15 years later, CPS reclaims Duncan's AUSL 'turnaround schools'.

Piccolo parents protest the takeover of their school by AUSL in 2012. (Katie Osgood pic) 

"Yet for all the public attention, AUSL's results have been mixed; many students have made considerable progress, but as a group they still lag well behind district averages ... with many ending up on par or even below comparable neighborhood schools." -- Chicago Tribune, 2/6/2012

Yesterday, CPS announced that it was reclaiming the so-called "turnaround schools" which were handed over to the private management and teacher training company, the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) in 2006. 

All I can say about this break from Arne Duncan's privatization "reforms" carried out under the banner of Renaissance 2010 and then rebranded as Race to the Top during his term as Sec. of Education, is -- it's about time. 

Lacking any research base and built on the false premise that private companies, hedge funders, and power philanthropists could best operate public institutions, AUSL's school takeover turned out to be an expensive and dismal flop.

AUSL was founded and run by Chicago venture capitalist Martin Koldyke, who used his connections and big campaign donations to become a powerhouse in the school turnaround business. Koldyke, a golf buddy of then-Mayor Daley, decided he could save the public school system by running it like a business. Koldyke's company, Frontenac, had been a big investor in for-profit colleges like DeVry and Rasmussen College.

Despite AUSL schools ranking at or near the bottom of the system, the company benefited from backing from Daley, and then from Rahm Emanuel. Rahm even selected a former AUSL top executive to oversee CPS' finances and named AUSL's previous board chairman, David Vitale, as president of the CPS Board of Education. With virtual control of the board and the central office, Koldyke was assured of a stable funding pipeline to his then 19 turnaround schools, even in the midst of a budget crisis when neighborhood schools were being starved of operating cash.

But as I pointed out here in 2012, 

 Chicago's turnarounds failed to meet even their own criteria of success and they paled in comparison to a large group of neighborhood schools being run more democratically with popularly-elected Local School Councils. More than 60 elementary-level high-poverty schools that have made school-based democracy a reality, out-achieved the top Turnaround School.

I still remember Duncan speaking to Dodge Elementary parents who were angry over his handing their school over to AUSL, without any input from the community, and promising them that they would be thrilled with his new Renaissance alternatives. 

WBEZ's Becky Vevea wrote at the time:

In 2008, Dodge was where then president-elect Barack Obama announced Duncan as his pick for Secretary of Education.

“He’s shut down failing schools and replaced their entire staffs, even when it was unpopular,” Obama said at the time. “This school right here, Dodge Renaissance Academy, is a perfect example. Since this school was revamped and reopened in 2003, the number of students meeting state standards has more than tripled.”

But fast forward another five years, turnarounds Dodge and Williams were closing their doors after being labeled as low-performing schools. And by 2013, CPS  had closed many of the schools Duncan had created.

Four years after it was opened CPS pulled the plug on “turnaround” school, Bethune Elementary. The Bethune staff had all been fired when AUSL took over. Duncan claimed that a "clean slate" would lead to better schools. He would go on to push that same baseless claim at the D.O.E., withholding federal funds from school districts unless they closed schools and fired teachers in mass.

Good move, CPS and Mayor Lightfoot in bringing these 31 schools back home to CPS and in taking steps to put the public back in public schooling. There's still a long way to go on that one.

We're re-imagining post-corona schools. So are they.

Using federal school rescue funds to feed private school operators.

I find myself wishing for a storm in Chicago — an unpredictable, haughty, devastating swirl of fury. A dramatic levee break. Geysers bursting through manhole covers. A sleeping city, forced onto the rooftops. " -- Kristen McQueary, Chicago Tribune Editorial Board

Rethinking corona-era schooling seems to be the order of the day for progressives and community educators. But rest assured, we're not the only ones doing the rethinking. Fifteen years ago, the shock & awe that came with Hurricane Katrina, left the door open for conservative ideologues like Friedman, along with the privateers and charter hustlers to reimagine the Gulf Coast disaster not as a crisis, but as an opportunity for privatization and profit.

I remember Obama's Secretary of Education Arne Duncan calling Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans,” because it gave the city a chance to bust the teachers union, fire the predominantly-black teaching force, and replace every public school with a privately-run charter.

Back home in Chicago, the Tribune's Kristen McQueary wished for a similar disaster to strike our city so it might follow the New Orleans example.

It looks like she finally got her wish.

Now, as educators, parents, students, and local officials ponder the impending reopening of schools, another battle is brewing between the defenders of public space and decision-making and the same group of corporate "reformers", now headed by the likes of Trump's ed secretary Betsy DeVos.

Case in point -- While we try and reimagine post-corona schools as small, safe, public centers of community health and education, where ubiquitous technology supports teacher/student relationships, Trump/DeVos are forcing public school districts to spend their federal rescue funding on private school students, regardless of income.

The New York Times reports:

A range of education officials say Ms. DeVos’s guidance would divert millions of dollars from disadvantaged students and force districts starved of tax revenues during an economic crisis to support even the wealthiest private schools. The association representing the nation’s schools superintendents told districts to ignore the guidance, and at least two states — Indiana and Maine — said they would.

DeVos' use of federal ed dollars as a cudgel to beat down local school district harkens back to the post-9/11 era when Secretary Duncan used federal funds to impose his Race To The Top "reform" strategy on local school districts and to punish mostly black and Latino, inner-city schools for their low test scores, to leverage mass school closings and teacher firings.

More on the coming battle and rethinking corona-era schools to follow.

TOMORROW ON HITTING LEFT... Brother Fred and I will be doing our own reimagining along with Chicago teacher/author Greg Michie and some of his students. The show is scheduled to run tomorrow at 11 CT but may run instead on Saturday due to corona-related issues. Check out our FB page @HittingLeft for more on this. You can now download the Lumpen Radio app for easy listening.

Greg is the author of two must-reads for educators: Holler If You Hear Me & Same As It Never Was.

Hard to understand CTU's vitriol on these charter closings.

Arne Duncan with K12 Inc. founder William Bennett

I'm having a difficult time making sense out of CTU policy statements lately. Yesterday, the union leadership came out with a blistering, overheated attack on CPS leaders. Why? Because CPS recommended the closing of two privately-run charter schools for poor academic performance and financial mismanagement.

The two schools are Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS) and Frazier Preparatory Academy Charter School. Both schools opened as part of Renaissance 2010, a failed initiative of former Mayor Daley’s schools chief, Arne Duncan. The initiative called for the opening of 100 new schools by 2010 amid the closure of dozens of schools the district said were "underperforming."

Private charter school operators moved in like vultures, promising that their non-union schools would outperform neighborhood schools. It turned out to be a lie. The best of the charters did just about the same as the schools they were replacing. The worst either kept getting their charters renewed with little oversight, or were closed, either for poor performance, financial mismanagement or put on probation and given a few years to improve. Several more went out of business of their own volition, as with any failed business venture.

CTU leaders have responded to the recommendation with vitriol, calling it "racist and irresponsible."

I have been an outspoken opponent of public school closings, especially the mass school closings in the black community, under Rahm Emanuel's regime, closings that disrupted the lives and learning of thousands of CPS students and drove hundreds of families out of Chicago. But that doesn't mean that no charter school should ever be closed, no matter how poorly it serves its students and their families or how corrupt they are. I know very little about Frazier, except that it has been on academic probation for several years and has failed to meet the standards set by its own operators.

According to the Tribune: 

At Frazier Prep, a K-8 school in Lawndale, CPS further cited a failure to meet a contractual requirement to implement a successful remediation plan and improve the school enough to get it off the academic warning list. Students in the community have higher-quality options, according to CPS.

 Since 2015, the Chicago Board of Education has used a “quality policy” to review charter schools. In accordance with that policy, school officials conducted “comprehensive performance reviews” and said they found that Chicago Virtual and Frazier Prep were failing to provide a high-quality education to students.

I generally mistrust evidence of "low performance" based solely or mainly on test scores. But I'd leave this decision to CPS in consultation with the school community.

CPS has assured the community that if the Chicago School Board approves the closures, CPS will provide families of current students with transition support "to help them identify a new higher-performing school that best meets their educational needs and priorities."

But we heard that before from Rahm. He lied. So far, Lori Lightfoot has shown that she's not Rahm 2.0. CTU President Jesse Sharkey told me as much on Hitting Left, last Friday.

But I do know something about Chicago Virtual Charter, a subsidiary of K12 Inc., the worst of the worst when it comes to privatization and plunder of American public education. The largest of the virtual charter chains, K12 Inc. in particular, has been a sewer of corruption since it was founded by Ronald Reagan's Ed Sec. William Bennett. The company was forced to remove Bennett as chairman of its directors following a series of racist remarks and gambling scandals which threatened the company's marketability.

K12 Inc. has been under investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, which has been looking into K12's involvement in a project that received an improper multimillion-dollar grant from the Department of Education during Bennett's tenure at the firm. MEANWHILE...

A K12 Inc. company database that included information for 19,000 students was available for anyone with an internet connection to see for at least a week, according to a report from Comparitech, which describes itself as a pro-consumer organization that offers security services. -- Digital Education

Trump's Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos touts online learning and cyber charter schools as a viable alternative to public schools. But her support for these virtual schools and the private companies that run them may have more to do with her and her husband's investment portfolio than with any positive results for students. Her husband invested in virtual school powerhouse K12 Inc. before she became secretary.

According to The Nation:

K12 Inc.’s lobbyists helped author model legislation to develop sweeping voucher laws through the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that provides state lawmakers with template legislation.

K12, Inc. initially wanted to open a full-time virtual school in Chicago, but Illinois law prohibited full-time online learning. To comply with the policy, K12, Inc. compromised by adding a mandatory, on-campus attendance requirement and thus the CVCS was born.

It's a school that never should have been opened in this city. In fact, back in 2006, the CTU filed a suit intended to stop state and city payments to the Chicago Virtual Charter School. The union sued the charter school operator, the Chicago Board of Education, which approved the school as part of its Renaissance 2010 reforms, and the Illinois State Board of Education, which gave final approval for the charter to open.

So the question is, why the sharp attack by CTU leaders, who called the CPS recommendation to close CVCS racist and irresponsible? I can understand their making a case against the closing of any neighborhood school. But CVCS was not that. Whether to close Frazier is a question worthy of community debate.

I hope the charges of "racism" against CPS leadership and the mayor's appointed school board isn't just a continuation of the negativity directed at the mayor and the board, stemming from the election and the school strike. But I see no other basis for it.

14 years after Katrina, half of the schools in New Orleans all-charter district are considered "failing".

"Hurricane Katrina gave a great American city a rebirth." -- Kristen McQueary, Chicago Tribune

On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina decimated much of the Gulf Coast, including the city of New Orleans. The hurricane triggered a chain reaction which led to the near-total abandonment of the city and its public school system. Over 1,200 died in the storm and nearly half the evacuees never returned.

For some conservative ideologues like Univ. of Chicago economist Milton Friedman and other neo-liberal reformers, the storm's devastation wasn't as much a disaster as it was an opportunity to replace the city's highly segregated, predominantly African-American public school system with privately-run, publicly-financed charter schools.

Former Secretary of Education Arne Duncan called Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans,” because it gave the city a chance to rebuild and improve its "failing public schools."

Former Chicago and Philly schools chief Paul Vallas got hired to lead the city's educational reconstruction project, which included firing the largely-black teaching force, busting the teachers' union and ultimately replacing every public school with charter schools.

The Tribune's McQueary wished for a similar disaster to strike the city of Chicago so it might follow the New Orleans example.

Now, 14 years later, comes the news that nearly half of the schools in the all-charter New Orleans district are considered "failing."

According to the Times-Picayune, a whopping 35 of the 72 schools in the district scored a D or F on their performance report, meaning nearly half of local public schools were considered failing, or close to it, in the school year ending in 2019. Since then, six of the 35 have closed.

While New Orleans has long been home to struggling schools, the data released this month are concerning. There was an increase of nearly 11% percentage points in the number of schools that received the state's lowest grades from the 2017-18 school year to 2018-19.

"It makes me angry and hurt. Because these are the children of our city," said Ashana Bigard, a parent of two children in Orleans Parish schools and a longtime critic of the post-Hurricane Katrina education reforms that rebuilt the district as a network of charter schools.

Me too. I'm angry and hurt by the great privatization scam that's been run on the citizens of post-Katrina New Orleans. As far as "failing" schools are concerned, as long as there's concentrated dire poverty in the city, there will be schools that are labeled "failing", whether they are charter or regular public schools.

Sun-Times blows it again on teacher planning time

Sun-Times editorial asks: "But since when do salaried professionals watch the clock like hourly workers on an assembly line?" Answer: In Chicago, schools are still organized like factories (remember them?) Teachers still punch in and out.

Today's Sun-Times editorial: When teachers strike so they can teach kids less, something is wrong, blows it again.

It's the second time in a row for S-T, although the last one wasn't an editorial. They just turned over a full page to an anti-public-school harangue by a right-wing think-tanker. But now they're running neck-in-neck with the Tribune's McQueary and Kass for most ill-informed anti-teacher, anti-union pundit awards.

Kass and McQueary I understand. They are committed right-wing, racist, anti-union ideologues who never bother with seeking truth from facts. Remember when McQueary wished a natural disaster would strike Chicago to pave the way for a "rebirth" of the city?

But the S-T (partially owned by the CFL) just seems to be missing the mark out of ignorance, rather than ideology. Today's editorial calls on the CTU to drop their demand for more teacher planning time and get back to work.

While I have been at odds with CTU leaders over their tactics, especially their abusive, personal attacks aimed at Mayor Lightfoot and her supporters (me included), I have been walking the picket line and supportive of the teachers' demands for better pay and working conditions, including full support staffing for every school.

I am hopeful that they can settle this thing, hopefully by today, by agreeing on a fair contract which includes provisions for adequate, teacher-directed planning time.

But for some reason, this demand for more and better teacher planning time has become a minefield and one of the last barriers in the way of a tentative agreement between the board and the union. The S-T editorial, by mischaracterizing the demand, just adds fuel to the fire.

According to S-T editorial,

The CTU has repeatedly insisted on a terrible idea: Giving elementary school teachers an extra 30 minutes of prep time every day, though this would meaning cutting 30 minutes of teaching time every day. Forget it. 

No, it not a terrible idea. It's a great one and one that doesn't have to cut into classroom teaching time. But even if it did, research shows, that's not so bad.

S-T claims,

Chicago once had the shortest school day in the country, which was a national embarrassment. When kids are not in class, they cannot learn. But since 2012, thanks to the effort of many parents, educators and former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Chicago has had a longer school day — something closer to the national average — and we cannot go back.

This is all bullcrap. Chicago didn't have the shortest day in the country and wasn't a "national embarrassment." That was all a fabrication of Rahm Emanuel's who made a longer school day his election campaign mantra so there would be more time for test-prep rather the prep time for teachers and staff.

Rahm even dragged Arne Duncan back to town from Washington to campaign for his longer school day plan. I gagged when I heard Duncan call Chicago's school day, a "disgrace" and a "badge of shame." Duncan had autocratically run the schools here for the seven years previous and with a compliant union leadership behind him, had never implemented a longer school day.

As one observer wrote in a letter to the Sun-Times in 2011,

 A longer school day without structure is like a restaurant serving “lots” of food — if the food is not tasty — who cares if you get a lot of it!

If less seat time for students was a "national embarrassment", why wasn't the Lab School, where Rahm sent his kids, embarrassed? They had a shorter school day and year than did CPS and still do. So do the wealthy suburban districts to the north of us. None of them equate more seat time with more learning.

S-T claims:

Yes, teachers need time to plan. But since when do salaried professionals watch the clock like hourly workers on an assembly line? True professionals — teachers, doctors, college professors, and even journalists — agree on an annual salary and get on with the job.

Have the S-T editors ever been inside a Chicago Public School? If they had, they would know that unlike other professionals, our teachers punch a time clock every day, just like factory workers (remember them?). No, teachers are still not treated as professionals. Real professionals have time to plan, much greater autonomy over their work and the time and wherewithal to collaborate with their colleagues.

Can you imagine a lawyer defending a client with inadequate prep time? Or doctors being told to spend more time in the operating room with less time to prepare? Or either of them punching a clock?

As I said up top, I hope the strike gets settled today and I hope teacher prep time is part of the deal. It shouldn't be that hard to reach an agreement on this.

What's happened to Chicago schools since Arne Duncan got Judge Kocoras to lift the deseg consent decree

Students wait for the bus in front of Bouchet Elementary Math & Science Academy in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood. More than 74% of students whose neighborhood school is majority black schools are bussed to majority-black schools. (Manuel Martinez/WBEZ)

I'm reading Sarah Karp's WBEZ story about Chicago's experiment with school desegregation and recalling how Arne Duncan helped get a federal judge to quash the city's deseg consent decree.

Karp writes:

Most of the city’s 78 magnet and test-in schools — including classical, gifted and selective enrollment — were created under the decree as a way to lure in a diverse group of students. But even after the court order was lifted, school district officials said they believed integration was important, and they started integrating by the socioeconomic status of children.

In 2009, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras lifted the consent decree ending three decades of efforts to integrate Chicago schools. The decree’s bilingual education provisions, according to Kocoras, duplicated protections in state law. The ruling came despite evidence presented by DOJ lawyers in court that the district repeatedly failed to enroll English learners in bilingual education fast enough or provide them with required services.

Since then, writes Karp, CPS has continued busing and spending extra funding on magnet and test-in schools and also added 13 new ones plus more charter schools that have been shown to contribute to segregation. This year, the school district plans to spend $50 million for bussing and extra positions at these schools, which serve 62,000 students.

But, says Karp, the WBEZ analysis finds only about 20% of magnet and test-in schools meet the racial makeup goal set out in the court order, compared to 35% a decade ago. Under that definition, the goal was for white students to make up between 15% and 35% of the student body and black, Latino and Asian students to make up between 65% and 85%.

Six schools of the 65 in existence 10 years ago went from being considered integrated to not, while only one of the new schools has that mix of students. Among the schools no longer meeting this definition of integrated are Skinner North Elementary School, which opened in the last decade, and Walter Payton College Prep High School — two schools often named as the best in the city and the state. They have both seen significant increases in white students. 

Magnet schools and busing programs that were created and funded for the purpose of encouraging racial desegregation have since been turned into their opposites. Now magnets have increasingly become privileged selective-enrollment schools, anchors for neighborhood gentrification with expensive busing programs taking children miles away from their neighborhood schools and into segregated ones.

Niketa Brar on Hitting Left

Niketa Brar, executive director of Chicago United for Equity, and a frequent guest on Hitting Left, says magnet and selective schools have been used as a way to allow families to avoid the problems of the public school system. This is especially true in gentrifying neighborhoods, she said, where parents put their children on buses to be driven away from their local schools.

Brar tells Karp:

“They become little havens of white people feeling like they are participating in the public school system while actually keeping their children segregated from the impacts of a local neighborhood school that have the same resources that every other child in their neighborhoods gets.”

It's worth recalling that it was Pres. Obama's Secretary of Education and former CPS school chief, Arne Duncan, along with Mayor Daley and Duncan's successor Ron Huberman, who pleaded with Judge Kocoras to scrap the decree a decade ago. They claimed that the city had done all it could do to desegregate its schools and that the deseg struggle was "futile and a drain on district funds".

This,  even though research has shown that the period in which school deseg was in full play was when the district had made the greatest gains in measurable student learning and closing the so-called achievement gap.

Duncan maintained that if the consent decree was lifted, CPS could save $300 million, mostly in eliminating bus service to magnet and selective enrollment schools. It was all a lie. Busing service and selective enrollment programs and charter schools have been expanded. Only their purposes have changed.

Under Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's selective-enrollment schools became even more exclusive.

During the period of 1981 to 2015, the total population of African-American students in CPS plummeted from close to 240,000, 60% of all CPS students, to 156,000 or 39% of CPS. The loss of so many poor and black children and an increase in wealthier white students have since been ignored as an explanation for claimed rising test scores and graduation rates.

I'd argue that they, along with school resegregation, have lots to do with it.

We'll see if and how things change over the next four years with a new mayor and city council. 

Cunningham's response to the devastation of black communities? Bring in 'new people'.

Just when you think we've heard the last from the disastrous duo of Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, they become media go-to guys on (of all things) gun violence and community development.

Remember, this was the pair that ran the Chicago Public Schools and the U.S. Dept. of Education for years, promoting austerity, mass school closings, privatization and uncapped expansion of privately-run charter schools in black communities. Their policies helped lead to the devastation of urban school districts and contributed to school re-segregation and the push-out of thousands of black and poor families from cities like Chicago.

Why media would turn to them for meaningful solutions to the problems they helped create is beyond me. But here we are.

Cunningham's Sun-Times commentary yesterday (To revive declining South and West Side neighborhoods, import people) was the most egregious. The headline says it all. Now that 300,000 African-Americans have been pushed out of Chicago over the past few decades, Cunningham sees their replacement with thousands of "new, middle-class people" as the city's salvation.

How unoriginal. I have referred to it as the whitenization of the cities. But it's deeper than that.

CUNNINGHAM QUOTES VITO...

Cunningham asks, just how do you attract the gentrifiers into formerly segregated, disinvested and isolated neighborhoods like Englewood? He turns to Godfather mobster character Vito Corleone for an answer. "Make them an offer they can't refuse."

So, what would it take to get 4,000 young middle-class families to move into these neighborhoods? The answer, or at least part of it, is affordable, high-quality housing. Sell the houses at cost.

If that’s too high, help cover the down-payment. Still no takers? Help pay their college debt or give them a 10-year property tax exemption, something Philadelphia has done.

Welp, where has that been? Why wasn't that offer made to the families who lived there before, the ones who built those neighborhoods and went to the now-closed neighborhood schools? The ones whose homes were foreclosed upon during the subprime crisis?

As for Duncan, who now runs Chicago CRED—a counseling and job placement service (not exactly what he was primed for by the Emerson Collective), he's cited as an expert on neighborhood gun violence in a Crain's column by Joe Warren. 

There, he carefully avoids any mention of gun control. Instead, Duncan appeals directly to his corporate pals, asking them to hire some gun offenders.

"My selfish interest is that the business community own this and see this as an economic problem, not a crime problem," Duncan says. "We have to hire our way out of this, not arrest our way out of this."

Yes, hire more and arrest less. But this doesn't even begin to deal with the enormous scope of the problem, as Mayor Lightfoot has pointed out in her recent jousting with Ted Cruz. 

But how do we stop the flow of guns and drugs into the city? What do we do about mass youth unemployment, disinvestment, and under-resourcing of public schools? The notion that the answer to Chicago's gun violence epidemic rests simply with more counseling and job placement is absurd on its face.

To quote the mayor:

“There’s a great need across this country for federal leadership in particular to step up and come forward with a real plan to deal with the gun violence that we’re seeing not only in cities like Chicago but really across the country.”

Duncan hasn't a clue.

Education not an issue for Dem debaters until the Harris/Biden clash over deseg

Demand for School Integration Leads to Massive 1964 New York City School Boycott

"Forcing integration upon us is not a nimble concept."  -- Alabama Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, 1956

For most of the 20 Democratic Party candidates onstage Wednesday and Thursday nights, or for the debate moderators, education wasn't an important enough campaign issue to deserve a mention. Not a word was spoken about the hottest ed issues like charter schools, vouchers, pensions or testing. Common Core Standards, ESSA, it seems, were yesterday's news. There was not even a poke at Trump's ed secretary, Betsy DeVos or at Trump himself.

That's nothing new for party presidential campaigns. I remember the 2015 debates when education issues never came up. At the time, Prof. Julian Vasquez Heilig wrote in the Progressive,

Perhaps the silence is due to the fact that the Democrats have basically adopted the Republican approach to education from the 1990s.

If anything has changed in the past four years, that hasn't. This week, hardly an ed word was spoken. Not a word, that is, until Sen. Kamala Harris stole night two with her devastating "That little girl was me," confrontation with Joe Biden. After prefacing her obviously well-planned punch to Biden's mid-section with "I do not believe you are a racist," Harris laid bare his role in the busing battles of the '70s.

Biden seemed totally unprepared or ill-prepped. He sputtered and lashed out at Harris personally.

I was a public defender. I didn’t become a prosecutor. I came out and I left a good law firm to become a public defender, when, in fact — when, in fact, my city was in flames because of the assassination of Dr. King, number one.

What the hell all that has to do with anything is beyond me. Was this whiter-than-white, male, former vice-president of the United States really throwing shade at an African-American woman for becoming a successful lawyer and prosecutor? Yup.

Then after invoking Dr. King's name and recounting his long history of civil-rights advocacy and his relationship with Pres. Obama, Biden actually doubled down on his opposition to the Dept. of Education's role in enforcing the Supreme Court's Brown decision. The argument went like this:

HARRIS: But, Vice President Biden, do you agree today — do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree?

BIDEN: I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed. 

HARRIS: Well, there was a failure of states to integrate public schools in America. I was part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California, public schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.

BIDEN: Because your city council made that decision. It was a local decision.

HARRIS: So that’s where the federal government must step in.

BIDEN: The federal government ——

HARRIS: That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. That’s why we need to pass the Equality Act. That’s why we need to pass the E.R.A., because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people.

This exchange brought back nightmarish memories of  Obama's former Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan claiming that he was for school integration but not "forced integration." Then there was his assistant, Peter Cunningham's apologia for school segregation in U.S. News & World Report, which claimed that "integration is expensive and takes money away from other necessary improvements."

In other words. Biden, while ill prepared, wasn't speaking out of school. He was simply repeating, in his own stumbling, bumbling way, the party line going back decades. It's just that his timing was off.

And it's not like any of the other candidates had Harris's back when push came to shove. The silence on their part (including on Bernie Sanders's part) was deafening.

How can they all be running against Biden, yet be so afraid to take him on?

The gossip mill is churning. Keep your eyes on the prize.

Lightfoot on election night. A mandate for change. 

The confetti from Lori Lightfoot's Hilton ballroom celebration of her historic victory hadn't even been swept from the floor before the Facebook Lightfoot-haters' rumor mill began cranking out the news that Lori had appointed Arne Duncan to her transition team. Rumor central was the CTU's House of Delegates meeting where leaders were telling delegates that they had inside info about the appointment. This was followed by a wave of posts with comments like, "NOOOOOO" and "EWWWW".

I really need to stop spending so much time in the world of FB politics. You do too.

I asked several of the CTU folks who I know and respect for the source of the rumor. I would have thought a story this big would have hit the media before it was leaked to a union official. None of them had an answer. Some claimed the union got it from a leak at City Hall.

Then Mayor-elect Lightfoot posted this on Twitter:

Thank you SO much to everyone who has reached out to us in the past 24 hours! We’re grateful for your support and excited to keep building and mobilizing this movement for change. To everyone who’s asking—we haven't announced our transition team just yet, so stay tuned!

— Lori Lightfoot (@LightfootForChi) April 3, 2019

Here's my initial thoughts on the Duncan gossip.

First, as all my readers know, I am no fan of Arne Duncan. If you're not an avid follower (shame on you) just move your eyes over to the right-hand column and down to the TOPICS column. If you scroll down to DUNCAN, you will see 431 posts (this makes 432) I have done on the former Chicago schools chief and Obama ed secretary. They go back a dozen years and are mainly exposures of his poor and corrupt leadership, locally and nationally. I doubt there's anyone who has written more about this misleader.

Second, I have no idea who the mayor-elect will appoint to her transition team and neither do you. But whoever she chooses to help with the difficult transition, they certainly do not represent a line in the sand for me. Transition team members traditionally come from a diverse range of the city's interest groups and power centers; i.e., business and labor, race, gender and political interests. It's important for the new mayor to get input from all of them. I'm sure powerbrokers, including Barack Obama, will have some input -- as they should.

Transition team members are not the policy makers or necessarily future position holders in the administration. The team itself disbands as soon as the transition is made. I'm sure, once the team has been named, I will find appointees whose names evoke my own "EWWS" as well as smiles.

Lightfoot has committed herself to an education platform that I like and that the CTU should like as well. Especially, coming off of 8 years of mayoral control of the schools by an autocratic, union-busting mayor. It's the main reason I voted for her. Her platform includes investments in neighborhood schools, early childhood and special education, opposition to charter expansion and school closings, and support for an elected school board. These are all program points that should fill CTU members, parents, students and community folks with joy and optimism and fill Arne Duncan (who, btw, supported Toni Preckwinkle), with deep anxiety. Remember, Duncan's career has been built on opposition to every one of these points.

As a lifelong union guy, I think CTU leaders are crazy for positioning themselves in such an over-the-top, oppositional way before Lightfoot even takes office. She won this historic election by the largest margins ever over the CTU's endorsed candidate, to become the city's first African-American, woman, lesbian mayor in the city's history. Lightfoot swept every ward and won in every demographic by a wide margin. In other words, she has a clear mandate for change that we all should respect.

Why the union would want to isolate itself from this huge potential base of support, especially with contract negotiations coming up, is beyond me.

Of course, this doesn't mean no criticism. Politics is not a spectator sport and we cannot afford to sit back and hope that Lori Lightfoot does the right things once in office. But struggle should be carried out on just grounds, with reason and restraint. We need to help her become a great mayor. If she fails to do the right thing, we will hold her accountable. But that's not the same as spreading disinformation, gossip and lies in advance.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free..." -- Emma Lazarus

Eve Ewing

Language is everything. Since the origin of public schooling in this country there’s never been anything that’s an objective measure of school quality, because communities have always had divergent definitions of what they want their schools to do. -- Chalkbeat interview

Natalie Wexler 

[Arne] Duncan—like many education reformers—resolved to put his faith in “data.” Data may not always give the whole picture, he concluded, but it can “be counted on not to lie.” Or can it? -- Forbes 

Roberta Jacobson, former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico

Left the Trump administration in May, and writes in the new op-ed that she felt “glad to escape the disorder”..."Believing deeply in the United States-Mexico relationship, I cannot pretend anything less than relief at no longer having to defend the indefensible."-- The Hill

Kina Collins, founder of the Chicago Neighborhood Alliance

“Several of the incumbents … have voted against the self-interest of the people in vulnerable communities. That has got to stop. The next target that we hope to hit is City Council.” -- Laura Washington's column.

John Prine

But your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore They’re already overcrowded from your dirty little war Now Jesus don’t like killin’, no matter what the reason’s for And your flag decal won’t get you into Heaven anymore -- New York Times

Rahm, no heart for the struggle. Who will wear the crown?

Hey little emperor come down from you throne

And let another emperor climb on -- Steve Earle

After a brief celebration and a listen, or two, or three, to Little Emperor, I came back down to Earth and began considering the changes ahead in a post-Rahm Chicago and the reshaping of the upcoming mayor's race.

Most, but not all of my friends are exuberant over the news that Rahm is bailing after two terms. He claims he's trying to save us Chicagoans from a bloody election battle (no heart) and that he wants to spend more time with Amy and the kids. But we all know that's bullshit. I'm kind of sorry we didn't get a chance to give him a beating in the election. But I'll take it.

Like his predecessor, Mayor Daley, Rahm could read the numbers on the wall. His closest advisors and wealthy patrons have been telling him since May that his pathway to victory was closing and with the Laquan McDonald cover-up re-emerging around the Van Dyke trial, more protesters about to fill the streets and block up the highways, and more school-closing battles on the horizon... Discretion became the better part of valor. Tough-talking Rahm wimped out.

But we need to keep in mind, he's still there 'til February and a lame duck can do a lot of harm, especially in the schools. It's called, loot-and-pillage. Rahm can also use his campaign cash and his organization to back a candidate of his choosing. Somebody with like-minded politics but without all his baggage.

At first I was thinking, someone like Arne Duncan. He's been feathering his nest over at the Emerson Collective since his return from his Race To The Top days as Obama's ed chief. But talk about baggage? My god! And Duncan would be running, not only against the CTU and every conscious teacher in the city, but against charter and testing-loving Paul Vallas, the very man who first brought him into the ed game in Chicago. A three-way split in the white vote would leave Rahm's minions in the same shape they are already in.

So since a lot of you have been asking. My bet that the next wave of big election cash will flow towards Toni Preckwinkle and that a LatinX will enter the race, just like Ald. Rick Munoz told us they would, when he was our guest on Hitting Left. Possibly someone like IL Comptroller, Susana Mendoza.

Then again, as Susan never lets me forget, I thought Clinton would beat Trump.

The youngest mayoral candidate and Black Lives Matter activist, Ja'mal Green will be our guest on Hitting Left this Friday, 11-Noon. Lots to talk about. You bet. 

DeVos and Duncan both bought into gun culture

Sec. of Education Betsy DeVos and her predecessor Arne Duncan, each wanted to buy guns with federal education funds meant for schools. The difference being, DeVos prefered teachers packing guns in their classroom. Duncan spent lots of ed dollars on expensive military hardware for his own DOE team.

A firestorm erupted when news got out this week that DeVos was considering letting school districts use federal Title 1 money to y guns, putting the issue back at the center of the debate over school safety.

This was mainly in response to the Parkland school shootings. But it also raised fundamental questions about the nature of public schools. Parkland students have been calling for tighter gun control while DeVos and Republican politicians, many on the NRA take, argued that a proliferation of guns in schools would discourage shooters and make schools safer. There's not a lick of evidence to support that theory.

Since he left his post as Pres. Obama's education chief, Duncan has been an advocate of gun control, to the point where, for a few days, he was urging parents to keep their children home from public schools until gun laws were passed. As you might expect, he pleas fell on deaf ears.

For one thing, Duncan's standing with parents has been lower than dirt since he attacked those "white, suburban" opt-out parents. For another, Democrats had a chance to push for gun control during the Obama/Duncan era when they controlled both houses. They didn't and Duncan was silent on the issue back then. Now, with Republicans controlling the legislature and White House, the chances of passing even the minimum gun safety laws are slim-to-none, making a long-term school boycott a ridiculous tactic. Finally, Duncan sends his own kids to private school and therefore has no skin in the boycott game he's playing.

Back in 2010, Duncan himself was a free spender when it came to buying military hardware for his department's own squad of student-loan chasers. He spent thousands on deadly new assault weapons, including these 27 shotguns:

 twenty-seven (27) REMINGTON BRAND MODEL 870 POLICE 12/14P MOD GRWC XS4 KXCS SF. RAMAC #24587 GAUGE: 12 BARREL: 14" - PARKERIZED CHOKE: MODIFIED SIGHTS: GHOST RING REAR WILSON COMBAT; FRONT - XS CONTOUR BEAD SIGHT STOCK: KNOXX REDUCE RECOIL ADJUSTABLE STOCK FORE-END: SPEEDFEED SPORT-SOLID - 14" LOP are designated as the only shotguns authorized for ED based on compatibility with ED existing shotgun inventory, certified armor and combat training and protocol, maintenance, and parts.

The were meant to replace 27 that were "worn out". I'm still waiting to hear how exactly they were worn out.

A year later, armed with their new hardware, Arne's troops went out hunting for student-loan late-payers. They mistakenly thought they found one out in Stockton, CA where Arne's army kicked in the door in the early morning hours to collect on the overdue loans and dragged Kenneth Wright out of his home, terrifying his small children. It was actually his estranged wife they were looking for.

Wright's neighbors, who did not want to disclose their last names, said they saw the raid unfold.

"They surrounded the house; it was like a task force or S.W.A.T team," across the street neighbor Becky said. "They all had guns. They dragged him out in his boxer shorts, threw him to the ground and handcuffed him."

According to Becky and her two children, the raid started at 6 a.m. with agents ramming down Wright's front door.

 "I watched until I went to work at 10:45 and they were still out there," Becky said.

Her young daughter, Valerie, said she counted 13 agents and one Stockton police officer outside Wright's home.

"I felt really bad for those kids," said Becky about agents when they brought out Wright's three children. "They were crying really loud."

Let's put an end to this gun madness. Keep schools and the DOE gun-free. 

If Rahm intended to run for re-election on CPS progress, his campaign may be over before it's begun

Rahm Emanuel is beginning to look like a politician whose re-election campaign may be on the brink of collapse before it's even officially begun. His political achilles heel surprisingly turns out to be his autocratic control over Chicago Public Schools. Most everyone thought his greatest vulnerability would be his cover-up of the Laquan McDonald police killing.

What should have been his strong suit, running as an "education mayor," is now buried in a volcanic lava flow of school privatization, corruption, inequality, and dysfunction.

His new schools CEO, Janice Jackson, the fifth CEO in six years, has gone from looking like a source of hope for change, to being little more than Rahm's political functionary, in just a few months, even fronting for the mayor in commercials touting the progress at CPS, bankrolled by a nonprofit with close ties to MRE.

Instead of talking about alleged increases in standardized test scores and graduation rates, the mayor could spend the next eight months leading up to the election dodging questions about the mountain of scandals piling up at CPS.

These include hundreds of recently revealed cases of sexual assault and abuse of students over the past decade, cases that were ignored or covered up by CPS' law department and the mayor.

My alderman, Scott Waguespack (32nd), put it bluntly:

“This is about more than politics, it’s a core issue of our humanity. We’re calling for a City Council hearing on what the Tribune found. Every alderman should be demanding to have CPS there and the mayor’s people, too. He’s the boss. Emanuel is the mayor.”

Then there's new reports of mountains of filth and vermin in the schools since custodial services were privatized by Rahm and former CEO Forrest Claypool, who resigned in December after being charged with "ethics violations."

The Sun-Times reports that SodexoMAGIC and Aramark Corporation have received nearly $800 million in contracts to privatize school engineers and custodians and bust their union. Coincidentally, SodexoMAGIC made an extraordinary campaign contribution of $250,000 to Emanuel. And Aramark has charged CPS with over $20 million in cost overruns.

U of C Lab School fired Aramark over mouse droppings

Chicago Public Schools officials have now agreed to give $259 million in additional work to Aramark. They will be handed control of all facilities work at most of Chicago’s schools on July 1, according to its contract, which CPS officials tried to keep under wraps.

The irony of all this is that the University of Chicago Lab School, the expensive private school where elites like the mayor and former Ed Sec. Arne Duncan send their kids, just gave Aramark the boot after finding mice droppings in school food. Looks like mouse poop is only OK for other people's children.

There's more, so much more, including pay-to-play scandals involving Rahm's hand-picked board members like Deborah Quazzo, who colluded with former CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, now doing time in prison, to enrich herself at the expense of the schools.

If Rahm had any intentions of building his campaign on his running of CPS, it's looking more and more like his campaign is over before it's begun.

U of C Study, out today, shows Rahm's 2013 school closings failed CPS students

Thousands of Chicago parents and community members protested the 2013 school closings. 

CPS’ current Schools Chief Janice Jackson called what happened “unacceptable.” But said the outcome will not deter her from closing schools in the future. -- WBEZ

Rahm Emanuel's mass school closings in have proven to be a disaster for the city and have offered none of the promised academic gains for the affected 12,000 predominantly-black students.

Aside from further blighting Chicago's south and west-side neighborhoods and likely contributing to the massive black exodus from the city, the closing of 50 CPS schools in 2013 led to a significant drop in student test scores. This according to a report being released today by researchers at the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research.

The report comes weeks before the city’s five-year moratorium on school closings expires. It's a moratorium that Rahm has already violated time and time again, most recently with the closing of high schools in Englewood as well as the National Teachers Academy.

According to the Consortium Report:

Despite the promised improvement in academic opportunities for students from the schools that were closed, the University of Chicago researchers found that their test scores fell in the wake of the closings and subsequent school mergers. And the drop in math scores lasted for four years. 

The researchers also said their interviews with CPS staff members revealed a “chaotic” plan for moving the students to other schools and too little support for blending the new and old communities of students and families, creating “challenging us-vs.-them dynamics.

The study concludes:

“Closing schools — even poorly performing ones — does not improve the outcome of displaced children, on average. Closing under-enrolled schools may seem like a viable solution to policymakers who seek to address fiscal deficits and declining enrollment, but our findings shows that closing schools caused large disruptions without clear benefits for students.”

CTU's Jesse Sharkey, said the report “validates” that the closures "were marred by chaos, a desperate lack of resources, lost libraries and labs, grief, trauma, damaging disruption, and a profound disrespect for the needs of low-income black students and the educators who teach them.”

Important to note... It wasn't just Chicago. Mass school closings were a requirement of then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's Race to The Top policy. Unless school districts closed schools, they were threatened with loss of millions of dollars from the D.O.E. An epidemic of closings and teacher firings, mainly in urban districts, followed in the wake of RTTT.

KIPP and KOPP join Duncan in telling parents to boycott schools until gun law is passed

CHICAGO (WLS) -- It's been another violent weekend in Chicago, with at least 6 people killed and 32 others hurt in shootings across the city. [None shot in school.]

KIPP leaders and other corporate school "reformers" like Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, are telling public school parents to "pull their kids out of school until we have better gun laws."

The boycott proposition received momentum online, including support from parents and the founder of Teach for America, Wendy Kopp... 

...“I’m in — let’s pick a date and start a movement no politician can ignore,” replied Jim Manly, the superintendent of KIPP Public Charter Schools in New York City.

After taking 14 years before firing their co-founder for sexual misconduct, it's no wonder that KIPP charter network is now forced to offer cash and prizes to parents as recruiting gimmicks. But their call for parents to boycott public schools, even in the wake of the Santa Fe school shootings, smacks of opportunism.

As brother Fred Klonsky points out in this morning's blog post:

For many Chicago young people, their public school is among the safest places Chicago parents can send their children each day. But more to the point, those like Cunningham and Duncan have a dismal history in proposing ideas for public school parents and  as public policy for others to follow.

 Yes, we need strong gun control laws passed. No, that's not likely to happen with Trump in the White House and Republicans (many on the take from the NRA) controlling both houses of Congress without pressure from mass protests in the streets. Telling parents to keep their children home until that happens may be provocative, but it's hairbrained. Not serious. Poor leadership as usual.

In the same breath they propose it, they are already walking it back. 

“It’s wildly impractical and difficult,” Duncan said. “But I think it’s wildly impractical and difficult that kids are shot when they are sent to school.”

 “We will see whether this gains traction, or something does, but we have to think radically.”

Yes, r-r-r-radically indeed. But there's nothing radical about punishing public schools for the sins of the politicians.

I'm recalling how Duncan and Cunningham blasted the tens of thousands of activist parents who actually won some important victories for their children by opting-out of school testing madness.

But Duncan claimed the opt-outers were simply...

"white suburban moms who—all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were."

I also recall how, when Democrats had even a slim chance to pass gun-control legislation during Obama's first term, Atty. General Eric Holder was told to "shut the f**k up" by none other than Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Oh, and speaking of guns, remember how Duncan tried to militarize the D.O.E. back in 2010? His purchase of 27 assault rifles had me wondering back then, if we needed an assault weapons ban on Arne?

I think Duncan's and the reformers' credibility as advisors to public school parents has been used up. Maybe it's time for them to to hold that thought. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Police Chief Art Acevedo of Houston, center, walking with demonstrators during a “March for Our Lives” protest in March. After a school shooting in Santa Fe, Tex., on Friday, he wrote on Facebook that he had hit “rock bottom” about inaction on gun control.CreditDavid J. Phillip/Associated Press

Profs Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd 

Locking any human being in a cage is a moral abomination -- Guardian

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education

Peter Cunningham tells us not to blame any of the reforms he and his team of bloggers espouse.  In 2016, he told us what we need is “more rigor” and higher standards when twelfth-grade NAEP scores came out. On April 20, 2018, like Duncan, Cunningham blamed politics — specifically unions and local boards of education — for the lackluster NAEP scores.  --Washington Post

Sally Yates

 "There should be consequences when leaders feel they are not even loosely tethered to the truth. But when we normalize this..." -- CBS News

 Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo 

“I know some have strong feelings about gun rights but I want you to know I’ve hit rock bottom and I am not interested in your views as it pertains to this issue." -- Facebook post

Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala.

Rocks falling into oceans, not climate, causing seas to rise. "And every time you have that soil or rock whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise. Because now you’ve got less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up." -- USA Today

All these shootings because we have too many doors, sea levels are rising because of rocks falling into the ocean, hurricanes devasting cities because of gay sex. Maybe we shouldn’t put complete fucking morons in charge of anything anymore.

— J.D. Evermore (@jd_evermore) May 18, 2018

And then there's this from the school "reformers"...

This is brilliant, and tragically necessary.
What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe?
My family is all in if we can do this at scale.
Parents, will you please join us? https://t.co/Yo4wsFuJI5

— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) May 18, 2018

I should remind Mr. Duncan that his family is already "boycotting" Chicago Public Schools.

Remember Deborah Gist?

As in West Virginia, educators in Oklahoma have reached a breaking point, fed up with stagnant wages and cuts to education funding. The idea of a walkout began to gain traction in mid-February after a proposed salary increase failed to win enough support among lawmakers. A ­superintendent circulated a petition asking colleagues if they would support a teacher walkout.

I WAS REVIEWING the press for Weekend Quotables this morning, when I came across this Washington Post story on the growing revolt among low-paid Oklahoma teachers.

WaPo reports:

At a local restaurant, it was a teacher who served Deborah Gist recently. At the Reasor’s grocery, there’s sometimes a teacher behind the register. And then there was the Uber that the school district chief hailed to catch an early-morning flight — a teacher sat behind the wheel, trying to earn some money before heading to the classroom. There was a stack of student journals on the passenger seat.

“It’s just so wrong that it just hurts my heart,” said Gist, who has been superintendent since 2015.

My reaction to the hand-wringing quote -- Wait a minute. Could this possibly be the same Deborah Gist?

And sure enough, it was.

For those who don't know, or can't recall, it was Gist, fresh out of Eli Broad's training academy, who served as Rhode Island's state superintendent back in 2010. She's the one who pushed local Superintendent Frances Gallo to fire all the teachers and staff at Central Falls High School back in 2010. In the face of national blowback from unions and school activists, Gist was forced to retreat and most of the teachers were hired back. But the school and the entire town of Central Falls never fully recovered from the debacle.

The worst part was Obama's Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan giving his nod of approval to Gist's assault on the state's teachers and the President himself hailing her mass firing as an "act of courage". 

As teacher Paul Murphy wrote in a recent WaPo column,

The staff of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island sure didn’t sign up expecting the president of the United States and the secretary of education to endorse their collective firing. While we may have expected to be treated like dirt by Republicans, we didn’t sign up knowing the Democratic Party would abandon us in such a publicly humiliating way.

It's only fitting, I suppose, that after being run out of R.I., Gist would wind up in "right-to-work" (for less) state, Oklahoma, where public schools are miserably underfunded and teacher pay is at the nation's bottom (ranks 49th), lower even than West Virginia where the rolling teacher revolt began earlier this year.

So sorry, Deborah Gist. Your hand-wringing won't get it. We remember you.

Broad and loud opposition to DeVos' voucher plans

Trump's Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos is determined to use the Dept. of Education's federal grant program as a weapon against public education. DeVos' stated number-one priority for the program is to “maximize” “educational choice". This means taking billions of dollars away from public school classrooms to promote school vouchers and privately run charters.

States that adopt her program, will be heavily rewarded, while those that don't will be punished. I should note that Obama's former Ed Secs, Arne Duncan and John King also used their $5B grant program to push charters and punish states that wouldn't adopt their failed "Race to the Top" program which included massive school closings and teacher firings. But DeVos' plan is Duncan squared with vouchers and "scholarships" for private schools put at the top of the list.

DeVos' Proposed Supplemental Priorities and Definitions for Discretionary Grant Programs has been met with loud opposition from a coalition of 50 school, community and civil rights organizations. The National Coalition for Public Education which includes both national teachers' unions, AASA: The School Superintendents Association, the National PTA, disability rights groups, the NAACP, and others is dead set against DeVos's priorities.

Their statement reads in part:

The Department should not reward states for adopting voucher programs that do not serve all students, fail to improve academic achievement, undermine public education funding, harm religious freedom and lack critical accountability for taxpayers. Instead, the Department of Education’s first priority should be funding, supporting, and strengthening our public schools, where 90% of our students attend.

It's a strong statement on vouchers, but unfortunately makes no mention of privately-run charter schools, the second leg of the destructive, right-wing Trump/DeVos "choice" initiative. While some groups within the coalition, like the NAACP, have been highly critical of charters, others haven't. So I'm assuming that the anti-voucher statement was the best possible without splitting the group.

In any regard, I doubt that DeVos (if she remains in power) will pay much attention to the statement unless it is backed up with protests in the streets and at schools.

Side note on charters...

Charter school operators who stand to gain from Trump/DeVos initiatives as well as from the biggest private foundations, have put their stamp of approval on DeVos' "choice" priorities. However, they do have one small criticism. They want the word "quality" put in front of "charter schools".

Quality is NACSA code language to signify that only the largest and richest charter school chains get the grants and that small, teacher-run, unionized, or "mom & pops" charters are eliminated.