Archives for category: Emanuel, Rahm
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Robert Kuttner: Say It Ain’t So, Joe

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2020 //
55

Robert Kuttner is editor of The American Prospect. Here he writes that Biden has asked Rahm Emanuel to advise him. What Kuttner fails to mention is Rahm’s disastrous control of the Chicago public schools. He should be forever stigmatized by his decision to close 50 public schools in a single day. He was continually at war with the Chicago Teachers Union. To know him, if you value public schools, is to loathe him.

Kuttner writes:

MAY 29, 2020

Kuttner on TAP

Say It Ain’t So, Joe: Rahm Emanuel?? Just when you thought that Team Biden couldn’t get any worse than Larry Summers, we now learn courtesy of the Chicago Tribune that Clinton and Obama alum Rahm Emanuel is a Biden adviser.

A quick refresher (or maybe emetic) on Emanuel. He began as a staffer in the Clinton White House where he helped push through NAFTA, then went to Wall Street to make his fortune (he made $16 million in less than three years). From there, he got elected to Congress where he epitomized everything bad about the revolving door.

As head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, he arranged to load up the House Financial Services Committee with Wall Street Democrats who sought the prized seat to raise lots of Wall Street money and protect Wall Street’s financial interests. This made the job of Chairman Barney Frank much harder when Congress was working on what became the Dodd-Frank Act.

Obama, looking for someone who knew Congress, selected Emanuel as his White House chief of staff, where he was a force for lowballing recovery outlays. He tried to talk Obama out of proposing the Affordable Care Act.

After exiting the White House, he got elected mayor of Chicago in 2011, where his approval ratings dropped to 18 percent following the police shooting of 17-year-old Laquan McDonald and the city’s bungled attempt to withhold evidence. Emanuel initially announced for a third term, but pulled out. He then joined the private equity firm Centerview Partners.

Just the guy to advise Biden. Though events are conspiring to push Biden to the left, his default setting is to reach out to the old boys of the Obama years.

Meanwhile, polls show that Elizabeth Warren is the possible running mate most likely to help Biden get elected. The two have been doing a public mating ritual, but the Wall Street Democrats close to Biden will do everything possible to keep her from being named.

If by some miracle Warren is selected, it will be trench warfare, with Wall Street Dems demanding one of their kind for the power posts of Fed Chair, Treasury Secretary, and head of the National Economic Council to balance Warren.

Rahm Emanuel! A good thing that Andrew Mellon is dead and Bernie Madoff is indisposed.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reformers, Emanuel, Rahm, Privatization

Chicago: The Teachers’ Strike Brings a Sea-Change in Education Policy

By dianeravitch
November 6, 2019 //
7

Craig’s Chicago Business acknowledges that the children in Chicago public schools need what the Chicago Teachers Union won in their contract negotiations. But still, they wonder, are taxpayers willing to pay the price? 

Now that financial details of the pact are starting to trickle out, it’s clear that the mayor was telling the truth—that is, for the teachers. And that truth raises a very significant question of whether the unprecedented, potentially $1.5 billion mayoral bet will be worth the cost to already struggling Chicago taxpayers.

That $1.5 billion figure comes from the Chicago Public Schools’ budget office. It’s at the high range of what officials say the new CTU deal will cost over the next five years cumulatively…

“The union won the strike. They absolutely won,” says Paul Vallas, a former CPS CEO who was one of Lightfoot’s rivals in the February mayoral election. “It’s going to be impossible for them to come up with that much dough without major tax increases if (Gov. J.B.) Pritzker does not fully fund the state’s new school-aid formula.”

Pritzker is working on that. But as Vallas noted, doing so likely depends on voters next year enacting the governor’s proposed graduated income tax amendment, and that’s no sure thing.

Overall, there is little dissent that putting increased staff resources into particularly needy schools—as the contract requires—is the right thing to do. Eventually, that should result in higher graduation rates and kids better prepared to enter the job market.

It is always good to get Vallas’ views, since he privatized schools in Philadelphia and New Orleans as his budget solution and ran unsuccessfully for mayor, governor, and lieutenant governor.

Are the voters in Illinois willing to pay higher taxes to improve conditions of learning, to assure smaller class sizes, and to get better prepared youth?

The Chicago teachers’ strike represents a change in Chicago, for sure. The harsh policies of Daley, Duncan, and Emanuel are over. A new day has dawned, with national implications.

“It’s a definitive shift in the entire landscape, not just in Chicago, but throughout the U.S., away from privatization, school closures, charter schools, and the kind of Koch Brother-funding of private schools instead of public schools, a threat we’ve been fending off for the last 30 years,” said Jackson Potter, a high school teacher and union bargaining member in Chicago.

Potter continued, “This contract really represents advances—and not just trying to preserve what we had or prevent the annihilation of the public system—but how to expand it, fortify it, and have a considerable [investment] in low income students of color and their communities that starts to look more [like] what we see in wealthy white suburbs.”

The contract dealt a blow to the charter industry, with “hard caps on charter school expansion and enrollment growth.” The rightwing Heartland Institute called the settlement “a death blow to charter schools in the Windy City.”

Alas, the sustained efforts of the Disrupters foiled by one powerful teachers’ strike, joined by Chicago’s progressive new mayor!  Their policies of austerity and privatization undone. Calling the world’s smallest violin.

Thanks to the invaluable organization “In the Public Interest” for assembling these sources in one place.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Democracy, Disruption, Duncan, Arne, Education Industry, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Funding

Meet Jitu Brown, a Hero of the Resistances

By dianeravitch
October 28, 2019 //
3

 

Jitu Brown is a son of Chicago. He is National director of the Journey for Justice Alliance, which has affiliates in 30 cities, where they work for social justice.

Jitu was the driving force behind the community effort to save Dyett High school  in Chicago, the last open admission high school in Bronzeville. Mayor Rahm Emanuel had decided to close Dyett, and Jitu organized a campaign to save Dyett. He led a 34-day hunger strike, and eventually Rahm gave up and instead of closing Dyett, he invested $16 million into renovating it as a school for the arts.

Listen to Jitu here, where he is videotaped by videographer Bob Greenberg. Greenberg has created an archive of hundreds of interviews with educators. He is a retired teacher.

In this video, Jitu Brown describes the two teachers who had a profound impact on him and helped him discover his strengths.

In this video, Jitu Brown recites Claude Mckay’s “If We Must Die.”

Jitu belongs on the Honor Roll of this blog.

Jitu Brown is a hero of the Resistance. He is also a member of the board of the Network for Public Education.

He is featured in my new book SLAYING GOLIATH.

Categories Chicago, Emanuel, Rahm, Honor Roll, Resistance

Mike Klonsky: On the Chicago Teachers’ Strike

By dianeravitch
October 18, 2019 //
3

 

Mike Klonsky just posted this as he was leaving to bring coffee and donuts to striking teachers, including his daughter.

I hope this strike has a good outcome for both the teachers and the new mayor. She is not Rahm Emanuel. She inherited the debt for Rahm’s two terms of hostility to the city’s public schools and their teachers.

Mike included this quote:

Yesterday, the parent group, Raise Your Hand, issued a statement on the strike which made a lot of sense.

Please remember to be good to each other out there. At the end of this contract negotiation, we are all parts of school communities that are part of a larger community, the Chicago Public Schools. Our children need all of us working together.

 

Categories Accountability, Chicago, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Teacher Pay, Teachers, Unions

Jan Resseger: The Racist, Disruptive Legacy of Arne and Rahm in Chicago

By dianeravitch
October 6, 2019 //
15

 

Jan Resseger reviews fifteen years of corporate education reform led by Arne Duncan and Rahm Emanuel and finds failure, disruption, and racism.

It started in 2004 when Arne launched his Renaissance 2010 initiative, pledging to close 100 “failing schools” and replace them, in large part with charter schools. Rahm continued it by closing 49 schools on a single day.

Resseger relies on the brilliant analysis of the school closings by Eve Ewing, where she showed the pain inflicted on black families and communities by the closings.

Corporate school reform in Chicago, while claiming to be neutral and based on data, has always operated with racist implications. Ewing provides the numbers: “Of the students who would be affected by the closures, 88 percent were black; 90 percent of the schools were majority black, and 71 percent had mostly black teachers—a big deal in a country where 84 percent of public school teachers are white.”(Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 5).

Resseger then turns to a new study by Stephanie Farmer of Roosevelt University, which found that the city’s school-based budgeting disadvantaged the poorest schools, where black children were concentrated.

A new report from Roosevelt University sociologist, Stephanie Farmer now documents that Student Based Budgeting Concentrates Low Budget Schools in Chicago’s Black Neighborhoods.

Farmer explains: “In 2014, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) adopted a system-wide Student Based Budgeting model for determining individual school budgets… Our findings show that CPS’ putatively color-blind Student Based Budgeting reproduces racial inequality by concentrating low-budget public schools almost exclusively in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods…  Since the 1990s, the Chicago Board of Education (CBOE) has adopted various reforms to make Chicago Public Schools work more like a business than a public good.  CBOE’s school choice reform of the early 2000s created a marketplace of schools by closing neighborhood public schools to make way for new types of schools, many of which were privatized charter schools.”

There is a rumor in Washington that Rahm wants to be Secretary of Education in the next Democratic Administration. Nothing in his record qualifies him for the job. He failed. Arne Duncan failed. The nation is living  with the consequences of their failed ideas, which were inherited from George W. Bush, Rod Paige, Sandy Kreisler, and Margaret Spellings.

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, NCLB (No Child Left Behind), Privatization, Race to the Top, Testing

Do You Live Near Boston? Come to Hear Eve Ewing Speak at Wellesley College on October 17!

By dianeravitch
October 4, 2019 //
5

If you live anywhere near Wellesley College in Wellesley, Massachusetts, I hope you will join me to hear Eve Ewing speak on October 17 at Jewett Arts Center at 7:30 pm.

She is speaking in an annual lecture series that I established a few years ago to bring some of the most important voices in education today to the campus.

Eve Ewing is one of them.

Ewing is an amazing woman who wrote a fabulous book called Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.

I reviewed the book here.

She was teaching in one of the 49 schools that Rahm Emanuel closed on a single day, an incredibly cruel, arrogant, and heartless act.

She then went on to earn her doctorate and is now a college professor.

The media writes about “failing schools” in Chicago, but Ewing understands that schools are part of a community’s historic identity. Her writing captures the pain that people feel when their identity is torn away from them by  politicians and faceless bureaucrats.

If you can read The New York Times online, you will enjoy this article about Ewing. 

Some excerpts:

Dr. Ewing, 32, can be a hard woman to slow down, keep track of, or sum up. To keep it simple, you could just say she’s a sociologist at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration…

But that would leave out the seemingly million other things she is doing.

In the past year, she has also published an acclaimed book of poetry; collaborated on a play about the poet Gwendolyn Brooks; and co-hosted the Chicago Poetry Block Party, a community festival she helped create. She also sold a middle-grade novel, coming in 2020; signed up as a consulting producer on W. Kamau Bell’s CNN series, “United Shades of America”; and began hosting a new podcast, “Bughouse Square,” inspired by the archives of another Chicago gadfly, Studs Terkel.

And then there’s her gig with Marvel Comics. In August, Dr. Ewing caused minor pandemonium on the internet when she announced that she had been hired to write “Ironheart,” the first solo title featuring its character Riri Williams, black girl genius from Chicago.

It’s tempting to see Dr. Ewing, who holds a doctorate from Harvard, as a real-life, grown-up version of Riri, a prodigy who builds her own Iron Man suit in her M.I.T. dorm room, without the benefit of Tony Stark’s millions….

Her poetry collection, “Electric Arches,” an Afro-futurist exploration of black girlhood, unfolds against the real and fantastical geography of Chicago, and includes plenty of homespun superpower technology. There are flying bikes, freedom-fighting space invaders, and,“The Device,” a machine created by “a hive mind of black nerds” that allows communication with the ancestors. (Publishers Weekly called it “a stunning debut.”)

In “Ghosts in the Schoolyard,” published by the University of Chicago Press, Dr. Ewing uses the more staid tools of social science to dive deep into one of the most contentious episodes in the city’s recent history: the 2013 school closure plan that ultimately resulted in the shuttering of 49 public schools, most of them in African-American neighborhoods.

It’s a scholarly book, and also an unabashedly personal one. It focuses on Bronzeville, the storied African-American neighborhood on the South Side, where Dr. Ewing, as she notes in an impassioned introduction, taught middle school for three years after graduating from the University of Chicago.

She looks at the history of discriminatory housing and education policies that gave rise to intensely segregated, unequal, often overcrowded schools, which then suffered steeply declining enrollments after the public housing towers that once dominated the neighborhood were demolished.

I am excited to meet Eve Ewing. She is one of the heroes of the Resistance in my new book Slaying Goliath.  Because of her book, Rahm Emanuel will be remembered not as a “reformer” but as a disrupter who cruelly destroyed schools, communities, and the lives of children and families. Eve Ewing gets the last word.

Come to Wellesley on October 17 to hear her speak.

You will be glad you did.

 

Categories Chicago, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Racism

Chicago Teachers Union on Mayoral Election

By dianeravitch
April 2, 2019 //
13

 

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.

 
Our militancy is not dictated by who sits on the fifth floor of City Hall

The Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Local 73 will continue to fight for an elected, representative school board and progressive revenue for the schools our students deserve.

CHICAGO, April 2, 2019—The Chicago Teachers Union and Service Employees International Union Local 73 issued the following joint statement tonight regarding the election of Lori Lightfoot as mayor of Chicago:

The most obvious win for our movement is that Chicago will be Rahm-less by May 20, for which we have a movement of educators, parents, workers, community organizers and activists to thank. Elections are about contrast, and at least on the surface, tonight’s results represent a contrast to the last eight years.

Tonight, the city of Chicago elected a new mayor out of a desire for bold and progressive ideas, and a commitment to building a more fair, just and equitable city. Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot has her work cut out for her on day one.

We did not win class size limits for students in kindergarten, first and second grades, TIF distribution to our school communities, or a special education monitor appointed by the state because we asked nicely or behaved politely. We will aggressively bargain, aggressively defend our platform and aggressively organize for social, economic, educational and racial justice in Chicago and Springfield. The Chicago Teachers Union and SEIU Local 73 have fought for fairness alongside our allies for nearly a decade because our city deserves it.

As a movement, we helped defeat the twin privatization forces of Rahm Emanuel and Bruce Rauner. But the millionaires and billionaires who supported them remain, along with astroturf education “deform” groups they fund that continue to support the push-out of Black families, the under-funding and closure of public schools, pension theft, marginalization of democracy and privatization of public services.

There is a significant amount of hope for city government, with checks and balances, that represents the will of this movement. Governance in the Chicago City Council will shift significantly with newly elected movement leaders like Matt Martin, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, Jeanette Taylor and Andre Vasquez, who join progressive champions Sue Garza, Carlos Ramirez Rosa, Maria Hadden and Mike Rodriquez. The progressive agenda is advanced by a powerful community organizing presence that was largely built against the policies of Rahm Emanuel, and is committed to taxing the rich and funding our schools.

The only reason either mayoral candidate embraced this agenda was because of this presence, and these leaders will hold the mayor accountable to her campaign promises. Congratulations to our endorsed winners whose victories represent a repudiation of the Rahm and Rauner agenda, and the vision of independent political organizations like United Working Families.

A Black woman will lead a city with a tragic history of racial strife and segregation. A Black woman will lead the nation’s third-largest school district, whose current leader closed 50 Black and Latinx schools in a single year and fired thousands of experienced Black female educators. Mayor-elect Lightfoot’s leadership must stop the hemorrhage of Black families from our city, prioritize affordable housing and rent control, secure a Community Benefits Agreement for the Obama Center, make the wealthy pay their fair share, and stabilize and fund public services. We expect her appointments to the Chicago Board of Education to be stakeholders—the very people who inhabit communities and neighborhoods that have lost the most under the racist influence of neoliberal school leadership.

And to be clear, we do not reach this moment—this moment—as a city without Chicago Teachers Union President Emerita Karen Lewis.

Mayor-elect Lightfoot’s work begins immediately. Our school communities need $2 billion and the wealthy must pay their fair share of the bill. School communities need justice and equity; an elected, representative school board; fully resourced school communities; Black, Latinx and veteran teachers in classrooms; and full restoration of our collective bargaining rights. Our parks need to be fully funded and staffed so they are safe and clean, no longer subsidized by an over-reliance on part-time workers who are paid poverty wages with little or no benefits, and provide the programs and services our community deserves.

School communities need a nurse and librarian in every building; counselor and social worker staffing levels that meet recommended ratios; special education classroom assistants, teaching assistants and restorative justice coordinators; clean and safe buildings that place our students’ interests above the profits of outside contractors; and 75 sustainable community schools. Our movement will continue to beat this drum, as well as demand adequate special education services and sanctuary for immigrant students.

Rahm and Rauner are gone. Their policies must go as well. We hope Mayor-elect Lightfoot separates herself from the dubious interests that funded her campaign, and governs like the progressive she claims to be by ending the funding of #NoCopAcademy and the Lincoln Yard TIF. We expect her to fight for an immediate $15/hr minimum wage in the city, for real and meaningful criminal justice reform, and for equitable investment in all of Chicago’s communities—especially those that have been habitually overlooked and underfunded.

We will also demand that Mayor-elect Lightfoot use her authority to make sure that Chicago is a city of unions for all, and that everyone has the opportunity to join a union no matter where they work.

If not, she will face immediate pushback. Elections are moments. We are a movement. See you at City Hall on April 9.
Chicago Teachers Union • 1901 W. Carroll Ave. • Chicago, IL 60612 • 312-329-9100
www.ctulocal1.org
for the schools Chicago’s students deserve
Sent via ActionNetwork.org. To update your email address, change your name or address, or to stop receiving emails from Chicago Teachers Union, please click here.

Categories Accountability, Budget Cuts, Chicago, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Funding, Privatization

Chicago: The Election Was “a Complete Repudiation” of Rahm Emanuel

By dianeravitch
March 3, 2019 //
8

 

 

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.””

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Closing schools, Emanuel, Rahm

Steven Singer: Rahm Emanuel Did Not Apologize for the Damage He Did as a Reformer

By dianeravitch
February 12, 2019 //
6

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.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Chicago, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Emanuel, Rahm, Privatization, Testing

Eve L. Ewing Explains the Racist Purpose of School Closings

By dianeravitch
December 20, 2018 //
8

Eve Ewing has a fabulous bio, as author, academic, playwright, poet, and comic book hero.

She is also the author of the recent book about Rahm Emanuel’s historic closing of 50 schools in a single day, called “Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side.” I reviewed it here. It was the first book to my knowledge that tells the story of school closings from the perspective of the students, families, teachers, and communities.

Here she appears on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah.

Speaking of ghosts, she will haunt Rahm Emanuel forever. Her book will be remembered long after he is forgotten.

Categories Chicago, Closing schools, Education Reform, Emanuel, Rahm, Racism
« Older Entries
Newer Entries »