I reported earlier today that Mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to require all students to have specific plans or they won’t be allowed to graduate.
Here is Peter Greene’s take on the same proposal.
That’s it– Choose college, trade school, internship, or military, or else Rahm will hold your diploma hostage.
Janice Jackson, CEO of Chicago Public Schools, pointed out that any student who graduates from CPS is automatically accepted into the City College community college program. So I suppose we could see this not as a draconian, one-size-fits-all intrusion on the lives of young adults and instead see it as a really, really aggressive recruiting program for the City Colleges.
Or maybe just an aggressive recruiting program for Chicagoland charter schools.
My mind is still reeling from trying to compile the full list of life paths that Rahm Emanuel has now declared Not Good Enough.
Steady job that’s not a trade? Working musician? Stay-at-home mom? Person who just needs to spend a year or two working at a crappy minimum wage job while they figure out what they want to do next? Manage the family business? All of that and more have passed through my classroom and gone on to successful, productive, happy lives. Are you telling me we shouldn’t have given them a diploma because they didn’t do what we wanted them to after graduation?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
No problem. Graduating seniors fill out an application to go to the local community college, graduate from high school and before the end of the summer break, drop out of college or just don’t bother to show up.
What is Rahm-the-Booger-Bomb going to do – repossess high school degrees or create an authoritarian police force that spies on recently graduated seniors to make sure they all follow through and if they don’t arrest them and send them off to prision for exercising their freedom to make choices even if the choice is to do nothing?
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You beat me to it, Lloyd.
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:o)
The early bird gets the worm.
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You might think Rahmbo has enough problems in Chicago with chaotic school governance, infamous police community relations and all the rest. This is an absurd demand.
Incredible numbers of eventual successful students go off to post secondary without locked down plans.
What kind of brain far is this?
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“We live in a period of time where you earn what you learn,” Emanuel said. False. Education only loosely correlates with earnings. Civic, democratic responsibility is also an important component of education.
“The school system of K through 12 is not applicable to the world and the economy and the world that our high school students are graduating to.” False. K-12 is not broken or outdated. Accessibility of higher education is still a financial issue, and will continue to be since we didn’t even elect Bernie Sanders to try to provide tuition.
“So we’re moving to a pre-K to college model.” False. Imagine yourself as a high schooler who doesn’t want to pay for college or join the military. You tell Rahm you’re planning to go to college, receive your high school diploma, and then you apply for or keep a job. That was easy! My high school principal tried this, requiring plans for college in order to graduate, back in the ’90s. It made him able to claim that 100% of his graduates went to college, so he could get promoted to middle management. The thing about the claim, though, it just wasn’t true.
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The best laid plans often get waylaid.
And Rahm’s plan isn’t even close to “best”.
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May be the only time I’ve disagreed with Peter! In this case, so much of this is already in the works in most schools, it’s not a big leap to require some definitive plan of action for the time after high school. In fact, as a special ed teacher, I’m mandated to be sure my students develop a plan and implement it to choose a career path. What it looks like for each student varies, of course (it’s an IEP, for heaven’s sake), but I think knowing the work I ask them to do for “transition planning” is also required of other students would improve buy-in to what is often viewed as busy work that “regular” kids don’t have to do.
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Do you withhold diplomas?
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No they don’t. Transition planning is required by law for special education students. It is not a condition for graduation. In fact, drakestraw’s high school probably does a better job of preparing special ed kids for after graduation than a lot of more affluent districts that really don’t know what to do with kids who will not be heading off to four year colleges.
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Um, maybe if you actually read what Greene wrote, you wouldn’t disagree so much. Do you disagree with this: “Is it valuable and worthwhile for students to be nudged and encouraged to think about life after high school? Absolutely. Should we hold their diploma’s hostage unless they comply with our demands for only approved choices in their future– not only comply with our demands, but do so on our timetable and not theirs?”?
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Rahm-BOO is another “sick” person. He’s a lot like trump. I’ve followed his shenanigans and they are NOT pretty. Remember the police cover-up? And on and on it goes. He has a lot to hide. Rahm-BOO needs duct tape over his mouth. He’s “paying someone or somebodies off” with his proclamation.
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Totally ridiculous! Some kids at 17 or 18 still have no clue to what they want to do. Some do not have the means to do what they would really love to do. Rahm needs to get real. Meet with the real kids. The ones struggling and who can’t even get things they would love to do. Let’s get real!
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It’s good sometimes to take a year’s work sabbatical before attending the university as well.
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“Some kids at 17 or 18 still have no clue to what they want to do.”
Hell, I still don’t at 62!
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Nice! The American Dream doesn’t run on rails. Take the steering wheel! It’s yours, Duane.
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If I know you, I rest assured you’ll be going off road.
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Heading to the river as soon as I get the coolers packed. Definitely off grid, sloooowww down on a couple of good canoe floats. Hang out with the critters. They don’t seem to mind other than the crows who bitch at everything (still one of my favorite birds, though). Thinking about a night float on Tues as it is a full moon. Have to see if the weather cooperates.
I don’t do motorized off road, prefer a simple sit on the bank of the river and watch everything going on. It’s amazing how much is going on in a given piece of land/river at any time.
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It’s the ideal ed reform idea. He’s not responsible for it, schools are, so he can’t fail and it requires no work or sacrifice or investment from anybody except people who are employed in public schools.
This is classic ed reform “high expectations” theory, right? All you have to do is “set the bar higher” and your job as a politician is done.
If it fails there will be 15 op-ed pieces on how a bunch of unidentified people or entities failed because they didn’t try hard enough, but Rahm Emanuel will be lauded for having such high standards.
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If you know someone who is entering a community college tell them this:
“New studies on incoming community college students found that as many as one-quarter of all students entering schools may be assigned to remedial courses they don’t really need. The studies, conducted by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, discovered that although students are assigned to these remedial courses based on placement test scores, many would have been able to earn a “B” or better heading directly into college courses. The findings are significant because the large majority of students who take remedial course in community college do not end up finishing their program and earning their degree.”
Apparently a lot of non- selective colleges use a garbage standardized test to place in remedial courses. It’s ALL they use. It’s probably cheaper to hire a bunch of part-timers to monitor testing than pay someone who knows what they’re doing to go thru a transcript or interview students.
I went to community college 25 years ago and I was interviewed and they reviewed my high school transcript in front of me, during the interview. I didn’t take any placement testing of any kind. I didn’t have to take remedial courses, which is good, because if I had been improperly placed in remedial courses I probably wouldn’t have persisted in college.
Tell lower income kids to question their placement in remedial courses if they are placed there based on a cheap, garbage placement test. I bet if they make some noise they can get a real review by a human being- someone who will look at their high school grades, ask them questions about work outside of school, etc.
Tell them to appeal the decision of the test and demand a review by a human being 🙂
https://www.communitycollegereview.com/blog/too-many-students-placed-in-remedial-courses-studies-say-yes
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This is draconian and patently idiotic. When did Rahm Emanuel become guidance counselor to the entire city of Chicago?
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It happened after he shut down the post secondary department in CPS and cut many of the counselors. Remaining counselors now do the job of 3 or 4 people.
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With Democrats like this, who needs Republicans? The man is just a vandal.
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According to a comment posted after yours, Rahm laid off many guidance counselors. The kids are on their own.
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Yeah, I saw that Diane. To be honest, I’n afraid our school system here in New York may be heading in the same direction. One wrong mayor and….
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That’s one reason why mayoral control is a terrible idea, whether or not you like the mayor.
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I definitely agree, and I am not in any way persuaded that mayoral control under Bill DeBlasio has been better than mayoral control under Michael Bloomberg. I can’t speak for other teachers, but I think Carmen Farina has been a real disappointment. If anything, things have become much worse in the school (in Lower Manhattan) in which I serve under this administration.
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“Democrats have always been the party that embraces education as an investment and a pathway out of poverty – @arneduncan on RI & Raimondo”
This is not true. Kids in public schools in the vast majority of states took budget cut hits during Obama’s two terms.
Duncan spent 7 years conducting “public education sucks!’ tours. He never missed an opportunity hit public schools when doing so advanced his preferred sector, which is charters.
Ed reform is fabulous for “public education’ only if you exclude the 90% of students who don’t attend charter or private schools. This is probably why those parents and students actually ARE excluded from all ed reform debates or discussions.
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Have any other ed reform leaders/lobbyists spoken out against Trump’s budget cuts-budget cuts that are targeted specifically at public schools?
There are thousands of paid ed reform lobbyists. If they’re “advocates for public education” shouldn’t they occasionally work on behalf of kids in public schools?
I’m afraid our schools are getting thrown under the “choice” bus once again.
Can we hire an advocate? Vouchers have advocates and so do charters. Are public schools already slated to take the hit for the voucher plan? How is that fair to children in those schools? They happen to attend the (currently) unfashionable schools so they’re just out of luck?
What if public schools become fashionable again in DC circles? There won’t be any left for Democrats to pander and lie to if this keeps up.
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Another insightful and pragmatic post by Peter Greene!
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Arizona’s voucher program mostly benefits higher income people:
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona-education/2017/03/30/arizona-taxpayer-funded-vouchers-benefiting-students-more-affluent-areas/99707518/
It amazes me that ed reform politicians (and affliated lobbyists) get away with this.
They SPECIFICALLY sell vouchers to the public as benefiting lower income students then they quietly and deliberately craft them to benefit higher income people.
It makes sense politically- it’s much easier to retain a government subsidy that mostly goes to middle class or higher- if they pull this subsidy now higher income people will scream bloody murder and they’ll be listened to, but BOY is it deceptive!
This happens in state after state. They sell vouchers as a remedy for poor students and then expand them to include higher income. One would think at some point someone would call them on it, but no one does.
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Exercising their freedom to make choices…
The ability to decide for ourselves where to go and what to say and do(create)-
autonomy…
Independence is/was the right of all peoples, in the name of self-determination…
It’s past time to go H.D. Thoreau on their ass…
(From the Righteousness and Dignity @cpunch)
“I do not wish to be regarded as a member of any incorporated society which I have not joined.”
C. White: ”I will live as if your world has ended, as indeed it deserves to end.
I will live as if my gesture of refusing your world has destroyed it.”
“A level of trust in our own self worth. A moral position taken not in submission to a religious rule or shared understanding, (or a credential),
but in concert with our own instinctual being.”
“Each of us has this option, as long as we can find in ourselves the place of righteous refusal in the manner of Thoreau. We can participate in the building of the new world to replace this failed one. Conscientious disobedience coming from one’s self-acknowledged dignity as a human being, is a very different act than that of partisan fighting over the Russians influencing our politics, absorbing as that is, or identity politics that depends for its energy on the victim condition of the individual or group.”
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This is an example of the business model applied to education:
We demand a return on our investment. Otherwise we should stop investing in that particular “product”.
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