Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago will go down in American history as the mayor who closed 50 public schools one day.
It was a brutal act. It showed his contempt for public education. While he closed public schools, he continued to open privately managed charter schools. Perhaps he hopes one day he hopes a charter school will be named for him, as one is named for billionaire Governor Bruce Rainer and billionaire Penny Pritzker.
But what about the children? Reformers like Emanuel think that closing schools is great for students. He thinks they thrive on disruption. They don’t.
A new study concludes that the children whose schools were closed suffered academic losses. Duh.
Here is the report in The Chicago Reporter.
Mike Klonsky writes about the report and the school closing disaster here.
Mike writes:
The study concludes:
“Closing schools — even poorly performing ones — does not improve the outcome of displaced children, on average. Closing under-enrolled schools may seem like a viable solution to policymakers who seek to address fiscal deficits and declining enrollment, but our findings shows that closing schools caused large disruptions without clear benefits for students.”
CTU’s Jesse Sharkey, said the report “validates” that the closures “were marred by chaos, a desperate lack of resources, lost libraries and labs, grief, trauma, damaging disruption, and a profound disrespect for the needs of low-income black students and the educators who teach them.”
Important to note… It wasn’t just Chicago. Mass school closings were a requirement of then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan’s Race to The Top policy. Unless school districts closed schools, they were threatened with loss of millions of dollars from the D.O.E. An epidemic of closings and teacher firings, mainly in urban districts, followed in the wake of RTTT.
Who thought it would be good for the kids in the closing schools? Arne Duncan started it. He made school closings a feature of Race to the Top. He (and his sidekick Peter Cunningham, now editor of billionaire-funded Education Post) defended it as a “remedy” for low-scoring schools. Duncan’s reform program in Chicago was called Renaissance 2010, built on the idea of closing 100 schools and replacing them with charters. Of course it didn’t work. Kids need stability not disruption.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I saw the critter Emanuel on PBS telling kids how he will see to tit that they learn. hahahahahaha
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Oh they learned a lot. They learned exactly what their place in Emanuel’s Chicago is.
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There has been an enormous de tease in Chicago’s black population recently. Maybe that’s the point.
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yes, lesson well taught
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When we built a new school here and re-jiggered all the other schools to fit it took 4 years and 3 amended plans and 2 community-wide votes. Contentious meetings. Strong feelings. Letters to the editor. Competing yard signs.
Which was a pain and definitely harder than just coming in with a bulldozer and rolling over the entire community – but no one even considered that as an option. Because it’s not optional, skipping the “public” part of public schools. It’s a necessary part of the process. REALLY inefficient. But has to be done.
It works better too 🙂
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Chiara: if you would permit me to riff off of your comments a little…
The public process you describe involves relatively slight inefficiencies in order to most efficiently—whatever the circumstances, favorable or unfavorable—ensure as much as possible genuine teaching and learning over the long run.
The default setting for the corporate education reform crowd is to do things fast, dirty and shallow without regard for sustainability. This is due in part to their dislike of any process that would give even the appearance of holding them accountable for fulfilling the promises they make.
A typical example is John Deasy, former LAUSD supt. Even his most ardent cheerleaders—the LATIMES among the most prominent and shameless—had to finally admit he engineered catastrophes.
Of course, once he was stuck with the iPad and MISIS fiascos none of his former ferociously supportive boosters like the LATIMES admitted even the smallest responsibility for helping him fail colossally. No, just throw him under the bus and on to the next rheephorm savior.
Thoughtlessness would describe the entire rheephorm project except that that implies there is any thought at all in their schemes and scams.
Except, of course, for the thought taken to ensure that one bright shining golden jewel of the “new civil rights movement of our time”: $tudent $ucce$$.
Gotta love them Benjamins…
😎
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I think it improved the final result. So it’s not just “democratic governance” or “open meetings” – those phrases- it has substantive worth.
We gave away “memorial bricks” when they knocked down the school that was built in 1910. People were really attached to it. It’s theirs. Belongs to them. You need their permission to take it.
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DeVos was before Congress yesterday. It’s become the norm the last 20 years but she does not have one idea or proposal to improve any public school, anywhere in the country. It’s all rear-guard. She’ll cut a greater or lesser amount. She’ll enforce or not enforce current law. They’re relitigating public school programs that came about in the 1960’s and 1970’s. That’s ALL you get- you get any benefits that past politicians put in place decades ago. Maybe. If you can hang onto them. It’s ALL subtraction. All loss. A greater or lesser loss! But still a loss.
The absolute best ed reformers can offer public schools is that they promise not to harm them. Half the time they don’t even meet that rock-bottom goal.
We can do better than that. We should hire new people.
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Emanuel launched his wrecking ball without any consideration to the community and the displaced families and children. Shortly after Emanuel closed fifty schools the murder rate in the city spiked as rival gangs were forced to cross each other’s turf. Emanuel was more interested in helping developers redevelop the formerly poor areas than help the poor displaced families. In typical “reformer” fashion, he was determined to see his vision get implemented despite protests and organized resistance.
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“Emanuel launched his wrecking ball without any consideration to the community and the displaced families and children.”
Au contraire. That’s exactly what he was considering. Counting on, in fact.
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Absolutely, retired. And the killing season commences for 2018:
beautiful weather + outdoor activities= great opportunities to be out on the streets to shoot & kill. Watch the murder rate increase (has started already).
And WHAT are YOU going to do about THAT, Paul Vallas, candidate for mayor?!
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I start my statements always with Oh Please because we live in a country that could care less about closing the schools with the approval of everyone, cant forget Oprah who stated when she opened her school in South Africa that the kids in Chicago didn’t want an education. Like education reform leaders she hired a white person who had strange sexual issues and little education background if at all. Besides listening to white people who were private education reformers not public school advocates . She put these girls at risk. No infrastructure for her South Africa private school for girls cause she is Oprah talk show host no need to educate yourself. She followed Governor Christie and Mark Zuckenberg for tv ratings another ruse. One million dollars for the City of Newark Public Schools, that money went to Bloombergs New York white consultants not a dime went to the kids who are now in charters. So these reformers are nothing but accountants looking at how they can make a fast dollar off the backs of poor children. The Mayor of Chicago is looking for his next political landing not about the minorities in that city.It is never about the children of America its about political corruption and each term the names change but it is the same old agenda we cant do better than that because we are to corrupt..
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I am firmly convinced that students are the last thing “they” care about. Perhaps they aren’t concerned about them at all.
Sad. The students are the future of our world.
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“even poorly performing ones”
I protest phrases like that one up there. Most if not all schools are NOT poorly performing ones … except for corporate charter schools and private sector, for profit online K-12 education.
It’s the poverty, not the schools or the teachers.
Growing up in poverty is a blight on children in every country on the planet.
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