Mike Klonsky writes about the public schools that were closed by former Mayor Rahm Emanuel (recently appointed as Ambassador to Japan). Emanuel ordered the closure of 50 schools in one day, something never done before by anyone. The reason given was “underutilization.”
Now, in the midst of the pandemic, Chicago public schools are overcrowded.
Klonsky writes:
Back in 2016, there was a plan to turn Dett into a center for women and girls or an artist incubator but potential buyers for the building backed out. So CPS was stuck with it. Neighborhood students were instead assigned to nearby Herbert or enrolled in charter schools.
Today students are back in school in Chicago with classrooms packed to overcapacity. Many schools are overcrowded with some kindergarten classrooms stuffed with more than 30 children, a horrifying thought in the middle of this deadly pandemic when there’s not yet a vaccine available for young children.
The lack of available classroom space forced the board to roll back its distancing requirement from six feet to three feet “wherever possible” with unmasked kids often eating together, shoulder-to-shoulder in school lunchrooms. In the high schools, we’re seeing images of students, many unvaxed, packed together in crowded hallways between classes.
I can’t even imagine being a short-handed teacher, trying to keep up with 32 or so kinders, keeping them masked and at least three feet apart, all the while trying to do some great teaching. And yet, like so many heroic doctors, nurses, and front-line medical staff, teachers are giving it their best shots. But I doubt this mode is sustainable.
CPS is operating in crisis mode in a churning sea of divisive state politics, racial segregation and inequities, all exacerbated by the resurgent Delta variant.
Schooling in a pandemic and preparation for post-pandemic schooling offers a chance for school planners and educators to take a more holistic approach and to try and undo the damage done by the mass closing of schools a decade ago.
The idea that we still have boarded-up school buildings and schools in some neighborhoods with excess classroom space, while in others, students are dangerously jammed together, is mind-boggling.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Rahm is a self important jerk who will go down in history as a bad mayor who harmed school children in that period along with his convicted BOE chair. Sent from my iPhone
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Some of these Chicago public schools closed for “under-utilization” in 2013 were then sold by the appointed CPS Public School board — the Board’s appointed members comprised entirely of non-educators and profiteers in the private sector — at suspiciously lower-than-market-rate sale prices to for-profit companies, who then rehabbed them, flipped them and changed them into luxury, high-rent apartments and condos.
These were naturally done in neighborhoods target for gentrification a decade earlier. The closing of the schools pushed low income minority parents into moving out, to be replaced by mostly white upscale residens, some of whom now reside in actual school buildings once attended by low-income, minority students, and –– in an earlier era –– by Hollywood’s Indiana Jones, Harrison Ford.
Here are a few such stories:
https://chicagoreader.com/columns-opinion/a-shuttered-chicago-public-school-promoted-as-best-in-the-class-upscale-apartments-is-a-big-fail/
from the link just ABOVE:
(the “best in the class” marketing slogan is particularly nauseating)
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“The Uptown controversy has to do with a sign posted outside 4525 N. Kenmore, the building that was formerly Graeme Stewart School. Chicago Public Schools closed the school and sold it to a private developer who’s turning it into the Stewart School Lofts, which are being marketed shamelessly on a placard over the school’s abandoned playground as ‘best in the class’ rentals.
“The sign ignited a Twitter debate between Erika Wozniak, a CPS fourth-grade teacher, and 46th Ward alderman James Cappleman, who helped foster the deal that turned a school into an upscale apartment complex.
“Built in 1905, Stewart was for years a thriving neighborhood grammar school with more than 1,000 students—including, at one point, Harrison Ford. In time, however, enrollment dropped, as many of the surrounding families moved out of Uptown, in large part because of higher rents brought on by gentrification.
” … ”
“Not everyone sees it that way, especially Wozniak, who lives in Uptown.
“‘To me, this is Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago,’ she says. ‘We’re closing schools and turning them into private projects and disinvesting in neighborhood kids.’
“What really galled her was that damn sign.
” ‘I find that insulting to all the kids who went to Stewart and all the people who worked there,’ Wozniak says.
“More maddening still is that Emanuel earmarked $16.1 million in TIF dollars to subsidize the development of a high-rise apartment complex at Clarendon and Montrose—not far from Stewart.
“So once again there’s no money for our dead-broke schools, but millions for upscale housing.
“Last week Wozniak vented on Twitter, posting a picture of the sign with the following caption:
” ‘This is what is happening to Stewart School, which was closed in 2013. I’m disgusted.’ ”
#SchoolsNotStadiums pic.twitter.com/ZiX7nXWuir
— Erika Wozniak (@ErikaWozniak) June 23, 2017
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Here’s some more of these stories
https://chicagoreader.com/news-politics/cps-closed-stewart-elementary-school-in-2013-now-its-a-luxury-apartment-building/
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“The idea that we still have boarded-up school buildings and schools in some neighborhoods with excess classroom space, while in others, students are dangerously jammed together, is mind-boggling.” Yes, the racism behind corporate school reform is mind-boggling. They see people as backpacks full of cash. They see young people as bags of money. Twisted.
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Isn’t closing schools and firing people what the business round table means when they talk about the flexibility & agility?
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It’s how you save a business (your own, if you are Mitt Romney) Kaching!
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HostileTakeoversRus
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/greed-and-debt-the-true-story-of-mitt-romney-and-bain-capital-183291/
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Flexible and segregationist are becoming synonyms. The drooling dollar sign-eyed demand unregulated flexibility to propagate inequality. Turning a blind eye on every citizen’s responsibility to pay for fixed costs, from social security to healthcare to public schools, people want flexible spending, ahem, the flexibility to not spend.
In two weeks, the billionaire bought board of Los Angeles Unified will deny public input and vote for Student Centered Funding, making the funding of schools agile — unstable — and enable traveling the down same disastrously failed road taken by Chicago Public Schools under Rahm Emmanuel. Ethics and foresight both went out the window a long time ago.
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Flequal: Flexible but Equal
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Up til fairly recently, Emanuel has benefited from the fact that he shared the name with the god of millions of people here in the US.
But if the people of Chicago are any indication , a lot of people are now no longer confusing the two.
And the Japanese are mostly Buddhist or Confucianist (as opposed the Confusion it’s) so probably don’t even know who Emanuel is, but are about to find out!
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Hiroshima was the first.
Nagasaki was the second .
And Emanuel is the third.
Japan survived the first two, but then again, they were not Rahmonuclear.
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“Emanuel ordered the closure of 50 schools in one day, something never done before by anyone. The reason given was “underutilization.”
I think what Rahm meant was that because the schools slated for closing were in predominantly African American neighborhoods, they were “underutilized by whites”
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Underwhitelized
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Underwhitelization
The schools are underutilized
By people who are white
You might say “underwhitelized”
It really isn’t right
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Michael Bloomberg and the billionaires said to Rahm Emmanuel, “We want working people under-your-boot-tilized.”
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Those who are underfeudalized and underlootalized must be underbootalized.
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Those who are underfeudalized, underlootalized, underbrutalized and underGoogleysed, must be underbootalized.
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UnderGoogleyesed: undersurveilled by Google
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Usage : “You are obviously underGoogleyesed. I can’t even find your house on Google Street view!”
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Not to worry, surveillancers of the world. Since, starting Wednesday, I will have to use a new, online, movement tracking camera in my classroom because of LA’s Continuity of Learning mandate, businesses will surely soon be able to overgooglize my students and me very soon. Microsoft and Google must be wetting their pants.
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Holy cow! I’m glad we’re having this conversation. I just realized the requirement to livestream audio and video of my students in class without their parents’ written consent is against the law. I am going to notify Leonie and Class Size Matters, UTLA, and my site administrator. My students and I have rights.
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Against the law?
When did that ever matter?
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Is there a California law against cameras in classrooms without consent?
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Yes. Public schools cannot publish video of students at school without their parents’ permission. It’s also illegal for news choppers to film students on campus. Zooming and filming in a classroom without consent forms is a liability. It’s one thing to voluntarily turn on your camera in Zoom at home; it’s something else to have your teacher turn on a camera in the classroom without your consent.
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Wait, I take that back. I couldn’t find a California law. It is apparently a district policy the district is possibly violating. I only found the district bulletin I always have to use when doing any online publishing. https://achieve.lausd.net/cms/lib/CA01000043/Centricity/domain/110/pdfs/2021%20Media%20Waiver%20English.pdf
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Schools “under utilized by whites” is often the recipe for closing schools. According to the red states there is no structural racism in this country. They just want to raise the flag and ignore our disparities.
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“Underutilized By Whites”
Welcome to the CPS Property and Lease Information site. CPS has created this site to provide specific property-related information to the public. This Property List page allows you to view all property used by CPS, whether it is CPS-owned, leased or subject to an intergovernmental agreement with another City agency. The Filter search to the right allows you to search for specific property by keyword, address or ownership. For those fields in which “N/A” is indicated, no information is available. For more information on “CPS Owned” property, please click here.
https://propertyleases.cps.edu/
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One time, a white IT guy told me the school in Watts where I used to teach shouldn’t get laptops, but the school near Encino we were standing in should instead get the laptops, he said because Black people would underutilize the technology. Ugh. A few weeks later, I saw him on PBS with Melina Gates arguing for standards-based “reform”.
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And then a decade later, she divorced him.
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that decades-long PBS stance: the need for school reform funded by people like the Gateses is simply not challengable
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PBS is brought to you by generous grants from the Gateses.
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And I have a friend who is afraid to send their children to CPS schools after seeing the lines of people crammed in front of their school. Social distancing? Hah! All of a sudden 3 feet is enough and the news shows groups shoulder to shoulder in classrooms and the overcrowded halls in high schools. But officials are all so happy that the kids are back in school. Thy all are closely watching their dashboards, reliant on reports by nonexistent and/or overworked school nurses, to identify spikes in cases. How about human interest stories on every family impacted by Covid? Who lost wages because of caring for quarantined or sick children? Who lost a spouse or grandparent, uncle or aunt possibly exposed by an asymptomatic child? Who has been trapped in their home for the last eighteen months because they are immune compromised? By the way, apparently living with someone who has health issues is not an accepted reason for being eligible for remote schooling in Chicago. Sorry abuela!
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And now we have a new Covid variant called “mu” that may be more dangerous than all the rest combined.
“The World Health Organization is monitoring a new coronavirus variant called “mu.”
“It has mutations that have the potential to evade immunity provided by a previous Covid-19 infection or vaccination, the WHO said.
“The new variant was first identified in Colombia but has since been confirmed in at least 39 countries, according to the agency.”
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/01/who-says-it-is-monitoring-a-new-covid-variant-called-mu.html
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Has Mayor Lightfoot tried to reopen any of these schools?
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The lack of available classroom space forced the board to roll back its distancing requirement from six feet to three feet “wherever possible” with unmasked kids often eating together, shoulder-to-shoulder in school lunchrooms. In the high schools, we’re seeing images of students, many unvaxed, packed together in crowded hallways between classes.
I have to differ with Mike here. Schools in Boston, Baltimore, Philly and New York have also dropped the distancing requirement to 3 feet. Perhaps it’s overcrowding in these other districts as well, but that’s now the policy being promulgated across the country.
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One of the reasons for the huge outbreak in Southern states is that many of the schools are doing little to mitigate Covid. The only change they are making is allowing students to wear a mask, but there is no mandate.
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LeftCoastTeacher: What is the google movement camera all about? And what is the purpose?
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The arrogance of the political class in America is no more evident than in the crisis that is the public schools. Emmanuel represents a bi-partisan hubris that thinks their privilege empowers them to lord over an institution they know little about. Much of the partisan divide we face today is the result of an educated class that lacks humility and believes their superiority allows them to promote policies that ignore circumstances on the ground. Insistence on school closures, reduced curricula, privatization, and punitive measures as incentives for improvement has now opened the door for those on the right who would use culture wars to deny access to the institution they have been trying to end for decades. Too few political leaders in America today focus on serving community and the current deterioration of confidence in our public schools is exhibit A in our decline.
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