The Chicago Teachers Union reports on some gains. Most notable is that individual school districts will be able to limit charter school expansion into their districts, a battle now being fought in California. The issue is whether the wishes of charter entrepreneurs should outweigh democratic local control of schools. Illinois says no.
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This is a school board unlike anything Chicago (or other big cities) has seen.
It consists of experienced people with a history of involvement in the lives of children and schools.
No hedge fund managers (wrong: there is one, but he was a teacher first)*! No CEOs of major corporations! No privatization devotees!
How remarkable!
*Revuluri is currently the Managing Director of Strategic Development at PEAK6 Capital Management, which leverages technology to manage risk in the options market.
Jan Resseger does not title her post “The Futility of School Closings.” She calls it “Considering School Closures as Philadelphia’s Empty Germantown High School Faces Sheriff’s Sale.” I inserted “futility,” because that is what I see as I read the books and studies she cites.
I am persuaded by books like Eve Ewing’s Ghosts in the Schoolyard (Chicago) and by Shani Robinson’s None of the Above (Atlanta) that the primary purpose of school closings is to gentrify low-income neighborhoods, push out poor black people, and open charters to lure white middle-class families. Chicago lost 200,000 black people from 2000 to 2016. Coincidence?
Read Jan’s great post and see what you think.
When the Waltons and Gates and Bloomberg read this, they will be very disappointed. Chagrined. The point of charters is to bust unions, they thought.
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The militant Chicago Teachers Union issued a statement following the election of Lori Lightfoot, who was not its first choice. The CTU celebrates the end of the nightmare rule of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Governor Bruce Rauner. And it commemorates the historic leadership of its President Emerita Karen Lewis, who inaugurated a historic awakening of teacher militancy with the Chicago teachers’ strike of 2012, which laid the seedsfor the walkoutsof the past year.
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I have recently been in touch with residents of Arkansas who are fighting the Waltons effort to destroy public schools in poor black communities. It is an uphill battle, to be sure, and they need our help.
Minister Anika Whitfield has been working with parents, teachers, and fellow clergy to forge grassroots opposition to resist the onslaught of the Wal-Mart empire.
Pastors are forming their own Pastors for Arkansas Children to defend the principle of public education.
Jitu Brown of the Journey for Justice Alliance will soon be in Little Rock to offer strategic advice. Jitu and J4J led the successful Dyett hunger strike, which blocked theclosing of the last open admission high school in Chicago’s historic Bronzeville neighborhood. As a result of a 34-day hunger strike, Mayor Rahm Emanuel reversed his decision to close the school and instead invested $15 millioninrenovating it into the Walter Dyett School of the Arts.
Please join me in helping the Resistance fight the Waltons and the Corporate Takeover of the state’s public schools by sending a check to:
Grassroots Arkansas
Arkansas Community Organizations
2101 South Main Street, LR, AR 72206.
It is registered as a charitable organization by the IRS and is tax deductible.
Thanks to Fred Klonsky for alerting me to this analysis of the mayoral election in Chicago, in which two African American women are in a run-off, the establishment candidate William Daley came in third, and privatizer Paul Vallas got about 5% of the vote. Voters voted no to Rahm’s school closings and charter favoritism.
Curtis Black writes:
“The election that advanced two black women to the runoff for Chicago mayor is certainly historic. And voters who backed Lori Lightfoot and Toni Preckwinkle were certainly demanding change.
“But the election was also a complete repudiation of Rahm Emanuel’s record as mayor of Chicago. All the candidates ran against Emanuel’s program. All of them rejected complete mayoral control over the school board, which has enabled wholesale school closings and charter expansion. All of them called for more investment in neighborhoods. The candidate closest to Emanuel ideologically, Bill Daley, even ran against the mayor with a slogan of “no more excuses.””
Tonight, history was made in Chicago. Two African American women won the top two slots.
Chicago’s next mayor will be an African American woman.
Farewell to Rahm Emanuel; your disgraceful historic legacy will be closing 50 public schools in a single day.
William Daley, the business establishment’s candidate, came in third. Au revoir.
Paul Vallas, school privatizer supreme, trailed the field.
CHICAGO — Two African-American women are headed for a runoff in the Chicago mayor’s race, setting up an election that will make history.
Lori Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor and sharp critic of the status quo at City Hall, and Toni Preckwinkle, the county board president and chairwoman of the county’s Democratic Party, will face one another in a runoff election set for April, according to The Associated Press.
The third top vote-getter — William M. Daley, a member of Chicago’s political dynasty of Daleys — earlier conceded defeat.
Either Ms. Lightfoot or Ms. Preckwinkle would be the first African-American woman to lead the nation’s third largest city, succeeding Mayor Rahm Emanuel as mayor. Only one other woman, Jane Byrne, has been elected mayor, in 1979. If Ms. Lightfoot were to win, she also would be the first openly gay mayor of Chicago.
Ms. Preckwinkle, 71, a long established politician who has often been urged to run for mayor, had been widely expected to do well in Tuesday’s balloting amid a cast of 14 candidates. The success of Ms. Lightfoot, 56, who has never run for elective office before, was far more surprising; she was less well known in Chicago’s political sphere and had far less money.
Her win, too, was seen as something of a rebuke to Mr. Emanuel’s tenure as mayor and to Chicago’s old political history. Ms. Lightfoot had tried to define her campaign as a rejection of machine politics and a refocusing on Chicago’s struggling neighborhoods, not just its gleaming downtown.
Ms. Lightfoot emerged at a gathering of supporters late Tuesday night, and seemed to take note of people who hadn’t expected her success. To applause, she called out: “So what do you think of us now?” She added: “This, my friends, is what change looks like.”
The historic nature of the runoff was not lost on Ms. Preckwinkle’s supporters, who gathered at a party on another side of town. The crowd cheered when Bridget Gainer, a county commissioner, noted from the stage that Chicago city would, one way or another, have an African-American woman as mayor later this year.
Steven Singer nails Rahm Emanuel’s false apology. Rahm claims he is no longer a Reformer yet continues to think he has to get tough on somebody to produce the test scores he wants. When I visited the Washington Post recently, I heard Rahm discuss his great education successes in Chicago, in conversation with the woman he appointed as superintendent of schools (talk about softball exchanges!). Not a word was said about his historic and vicious decision to close 50 public schools in one day, all of them located in communities of color. The gossip was that he was trying out for the next Secretary of Education role. His name will live in education history and it will remind us of his terrible actions as a privatizer, a hater of public schools, and a man who holds teachers in contempt.
Rahm Emanuel’s recent op-ed in The Atlantic may be one of the dumbest things I have ever read.
The title “I Used to Preach the Gospel of Education Reform. Then I Became the Mayor” seems to imply Emanuel has finally seen the light.
The outgoing Chicago Mayor USED TO subscribe to the radical right view that public schools should be privatized, student success should be defined almost entirely by standardized testing, teachers should be stripped of union protections and autonomy and poor black and brown people have no right to elect their own school directors.
But far from divorcing any of this Reagan-Bush-Trump-Clinton-Obama crap, he renews his vows to it.
This isn’t an apologia. It’s rebranding.
Jesse Hagopian, a teacher activist in Seattle, immersed himself in the UTLA Strike in Los Angeles to learn what teachers won. He interviewed Gillian Russom, a history teacher at Roosevelt High School and member of the United Teachers of Los Angeles Board of Directors, about how the strike was organized, the significant gains it made for students, and implications for the ongoing uprising of teachers around the country..
This is what he learned.
The key lesson is that the model was the zchicago strike of 2012. Even though Karen Lewis stepped down due to her health issues, she and her vision continues to inspire teachers.
There’s been a long history around the country of progressive caucuses fighting for unions to be more active, and to have a broader vision and a broader set of alliances in our struggles. The Chicago 2012 strike and the work of CORE—Caucus of Rank and File Educators—leading up to that strike really helped to educate so many of us around the country and clarified our direction. I’ve been a teacher and union activist in Los Angeles for eighteen years and I studied what worked in Chicago and joined together with others to help bring those lessons here to LA.
In 2013, we pushed for a referendum within our union calling for a campaign for the “Schools LA Students Deserve.” This was modeled off of the Chicago teachers who based their strike around their own “schools our students deserve,” aiming to draw in parents, students, and the community.
Our agenda for union transformation basically came down to transforming the union from a top-down service model to an organizing model. We were crafting our agenda of union demands in conversation with community allies so that it would be an agenda that would draw the active participation of people beyond our own union membership. Up until 2014, we still had a model of one union rep for every school, including massive high schools of like 100 teachers.
Diane Ravitch's blog 