax gun laws and lax enforcement. Every year the cops in Chicago take at least 5,000 guns off the streets and they have been unable to make the slightest difference in the supply guns or the violence caused by them. There are some voices at the grass roots level in the communities addressing the culture of violence and the abject lack of hope and opportunity, but there is no overall effort on the part of the city or the nation to address the root causes of all of this despite claims to the contrary like the need for better education via charter schools and other memes of distraction. That is the worst part of the Obama/Duncan legacy, a crime of omission, one using the failure to address the true causes of the problems of the inner cities as leverage for botched policies that contribute to them instead.
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A excellent analysis of deplorable public policies, Jon.
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How does one go about reaching you?
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C,
You can google my name and send an email to NYU.
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There is no doubt that school closure and privatization are contributing factors in the violence in many urban cities like Chicago. All the community and family disruption causes insecurity, and insecurity often breeds violence. When schools are closed, the community “glue” of the neighborhood is gone. Students are sent to the outer reaches of the cities, across gang lines, to unknown areas and unfamiliar schools with mostly white teachers. This disruption causes friction that often results in violence. The under funding of schools to encourage them to ‘fail’ comes at the price of children dying because there is no school nurse or support services in the schools. This link from ‘The Nation’ outlines the process as it appears in city after city. The profit the developers make reinventing neighborhoods is often at the expense of black lives.https://www.thenation.com/article/black-lives-matter-school-too/
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I would go further.
Thanks to Arne Duncan, Rahm Emanuel, and the rest, the percentage of Chicago’s black teachers, folks who have lived and taught in these communities their whole lives, has dropped (in Chicago) from 40% to 20%. Most of the schools have been replaced by privately-managed charter schools. The teachers have been replaced by Teach for America 22-year-olds who are neither from the community, nor are they black, nor are they from the same socio-economic class, being wealthy Ivy Leaguers, many of them.
In the prior scenario, you have teachers who can relate to, understand and guider their students in a way that the TFA-ers simply cannot, and never will be able to do. They’ve taught multiple sibliings, and even multiple generations in the same family. No TFA-er will ever stay long enough to do this.
The idea that “Ms. So-and-So”, who has lived and taught in the neighborhood for decades, and who did such a great job teaching your eldest child, will now teach your younger children… well, that’s all over.
That leads to more dropping out, less hope, and more kids that can then be drawn into a life of criminal activity, or at best, no job prospects.
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True, and as the leadership of gangs has been imprisoned, the number of gangs, now called cliques has increased as the older, larger gangs have become fragmented. The cliques numerical size and the size of the turf they control is far smaller than in the past, meaning more gang lines are available to be crossed. The criminal pursuits of the old, large gangs have also decreased while the socially driven conflicts between cliques have taken their place in terms of the causes of violence which is now often driven by name calling and relationship disputes etc. which often starts out on social media. The opportunists you mentioned and some you haven’t are not letting this crisis go to waste, there’s money to be made.
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“Safe Passages” was and is a total joke.
These so-called safe walking
routes that had to be created after the massive
closing of 50 schools in one day—in spite of
massive community protests to keep
those schools open.
One of the big reasons for the massive protests
against the closing of 50 schools in one day,
but not the only one — the biggest being the
opposition to overall privatization of schools —
was the threat to the safety of children who
would now be walking new, longer, and more
dangerous routes to school.
As with prior mass closings, the un-elected
Chicago School Board made up of wealthy
1% business executives with ZERO education
experience, was warned about how
children from closed schools would have to
cross gang borders, and walk through unsafe
areas to get to the schools to which they
were assigned, with these schools now
no longer within their neighborhood.
The CPS officials pooh-poohed such
concerns (as did Michelle Rhee when
she did something similar in D.C.
that led to similar, but less-well-known
results.)
Well, we all know what happened in Chicago
to Fenger high school student Derrion Albert in
2009—again after the same warnings
against school closings (executed by then
CEO, and current Sec. of Ed, Arne Duncan)—
as Albert walked to school on his new and
longer route:
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=914
This video of Albert being beaten to death
by teens swinging 2″-by-4″ wooden clubs …
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=fb1_1254077314
… was and still is on-line for all to see…
the murder directly attributed to school closings
and his being forced to walk longer distances,
crossing gang border, and walking through
dangerous areas.
Well, after the 50 schools that were closed
in 2013, the Chicago Public Schools announced
that they would simply expand “Safe Passages”
program, and provide more routes manned
by unarmed, barely-trained “security personnel” making
minimum wage. It was too expensive to hire actual
trained, armed security guards, or off-duty police.
I kid you not.
Predictably, this has been a disaster, with masses
of minimum wage “security personnel” either
walking off the job mid-shift, or being
totally useless in preventing problems.
Seriously, some barely-trained minimum
wage guy is going to jump in and intervene
when he sees a mugging or rape start
to occur — and risk getting killed
himself? God, what idiots ever thought
that this would actually work?
The corporate reform’s defense of this reached its nadir when corporate ed. reform apologist and water carrier Alexander Russo blogged that a shooting that occurred on one of the “Safe Passages” routes didn’t “count” because it occurred after the time frame recommended for walking to and from school. Never mind that kids often stay late, or come early to get tutored or to participate in sports or other extra-curricular activities or whatever … or that, because of the distances, have to get outside earlier to walk and/or ride a bus to get to their new school.
It “didn’t count”, Alex? Tell that to the victim’s loved ones!
For this gem from corporate reform shilll Russo, go to the top COMMENT of this article:
http://chicagoist.com/2013/09/04/workers_hired_for_cps_safe_passage.php
ALEXANDER RUSSO: “A ‘Safe Passages’ shooting really only counts if it happens while kids are going to and from school, not on the weekends or overnight or even during the day.”
which prompted this reply two comments later:
KEVIN_ROBINSON: “Only in Chicago do we have a set of conditions to determine when a ‘shooting really only counts.’ ”
That connects to the article that Dr. Ravitch posted agove.. Yes, in 2013, a 15 year-old high school girl walking to school along one of the “Safe Passages” routes was pulled into an alley and gang-raped: (from George Schmidt’s SUBSTANCE)
http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=4690§ion=Article
Thanks Rahm and Arne! And also thanks to then-Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett (now living in the Big House as a convicted felon for charter school graft, but that’s another story), and cheerleader-from-afar Arne Duncan, and all the sell-out aldermen/alderwomen who backed this schools’ closings and “Safe Passages” fiasco…
… and also thanks to the Chicago Public Schools Security Chief, Jadine Chou , who has no police or security experience whatsoever, was appointed by Rahm Emanuel & his puppet School Board in 2011, and who, to date, has refused to comment on the 2013 gang-rape (at the end of the article BELOW).
There’s blood on all of their hands.
The U.S. News & World Report article (linked by Dr. Ravitch above) has Duncan recently blubbering away while speaking at a Southside Chicago church, when it was Duncan’s policies that helped increase that neighborhood violence.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-08/chicago-violence-an-extracurricular-back-to-school-burden:
U.S.N&WR:
“The congregation had just mourned the death of Tyshawn Lee, a 9-year-old boy who was lured into an alley and executed by gang members after playing at a nearby park. The incident, though heartbreaking, wasn’t unique. As Duncan, who labored through the speech in tears, noted, through the first six years of his time in Washington, more than 16,000 young people in the U.S. were killed by guns.
“Chicago has become the epicenter of such violence. August was the deadliest month on record for the city in more than 20 years. The homicide tally, as recorded by the Chicago Tribune, stands at 507 – already 50 percent more than last year, and eclipsing the current count in New York City and Los Angeles, combined.
“ ‘In hindsight – and this was unbelievably naïve on my part – I honestly thought it couldn’t get worse,[ says Duncan, who ran the Chicago public school system before joining the Obama administration. [It’s great to be home and I’m thrilled to be back here, but it’s an extraordinarily hard time in the city and it’s gotten substantially worse.’ ”
Yeah, “it’s gotten substantially worse.”
And WHY (in part) do you think that is, Dumbass Arne??!!!
Just as with Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C, Duncan, while serving and the Chicago Public Schools’ CEO, was warned repeatedly — as was his successors and Mayor Rahm Emanuel — that the school closings he helped engineer and facilitate would require children to walk farther distances through dangerous neighborhoods, It would also require children to cross borders of gang territories, and attend school with children and siblings of rival gangs.
This could only increase the violence in Chicago’s urban neighborhoods.
Again, the videotaped murder of Derrion Albert — captured on video — was directly attributed to Duncan’s plan. Classmates identified him as an alien intruder into their territory, and beat him to death with a two-by-four piece of wood. The Albert murder occurred shortly after Duncan took over as Secretary of Education.
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@ Jack- This was happening in Houston under Terry Grier. Our new superintendent is from SF and all we can do is wait and see what happens. Of course too many still do not realize the importance of electing candidates whose true interest is that of students in our public schools as opposed to getting contratcs for their friends and family.
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Chicago schools closing: one more example of how business “efficiency” missed the obvious, and helps cause human sociality to break down. People are not widgets, or bottom-line numbers, or Wall Street profitability tools. Duncan, Emanuel, and (sad to say) even Obama misses the obvious.
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Wells Fargo should exemplify “business efficiency” and the result of missing adult supervision in free markets. Of course, the 5,800 fired WF employees browbeaten by upper management are the only ones held accountable. It never fails, those that love Friedman free markets and crony capitalism are the ones most insulated from the negative effects.
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This is part of the legacy of neoliberalism, the savage, “free” market-touting economic ideology worshiped by most Republicans and the New Democrats, principally Bill & Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The facts that “free” markets are a myth, and that such an economic ideology which puts private profits (privatizing everything) before the lives and welfare of people is dangerous, destructive, and anti-democratic as well as anti-human, are of no concern to the 1% Parasite Class who run the U.S. and much of the world.
Trump and Hillary are the tools of that 1% Parasite Class, and both believe in the dangerous, arrogant lie of “American exceptionalism”, which is simply code for the ever-expanding U.S. global military/corporate empire. Endless wars and endless war budgets for their National Security State will not only continue to unnecessarily cost lives, but continue to drain resources away education, infrastructure repairs, health care, and transitioning to a sustainable energy system no longer reliant on global-warming fossil fuels and dangerous nuclear power plants.
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Back when the news of the Atlanta cheating scandal broke, what was Duncan’s take on the Atlanta cheating scandal?
Mehhh, it’s no big deal.
ARNE DUNCAN (blase): “This is an easy one to fix: better test security.”
Watch the August 2011 video:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/07/atlanta-cheating-scandal-_n_892169.html
Oh, I’m so glad Arne got to the bottom of this whole problem, and identified the cure. We can all relax now.
This interview is great. Apparently, this was just some local Atlanta reporter, but she asked some pointed questions.
She asks him if the unrealistic expectations of NCLB are part of the problem, and he’s totally non-responsive… he doesn’t give a yes or no to this. Instead, he just says, “There are great teachers who are amazing… beating the odds… blah blah blah”
Later, she says that “a lot of this is about money”, and asks if punishments and monetary rewards “need to be de-coupled from student learning.” Instead of owning up and admit this obvious reality—painfully obvious, in the light of what just happened in Atlanta– Dun-an says… oh no… not at all. We need to do this MORE.
Check out this word salad (including the usual Duncan smarmy “snow job” of praising teachers and principles… the same folks whose profession Duncan has destroyed):
————————————————————–
DUNCAN: (at 02:30) “Well, I think rewarding teacher excellence is important. I think I would argue the opposite (i.e. don’t “de-couple”), that far too often we haven’t we haven’t celebrated great teachers. We haven’t celebrated great principals who are making a huge difference in students’ lives. You just want to make sure that they’re doing it honestly, and again, the vast majority of teachers are doing an amazing job, often in very difficult circumstances, in helping students beat the odds every single day. I think we need to do a better job of spotlighting that, and incentivizing that, and encouraging that, and learning from that.
“In education, we’ve been far too reluctant to talk about success. We just need to that. We just need to make sure that we’re doing it with integrity.
“Not too hard to do.”
————————-
Really Arne? “Not too hard to do”? “Merit pay” and basing personnel decision on test scores has been tried countless times for over 100 years, and it has always failed.
What you claim is “not hard to do” HAS NEVER WORKED.
IT WILL NEVER WORK.
In fact, when it’s tried, it actually causes severe harm—narrowing of the curriculum, turning schools into test prep factories, etc.
Duncan’s corporate reform masters need testing to drive privatization, corporate profiteering, and union-busting, and so Duncan will defend to the death the misuse, the over-emphasis on testing, the massive over-testing in general, etc.
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