The Emerson Poll: Perception vs. Reality

Crime is once again the hot-button issue here in Chicago and in cities across the country. Yesterday's funeral following the killing of Chicago police officer Ella French has understandably amplified the anger, fears, and frustrations many feel about violent crime. 

At the same time, a poll was released showing crime to be the overwhelmingly top concern of Chicagoans, dwarfing worries about the spiking covid pandemic, the reopening of schools, and every other issue. But let's take a deeper look and see if there's a gap between that perception and reality. 

What's wrong with this statement?

A WGN-TV/Emerson College poll of Chicago residents found that crime is on the rise, with 62% saying there is more crime now in Chicago than there was a year ago. Twenty-four percent (24%) feel that the amount of crime has stayed the same, and 14% feel that there is less crime today.

Well, for one thing, you can't determine whether or not a city's crime rate is going up or down by taking a poll. Polls like Emerson may give us a sense of people's changing perceptions of crime, or the favorability or unfavorability of certain politicians, but those most often depend on how questions are asked, who's being asked, and who's doing the asking. 

Case in point: Chicago crime isn't really on the rise , although it's completely understandable why so many feel that it is, given local media's attention paid to daily crime reports. While crime rates have been falling steadily over the past two decades, homicides so far this year have risen. 

An NBC News analysis of Chicago Police Department data going back 20 years shows that overall, violent crime continued its slow decline during the pandemic. When all categories of violent crime are added together, the total declined by 46 percent over 20 years and held steady between the first half of both 2019 and 2021.

There's some  research showing  that public demand drives coverage of bad news — that people have a “negativity bias.” But I think it's the other way around, with the media driving the bias. 

It's not that I doubt the veracity of the poll itself. I don't. I just think that polling and news groups tend to overstate the significance of their results and blur the distinction between perception and reality. Polls shape and influence perceptions as well as measuring them. That's something we've all come to recognize in the last few national elections. 

According to the Emerson poll, crime, and especially violent crime, is the number-one concern of Chicagoans. 

Respondents were asked what the number one issue facing Chicago today is. A plurality of residents (44%) feel that crime is the number one issue facing the city.... Compared to the WGN-TV/Emerson poll in June, crime has risen six points as a top issue, from 38% to 44%.

What happened in the city in June and July to cause a six-point jump in perception is not clear from WGN's report. I would guess that it's the daily coverage of the recent wave of horrifying carjackings or the terrible rise in summertime gun violence that has put all of us on edge lately. 

While crime dominates popular concern, all other issues were below 12%: Covid-19 (12%), education/schools (8%), jobs (8%), police reform (7%), healthcare (7%), housing (5%), and homelessness (2%). Six percent (6%) of respondents said something else. 

The widening poverty gap isn't on the list of concerns offered in the poll, although homelessness is and ranks at the very bottom. There's no connection made by the pollsters between this widening gap and crime or contextualizing crime in the way questions are asked. There were no questions either, regarding the easy flow of illegal guns into the city.

Many people around the country perceive Chicago as the number-one crime city in America. But the actual numbers paint quite a different picture. Trump repeatedly criticized Chicago, saying it was “worse than Afghanistan.” I myself engaged in similar hyperbole a few years ago, referring to Chicago as "Chiraq" a la Spike Lee, just to make a point. But it turns out that our city hasn't even made the top-30 list when it comes to urban crime rates. 

A recent New York Times quiz revealed some common misperceptions about crime trends, the most widely held of which involved Chicago. Readers were asked to rank Chicago nationally in murder rate. The options were first, third, fifth, or seventh. Most picked “first,” and only 8 percent chose the right answer (seventh).

I was also a little surprised to learn that even with Chicago students about to return to school in a matter of days in the midst of a surging pandemic, only 8% had education/schools at the top of their list of concerns. In fact, the surging pandemic only made the top of the concern list for 12% of Chicagoans. Is that because Chicago is doing so much better than other big cities in containment? I don't have an answer on that one.

Another surprising (to me) result showed a majority (70%) of respondents having at least a somewhat positive opinion of the Chicago Police Department, while 23% have a somewhat or very negative opinion, and 7% are unsure. 

I'm only surprised at how that perception has changed since its low point, following the police murders of Laquan McDonald in 2014. The fallout from that killing and the political cover-up that following drove then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel from office. Polls at the time showed: "nearly two-thirds of African-American voters in the city said they didn’t trust him, and half of all likely voters thought the mayor should resign. The Emerson poll shows concerns about police reform now dropping into single-digit. 

Not surprising was a strong majority (70%) indicating support for a reinstatement of an indoor mask mandate in Chicago, with 21% opposed and 9% unsure. Such a mandate goes into effect citywide, tomorrow. 

Finally, the poll shows that Chicagoans appear pretty evenly split on Mayor Lightfoot's performance so far, with 46% disapproval and 43% approval. While her approval ratings are down about 20% from a year ago, I'm surprised that they're as high as they are, given the divisive nature of current politics, extremely negative City Hall press coverage, and an unrelenting hate campaign organized by both FOP and CTU leaders who have never gotten past Lightfoot's defeat of their candidate in the last election. 

On Chicago's 183rd birthday, I'm early voting

Happy birthday, Chicago. Sanctuary city of immigrants. Heartbeat of anti-Trump resistance. Definitely a union town with a black, gay, woman mayor. Look how far you've come in 183 years. See how far you have to go.

On my way to early vote this morning. The choice for me is pretty simple. Buttigieg out. Klobuchar out. Bloomberg out. Warren will likely be out before you read this post. My only choice left is between the two old white guys, Biden and Sanders.

One voted for the war in Iraq, supported the so-called "Race to the Top" in education, and authored the crime bill that paved the way for the world's worst mass incarceration.

The other, the leading progressive politician of our time. Author of a bill that requires congressional approval of acts of war. The leader in the fight for Medicare-for-all and tuition-free, K-16 public education. Opponent of school privatization. Supported by more than 100 African-American scholars, writers, and educators.

JUST IN: more than 100 Black Scholars, Writers, and Educators including @BarbaraRansby, @murchnik, @marclamonthill, Robin DG Kelley + have just announced their support of the movement to elect @BernieSanders.

Read the POWERFUL statement HERE: pic.twitter.com/WY8gh1lQvl

— phillip agnew (@iPhilSomething) February 29, 2020

All this and more will make my vote for Bernie Sanders an easy one.

My other easy vote will be for State's Attorney Kim Foxx who has turned IL from being the false-conviction capital of the U.S. into its opposite.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

We are the people,” Gearah Goldstein said as she opened Sunday’s program in Chicago. “As we stand here together, we must hold love and light in our hearts because those are the forces that will extinguish the darkness and hate that has been called up in our country and around the world.”

Rev. Michael Pfleger, of St. Sabina Church

"When we stand up and when we unite together across all faith lines and race lines, when we do that, we will win.” -- Sun-Times

Progressive Pittsburgh Jewish leaders to Trump: 'Stay away!'

"In our neighbors, Americans, and people worldwide who have reached out to give our community strength, there we find the image of God," the authors write. "While we cannot speak for all Pittsburghers, or even all Jewish Pittsburghers, we know we speak for a diverse and unified group when we say: President Trump, you are not welcome in Pittsburgh until you commit yourself to compassionate, democratic policies that recognize the dignity of all of us." -- You can read the full letter here.

David Simon, creator of "The Wire" to Israeli Minister

"Go home. [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu’s interventions in US politics aided in the election of Donald Trump and his raw and relentless validation of white nationalism and fascism. The American Jewish community is now bleeding at the hands of the Israeli prime minister. And many of us know it." -- Haaretz

President Donald Trump this morning...

 ...attacked the “fake news media” as the “true enemy of the people” following a week of terror and violence in the United States. Five days after a pipe bomb was sent to CNN, a network frequently bashed by the president, Trump tweeted that “inaccurate” reporting is partially to blame for the “great anger in our country.” -- Huffington

Former President Jimmy Carter to Brian Kemp

In Georgia’s upcoming gubernatorial election, popular confidence is threatened not only by the undeniable racial discrimination of the past and the serious questions that the federal courts have raised about the security of Georgia’s voting machines, but also because you are now overseeing the election in which you are a candidate. -- AP

The new Brazilian president's pledge to wreck the Amazon is a tragic reminder that environmentalists need to win a fight forever, while the other side only needs to win it once.

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) October 29, 2018

Chicago proud: The Resistance started here

Anti-Trump protest at UIC, March 2016. 

Omarosa's tell-all book makes reference to the March 2016 anti-Trump protest which shut down his campaign rally and sent DT scurrying out of town, not to return again. The protest “left a deep scar”, writes Omarosa Manigault Newman. 

According to the Sun-Times:

“There was a lot of blame to go around for the failure of the Chicago event,” she writes. “We blamed the protesters. We blamed law enforcement for not properly managing the situation. We blamed Chicago and its mayor, Obama acolyte Rahm Emanuel, for not supplying adequate security resources. We blamed everything and everyone, except for Donald Trump.”

“When I look back and try to pinpoint the moment when, in my own heart, I adopted an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mind-set, it was that night in Chicago in March 2016. We all had a bunker mentality . . . I never stopped to ask myself what all this conflict meant for the future of the country. If I acknowledged my role in what was happening, I would have had to come to terms with nearly thirteen years of suppressed doubts and concerns about Donald Trump, and I was simply incapable of doing that at that point.”

Actually, the UIC rally was relatively peaceful (a few scuffles broke out inside the Arena as they always do at Trump rallies). Some 25,000 people gathered peacefully outside the Pavillion immediately following the reports that Trump had slipped into town. Seeing that the few hundred of his supporters would be badly outnumbered by the huge anti-Trump crowd, he called off the rally and split town, tail between his legs.

Writes Omarosa:

“The night of the Chicago rally left a deep scar on my consciousness, and I’d never even reached the city. From my place in the figurative bunker, I came out aggressively to support candidate Trump and believed the argument that the protesters were at fault.”

While the protest, organized by a few student groups, was a great success, it happened despite dire warnings of consequenses from a few frightened Democrats and some in the media.

The Tribune's Ron Grossman, exaggerated the level of violence and implored us to "halt the demonstrations", warning Trump would "profit" from "images of punching and cursing partisans" on the evening news. According to Grossman, "It doesn't matter whose cause is just and whose is not."

But it does indeed matter and there was no "profit" for Trump, writes Omarosa.

 In the aftermath of the botched rally, she says she was instructed to stick to the campaign strategy of “whataboutism” while making the rounds on cable news, pivoting from questions about provoking conflict to attacking Hillary Clinton over the FBI investigation into her emails.

“It was the only thing we had. At that point, we lacked a platform, plans, big ideas about foreign or domestic policy. All we had was Trump’s bluster, the MAGA slogan, and Hillary’s emails.”

Grossman went on to attack, not only the UIC protest, but protest movements in general, including Black Lives Matter and the anti-Vietnam War protests of the '60.

I think it's fair to say that today's Resistance movement against Trumpism was born that day in Chicago. City after city, followed suit right up through the inauguration, and Women's March and today, make it virtually impossible for Trump to travel anywhere outside of his red base areas.

The same hold true for his neo-fascist and white-supremacist supporters.

Let's keep marching people. It won't fall by itself.

Testing the limits in Bizarro World

Students didn't suddenly get less intelligent. They were not doing as well in the past as everyone was led to believe. The state had dumbed down the tests and lowered cut scores to avoid sanctions from the federal No Child Left Behind Act. -- Tribune editorial. 

In the Bizarro World that is Chicago's corporate school reform, worse is better. If students score too high on standardized tests, they simply re-norm the tests to push scores downward, causing angry parents and students lots of grief and fear while elating the corporate reformers and school privateers over at the Civic Committee. Then, faced with the data showing that less than half our kids scoring at or above grade level (not the 75% they were claiming a year ago), they turn around and declare how awed they are by the "steady progress" being made (despite that nasty, disruptive teachers strike).

Says the Trib:

The results will be ugly. Thousands of students statewide who were rated as meeting standards in 2012 will not make the cut in 2013. Teachers, principals and ISBE officials are bracing for a torrent of angry, confused and disappointed parents. 

But says Rahm, "these are indicators of where progress is being made on the importance of an education of our children … You want a highly-educated, highly-skilled work force and that’s gonna happen at schools."  Gonna, indeed.

Heiress Robin Steans, who heads the state education policy group Advance Illinois (authors of SB7), but who has no business (no pun intended) being around public schools, says she's “pleasantly surprised” with the results which she called a more honest assessment of children’s progress.

I'm so glad m'lady approves. So does BBB.

“I actually believe this is much better for our children, in the long run it’s going to help our children to be far more successful in getting ready for college,” schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett said of the apparent decrease on a conference call Tuesday.

Steans is "pleasantly surprised"

Ah yes, everything they do is "for our children." That includes closing schools throughout the black community (talk about disruptions) and sending tens of thousands of them across dangerous territory to receiving schools that will become severely overcrowded with swelling class sizes.

Now we learn that according to the latest "revised" test results, that several of the closing schools are making amazing progress, while their receiving schools are sinking like stones.

Of the 48 closing, 23 improved, 23 declined, and one remained the same. The 48th is a high school program whose students don’t take the ISAT.

Some of the biggest gains among the closing schools happened at Bethune Elementary School, which leaped to 38.4 percent meeting or exceeding from an adjusted 22.4 percent. 

A few closed schools outpaced their receiving schools, including Morgan Elementary with 34.9 percent meeting or exceeding, compared with 27.9 percent at Ryder. Of the schools chosen to receive those children, 22 increased their scores, 18 decreased and the rest were not available.

Chopin Elementary dropped to 67.4 percent meeting and exceeding from an adjusted 80.9 percent, while students it will take in from Lafayette Elementary improved a bit to 35 percent meeting or exceeding from an adjusted 33.8 percent. And Manierre, which was spared from closing at the last minute, increased to 30 percent while its intended receiving school, Jenner, dropped to 16.6 percent. -- Sun-Times

Remember CEO Byrd-Bennett promising to send "every" student from closing schools to "a school that is academically better:? I do.

Then there's the matter of teacher evaluations which will soon be based disproportionately on student test scores, and will drive teacher "merit" pay.

We can only wait until next year when the negative effects of massive teacher layoffs, overcrowding, increased school violence, and a longer school year with sweltering class rooms come into play. Ah but don't worry. When it becomes politically expedient, manipulating test score data is a relatively simple matter. Scores can be normed up or down as easily and adjusting a thermostat.

Remember how Arne Duncan was able to ride the Chicago "miracle" all the way to the top of the D.O.E.? I do.

But actually, outside the Bizarro World of corporate-style school reform, none of these scores mean a damn thing with regard to what children are actually learning. From the wildest leaps at Bethune to the sudden dips at Chopin, the ups and downs on test scores have little or nothing to do with anything new or different going on in classrooms and lots to do with what's going on outside, in the lives of children and their families.

'63 School Boycott revisited

The Hyde Park Union Church was packed last night for the remembrance of the historic 1963 Chicago school boycott. It was the kick-off of this weekend's Free Minds, Free People national conference.

We got a sneak peek at a new Kartemquin film about the boycott (you can watch it here). The highlight of the evening was re-enactment by Civil Rights Opera Project, of the '63 community meeting leading up to the boycott, complete with a SNCC activist up from Mississippi, comedian Dick Gregory, Bill Berry, Daley machine man Bill Dawson, and others. I was hoping for a character portraying  school segregationist villan, Supt. Benjamin Willis, infamous for his notorious Willis Wagons.

Follow-up panelists included Civil Rights Movement veterans Timuel Black and Fannie Rushing.

Take-aways

Today's movement to save our public schools, stop the mass school closings targeted at the city's black community, and against school re-segregation connected with charter expansion and privatization, is part of the legacy of the '63 boycott movement.

The '63 boycott linked the movement in Chicago (most segregated city) with the struggles in Alabama and Mississippi. It shook the very foundations of the Daley machine and institutionalized school segregation.

Missing from last night's program was any mention about what's going on today in Chicago, ie. Rahm Emanuel, school closings, etc...

The boycott strategy was effective then. Could it be again when school opens in the fall? You bet.

On the removal of Principal Zoila Garcia from Whittier Dual Language School

Parents, teachers, and community members meet to protest the removal Principal Garcia. (Photo: Un-Official Whittier Dual Language School)

To the extended Whittier Dual Language School Family

Whittier Dual Language School, under the direction of Zoila Garcia, was visited before she was abruptly removed by PLV Network Chief Steve Zrike, with no input from the LSC or Whittier School Community, by the one of the national authorities on Dual Language, The Dual Language Education of New Mexico, who participated in an all day instructional round observation in nine classrooms. The DLeNM is an organization that knows more about dual language education than anyone in CPS.

In the report, they wrote the following of our principal, Ms. Zoila Garcia:

"School principal, Zoila Garcia, possesses an exemplary understanding of dual language instruction and programming that she has translated into consistently high quality practices amongst her teaching staff. Principal Garcia and her staff were receptive to the observations and recommended next steps from the instructional rounds team, and had already begun discussing their ideas for the implementation of next steps before the debrief had ended." DLeMN

It begs the question on why Dr. Steve Zrike, pulled the principal from her job at this moment!!! Strange that her contract was renewed only the summer before and now she is gone.

Dr. Zrike now handles the Whittier Dual Language School budget. What surprises does he have in store for our school.

You can't run a Dual Language program by placing someone with no real operational knowledge of Dual Language and rebuilding a program by taking pages from different books on dual language. It doesn't work like that in education. Running a dual language school is about time on task, living and breathing it. Dual Language has to be done right, not light!

Our Dual Language program runs in spite of the lack of resources provided by CPS. Dual Language programs are not just for the more affluent neighborhoods, but for all children. We ask that the larger extended family of Whittier Dual Language School, take time to call to defend our program.

Call CPS CEO Barbara Bird Bennett and ask her to return Ms. Zoila Garcia to Whittier School and support our dual language program. (773) 553-1500

Call CPS Chief of all Networks and tell Dennis Little to return Ms. Zoila Garcia to Whittier School and support our dual language program. 773 553 3430

Cal Dr. Stephen Zrike Jr. and ask him to return Ms. Zoila Garcia to Whittier School, support our dual language program and stop trying to manipulate our LSC.

Chief of Elementary Schools Pilsen-Little Village Network
773 5351900

For more go to The Un-Official Whittier Dual Language School at FB

Remembering Metro, the school without walls

Progressive educators, alternative and small-schoolers will want to download a copy of Metro: The Chicago Public High School for Metropolitan Studies, 1970-1991. 

Metro was fondly referred to as “the school without walls,” and the city was its classroom. Derived from the radical concept that students should take responsibility for their own education and that urban institutions and businesses represented countless and varied opportunities for educational enrichment, the Chicago Public High School for Metropolitan Study, or “Metro,” was unique in the CPS system and the school was under fire from the Chicago Board of Education almost as soon as classes began in 1970. As I recall, Metro was ultimately closed and absorbed into Crane High School in 1991, which is now being closed and turned into a charter schools. And so it goes in Chicago's version of school reform.

The late, great Chicago educator, researchers and schools activist, Don Moore, then a Harvard doc student, was part of the Metro planning team.

Paula Baron, one of Metro’s history teachers, brings the school’s story to life in 86 pages of essays by Metro students, parents, teachers, and the school’s founders and  founding principal, Nate Blackman. Illustrated with photos and ephemera, including a wonderful picture of Studs Terkel speaking at 1975 graduation,  the book evokes the spirit of a school that allowed teachers to use their creativity to find ways to link academics with practical experience, and to bring students into the lives and workplaces of professionals in an array of fields.

It's available as a print-on-demand book at www.lulu.com on Amazon, or as a free PDF download at www.metrohschicago.com.  For more information or to speak with the editor, you can contact Paula Baron directly at plbaron@rcn.com (773-907-2203).

"Thank God Obama didn't listen to me!" --Rahm

While kids in Chicago continue to die at two-to-three times the rate of troops in Afghanistan, the mayor and his corporate patrons are worried that the nearly 40% rise in killings this year is grabbing headlines and that  the body count may be bad for business.

 We need the mayor, who is the city's best spokesperson, to be public in an aggressive way. He should be prepared to call convention groups and reassure them of everything that is going on. The mayor needs to be public in saying we don't have a crime problem. The real danger isn't to tourists. The real danger is a convention group that gets panicked and we lose millions. -- Laurence Geller, president and CEO of Chicago-based Strategic Hotels & Resorts Inc.

Rahm jumped on his assignment and used the shooting death of 7-year-old Heaven Sutton as a his chance proclaim that there is no crime problem here.

"This is not about crime. This is about values," shouted the mayor as if talking to an imagined attentive group of gang-bangers. He urged them to, "take your gang conflict away from a 7-year-old. Who raised you?"

Good job Rahm. No, this is not a "crime problem." It's about "culture." Yeah, that's the ticket. Not a word of course, about school closings, easy access to guns and drugs, issues of poverty and youth joblessness, all of which are major contributing factors to the alarming jump in youth violence.

But that's not Rahm's quote of the day. This is: 

“Thank God for the rest of the country he didn’t listen to me.”

He was referring of course to Supreme Court decision which rule Obama's healthcare bill constitutional. White House Chief of Staff Emanuel was the main one trying to kill the initiative, calling it a political loser. A better quote might have been: "Too bad he listened to me on other stuff -- like, Guantanamo trials, the Dream Act and the drone war in Afghanistan."

While dozens of more Chicago teachers at Clemente High School continue to get pink slips, Rahm is dishing out millions in taxpayer money to his friends who own the Cubs and Bulls. His patrons include Democrats and Republicans and even far-right-wing Obama haters like the Ricketts family and school privatizers like Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel Investment GroupHis Infrastructure Trust scheme will also fill their coffers. To keep schools afloat, Rahm is taxing property owners to the max for the second year in a row making schools even more reliant on this inequitable form of school funding.

Finally, speaking of culture, it may well be that a new prison may have to be built exclusively to hold convicted local machine politicians.  I'm thinking, maybe they can use the closed Tamms super-max prison.

Anatomy of a big high school

Chicago's great architectural critic Lee Bey writes for WBEZ public radio, about his alma mater, Chicago Vocational High School ("School of architecture: A look at sprawling Chicago Vocational.") 

The massive, 72-year-old school, located at 2100 E. 87th St., is not only the city's second largest high school building (only Lane Tech is bigger), but is Chicago's best large-scale example of Art Moderne architecture. The 27-acre school, formerly known as Chicago Vocational High School, was built for $3.5 million, with 45 percent of the cash coming from the federal Public Works Administration.

CVS was the first high school that joined the Small Schools Workshop back in the early 1990s. With nearly 4,000 students at that time, teachers and administrators were looking for ways to break through big-school anonymity, create a safer learning environment, and break down the wall between academic and vocational learning embeded in the old voc-ed model. After some initial successes, the project was lost to the district's shift to a test-prep regimen under Paul Vallas' regime.

Chicago Vocational closes and  re-opens in the fall as one of the city's five STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) academies. This is the latest in a long line of top-down, turn-around magic bullets. The hope, says Bey,  is that these six-year schools, with a curriculum and program developed by IBM, Cisco, Microsoft, Motorola Solutions and Verizon, will return the school to its original mission of producing graduates for the workforce. The design may have changed but the notion of public school as simply job training is anathema to sound ed policy.  But I do like the 6-12 concept, the small academy idea which lets kids choose based on their interests. I just think schools are for educating the whole child, not just the voc side.

Writes Bey, 

Chicago Vocational's original concept was revolutionary. The school system figured out the world of the 1940s and beyond would need more machinists, auto mechanics, electricians, architectural draftsmen, food service experts, sheet metal workers, complex printing machine operators–and more–so they built a school to fill the need. The school was built for 6,000 students, all male, originally, who would graduate with certificates proving they were work-ready.

 

Building a bridge between teachers and parents

On last night's panel at DePaul were (right to left in photo) Monica Espinoza and Joanna Brown from Logan Square Neighborhood Association, Lynn Morton from Community Organizing and Family Issues, Julie Woestehoff from PURE, Wendy Kattan from Raise Your Hand, and Latrice Watkins, LSC chair of Piccolo Elementary, who led the Occupy Piccolo protest earlier this year (Cecile Carrol from Blocks Together arrived after this pic was taken).

Catalyst reports a growing connection being built between the Chicago Teachers Union and local parent groups. 

In recent weeks, teachers at dozens of schools have made efforts to reach out to parents about issues ranging from the longer school day and school funding to class sizes to teacher pay. The latest efforts represent a new target for outreach, as the Chicago Teachers Union has long collaborated with the city’s grassroots parent groups. Julie Woestehoff, the director of Parents United for Responsible Education, noted that her group was founded by parents who wanted to support the last teachers’ strike, in 1987, and believed that “politicians and bureaucrats weren’t doing their job.” Woestehoff spoke at a panel held for DePaul University teacher candidates on Wednesday.

See more on last night's panel at DePaul on PURE's blog.
Thanks to DePaul Colleague Diane Horwitz who organized the event. 

Student killed at privatized CPS school

Chris Wormley

Students at a therapeutic day school on Chicago's far south side have returned to class, one day after one of their classmates, Chris Wormley, 17, was stabbed to death in an attack in the school's entryway.  Another student who intervened and tried to stop the attack, was also stabbed and is expected to recover.

Questions are now being raised about conditions in an around the school, AMI Kids Infinity High School, formerly a Chicago public school, Las Casas Occupational High School, which was ordered closed in 2009, despite community protests. The school was then handed over to a private, Florida-based company, AMI Kids which operates a chain of 56 facilities across the nation.

Family members say that Wormley had characterized the school as an unsafe place. “He used to always tell me he thought threatened at the school,” Wormley’s mother, Charmayne Prince, told CBS 2’s Mike Parker. “He didn’t want to be there.”

More to come on this. 

Looking back to 2001: Death of the Small Schools Movement

"There were two strategies going on at the same time which were diametrically opposed to each other." -- Bill Gerstein

A 2004 article by Beandrea Davis, in the Philadelphia Public School Notebook, tracked the beginning of the end of the small schools movement to the Paul Vallas era in Chicago, circa 1995-2001. By 2004, this promising reform movement, led by teachers with support among parents and community activists, had met its match -- the so-called accountability wave of top-down, test-and-punish, mayor-controlled corporate "reform."

Before he was fired by Mayor Daley, Vallas had succeeded in replacing teacher-led, highly-autonomous small schools with privately managed charter schools and school re-design with school closings. It was a trend he would take to scale as CEO of Philadelphia Public Schools and later as school boss in post-Katrina New Orleans.

Vallas

Davis quotes Vallas during a 2004 press briefing: "I really see charters as the way to create more small schools."  Vallas pointed out that he has more leeway to expand charter school options in Philadelphia than he did in Chicago.

Vallas's June 1995 appointment as CEO happened as the Chicago small autonomous schools movement, which emerged in the early 1990s, was starting to take off. Wanting to transform the city's large, impersonal, and often low-performing high schools by restructuring them into small, autonomous, community-centered schools, an alliance of educators, organizers, parents, and community members joined together... CPS insiders as well as outside partners with the district agree that conflict did arise between the Vallas administration's strong emphasis on improving student test scores in the short run and some advocates' efforts to promote small schools as a long-term school improvement strategy.

The Notebook article makes it clear that the early small schools and smaller learning communities were never envisioned as a panacea for "failing schools" the way that charter schools were later hyped. But rather as a teacher-led reform that could improve school climate, support teacher collaboration and professional development, and create better conditions for personalization and a sense of school community.

The story of the rise and fall of the modern small schools movement was developed more fully in  "Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society" by Michael and Susan Klonsky (Taylor & Francis, 2008).

Who will turnaround the turnarounds?

"We note with continued dismay that Chicago's unelected school board members continue (to) drain millions of public dollars from regular neighborhood schools while they instead invest in charters, private-sector school models which have been shown to educate students no better." -- Chicago Teachers Union

Last summer, we learned that L.A.'s mayor-run and privately-operated turnaround/charter schools were a miserable failure,  even when compared to struggling regular district-operated public schools. Similar results are now being reported in other urban districts where contract-hungry corporate reformers are imposing top-down turnaround solutions to complex problems.

Now the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research reports that, after four years, “turned around" high schools in Chicago have failed to outperform the city's similar struggling high schools. The report studied 36 schools that adopted one of four models required for federal funding under Race To The Top  — replacing principals, replacing staff through either district-led or AUSL-managed turnarounds and replacing under-performing neighborhood schools with charters, and then compared them to the worst schools in the district that underwent no change, seeing how far they deviated from district averages.

Elementary schools being run by politically-connected AUSL, showed some statistical gains. But only with greater resources. Even with those resources there is no evidence that these initial bumps can be sustained. the pattern has been for those test-score gains to flatten out over time. But at the high school level, the report concluded that CPS' efforts — overhauling school staff or closing schools and then opening charters in their place — "had little effect."

The Sun-Times reports that CPS bureaucrats were quick to seize on the small bump in elementary scores to tout AUSL, which ran 12 of 36 schools studied and, if approved, will oversee six more.

“I would say the report shows there’s promising and encouraging data about our turnaround models in particular and about AUSL as an example,’’ said CPS Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso.

Of course Donoso, like other CPS officials who now serve only at the pleasure of the mayor and spin things accordingly, can say what she wants. But the spin is politically, not educationally driven. Clout-heavy AUSL has from the start, benefited from backing from the Civic Committee, former mayor Daley, current mayor Rahm Emanuel and Sec. of Ed Arne Duncan. Emanuel even selected a former AUSL top executive to oversee CPS' finances and named AUSL's previous board chairman, David Vitale, as president of CPS' Board of Education.

Donoso should at least mention that in elementary schools, the AUSL model comes with $300,000 in one time start-up costs and $141,000 for an assistant principal. One can only imagine what comparative outcomes might have looked like if struggling neighborhood schools got that kind of support.

Actually, for all the public attention and extra political and financial support, AUSL's results have been mixed; some students have made  progress, but as a group they still lag well behind district averages ... with many ending up on par or even below comparable neighborhood schools. According to the Tribune, AUSL has also been accused of "kicking out lower-performing students in the turnaround process to enhance academic gains."

Yesterday, the Chicago Teachers Union responded by announcing it planned to file a lawsuit seeking an injunction to prevent the Feb. 22 school board vote to give AUSL even more schools to operate.

What a night! The People Speak

Lupe Fiasco performed last night at The People Speak [M.Klonsky pic]

Packed house went wild last nigh at Metro in Chicago for The People Speak. Opened with Matt Damon reading Howard Zinn's "The Problem With Civil Obedience", Malcolm London doing Fred Hampton. Lupe Fiasco, Idris Goodwin, Avery Young (an amazing version of Nina Simone's "Mississippi Goddam"), Angela Jackson, She'Kira McKnight, Rick Kogan, Rami Nashashibi doing a brilliant reading of Dr. King's "Where do we go from here" (1967), Kevin Coval, doing Nelson Algren, much more... Take this on the road please.

Rail against the machine

Jose More pic

Community protesters drowned out the voice of CPS schools boss Jean-Claude Brizard yesterday, as he was about to announce the closing of more schools, turning them over to private charter school management companies.  “You have failed…You have produced chaos…You should be fired” they chanted. When they paused, billionaire board president David Vitale said he hoped they had “gotten it out of their system.”

They hadn't. 

According to CNC reporter, Rebecca Vivea, the protest marked the first time Occupy Chicago has been directly involved in a demonstration against CPS, though the group has been closely aligned with the CTU for other protests. Ashley Bohrer, an Occupy Chicago activist and graduate student at DePaul University, spoke against charter schools at the meeting and what she called the privatization of public services. 

“The goal of this action was not to shut down the Board of Education meeting,” Bohrer said. “When they walked out of the meeting, they made it very clear that they are not interested in an open democratic discussion about the future of social services in this city.”  -- Chicago News Co-op

The board unanimously approved 12 new charter schools at the end of the meeting.

More video of today's battle in Chicago to save our schools

TWEETS FROM INSIDE TODAY'S CPS BOARD MEETING

lindalutton 

Protesters: ”these are our children, not yours” ”reject cps failed reforms”

cncschools Chicago News Coop 

Now shouting "who's meeting? our meeting!'

 @cncschools: Audience interupts Brizard, shouts "Mic check!" & procedes with loud chant. "These are our children not corporate products."

@cncschools: Chants start again after Brizard tries to begin presentation again. #SOSChicago
 

@CatalystChicago: Vitale says I hope they have gotten it out of their system. #SOSChicago

 CatalystChicago Catalyst Chicago Mag

People now being forcably removed from building.

cncschools Chicago News Coop

Each time one gets escorted out a new one starts. yfrog.com/hsnjjyvj 

lindalutton Linda Lutton

Mics cut board leaves

In Chicago: 'A fight for the soul of public education'

Carrying signs and bullhorns, several hundred parents and teachers gathered outside Chicago Public Schools headquarters Tuesday night to rally against the proposed closures, consolidations, and phase outs of 17 schools in low-income, African-American and Latino communities. About 40 people spent the night in the wind and rain to be first in line for a board meeting that will decide the schools' fate. Though rain reduced their numbers, their message in support of the schools did not waver.  

"This is a huge fight for the soul of public education," said CTU president Karen Lewis.

The real Chicago "miracle" -- Arne Duncan still has a job

The only miracle emerging from the past decade of Chicago's corporate-style school reform is that former CEO and current Sec. of Education Arne Duncan hasn't resigned from either posts out of sheer embarrassment.

The latest results from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) once again put Chicago near the bottom compared to other large urban districts with similar demographics and concentrations of poverty (85% of CPS students live in poverty). Significantly, the biggest drops in reading scores came during Arne Duncan's time as CEO when the media was spinning the myth of a Chicago "turnaround miracle."

A new report on the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress taken by 21 big-city districts was the second analysis in less than a month to indicate that, despite more than a decade of massive investments in corporate-style reform, and despite a heavy administrative emphasis on test-prep and big push on  reading skills,  Chicago’s elementary-grade reading performance has barely budged for years. The Sun-Times reports that the so-called "achievement gap"  between white students and black and Latino students— showed no real shrinkage since at least 2003 in fourth- and eighth-grade math and reading. In fourth-grade reading,

Most interesting -- Chicago’s NAEP reading doldrums occurred during a huge reading push ordered by former Mayor Daley and carried out by then-Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan, now the nation’s Education Secretary.

The Sun-Times reports however, that "real progress didn’t show up until 2011 — after Ron Huberman took over the Chicago Schools CEO helm in 2009 and shifted the district from Duncan’s emphasis on reading coaches to a new emphasis on data analysis."

I suppose the lesson here is that the real key to progress in school reform is manipulating and spinning data reports (Huberman's specialty) rather than the imposition of programmatic reform. Duncan's success came after he and his media team fabricated the myth of a Chicago turnaround "miracle" which later formed the basis for federal education policy, including Race To The Top.

Peter Cunningham, Duncan's media guy, tells the S-T: 

“The information we had [from state achievement tests] showed [CPS] was showing great success... We weren’t gaming the numbers."

My experience tells me that whenever the spinners claim that they aren't gaming the numbers -- they're gaming the numbers."  If Cunningham has some previously unrevealed evidence of great progress, perhaps he wouldn't mind sharing it with us. Until then, we'll go with the NAEP results.

Yo-yo Ma brings "Arts strike" to Telpochcalli

Telpochcalli is a small neighborhood public school on Chicago's southwest side. It was started by teachers as part of the early small schools movement. The school's mission focuses on arts integration and bi-lingual literacy. In this morning's Trib, Mark Caro writes:

What Yo-Yo Ma and friends brought to [Telpochcalli] Monday was dubbed an "arts strike," which is fitting because that particular iron is hot. Ma, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's creative consultant, and Damian Woetzel, a ballet star/director/producer who serves with the virtuoso cellist on President Barack Obama's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, gathered a diverse collection of performing artists at the Telpochcalli Elementary School in the predominantly Mexican-American Little Village neighborhood to illustrate the benefits of arts-based education programs. Don't miss the great video. 

According to Caro, after the program Ma was enthusiastic about Telpochcalli.

"The school is spreading a fabulous message," he said, noting that teaching two languages helps students see the world from multiple perspectives. "Plus you add the senses, whether it's music, it's dance, collaboration — all these things are the ingredients that stimulate the imagination. Imagination and empathy are the key ingredients to creating an innovative workforce, a student population that is absolutely curious and passionate about learning, and this school is doing it the right way."

"This is the type of thing that could really make a difference in people's lives," he said, "not just enriching but giving the fundamental values of what builds a great society."