Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel published an opinion article in the Washington Post saying something about how choice is a good thing when it is a good thing, so don’t get your knickers twisted against school choice just because Trump is for it. At least I think that is what he is saying. Read it and tell me why you think he (or someone wrote) wrote this article to get people to think well of school choice.
I think he is saying that when Democrats promote privatization by charter school, that is a good thing, and we must keep doing it even though Betsy DeVos wants to turn every school into a charter school and/or give every student a voucher to attend a religious school.
Sorry, but I have a hard time reading anything allegedly penned by Rahm about schools without thinking of the day of infamy when he closed 50 public schools at one fell swoop. He will be remembered for the brutal, disruptive, heedless closing of 50 community public schools. That, and the awful youth violence that continues to plague Chicago, promoted to some extent by the deliberate destruction of communities.
At the same time that Rahm and his hand-picked board of the city’s elite were closing public schools, they continued opening charter schools. Chicago is not an example of the success of school reform. To the extent that we use the federal NAEP scores as a measure, Chicago is still one of the lowest performing urban districts in the nation. It has some very good public schools, but it also has many very poorly resourced schools. Rahm will not be remembered as an education reformer.
In this article, he boasts again of Urban Prep Academy. This is the all-black, all-male school where 100% of the students who reach 12th grade graduate and go to college. This is a school that Gary Rubinstein researched and discovered its high attrition rate and its low test scores, lower than those of students in Chicago public schools. When I googled Urban Prep to find the links, I noticed that newspapers around the country still report the news of its “100% graduation rate” and “100% college acceptance rate.”
Knowing what Rahm has done to the Chicago public schools, I find it hard to understand why he thinks he is in a position to offer advice to the nation about school reform. The reality is that he is comfortable with Trump and DeVos and the privatization movement and has no qualms about continuing to implement it in Chicago.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Make Rahmses The Great Again … All He Needs Is His Own Pyramid …
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And the Chicago charters — with their ability to cream students who are the most difficult and most expensive to educate — are not even performing better than the traditional public schools.
Check out this recent, multi-year study:
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/2203
x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
ABSTRACT:
“Charter schools have become the cornerstone of school reform in Chicago and in many other large cities. Enrollments in Chicago charters increased by more than ten times between 2000 and 2014 and, with strong support from the current mayor and his administration, the system continues to grow.
“Indeed, although state law limits charter schools in Chicago to 75 schools, proponents have used a loophole that allows multiple campuses for some charters to bypass the limit and there are now more than 140 individual charter campuses in Chicago.
“This study uses comprehensive data for the 2012-13 and 2013-14 school years to show that, after controlling for the mix of students and challenges faced by individual schools, Chicago’s charter schools underperform their traditional counterparts in most measurable ways. Reading and math pass rates, reading and math growth rates, graduation rates, and average ACT scores (in one of the two years) are lower in charters, all else equal, than in traditional neighborhood schools.
“The results for the two years also imply that the gap between charters and traditionals widened in the second year for most of the measures. The findings are strengthened by the fact that self-selection by parents and students into the charter system biases the results in favor of charter schools.”
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Here’s a relevant bit from Eve Ewing, an public school teacher currently writing her doctoral thesis on corporate ed. reform. She appeared a year ago on a radio show debating Peter Cunningham about the situation of the the hunger strikers trying to save Chicago’s Dyett High School:
https://www.wbez.org/shows/morning-shift/dyett-hunger-strike-enters-third-week/dc2e6415-dbac-4b14-8159-8c473cb83742
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( 10:49 – )
MODERATOR: “But I wonder again if this gets to the larger issue of this … this approach, this philosophy that’s not pretty entrenched, pretty ingrained not only in Chicago, but in other cities-”
EVE EWING: ” – of the choice -”
MODERATOR: “That I mentioned this whole idea of doing away with boundaries.”
EVE EWING: “Um. It is. It’s very much endemic in that, because that is an idea that works very well if you think of (choosing) a school like ‘a market’, and you think of parents like rational consumers.
“So the idea of choice assumes that people choose schools the way they choose cereal:
“You go the cereal aisle.
“You see what flavor you like.
“You see what, you know, what nutritional content is there,
” Then you make this choice based on your preferences, and based on the data available.
“And there’s A LOT of research that shows that that’s ACTUALLY NOT how this works AT ALL … in TWO directions:
“ONE: parents who are already disenfranchised from the school system — which is in Chicago, means predominantly black, and also, Latino and poor parents — are often unable to make informed choices. The district doesn’t always make it easy for them to make those decisions.
“For example, for a lot of these charter schools, you (parents) have to come to a mandatory informational session. You have to fill out supplementary and additional levels of applications to get your children into these schools, as well as a testing (minimum test score) cut-off.
“And (TWO): it’s also not rational form the point of view of white parents, because there’s a lot of research (that shows) that while parents will actually pull their children out of a majority students of color school, even if that school is doing well, even it it’s academically superior to a majority white school.
“So what we’re really seeing is that this ‘choice’ is NOT ‘informed choice’ AT ALL.”
———
There’s more about this radio show here: (about halfway thru the Comments section)
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Emanuel and Trump are similar in the way they have no regard for the “little people.” Both wield their power like an ax, and both have lots to learn about democracy. Neither understands the community value of public schools, nor its role in creating a civil society and an informed electorate. Emanuel claims there have been vast improvements in Chicago Public schools during his tenure. If the schools are so much better, why is there a need to privatize them? He cannot make the same claim about the murder rate which may have risen due to Emanuel’s community disruption and destabilization.
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As usual, Peter “CURMUDGUCATION” Greene nails it:
http://curmudgucation.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-free-market-does-not-work-for.html
———————————————-
EXCERPTS:
PETER GREENE:
“Why do so many charters close?
“There’s no mystery to it. Here’s a quote from the Philly charter CEO:
” ‘Kenderton is facing significant financial challenges due to a number of factors, including the school’s rising special education costs. As a result, Scholar Academies has concluded that, next school year, it is no longer able to manage the school in the best interest of kids.’
“Charters close because charter schools are businesses, and businesses close when it is not financially viable for them to stay open.
“The free market will never work for a national education system. Never. Never ever.
“A business operating in a free market will only stay in business as long as it is economically viable to do so. And it will never be economically viable to provide a service to every single customer in the country.
“All business models, either explicitly or implicitly, include decisions about which customers will NOT be served, which customers will be rejected, because in that model, those customers will be detrimental to the economic viability of the business. McDonald’s could decide to court people who like upscale filet mignons, but the kitchen equipment and training would cost a whole bunch of money that would not bring a corresponding increase in revenue, so they don’t do it.
“In a particularly apt example, FedEx and UPS do not deliver to the remoter rural areas. If you hire FedEx to deliver a package to your uncle at the end of Bogholler Road in Outer Ruralsville, what they will actually do is sub-contract the United States Post Office to finish the delivery for them.
“Note what the CEO said above.
“Special ed students are too expensive for their business model.
“When we see across the nation that charters largely avoid students with severe special needs, or English language learners, this is not because the operators of those charters are evil racist SWSN haters. It’s because it’s harder to come up with a viable business model that includes those high-cost students. Likewise, you find fewer charters in rural and small town areas for the same reason you find fewer McDonald’s in the desert– the business model is commonly to set up shop where you have the largest customer pool to fish in.”
————————
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A free market is merely a description of an economic practice, It is naive to believe it can solve problems. To the contrary, it encourages cheating, lying and stealing, all tactics of privatization.
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Jersey Jazzman also nails it on this topic:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-sick-consequences-of-competition-in.html
—————–
JERSEY JAZZMAN:
“Thursday, August 25, 2016
“The Sick Consequences of “Competition” in Education
“ADDING: Big props to @pippi longstocking for guiding me to this story.
“There are two ways to get you to buy my product:
Convince you my product is good.
Convince you the other guy’s product sucks.
“Sure, there are plenty of companies that base their marketing strategy around a positive message. But if my product isn’t really that good to begin with, it’s going to be hard to convince you to fork over some cash for my stuff. It’s probably easier, and more effective, to just bad-mouth my rivals.
“Now, we are currently living in the golden age of competition in public education. Milton Friedman’s dream of pubic schools having to compete for students has finally come true. Which means charter schools have to go out and make their case for enrollment, either by extolling their virtues, or by denigrating the public schools with which they compete.
“The problem is that when you’re opening a brand new charter school, it’s hard to prove to people you’re better than the local public school district — the same school system that has been at the heart of the community for generations. The same district that brings America Friday night football games and kindergarten Halloween parades and high school spring musicals and all the other traditions tightly tied to our nation’s identity.
“That pretty much leaves you only one choice:
http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2016/08/the-sick-consequences-of-competition-in.html
This is an actual mailer sent to families in the Bethlehem, PA area, recruiting for the Innovative Arts Academy Charter School. Sara K. Satullo, reporting for lehighvalleylive.com, picks up the story:
– – – – – – – – –
“A promotional mailer claiming to be from a new Catasauqua charter school paints Liberty High School students as drug users, sparking outrage among many Bethlehem residents.
“Innovative Arts Academy Charter School denies it had anything to do with sending out the promotional mailer, which lists the school’s return address.
“The postcard references the September 2015 drug arrest of a 17-year-old Liberty student and asks “Why worry about this type of student at school? Come visit Arts Academy Charter School. Now enrolling grades 6-12.”
“It shows a stock image of a teenager holding their head in their hands and reprints a Morning Call headline: ‘Teen busted by Liberty HS officials with more than $3,000 of heroin, cocaine.’
“Photos of the mailer spread quickly on Facebook and Twitter and led some to share their disgust. [emphasis mine]
– – – – – – – – –
“Drugs are a serious problem in America’s schools, no question. Of course, about five minutes on Google will probably give you all the examples you need of drug busts in affluent, ‘nice’ schools, including private schools. But they aren’t the ones competing with charters (yet).”
———
… and on it goes.
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Oh, and here’s an anecdote from my own experience (from Spring 2015):
On a rare rainy morning in Spring 2015, an announcement was made that we were to take our students inside to our classroom at 7:00 am, an hour earlier than usual (an unpaid extra hour of supervision / work, but hey, who’s complaining?😉 )
While I was sitting drinking my coffee, with the sound of rain outside the window, one of my female fifth-grade students was talking to the other students present about a charter school presentation that she and her mother had just attended the night before. They attended this meeting in pursuit of information they would use to decide which school she will attend in Fall 2015:
… the traditional public middle school that our school feeds into,
or
… the charter middle school whose presentation they attended.
This is a school that is competing with the traditional school for students.
Given my obvious interest in the issue — no, really Jack? — my ears pricked up at this.
My student then began recounting what she and her mother were told by the charter folks. The traditional middle school was to be avoided at all costs, as it is a hotbed of academic failure.. “They say that ____ is ‘a failure factory.’ ”
I then heard the same dumb-ass, word-for-word cliche I’d heard countless times before:
“If you go to ___ Middle School, you have a 1% chance of going to college. If you got to Acme Charter Inc. School, you’ll have a 99% of going to college.” (This asinine and bogus one-liner was also used almost verbatim by Holly Hunter’s character in the corporate ed. reform propaganda film WON’T BACK DOWN… these reformista idiots—including their screenwriters—all apparently read and quote from the same playbook, obviously.)
Audible groan from me, then shaking my head, rolling my eyes… knowing this to be total bullsh#%, as I had knew of countless former students of mind and others who attended our traditional public middle school and went on to complete college. I also had friends who taught at ____ Middle School, so I was angry on their behalf as well. Furthermore, this particular charter school in question had just started up, and thus had no such 99% college-attendance record about which they can make such impressive boasts, nor did the charter school world in general have any such data to justify such boasts … if that’s what the recruiter was trying to claim
However, things then got really ugly. My student then started talking about how _____ Middle School was embroiled in gang violence… shootings… stabbings, and… I’m not kidding here… rapes, etc. If you go there, she insisted, you might get shot or stabbed or even… raped.
This was a then-ten-year-old girl — her birthday was last summer — recounting this. Think about the sick mind and absent morals of a highly-paid charter recruiter that would put “rape” into the minds of ten-year-old children.
Chew on that for a while.
I then spoke up and interrupted this entertaining colloquy. “Kids, I’m sorry, but I HAVE to say something here. None of what (FEMALE STUDENT’s NAME) was told by the charter people last night is even remotely true. It’s all lies. All of it.” I continued in this vein for a bit, then had an idea. “Say, I have friends who’ve taught at that school for decades. What say, we call up one of ’em, and here what that teacher has to say? Good idea?”
I then whipped open my cell phone, dialed, and waited for an answer:
“Hi, (NAME), it’s Jack here … yeah, it’s good talk to you, too … Fine.. how are you? … Great … ” Eventually, I got around to my point in calling, ”
“Look ____, I’m trying to find out some information about your school for my students who are right her with me… First of all, how long have you taught at ___ ?”
I put the phone on speaker mode, then held up the phone to the students.
“23 years.”
“In your time at ___ Middle School, has there ever been a shooting or stabbing?”
“No. Of course not.”
“No.”
“Is your school full of gang members terrorizing your students?”
“No,” he replied, audibly laughing.
“In your 23 years at ____, has any student ever been raped, or sexually assaulted, or even sexually touched in any way?”
“Oh, no. Absolutely not. Where’d you hear this nonsense?”
“It doesn’t matter … Now, as someone’s whose tight with both your school’s teacher’s union leader and with the principal, and as someone who’s heavily involved in what goes on in that school, you would know if such a thing had ever happened. Like this could not have occurred, with you not finding out about it? Correct?”
“Sure.”
“In 23 years, have you EVER encountered a gang member who attended school there… even just one?
“No … if there was, he or she kept it a secret. Gangs are like a total non-issue here.”
“Thanks for talking to me, ____. I gotta go. I’ll talk to you later.”
The room went dead silent at the sound of my cheap old phone clapping shut.
I had a hard time concentrating that day while I taught, I was so incensed.
After school that day, I went to the Main Office at ____ Charter Middle School, and asked to speak to one of the administrators. A nice enough and very young (mid-to-late 20’s) woman then came out to talk to me across the counter. I introduced myself as a 5th grade teacher from ____ . I mentioned that that some of my students might be attending her school next year.
“Oh, that’s nice,” she replied, a little surprised and curious as to why I was there… after all, I’m an evil union member setting foot on non-union turf.
With a serious expression, I then told her about her school’s forum that one of my students attended the night before, and the disturbing things that one of her school’s marketers told this student and her mother, and that he also told all the other people attending this fourm.
She became visibly uncomfortable, and didn’t want to talk about this, “Look Mr. Covey, that’s not my area of responsibility at our school. I’m not involved in any of our school’s outreach or recruiting, so I’m sorry, but I really can’t speak to any of that.”
“Okay, well then let me just ask you: do you approve of what I just described, of what your marketers said and did last night? I mean YOU, personally, _____. Do YOU approve of that?”
“Sir, I’m not discussing this … Sorry.”
“Well, fine, then let me finish with this. I want you to pass on to your people that I’m seriously considering going to the LAUSD and to the Los Angeles Times, or to the where-the-hell-ever I can think of to report this.
“Let’s just take the ‘rape’ thing. First of all, that’s a slanderous and easily disproven lie.
“Secondly, and most importantly, what your recruiter did last night was child abuse… emotional, mental, psychological abuse of a child… in this case, a child for whose well-being I’m responsible. So I take this seriously, ____, and if you give a sh#% about children, you should, too. For someone connected with your school to put such baseless and traumatizing images in the mind of ten- and eleven-year old girls is utterly reprehensible and sick. Sweet Jesus, have you people no sense of decency? Is there NOTHING you won’t do… no sleazy tactic you won’t stoop to… no vile behavior that you folks won’t engage in to lure students to your school? Let me tell you. This better not happen again. You got it?”
She nodded, and I left the building … feeling a little better, but still unsafisfied.
I’ve told this story privately many times, but not publicly… until now, that is.
By the way, to the best of my knowledge, all my then-students went to the traditional middle school. Furthermore, I have no beef with the teachers at this charter school — they’re all my brothers and sisters, I like so say. Indeed, I’m currently heavily involved in helping them form a union at this school and the other schools in its chain. Those teachers are doing so, in the face of opposition from a highly-paid union suppression organization — the same one used by Walmart, and connected with the Broad-funded California Charter Schools Association — that is every bit as evil and as amoral as the charter school recruiter described above.
But that’s another story.
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Choice sounds so sweet to the ear of Americans who think of it as synonymous with liberty and freedom. School choice, however, really means that the school gets to choose those children it wants to keep, and the rest can get thrown back on the trash pile of public education. Dr. Ravitch and others have written for years about the sly strategies private schools use to filter out the children difficult to teach or require costly special education services. School choice is a path backward to segregation. It is bewildering why Rahm and other Democrats are as hell-bent to destroy public schools as the Republicans. We have our work cut out for us, but we have no choice!
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My last one….
Here’s another debunking of the “let’s turn schools into a free market” idea:
http://www.progressive.org/pss/10-things-know-about-charter-school-debate
It lists 10 Things. Here are five of them:
————————————
JULIAN VASQUEZ-HEILIG:
— School “choice” does not cure the inequality created by markets.
Not surprisingly, the academics neglected to mention that market-based mechanisms are the very system that created the inequities in American public schools today. Along with other public policies, including redlining, market forces created racial and economic segregation. Instead of making this situation better, school choice made this situation worse.
A group of Chilean economists mentored by Friedman, the Chicago Boys, took Friedman’s theories about education back to their home country and to push an education system with universal choice and relaxed regulation and oversight. Over the past several decades, Chile simultaneously became one of the richest countries in South America and the most unequal developed country in the world.
———-
— Why is more oversight and accountability needed for charters?
Proponents of more accountability for charter schools want parents to be able to choose from high-quality public schools. Instead, charter schools have the power to selectively choose students who will perform well. Charter supporters blame a few bad apple charters for expelling too many students.
But charter school supporters and their lobbyists consistently support laws that promote lax oversight and regulation. For example, the California Charter School Association has actively lobbied against data collection and accountability for punitive and exclusionary school discipline and teacher turnover in charter schools.
————
— The position of the NAACP and Black Lives Matter on privatization is consistent with the views of past civil rights leaders.
NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, in his essay Negroes and the Crisis of Capitalism in the U.S., extolled the virtues of collaborative social and government action. He railed against the role of businesses and capitalistic control that “usurp government” and made the “throttling of democracy and distortion of education and failure of justice widespread.”
Malcolm X characterized market-based public policy as “vulturistic” and “bloodsucking.” He advocated for collaborative social systems to solve problems.
Martin Luther King Jr. argued that we often have socialism in public policy for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor. King and Malcolm X would have recognized the current patterns we see of charters located primarily in urban and poor areas rather than wealthy suburban enclaves.
White academics pressing for market-based school choice in the name of “civil rights” ignore this history of African American civil rights leaders advocating for collaborative systems of social support and distrusting “free market” policies.
———-
Do families actually choose charter schools?
Probably the most prominent argument heard from market-based education proponents is that school choice means that families can choose their own schools. Proponents of market-based school choice have argued that charter schools were designed to have both more freedom and more accountability. Critics of privately-managed schools point out that charters are actually afforded less accountability. For example, a recent report released by the ACLU and Public Advocates found a variety of illegal exclusionary policies in more than 20 percent of charter schools they examined. The New York Times has described the reality of school choice for parents in Detroit as “no good choice.”
———-
Do charters perform better than public schools?
Charter proponents often cite studies produced by The Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) at Stanford University. CREDO studies are not peer reviewed. But charter school supporters and the media point to CREDO’s 2015 urban charter study to say that African American and Latino students have more success in charter schools. Leaving aside the integrity of the study, what charter proponents don’t mention is that the performance impact is .008 and .05 for Latinos and African Americans in charter schools, respectively. These numbers are larger than zero, but you need a magnifying glass to see them.
Contrast that outcome with policies such as pre-K and class size reduction with far more unequivocal measures of success than charter schools.
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Ya, school choice, except for the most logical choice, a quality school that a student can walk to.
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Choice STOPS with selecting a CHARTER school. Then suddenly your child has entered the most restrictive educational environment ever created.
Choice of dress? No. Uniforms
Choice of electives? No. Minimal course offerings
Choice of extra-curricular activities? No. Just longer days spent test prepping
Choice of methodologies? No. Just scripted lessons
Choice of teachers? No. just the burned and churned TFA ers
Choice of behaviors? No. Just NO excuses displine
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Sorry, but Obama’s choices for Secretary of Education have been dismal. Remember, Obama went to PRIVATE schools. He has no clue about the power of our public schools and public school teachers.
Please check out the work of George Lakoff. “MINORITY” president-elect trump uses framing. https://georgelakoff.com/videos/
The DEMs dissed Bernie. The DNC is in denial about their hand in all of this craziness. The DEMS went right and got stuck re: greed and power.
Here’s Bernie and he is indeed smart and moral. He understands framing.
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Yvonne,
I won’t repeat this. Bernie entered the Democratic primary although he was not a member of the Democratic party. He is still not a Democrat. The party voted for Clinton, who won 3 million votes more than Bernie. Clinton received nearly 3 million votes more than Trump. We now know, unless you believe Putin more than our own intelligence agencies, that agents of the Russian government manipulated our media to help Trump. He is not my president. I have participated in every election since 1956, when I cast my first vote. I have voted for Democrats and Republicans. I have never felt such antipathy to any president. His appointments of the most extremist person imaginable tells you who he is: a climate change denier; a hater of public education; a believer in conspiracy theories; an enemy of public health and welfare.
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Diane,
For what is worth, every one here seems to emphasize that Hillary Clinton won about 2.8 million votes more than Donald Trump.
Just to remind every one here “Hillary Clinton’s margin over Trump in California was 4.2 million.” If you leave out a single state, i.e., California she lost by 1.4 million votes in the other 49 states and DC.
I will be the first one to admit that all these arguments do not lead us anywhere. As per the prevailing rules she lost to some one of negligible importance. That is finally what counts.
I will never say that he is not my president, because he will be the president of the United States in few weeks.
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Raj,
Every vote counts. A vote in California should have the same weight as vote in Idaho.
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Agree. The democrats turned their backs on some of their most stalwart supporters. What did they think would happen? I’m grieving the outcome of this election, but I can see how people would not want to vote for the party of Rahm Emanuel. Lots of friends did not even realize that public school supporters had a huge problem with the Obama administration.
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“I have a hard time reading anything allegedly penned by Rahm”, now that gave me a much needed chuckle. I have “The Death and Life…” revised edition on my Christmas wish list and have reason to believe it will be under the tree. I hope it’s not just “allegedly penned” by you :-).
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GregB, you always have good reading suggestions.
I promise that no one pens anything for me.
When my name appears, I am the author.
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The reason Emanuel wrote the piece- he’s Mayor 1% and, the rich don’t want to lose a potential “$1 trillion business sector.” With bi-partisan support, billions to buy politicians and advocacy groups, Emanuel’s cheerleading is over-kill.
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Right on cue, here come the ed reform echo chamber pieces backing the DeVos agenda.
Hooray for charter and private schools! Boo, hiss for public schools!
I always wonder if these ed reform marketing campaigns are coordinated. They all sound exactly the same, down to words and phrases.
I feel bad for kids in public schools. They happened to come along at a time when public schools were unfashionable in elite circles.
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I do appreciate top Democrats letting us know they won’t be doing anything at all to defend public education from Trump and DeVos.
Now we don’t have to waste our time supporting any of them.
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Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. We don’t. Rahm is an image-building program. After dismal ‘optics’ following the Laquan McDonald shooting, he believes he has a chance to resurrect his political ambitions. Hence, the visits with Trump Inc. and now this piece. I don’t know if he believes any of this — the graduation rate at Urban Prep and other miracles of charterdom, for example, have been debunked by revealing their attrition rates, and he has had to swallow a charter cap in the language of the contract with CTU. But Illinois, and thus, Chicago, has no money to fund education properly, so Rahm is hedging his bets. By the way, the last remaining application for a new charter campus in Chicago this year has been withdrawn. Several neighborhoods had rallied to oppose previous expansion tries.
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Chicago is a train wreck. All those homicides
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Did Rahm send any of his own children to a public school or only to U of Chicago Lab School?
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Only to Lab School: small classes, experienced teachers, beautiful facilities
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Only to a limited-seat “Lab” school — yet the man gets national credit for sending his kids to a public school.
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U of Chicago Lab School is not a public school. It is a high tuition private school.
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EXACTLY.
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Chicago Concept (Gulen) charter schools headquarters raided byFBI. Oh yes, charters are superior!
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You can not profit from helping people and do it effectively and/or fairly. He was right about principals though.
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Right about principals? Guess you’ve forgotten about SUPES and Barbara Byrd Bennett: http://catalyst-chicago.org/tag/supes-academy/
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That’s fine. We can call it administrators if you’d like. Bad teachers are not as hard to get rid of as people like to think. The problem is most administrators aren’t willing to put in the work required to do so. Too many of them are people who never really had an interest in teaching or putting in the hours that an effective teacher needs to do their job.
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The irony is that over a decade ago, Steve Tozer at UIC told me that he had worked with CPS to develop a program for school improvement and principal training, but that he had to withdraw eventually, because what his team has proposed was not what came out when it went through the CPS sausage machine. Now they’re going back to partnerships with area universities. Jean Claude Brizzard, the short-term school chief, was right about one thing: it’s really hard to change a bureaucracy.
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Exhibit A in the case of Ed reform under Trump will be just a slightly more frank version of Ed Reform under dems.
Ed reform bullshit is Ed reform bullshit no matter the political party.
Some folks have been struggling with that concept since the Trump stolen….I mean election.
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Does Rahm have access to the statistics on four year college graduation rates for Chicago students?
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