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Chicago: Board Member Picked by Rahm Invested in Companies Doing Business with Schools

By dianeravitch
May 31, 2018 //
7

The Inspector-General of the Chicago Public Schools called out a former board member, Deborah Quazzo, for significant financial conflicts of interest.

Blogger Fred Klonsky invented a new verb for corruption: “We got Quazzoed.”

Disgraced former Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, now in prison for a kickback scheme involving millions of dollars in school contracts, accepted lavish meals at some of the city’s priciest restaurants from a CPS vendor whose investors included Deborah Quazzo, who at the time was a Mayor Rahm Emanuel appointee to the Chicago Board of Education.

That’s according to a new report from CPS Inspector General Nicholas Schuler, whose investigation led the FBI to Byrd-Bennett.

Among the findings Schuler has reported confidentially to the school board:

• Byrd-Bennett steered a $6 million contract to Think Through Math, a company in which Quazzo was invested.

• Byrd-Bennett and the coterie of top aides she brought with her to CPS had a series of expensive meals on that company’s dime during the bidding process for that deal.

• Quazzo violated the school system’s ethics code by talking up her companies’ products to CPS principals and introducing them to company representatives — which she at first denied to Schuler she’d done but acknowledged after being shown emails proving that.

“While Quazzo’s ethical violations were arguably less egregious than Byrd-Bennett’s violations involving her dealings with TTM,” Schuler wrote in the 26-page memo, obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times, “Quazzo’s violations were significant, nonetheless.”

According to the inspector general’s memo, CPS’s ethics policy violates state law and needs to be changed. Schuler wrote that it’s not enough for board members to decline to vote on matters in which they have a significant financial interest. He says CPS can’t do business at all with those companies — unless the board member with an ownership stake either divests or resigns.

In 2015, Quazzo said she saw no conflict of interest but asked Emanuel not to reappoint her after a Sun-Times investigation revealed that companies in which she had a stake had seen their business from CPS triple in the year since her appointment, taking in more than $3.8 million from deals with the city’s schools. Also, the Quazzo companies had gotten $1.3 million from CPS-funded charter schools.

It just goes to show that the person who gives the graft gets off easier than the one who took it.R

Categories Chicago, Corruption, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm

Chicago: The Measurable Result of Closing 50 Schools in One Day in 2013

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2018 //
37

Julie Vassilatos read the report of the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research about the closing of 50 schools in one day in 2013. She knew that there was no academic gain for the children affected.

http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-public-fools/2018/05/in-the-wake-of-the-mass-school-closings-one-measurable-result/

But there was one measurable result that no one talked about: Sorrow.

“The sorrow of children whose schools were closed.

“It’s measurable. The researchers measured it. They liken the losses that the students–and teachers, staff, and families–experienced, to grief. The technical term for it is “institutional mourning.” Children and staff talked about losing their school “families,” spoke of the forced separations like a divorce, or a death. Generations-long relationships with schools ended abruptly after a pained, humiliating school year of battling to keep them open–schools that served as neighborhood anchors, social roots, home of beloved teachers. Most of the 50 shuttered schools have since stood empty and fallow after the closings, untended eyesores perpetually in the view of the kids who lived nearby, monuments to loss.

“Thousands of children who experienced this loss, all at once. And it’s long term–it did not go away in a week or a month or a year.

“Does it matter to anyone? Does it matter to the mayor? Would he say: but what is that to me?

“What is it to him? The wholesale destruction of 50 communities in predominantly poor and minority neighborhoods, for no measurable benefit, leaving the measurable sadness of thousands of children in its wake?

“We can only hope it’s the beginning of the end of mayoral control of CPS.”

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Closing schools, Disruption, Emanuel, Rahm

Jitu Brown: “We Call for a Moratorium on School Privatization Now!”

By dianeravitch
May 22, 2018 //
8

Watch this powerful 2-minute video, in which civil rights leader Jitu Brown tells the dramatic story of the Dyett hunger strike in Chicago, which lasted 34 days and compelled the city to keep Dyett open and invest $16 Million in the new Dyett.

Jitu Brown leads the Journey for Justice, which is leading a national campaign to stop school closings, privatization, and charter schools. They are fighting to create thousands of community schools.

This video was created by videographers Michael Elliot and Kemala Karmen. It was funded by the Network for Public Education.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Civil Rights, Closing schools, Courage, Education Industry, Equity, Justice, Privatization

A Short Video About the Real Cost of School Closings

By dianeravitch
May 21, 2018 //
11

In 2013, Rahm Emanuel closed 50 public schools in one day. If for no other reason, he will go down in history as the mayor who shuttered 50 public schools on the same day. Never happened before.

What happened to those schools? Watch this short video.

Did he think that schools are like hot dog stands or shoe stores? If you don’t make a profit, you close it and move on? Did he forget that he was cutting the arteries away from communities, families, and children?

Tina Trujillo at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Colorado’s Michelle Renée suggest that government agencies and policy-makers, including the U.S. Department of Education, would be wise to look at educational research as they guide school turnarounds.

Evidence shows that top-down, punitive efforts are ineffective and counterproductive. Instead, a collaborative, community-driven approach—combined with significant, sustained financial investment and a focus on improving the quality of teaching and learning—has been proven to be the better path to school improvement.

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform

Chicago: “You Can Thank Karen Lewis for the National Wave of Teacher Insurrections”

By dianeravitch
May 16, 2018 //
17

There are very few people I have met in my lifetime where I had one meeting and was instantly smitten. Karen Lewis is one of them. In the fall of 2010, I was traveling the country to talk about my somewhat explosive new book “The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education.” Within the world of education, it was a bombshell, because I was renouncing many years of advocacy, switching sides, and losing many friends in the process. On the substantive side, I was explaining and describing the true nature of the powerful movement that would reveal its ugly face later that same year with the release of “Waiting for Superman.”

I had two speaking engagements one week, first in Detroit, then in Los Angeles. I planned to change planes in Chicago. But before I embarked, I got an e-mail from Karen Lewis, whom I had never met. She asked if I would change my flight and arrange a stopover of several hours in Chicago. I did. She and her husband John met me at O’Hare. We drove to a nearby hotel where they had rented time in an empty conference room, and Karen and I talked nonstop for four hours. When we were done, we left as close friends. She is brilliant, funny, passionate, compassionate.

We met from time to time after that and emailed often. She led a historic teachers strike in 2012 to protest the city’s underinvestment in the schools and Rahm Emanuel’s endless school closings. The year before, the legislature had passed a law to curtail teachers’ job rights and prevent teschers’ strikes, saying that a strike vote had to be approved by 75% of the members, thinking that would never happen. This was when Jonah Edelman of Stand for Children showed that he and his organization had sold out to the hedge funders. He engineered the deal and hoped to crush the Chicago Teachers Union (when caught on tape bragging about his coup at the Aspen Ideas Festival, seated next to James Crown, a prominent Chicago equities guy, he had to apologize. The session was about outsmarting the teachers’ unions by buying up the best lobbyists and was titled “If it Could Happen There, it Could Happen Anywhere.”)

The CTU didn’t get 75% of the membership, it got more than 90%. It went out on strike. While the national press was almost universally hostile, hated the very idea of a teachers’ strike, the parents and working people of Chicago supported the teachers.

Ben Joravsky writes here that Karen Lewis was the inspiration for the current wave of walkouts, insurrections, protests, but this time the teachers are winning broad public support. In Chicago, the teachers wore red. Today it is #RedForEd.

Rahm got even with the CTU in 2013 by closing 50 public schools in one day. It too was historic, in an evil way. Charters continued to open.

Karen Lewis planned to run against Rahm for Mayor in 2014–she was far more popular than he and would have likely won. But she discovered she had a malignant brain tumor. Her life changed. She had surgery and survived. Last fall she had a minor strike. She took these blows with courage, dignity and even humor.

I last saw her when The Network for Public Education held its annual meeting in Chicago n 2015. I interviewed her and the video is here. She was physically weak but spiritually strong.

Yes, she showed us that teachers must work in and with their communities to build public support. She said that those ties were essential. She showed us what teachers could do even in the worst of circumstances. And now that she is in the worst of circumstances, we remember her and thank her for her leadership, her example, and the life lessons she taught us.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Courage

Nancy Bailey: Beware of Tech Titans Bearing Gifts

By dianeravitch
May 11, 2018 //
8

Nancy Bailey learned that the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative was giving $14 Million to the schools of Chicago to put more students online.

Apparently no one in Chicago ever heard of the Trojan horse.

Read on.

Categories Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative, Chicago, Online Education, Technology

School Closings Hurt Children and Communities

By dianeravitch
May 10, 2018 //
8

 

No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top encouraged school Closings as a “reform,” but this turns out to be a destructive approach that hurts children and communities. 

Rahm Emanuel and his hand-picked board in Chicago closed nearly 50 public schools in one day in 2013. That’s a record. One for the history books. That’s the kind of thinking that views people and children as objects, unimportant lives, easily discarded.

The National Education Policy Center describes the strategy of closing schools as “high risk, low gain.”

BOULDER, CO (May 18, 2017) – Federal and state school accountability policies have used standardized test results to shine a spotlight on low-performing schools. A remedy offered to “turn around” low-performance in school districts is the option to close the doors of the low-performing schools and send students elsewhere.

School Closure as a Strategy to Remedy Low Performance, authored by Gail L. Sunderman of the University of Maryland, and Erin Coghlan and Rick Mintrop of the University of California, Berkeley, investigates whether closing schools and transferring students for the purpose of remedying low performance is an effective option for educational decision makers to pursue.

Closing schools in response to low student performance is based on the premise that by closing low-performing schools and sending students to better-performing ones, student achievement will improve. The higher-performing schools, it is reasoned, will give transfer students access to higher-quality peer and teacher networks, which in turn will have a beneficial effect on academic outcomes. Moreover, it is argued that the threat of closure may motivate low-performing schools (and their districts) to improve.

To investigate this logic of closing schools to improve student performance, the authors drew on relevant peer-reviewed research and well-designed policy reports to answer four questions:

  1. How often do school closings occur and for what reasons?
  2. What is the impact on students of closing schools for reasons of performance?
  3. What is the impact of closing schools on the public school system in which closure has taken place?
  4. What is the impact of school closures on students of various ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds, and on local communities and neighborhoods?

Based on their analysis of the relevant available evidence the authors offer the following recommendations:

  • Even though school closures have dramatically increased, jurisdictions largely shun the option of “closure and transfer” in the context of the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Policy and district actors should treat the infrequency of this turnaround option as a caution.
  • School closures have at best weak and decidedly mixed benefits; at worst they have detrimental repercussions for students if districts do not ensure that seats at higher- performing schools are available for transfer students. In districts where such assignments are in short or uncertain supply, “closure and transfer” is a decidedly undesirable option.
  • School closures seem to be a challenge for transferred students in non-academic terms for at least one or two years. While school closures are not advisable for a school of any grade span, they are especially inadvisable for middle school students because of the shorter grade span of such schools.
  • The available evidence on the effects of school closings for their local system offers a cautionary note. There are costs associated with closing buildings and transferring teachers and students, which reduce the available resources for the remaining schools. Moreover, in cases where teachers are not rehired under closure-and-restart models, there may be broader implications for the diversity of the teaching workforce. Closing schools to consolidate district finances or because of declining enrollments may be inevitable at times, but closing solely for performance has unanticipated consequences that local and state decision makers should be aware of.
  • School closures are often accompanied by political conflict. Closures tend to differentially affect low-income communities and communities of color that are politically disempowered, and closures may work against the demand of local actors for more investment in their local institutions.

In conclusion, school closure as a strategy for remedying student achievement in low-performing schools is at best a high-risk/low-gain strategy that fails to hold promise with respect to either increasing student achievement or promoting the non-cognitive well-being of students. The strategy invites political conflict and incurs hidden costs for both districts and local communities, especially low-income communities and communities of color that are differentially affected by school closings. It stands to reason that in many, if not most, instances, students, parents, local communities, district and state policymakers may be better off investing in persistently low-performing schools rather than closing them.

Find School Closure as a Strategy to Remedy Low Performance, by Gail L. Sunderman, Erin Coghlan and Rick Mintrop, at: http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/closures

 

 

Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, National Education Policy Center

Chicago: Charter Chain Does Not Permit Girls to Go to Bathroom for Menstrual Emergency

By dianeravitch
May 3, 2018 //
28

 

NPR Illinois has been covering the harsh disciplinary policies at the high-scoring Noble Network of charter schools.

After publishing one piece about “dehumanizing” discipline, NPR learned about another issue. Girls who are bleeding because of their menstrual period and need to go to the bathroom at once must wait for an “escort,” if the incident happens during class. If the escort is late, the girl bleeds on herself. Sometimes they are allowed to tie a sweater around their waist to hide the blood on their trousers, and they won’t get a demerit.

Two teachers persuaded the administration to let girls wear black trousers instead of khaki, to hide the bloodstains.

Would any public school do this to students? Is this inhumane discipline resreserved for low-income students of color in “no-excuses” charter schools?

Be sure to read the comments. Many were posted by people who say they are current or former teachers at the Noble Network.

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Discipline, Education Reform

Chicago’s Noble Network: Teachers Call “No-Excuses” Discipline “Dehumanizing”

By dianeravitch
April 24, 2018 //
28

 

Teachers who worked at Chicago’s leading charter chain spoke out to NPR and described their discomfort with the strict disciplinary code. Some called it “dehumanizing.” 

“The trend toward school choice has educators across the country looking at Chicago’s Noble Charter Schools — an award-winning network of mostly high schools that specializes in helping inner-city kids achieve the kind of SAT scores that propel them into four-year universities. But despite its prestigious reputation, Noble has a peculiarly high teacher turnover rate.

“And some of those teachers are speaking up about policies they describe as “dehumanizing.”

“Noble’s handbook lists more than 20 behaviors that can elicit demerits. The dress code, for example, requires students to wear light khakis, plain black leather belts,

“Kerease Epps, who taught at Noble’s Hansberry College Prep, made sure to arrive by seven o’clock every day to help students with curved lines in their hair avoid punishment.

”“Every morning, I would color in two of my boys’ parts,” she says. ”I had a hefty amount of eyeliner at my desk, so I’d just color in with black or brown eyeliner.”

“Ann Baltzer taught chemistry at Hansberry. When one of her female students showed up with braids that included strands of maroon — the school color — the girl was told she couldn’t attend class. So she asked Baltzer to use a black marker to obliterate the maroon in each braid. The teacher looks back on that as not only unnecessary, but racist.

“To have a system that results in a white woman having to color on a black woman’s hair, and if I don’t, she’s excluded from education, there’s something wrong with that,” Baltzer says…”

Some teachers like the strict discipline and the culture change it promotes.

But turnover among teachers is high, in part because of the culture of the schools.

“It’s a completely dehumanizing system, both for teachers and students,” Baltzer says.

“One of the policies that made her most uncomfortable was demanding “level zero,” or complete silence, in the hallways during passing period, which she says teachers could activate by yelling “hands up.”

“Teachers were applauded if you had the ability to shut down the hallway,” Baltzer says. “We had no awareness that it would be inappropriate to shout ‘hands up’ at a hallway full of black children. And so we had white teachers shouting ‘Hands up’ and kids putting their hands up and going silent. That is insane.”

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Discipline, Education Reform, Privatization

Tamar Manessah: Save Chicago’s Schools—from Rahm Emanuel and Charter Schools

By dianeravitch
February 16, 2018 //
5

 

Community activist Tamar Manessah wrote an eloquent plea in the New York Times to save public schools in Chicago—from Rahm Emanuel and the charter industry. 

She writes:

”On Feb. 28, the Chicago Board of Education is expected to vote on a disastrous proposal to close four public high schools with declining enrollment around the Englewood neighborhood of southwest Chicago. The affected children, who are overwhelmingly black and poor, would go to public schools out of the neighborhood or be encouraged to attend one of the charter schools being pushed by business and religious interests.

“The schools would close over three years, and in their place, the city plans to build an $85 million high school in Englewood. But the school won’t be up and running until September 2019 at the earliest — more than a full school year from now.

“Dwindling enrollment is a reality at these schools, but that’s partly because the city has not invested nearly enough in them. At the same time, Chicago has opened dozens of new schools, mostly charters, which draw students away from traditional public schools.

“Englewood, one of the poorest areas in the city, is plagued by high unemployment and gang activity. It’s where my organization, Mothers Against Senseless Killings, does its work. Our volunteers take care of the local kids during the summer, feeding them hamburgers for lunch and encouraging them to stay in school. And the neighborhood has made great strides — last year there was a significant drop in homicides and shooting.

“My greatest fear is that we will backslide. How we will be able to sustain these gains without a strong public school presence?“

Categories Charter Schools, Chicago, Emanuel, Rahm
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