An independent investigation found that nearly half of Chicago’s charter schools are under-enrolled, but the mayor-controlled school board plans to open more. This will drain more students and resources from the public schools. Mayor Emanuel hopes to destroy public education as his legacy to the city.
The mayor’s hand-picked board will vote tomorrow on authorizing 31 new charters.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact:
Amy Smolensky, 312-485-0053
Data Analysis Reveals Nearly 11,000 Empty Seats; 47% of Charter Schools Under-enrolled
Pending Vote for Opening 31 New Charters Likely to Have Devastating Impact on Many Chicago Public Schools
CHICAGO, January 20 2013 — In an independent investigation of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) data from the 2013-14 school year compiled by parent Jeanne Marie Olson of the Apples to Apples project, parent group Raise Your Hand has discovered that 47 percent of CPS charter and contract schools had student populations below the CPS threshold for ideal enrollment. This equates to 50 schools with nearly 11,000 seats sitting empty. The analysis also reveals a decline in overall CPS enrollment of 3,000 students this academic year. Despite this drop, the Chicago Board of Education could approve as many as 31 new charters over the next two years.
These revelations combined with tremendous CPS budget cuts, a one billion dollar deficit and the recent closing of 50 neighborhood schools, have parents and community members demanding a halt to charter expansion. Opponents to the charter expansion, which is scheduled to be voted on during Wednesday’s Board meeting, are outraged at the prospect of adding 31 new charters (10 of which have already been approved) while neighborhood schools continue to receive funding cuts that have forced elimination of critical teaching and support positions as well as fundamental education programming.
“CPS has been opening charters in the Austin neighborhood for years and cannibalizing district schools,” said RYH Board member Dwayne Truss. “It is especially offensive to me as a resident of Austin that anyone would propose a new charter in our community after the closing of four district schools last year due to a so-called underutilization crisis manufactured by the district.”
CPS has contended that they will open more charters to meet parent demand and relieve overcrowding.
Raise Your Hand member Jennie Biggs said, “CPS claims to face another near billion dollar deficit. They risk destabilizing all of our schools by this unwarranted expansion. Every type of school in CPS has wait lists and this myth that CPS must open more charters to meet parent demand is insulting as a taxpayer and a resident of a community that had schools on the closing list last year and now has a charter proposal. We must strengthen our existing schools or we face another even more students leaving the system.”
About Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education: Raise Your Hand is a growing coalition of Chicago and Illinois public school parents, teachers and concerned citizens advocating for equitable and sustainable education funding, quality programs and instruction for all students and an increased parent voice in policy-making around education. http://www.ilraiseyourhand.org.
Bruce Rauner is a fabulously wealthy equity investor who is running for Governor of Illinois.
He is also one of the most important financial backers of charter schools in Chicago. He even has a charter school named for him, part of the Noble network of charters.
In his gubernatorial campaign, he recently made headlines when he broke ranks with the other Republican candidates on the issue of the minimum wage. Democratic Governor Pat Quinn has called for an increase in the minimum wage to $10 an hour from its current $8.25 an hour. Four Republican candidates say it should be kept where it is. Rauner proposes to lower the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour to keep Illinois “competitive.”
“Despite his appearance as an average Joe who stays at cost effective motels and starts his day with Raisin Bran just like everybody else, Rauner need only shake his hammer for an hour to make what minimum wage earners make in a year. Rich Miller at Capitol Fax provides the breakdown: To put this into a little perspective, somebody earning minimum wage in Illinois today (before any Rauner-enforced pay cut) would have to work 6,424,242 hours to match Rauner’s 2012 income of $53 million. That works out to 803,030 days, 160,606 40-hour weeks, or 3,088 years. Rauner’s income averages out to $204K a day for a five-day work week, or $25,550 every hour of an eight-hour day. It would take a minimum wage employee 399 days to earn as much money as Rauner made in a single hour last year. And, again, that’s before any pay cut.”
To show what an average Joe he is, Rauner should try living on $7.25 an hour for one week, just one week.
I had a personal encounter with Bruce Rauner. Two years ago, I received the Kohl Education Award from Dolores Kohl, the woman who created it, a great philanthropist who cares deeply about the forgotten children and annually honors outstanding teachers. After the awards ceremony, Ms. Kohl held a small dinner at the exclusive Chicago Club. There were two tables, 8 people at each table. I sat across from Bruce and of course, we got into a lively discussion about charter schools, a subject on which he is passionate.
As might be expected, he celebrated their high test scores, and I responded that they get those scores by excluding students with serious disabilities and English language learners, as well as pushing out those whose scores are not good enough. Surprisingly, he didn’t disagree. His reaction: so what? “They are not my problem. Charters exist to save those few who can be saved, not to serve all kinds of kids.” My response: What should our society do about the kids your charters don’t want? His response: I don’t know and I don’t care. They are not my problem.
This was not a taped conversation. I am paraphrasing. But the gist and the meaning are accurate.
EduShyster wrote about Rauner’s charter school–part of the Noble network–here. The Noble network is known for fining parents if their children don’t follow the rules.
Oh, and one other interesting story about Bruce Rauner: The Chicago Sun-Times reported that he pulled strings with his friend Superintendent Arne Duncan to get his daughter admitted to Chicago’s very selective Walter Payton College Prep school after she was rejected; eighteen months later, Rauner donated $250,000 to the school’s private fund. Rauner also gave a handsome gift to the CPS foundation, run by “the school system’s top administrators”:
Rauner’s gift to the Payton Prep Initiative came two months after his foundation gave $500,000 to the Chicago Public Schools Foundation, run by the school system’s top administrators. His foundation previously had given money to that organization.
Rauner, a venture capitalist, called Chicago school officials in early 2008. Within days, his daughter was admitted to Payton for the 2008-09 academic year by the school’s principal, according to a source familiar with the matter.
MEDIA ALERT: TUESDAY FORUM
PARENTS DEMAND HALT TO CHARTER EXPANSION-
Community Organizations across Chicago Urge CPS to Vote Against Proposed Charter Expansion and Refocus on Protection/Funding of Neighborhood Schools
What: Following the closure of 50 neighborhood schools due to budget and a so-called “underutilization crisis,” parents and community members are furious at the proposal for the creation of 21 new charter schools, which will come up for vote at the School Board on January 22nd – bringing the total numbers of potential new CPS charter schools to 31 in the next two years.
Held in the Brighton Park community, this public forum will bring together community groups, area professors, parents and students from around the city to shed light on the facts surrounding rapid charter proliferation and the harm it is causing to district schools. The forum will address action steps to halt this expansion.
Date: Tuesday, January 14
Time: 6:30 p.m.
Location: Shields Middle School, 2611 W. 48th Street
Why: Despite tremendous CPS budget cuts, a one billion dollar deficit and the recent closing of 50 neighborhood schools, the Board is planning to vote to open up to 31 new charter schools in the next two years. Parents and community members are outraged as neighborhood schools continue to receive funding cuts that have forced elimination of critical teaching and support positions as well as fundamental education programming.
Topics will include:
· Charter impact on special education
· Financing issues and lack of transparency with charter budgets
· Academic performance of charters vs. neighborhood schools
Speakers and supporters to include:
· Students who have been counseled out of charters will offer testimony.
· Researchers:
· Members from the following organizations will be present: Brighton Park Neighborhood Council, Albany Park Neighborhood Council, Blocks Together, Raise Your Hand, Parents4Teachers, Teachers for Social Justice,
Contact: If you plan to attend this event or have any questions, please contact Wendy Katten at 773-704-0336, wkatten@yahoo.com.
This remarkable article by Cassie Walker Burke with assistance from the Better Government Association details the story of Juan Rangel and the UNO charter school network, the biggest charter chain in Chicago.
It is a gripping tale about the consequences of deregulation and privatization, of creating schools that are not subject to the same laws as public schools, and of the problematic nexus between charter operators and politicians. The charter operators need the money controlled by the politicians, and the politicians need the troops controlled by the charters.
Burke writes, after a lengthy interview with Rangel last fall:
What emerged is a cautionary tale about the intersection of ambition and opportunity. UNO and its CEO thrived mainly because of gaping loopholes in the charter school system. While UNO has received a staggering $280 million in public money over the past five years to spend on education, neither Chicago Public Schools nor the Illinois State Board of Education provided enough oversight. Without that, insiders say, UNO developed a free-wheeling culture that was ripe for abuse. It collected lots of money, and Rangel amassed lots of power. But he didn’t always use them for the benefit of the thousands of kids in his charter schools…
From the beginning, Rangel operated on the notion that charters were exempt from the school district’s nepotism rules (they are allowed to write their own ethics policies) and from the so-called Shakman Decree, a consent decree put into place in 1983 to curb the patronage practices of Chicago pols (it applies to CPS but not to charter operators). As the UNO organization grew, it created plenty of jobs: teachers’ assistants, IT consultants, central office administrators, and community relations officers that Rangel and Mullins filled as they pleased…
[After dismissing its external for-profit management company], UNO…began paying itself a “management fee” of $1 of every $10 it received from local, state, and federal sources. (Some years UCSN kicked up more. In 2012, those fees totaled $5 million.) Under Rangel and Mullins, UNO had control over how that cash was spent…
A third of the nation’s charter schools pay fees to management companies—a head-scratching arrangement when you consider that charters were created as a way to eliminate bureaucracy, not create it. Few rules govern these arrangements, according to Gary Miron, a professor of education at Western Michigan University who has studied charter financing (though not UNO’s specifically). Once the charter manager collects the fee, the funds go under “the veil,” says Miron. “Basically, all of this money ends up getting paid to the management company, but we don’t know how much goes into their pockets or how much they spend on administrators, or administrators’ nephews or uncles.”
Free from oversight or supervision, the UNO organization collected millions from private foundations (like Walton) and from the government; and it was rife with conflicts of interest.
In June 2009, the state legislature awarded UNO a $98 million grant for school construction. Even charter advocates were shocked by such a staggering sum handed out to a single operator. “Very few, if any, charters [nationwide], except UNO, get that kind of state money to build schools,” says Andrew Broy, the president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, a lobbying and resource group.
Anticharter parents’ groups and unions immediately cried foul. “What on earth was the state thinking?” says Julie Woestehoff, the executive director of Parents United for a Responsible Education, a Chicago advocacy organization. “We have this huge budget crisis. To be giving UNO $98 million—it’s preposterous. It throws into enormous relief the political nature of this organization, the clout they have.”
UNO’s coup was the result of a classic one-two punch. The cousin of Miguel d’Escoto, Rangel’s chief organizer at the time, had bused hundreds of parents in matching T-shirts to Springfield to rally for weeks in front of the Capitol and the TV cameras. Behind the scenes, Rangel had worked Republican lawmakers— many of them charter fans—from Senate Republican leader Christine Radogno on down. To reinforce the message, he had hired a cadre of powerhouse lobbyists, including Victor Reyes and Michael Noonan, a former Madigan aide.
“They were playing the ‘Kumbaya’ chord that this was for the betterment of Latino families,” recalls Senator William Delgado, a Chicago Democrat who chairs the Senate Education Committee and voted for the grant—a decision he says he now regrets. “But it was the wolf dressed in sheep’s clothing. These guys [at UNO] weren’t responsible enough to get that much money.”
With that $98 million, UNO began scrambling to build new schools, Rangel’s two-campus Soccer Academy complex among them. No one inside the organization, it seems, bothered to read the grant agreement’s fine print. It specified that UNO “must immediately notify the [Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, which administered the grant] in writing of any actual or potential conflicts of interest.”
As the Sun-Times would reveal in February 2013, a long line of contractors, plumbers, electricians, security firms, and consultants tied to many of the VIPs on UNO’s organizational chart got a piece of the action. Rangel spelled out in tax documents and in later bond disclosures that the construction firm d’Escoto Inc.—owned by former UNO board member Federico d’Escoto, the brother of Miguel d’Escoto—was the owner’s representative on three projects funded by the grant. Another d’Escoto brother, Rodrigo, was paid $10 million for glass subcontracts for UNO’s two Soccer Academies and a third school in the Northwest Side neighborhood of Galewood.
The vendor lists were peppered with other familiar names: a $101,000 plumbing contract awarded to the sister of Victor Reyes, UNO’s lobbyist, who helped secure the state grant; a $1.7 million electrical contract given to a firm co-owned by one of Ed Burke’s precinct captains; tens of thousands in security contracts to Citywide Security, a firm that had given money to Danny Solis, and to Aguila Security, managed by the brother of Rep. Edward Acevedo, who voted for the $98 million for UNO.
…Behind the scarlet curtain, UNO’s schools could be sloppy. Rangel rarely entered them. From 2008 until 2011, day-to-day operations fell to a strict Catholic nun, Sister Barbara McCarry, a veteran from the CPS office that vetted charters. To make up a budget gap from leaner times, UNO began stuffing more kids in classrooms (up to 30 in kindergarten and first grade, compared with the CPS average of 24) and levying “activity fees” on unsuspecting families. Expectations were high, tempers were strained, and a revolving door of principals (called directors at UNO schools) left a young and largely inexperienced crop of teachers casting about for guidance. Teachers say they felt pressure to please parents and to not draw any negative attention to the schools….
UNO’s teacher turnover rate careened toward 40 percent for the 2011–12 school year, though the network wasn’t the only charter operator in Chicago burning through staff. According to the independent Chicago education journal Catalyst,average teacher turnover at all local charters exceeded 50 percent the previous year….
[with legal troubles growing, Rangel resigned in December but UNO is still operating.]
UNO can’t count on more largess from the State of Illinois, at least until the inevitable political amnesia sets in. (In an email, a Quinn spokesperson wrote “NO” in all caps in response to the question of whether the governor would consider future UNO grants.) But the network’s authorizer, CPS, remarkably still seems to have its head firmly planted in the sand. Last February—after the Sun-Times stories broke—the board of education voted unanimously to extend UNO’s charter for another five years.
Chicago Public Schools, known for their love of charters, turned down a proposal to open two new Concept charters. The one existing Concept charter school in Chicago had unimpressive test scores. So Concept went to the Illinois State Charter School Commission and won their charters!
What a coup! How did it happen? Well, it seems that Concept charters are affiliated with the Turkish Gulen chain, the largest in the nation. And they have a very good friend: House Speaker Michael Madigan.
Madigan is “the South Side Democrat who’s a powerful advocate of Concept and the faith-based Gulen movement to which the schools are connected.”
Better yet, the Concept charters will get 33% more funding than other charters in Chicago!
Madigan really, really likes Turkey, and he truly likes the Gulen charters, too, according to the story by investigative journalist Dan Mihalopoulos.
“Madigan, who’s also the Illinois Democratic Party chairman, visited Concept’s Chicago Math and Science Academy last year. In a video the school posted on YouTube, Madigan praised the school, founded and run by Turkish immigrants.
“The speaker’s son Andrew Madigan also visited and filmed an endorsement of the CMSA campus at 7212 N. Clark St. Andrew Madigan works for Mesirow Insurance Services Inc., whose clients include CMSA and the two new, state-approved Concept schools in McKinley Park and Austin, according to records obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times.
“The elder Madigan has ties to other Chicago Turkish immigrant groups that, like Concept, have connections to a worldwide movement led by Fethullah Gulen. He’s a politically powerful Muslim cleric from Turkey who moved to this country in 1999 shortly before being implicated in a plot to overthrow Turkey’s secular rulers and install an Islamic government — charges that were later dropped.
“Madigan has taken four trips in the past four years to Turkey as the guest of the Chicago-based Niagara Foundation — whose honorary president is Gulen — and the Chicago Turkish American Chamber of Commerce, according to disclosure reports the speaker has filed.
“State records show Madigan’s visits were among 32 trips lawmakers took to Turkey from 2008 through 2012. The speaker and members of his House Democratic caucus took 29 of those trips, which they described as “educational missions.”
Ah, the wonders of school reform, putting kids first.
Mayor Rahm Emanuel keeps telling us that Chicago’s school system is too broke to adequately fund the schools it already has, but that hasn’t stopped him from gearing up to open as many as 21 new charter schools in the next two years.
The mayor likes to say that he’s all about improving the choices available to parents. But before he hands the charters another nickel of our tax dollars, allow me to make a humble suggestion: How about making them disclose how they spend the money we give them, so that parents and other citizens can make even better choices?
This suggestion comes to mind thanks to the ongoing litigation pitting Dan Mihalopoulos, ace investigative reporter for the Sun-Times, versus the United Neighborhood Organization, a charter school empire with 16 schools.
Folks, this is a championship bout. Mihalopoulos’s determination to force UNO to reveal how it’s spent tens of millions of public dollars is matched only by UNO’s determination to keep that information secret.
I only wish they were teaching the details of this fight in high school civics classes—charters included—so that the leaders of tomorrow could learn how Chicago really works.
UNO is Chicago’s largest charter chain. Its founder, Juan Rangel, was co-chairman of Rahm Emanuel’s campaign committee.
Governor Quinn and the Illinois legislature gave UNO $98 million to build more charter schools.
After the news broke that some of that money was funneled to corporations owned by family, friends, lobbyists, and other politically-connected individuals, the state money was put on hold.
First, UNO’s chief operating officer stepped down; then just weeks ago, Rangel resigned.
The reporter Dan Mihalopoulos of the Sun-Times has been trying to gain access to UNO’s financial records, but he has been stone-walled.
You see, UNO is actually contracting with another corporation which is contracting with the city and the state. Both share the same offices, the same board of directors.
So, you see, the UNO charters are not public schools, they are schools operated by contract with the city and state and have no obligation to tell the public how public dollars are spent.
Ergo, the UNO charters are using the same defense used by charters in federal courts and before the NLRB. They are not public schools. They have no reason to be transparent.
Rangel’s departure “by mutual agreement” with the board of the not-for-profit group is effective immediately, UNO officials said Friday.
Rangel had three family members on the UNO payroll. Sources said two of the relatives quit recently, including deputy chief of staff Carlos Jaramillo, Rangel’s nephew.
Reached by phone, Rangel hung up on a reporter.
Rangel has close ties to politicians including Mayor Rahm Emanuel, whose 2011 campaign Rangel co-chaired, Ald. Edward M. Burke (14th) and Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago), who sponsored a $98 million state school-construction grant to UNO in 2009 that has fueled its rapid growth as a charter-school operator.
Parents, educators and other Chicagoans disgusted with authoritarian control of public education organized their own Board of Education, which held a public meeting one day before the mayor-controlled board held its meeting. The agenda was the same, but the tone and process were very different.
For one thing, the “People’s Board” met from 6-8 pm, in contrast to the regular board’s “banker’s hours.”
The star of the evening was a high school junior. Read her comments in full.
They start like this:
“Hi, my name is Dalia Mena. I’m a student organizer from the Chicago Students Organizing to Save Our Schools, and I am a junior at Steinmetz High School. Last week Rahm Emmanuel gave Lincoln Park Elementary, a school in a rich neighborhood, $20 million. But when the problem is in a poor Black or Latino community suddenly CPS and the city are broke.
“We are a group of students that are not required to meet, but we do anyway because we deserve more than what CPS is giving us. This year, CPS took millions of dollars from neighborhood schools while giving more to charters…..”
Leonie Haimson reports that Chicago has pulled out of inBloom, the massive data collection project funded by the aGates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation.
Leonie has been the key figure nationally in alerting parents, educators, officials, and the media to the plans of inBloom to collect hundreds of points of data about children, using software developed by Rupert Murdoch’s Wireless Generation, and stored on a “cloud” managed by amazon.com, with no guarantee that this personal and identifiable information cannot be hacked or sold to marketers.
New York is now the only state that continues to collaborate fully in sharing confidential student data with inBloom. State officials take an almost incomprehensible glee in their insistence that no one can stop them. I have no doubt that Leonie Haimson, champion of children, will beat them all: Gates, Carnegie, Murdoch, Bezos, and the New York State Education Department.
As Margaret Mead said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
The Chicago parent organization PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education) called on Chicago school officials to de-emphasize standardized testing and pay greater attention to teachers’ judgment.
PURE issued this press release today:
Parents give district a “D” for its test-focused policy
Chicago, IL: Today, tens of thousands of Chicago Public Schools (CPS)
parents will flock to their children’s schools to pick up student report
cards and meet with teachers. They look forward to these meetings as an
important step in strengthening the home-school connection. Report card
pick-up day is the best opportunity most parents have to learn how to
help their children succeed in school from the people that know the most
about how to do that – their children’s teachers.
Parents take the report cards home and study them. They discuss them
with their children – sometimes those are happy discussions, sometimes
not so happy! Parents sign the back of the report card and slide the
cards into their children’s backpacks, often taking that moment to
resolve to do more to help their children learn and improve in the weeks
ahead.
This process has been meaningful to parents for decades, but it’s been
increasingly pushed aside as school districts like CPS give standardized
test scores more and more power over students, teachers and schools.
Parents from the Chicago group More Than a Score disagree with this
trend, and have presented CPS with an alternative promotion policy
that relies primarily on report card grades and uses standardized test
scores in the way they were intended to be used, as diagnostic tools and
not high-stakes “gotcha” measures.
More Than a Score parents give CPS a “D” grade for a promotion policy
that continues to focus too much on test scores and ignores the value of
report cards.
“Report cards are the only evaluations that look at the students’ work
over time and across all areas of learning. They are the only
evaluations done by experienced, qualified adults who personally observe
and assess each student’s progress,” said CPS parent Julie Fain.“That’s
the kind of information that makes sense to parents and actually helps
children. When we get our children’s standardized test scores at the end
of the year, we don’t get to see the questions or their answers. We have
no idea whether they missed a certain concept or were just distracted
for part of the test. In any case, our children are so over-tested that
these results have become less and less useful to parents.”
“The CPS promotion policy begins and ends with the state test score,”
said Julie Woestehoff, head of Parents United for Responsible Education
(PURE). “Most of the information from report cards is ignored by CPS
when end-of-the-year promotion decisions are made.”
“I believe standardize testing is a harsh way to keep a child from
thinking outside the box. All our children have different needs, speeds,
and challenges. I have witnessed up close and personal the emotional
stress testing causes – creating a lack of self-esteem while labeling my
children as dumb only because they did not meet your standardized laws.
I support my children by opting them out of testing,” said Rousemary
Vega, a CPS parent.
Parents who have opted their children out of standardized tests are also
confused and concerned because the new promotion policy just swapped one
high-stakes test (the SAT-10), for another (NWEA), making opting out
more difficult.
Since the promotion policy was first implemented in 1996 by Paul Vallas,
it has focused on test scores on the Iowa test, then the IGAP, ISAT, and
SAT 10. The new proposal substitutes the NWEA, which CPS officials say
is just temporary until they replace it with the PARCC Common Core
tests.
“How are we supposed to keep track of this alphabet soup of tests?” asks
Linda Schmidt, a CPS parent who notified her child’s school at the
beginning of this school year that she does not want her student to take
the NWEA. “Will my child be held back next August because I made a
decision last September?”
Policymakers often cite the subjective nature of teacher grades as a
reason for giving them less weight than standardized tests scores.
However, test questions are written by subjective human beings, too, and
test makers consistently state that their tests should not be used to
make high-stakes decisions about children. The manual for the SAT-10,
which CPS used last year to retain students, states that test scores
“should be just one of the many factors considered and probably should
receive less weight than factors such as teacher observation, day-to-day
classroom performance, maturity level, and attitude” – just the kind of
information in report cards.
“What’s wrong with report cards?” asked Wanda Hopkins, the parent of a
CPS high school student. “If CPS does not trust teacher grades, they
need to explain why and what they are doing to fix it. I trust my
child’s teacher more than I trust for-profit test companies.”
Parents with More Than a Score believe that our proposed promotion
policy
offers an alternative to the CPS test-based promotion policy that
respects input from teachers, avoids the pitfalls of standardized test
misuse and retention, makes sense to parents, and – most importantly –
provides a higher quality evaluation of each student’s progress and
needs.
Notes to the proposed alternative promotion policy here
Diane Ravitch's blog 