Michelle Gunderson, veteran teacher in Chicago, explains here what Mayor Rahm Emanuel is doing to the city’s schools and the damage he is inflicting on communities of color:
On December 1, the Board of Education of the Chicago Public Schools announced its plan to shutter Harper, Hope, Robeson, and Team Englewood High Schools. All of these high schools are located in the predominantly African American Englewood neighborhood. With their planned closing there will be no neighborhood open enrollment public high schools left in this community of 30,000 people.
Schools are the cornerstones of neighborhoods, the place where a community comes together and relationships are built. Once a neighborhood school is closed it is like giving the community a black eye. The message is clear – this part of the city is not deserving of a public school and its children can be educated elsewhere.
You will hear about a beautiful, new high school planned for Englewood. While this sounds good, it does nothing for the current students of these Englewood high schools. NONE of the current high school students at Harper, Hope, Robeson, and Team Englewood will be allowed to attend. The school will start with a freshman class in 2019 and build a new class each year.
In the meantime, current students are set adrift and told to search out another school in an adjoining neighborhood. This brings up both academic questions and serious safety issues for these youth. In essence, Englewood students will be shipped to other schools, and the end of their high school careers sacrificed for a “fresh start” for the new school.
There is only one word for pushing African American children outside of their community in order to make room for a future student population – apartheid.
If CPS sincerely cares for the children of Englewood the current high schools would stay open until the new one was built and there would be a plan for integrating their students into the new school. To ‘start clean’ with only freshmen is to deny the value and humanity of the current youth in this neighborhood.
The narrative around the school closings is that the schools are under-enrolled and that they are not meeting the needs of the students. Janice Jackson, chief education officer of Chicago Public Schools said, “When I look at Englewood, at the experience some kids are getting, I can’t make the case they’re getting a good high school experience.” On this, she is right. The high schools in Englewood have been starved of the resources needed for high quality school programming for years. They have been intentionally run into the ground so that their closings would be inevitable.
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has been fighting for fair funding of schools for many years. The union’s underlying analysis is that the Chicago Public Schools purposefully defunded schools, claimed them as failures, and then proceeded to close them. The city is in fact “broke on purpose” so that these neighborhoods can be taken over and gentrified. What are the values of our society when children’s lives are sacrificed to the real estate ‘gods of gentrification’?
There will be readers who ask, why would a city government plan the demise of the high schools in an entire section of town? The answer is clear – real estate. Englewood sits in prime territory just south of Chicago’s Loop and with ready access to expressways and transportation. This is a real estate grab.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Englewood isn’t exactly “just south” of the Loop – it’s about six miles south. But it is immediately adjacent to the University of Chicago and it does have good access to the Dan Ryan expressway.
LikeLike
Gentrification is class warfare, pure and simple.
LikeLike
It is also about developers and cities colluding to increase the value of well positioned real estate. The developers make a tremendous profit and the cities gain much higher valued tax ratables. That is why they often work together by closing schools or sometimes using eminent domain laws which are not as “simple” a dispersal of the poor as they sometimes have to fight in court over the right to seize property.
LikeLike
I named the disease; you described some specific symptoms.
LikeLike
“There will be readers who ask, why would a city government plan the demise of the high schools in an entire section of town? The answer is clear – real estate.”
Not sure I follow. The city is building a new high school in the same neighborhood. I’d need a little more detail about what the city plans to do with the buildings/land that these four smaller schools are currently occupying before it would be “clear” to me that this is a simple real estate play.
LikeLike
Believe it, FLERP!–Michelle’s analysis of the situation is based in what has been done in the past. In Uptown, a north side area being gentrified, w/valuable real estate near the lake, a beautiful school was closed (as one of the Big 50 Massacre) & developers are renovating into apartments some, supposedly, set aside as “affordable,” but others for luxury. The company had a big sign on the property (forget the name given to the building) w/the tag “First in its Class.”
Some neighborhood residents (who presumably had had children attending the school) didn’t like the “humor,” & the sign was taken down.
Of course, also, some buildings will become charters, & will probably be sold at a ridiculously low price to the buyer(s). After all the hoopla of passing the “wonderful” school equal funding bill (which is using money from programs kiboshed {such as the taking of money that had been budgeted solely for special education}, as, in ILL-Annoy, there is NO new revenue), much of CPS’ share of the money is going to charter schools & consultants.
Having said that, however, “it’s always kids first.”
Yeah…first to be shoved out of their schools & their neighborhoods.
LikeLike
It does sound to me that this analysis is based entirely on a sense of things that have happened in the past, which is why I say it isn’t “clear” to me that this is a real estate grab.
If CPS delayed the closing of these schools until 2019, and then populated the new school with all of the students who would otherwise be going to the four to-be-shuttered schools, this might sound like a sensible plan on its face. For the sake of those students, I hope CPS can be persuaded to delay these closings by one year and to allow rising 10th through 12th graders to attend the new school.
LikeLike
“It does sound to me that this analysis is based entirely on a sense of things that have happened in the past, which is why I say it isn’t “clear” to me that this is a real estate grab.”
Unlike with the stock market, with human behavior, past performance is the best predictor of future behavior. “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”
“If CPS delayed the closing of these schools until 2019, and then populated the new school with all of the students who would otherwise be going to the four to-be-shuttered schools, this might sound like a sensible plan on its face.”
Well, yes, it would. And if that’s what they were doing, there would be a lot less talk about gentrification. But why exactly do you think they’re doing it the way they’re doing it? What other explanation is logical?
LikeLike
I’d have to leave that question to the defenders of the existing plan and/or others much more familiar with it. Flipping the question, if the school closings are nothing more than a real estate and gentrification play, why build a new high school at all? Why not just close the schools and immediately and permanently make it so there is “no neighborhood open enrollment public high schools left in this community of 30,000 people”? The new high school won’t be of any interest to the gentrifiers — history tells us that they tend to have no children or very young children. [White] gentrifiers with middle- and high-school aged children probably don’t want to send them to a school with a 9th grade class that’s fed by the same local middle schools that serve longtime residents, do they?
But this is far outside my ken. I don’t know the neighborhood or even Chicago generally. Just saying the real estate play isn’t clear to me based on this article or the few others I googled up.
LikeLike
FLERP, if there is no high school in the neighborhood for the three or so years until the new one is built, that helps to destroy the existing neighborhood and advance the process of gentrification.
LikeLike
“…why build a new high school at all?”
So the incoming rich white kids have a place to go.
LikeLike
Again, I don’t know the area, but I would love to take the other side of any bet that any “rich white kids” will be in the freshman class when the new high school opens in 2019.
LikeLike
Flerp, You would lose the bet. First the school won’t be built and open by 2019. They don’t even have blue prints drawn or location decided. But they will close those HS in June, 2018.
Make them move, and once they are gone, then start to build. And gee it is so close to the U of C that they might grab the land for their own.
It was no secret that when those 50 schools were closed that the plan was to gentrify the neighborhoods.
LikeLike
I believe I’d win. Let’s set it up. Also, if they don’t even have a location set, I’d also bet that school won’t be open by September 2019.
LikeLike
“Explanations exist; they have existed for all time; there is always a well-known solution to every human problem — neat, plausible, and wrong.”
-H.L. Mencken, 1880-1956
LikeLike
Is part of Rahm’s money in real estate?
Rahm already has miliona of dolllars.
Bet he wanrs to be a billionaure.
LikeLike
FLERP: TROLL
LikeLike