Disinvestment & Gentrification: Two sides of the same racist coin

On yesterday's Hitting Left show, community activists Christian Diaz and Cory Stevenson both agreed. Southside disinvestment and northside gentrification were simply two sides of the same racist coin.

Nowhere is this more evident than in city policies of closing dozens of schools in struggle south and west side communities while opening up new charter and selective enrollment schools on the north side. This tweet from the parent group, Raise Your Hand, brings the contradiction into clear focus.

#ERSBnow this is absurd. District lost 40k students in 7 years, resources spread way too thin. CPS keeps putting out charter RFPs yearly. @ILSenDems @HouseDemsIL what's the plan? https://t.co/uS4uIRXbR8

— RYHAction (@RYHAction) November 14, 2018

Cory Stevenson pointed to the impact the closing of two southside Target stores could have on his community and relatives in terms of loss of hundreds of jobs and access to basic needs for families that don't have cars.

The Target store closings are symptomatic of the structural disinvestment and erosion of public space and public decision-making now taking place in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods. This includes the closing of schools, clinics, stores and other city services, making many areas of the city uninhabitable.

While across town, gentrification has created a housing crisis for poor and middle-class, mainly Latino families in neighborhoods like Logan Square. This, according to Diaz, who is the housing organizer at Logan Square Neighborhood Association (LSNA).  LSNA has been organizing community meetings and marches to protest high rents and support affordable housing projects.

While supporting the push for new rent-control laws, Diaz doesn't think current emphasis on lifting the ban on rent-control is the best tactic. "My fear is that we're talking about a campaign that may take 10 years and in the meantime, families are losing their homes and rents are climbing, making affordable housing out of reach."

Instead, LSNA is pushing for a "community land trust" where a nonprofit, community-based organization develops and stewards affordable housing, community gardens, civic buildings, commercial spaces and other community assets on behalf of a community.

Harold died 30 years ago. 

At our holiday family gathering this week, we will take a moment to remember Chicago's greatest mayor, Harold Washington, who suffered a fatal heart attack the day before Thanksgiving 30 years ago. Today the city is more in need of a mayor like Harold, than ever.

Instead, big-money corporatists and old-line machine Democrats have jumped into the race following Rahm Emanuel's departure and they appear to be sucking up all the air and money from the campaign as they try and push out upstart progressives. The shakeout will begin in earnest after Nov. 26, the day that nominating petitions are due. Without a big campaign war chest and paid staff or ward organization to round up the needed 12,500 valid signatures, several of the early runners are likely to drop out. Actually, campaigns really need to collect at least double that amount so they can withstand a challenge.

More on that to come. But for now there two developments in the past week that caught my attention. The craziest came from candidate Bill Daley, who more than all the others, combines the worst of big-money corporatism with old-line machine politics. Daley, trying to outflank former top-cop, Garry McCarthy as the law-and-order candidate, says he wants to have thousands of camera-equipped drones flying over the city.

He tells the Sun-Times:

“I’d have as many cameras as we could buy so the people could feel safer wherever they’re at … I’d have a camera on every block in the city if I could.”

Chicago’s network of 29,000 public and private surveillance cameras is already billed as the largest “federated” system in the nation. But I'll bet there's a Daley family member or close business associate who'd be thrilled to get that drone contract. Kind of like Rahm's red-light camera plan.

The other recent development is the entrance of Susana Mendoza into the race. Mendoza, who has always been viewed suspiciously by progressives as a Rahm/Madigan machine puppet, is now staking out progressive territory and trying to outflank frontrunner Toni Preckwinkle on the left. She promises to stop school closures, including the closing of embattled National Teachers Academy, the re-opening of the clinics closed by Rahm, and support for an elected school board.

You can believe her or not. But for now at least, other candidates will have to respond on these issues.

Dizzying!

My favorite Ryan moment

Is anyone buying Paul Ryan's stale excuse for jumping ship? No, he doesn't really want to spend more time with his children. He hires people to do that. After years as a corporate shill, busting his state's unions and putting hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars into his wealthy patrons' pockets through regressive taxation, Ryan is joining the mass exodus of Republicans from DT's sinking ship for one reason only. He knows his day of reckoning is near.

My favorite Ryan story took place back in 2014, when he was called out by a Wisconsin high school, social studies teacher named Al Levie, who had been one of three recipients of a Martin Luther King Jr. humanitarian award. During a celebration honoring the late civil rights leader, Al refused to accept the award from Rep. Ryan, who he correctly called, "a lackey of the one percent". He then told the audience,  “I can’t in good conscience accept this award, as a humanitarian, Paul Ryan stands for everything I don’t believe in.”

After Ryan spoke, Al criticized the congressman’s policies before being walked off the stage. He had earlier made it clear that he would like to see collective bargaining restored in Wisconsin, fair immigration reform and a fair tax system and more.

“Paul Ryan had no business at a Martin Luther King event, it’s totally hypocritical. On the one hand he votes to slash health care, while on the other hand, King dedicated his life and he died for it — for people to have adequate healthcare, to have adequate jobs.”

I imagine, Al is smiling a little today, both at the news of Ryan's imminent departure and of the rolling teacher wildcat strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky and more.

Then there was the time in 2012 when V.P candidate Ryan ventured down to Chicago to counsel his pal, Mayor Rahm Emanuel on how to break a teachers strike.

"I've known Rahm Emanuel for years. He's a former colleague of mine. Rahm and I have not agreed on every issue or on a lot of issues, but Mayor Emanuel is right today in saying that this teacher's union strike is unnecessary and wrong. We know that Rahm is not going to support our campaign, but on this issue and this day we stand with Mayor Rahm Emanuel." 

Then Ryan artfully called out Pres. Barack Obama, who, in the middle of his re-election campaign, and worried that his support for the striking teachers would split his Democratic Party base, was trying to walk the center line  in the epic battle between the CTU and MRE. A sign of things to come.

My favorite Ryan quote came from another visit to Chicago a year earlier. Speaking at the city's Economic Club, Rep. Ryan said that Obama's attempt to raise taxes on the wealthiest Americans amounted to “class warfare” and "class envy".  Ryan only wanted to make sure that class warfare remained one-sided.

As NYT columnist Charles Blow put it:

Ha! The war is already being waged against the poor and vulnerable, and the envious have-nots didn’t start it. The right and its cabal of economic cannibals did.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Chuck Schumer gives advice to Trump on how to be a good opportunist

"He likes us. He likes me anyway..Here's what I told him. I said, 'Mr. President, you're much better off if you can sometimes step right and sometimes step left. If you have to step just in one direction, you're boxed.'" -- CNN 

Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.) on Dem's deal with Trump

"I love Nancy Pelosi. I don’t have any doubt of her authenticity and commitment. But how do I now have to accept border security? Do I now have to put up half a fence? Is it going to have electricity and barbed wire on it?" -- Politico 

Robert Jay Lifton, psychohistorian

The American president has particular power. This makes Trump the most dangerous man in the world. He’s equally dangerous because of his finger on the nuclear trigger and because of his mind ensconced in solipsistic reality. The two are a dreadful combination. -- Bill Moyers & Co. 

Atty. G. Flint Taylor

About half (of the $125 million in taxpayer money used to defend torturer Jon Burge) has gone to the survivors. The other half has gone to...pin-stripe patronage'. That's all your downtown law firms that are hired to fight us in court, about twenty-five to thirty million that has gone into the pockets of those lawyers defending Jon Burge and Richie Daley. -- Hitting Left

Diane Ravitch

Betsy DeVos is the first secretary of education in our history who is actually hostile to public education. We've never had this before. -- NPE 

Racism works by raising the bar for some people, and lowering the bar considerably for other people. @chrislhayeshttps://t.co/paJ3Ztt4Dd

— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) September 16, 2017

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Vallas/Solomon/Synesi connection was ignored when he ran with Quinn. 

The Watch Dogs

In a series of letters to Louisiana officials who oversaw the New Orleans district, Vallas vouched for Synesi Associates, an education consulting firm that recently had been started in Chicago by a former high school teacher named Gary Solomon.

“This out-of-state provider has a record of demonstrated effectiveness,” Vallas wrote in 2007, citing the “unique experience” of the firm’s staff.  -- Sun-Times

Rev. Jesse Jackson: 

Latinos building the border wall is like blacks building slave ships...If they were going to build slave ships to take blacks back to Africa, I hope blacks would not try to get the contracts. -- USA Today

Glenn Greenwald

Mocking “the instant elevation of Trump into a serious and respected war leader,” Glenn Greenwald in the Intercept recalled John Jay, one of the authors of the Federalist Papers, who wrote more than 200 years ago: “However disgraceful it may be to human nature . . . nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it.”

In fact, Jay wrote, “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it” — except, of course, to scratch that eternal itch for military glory, revenge or self-aggrandizement. -- Washington Post

Rex Tillerson 

Tillerson said that once the threat of the Islamic state "has been reduced or eliminated," the U.S. can focus on stabilizing Syria. -- Politico

Trump election has reformers reconsidering 'groupthink'.

Credit: Creative Commons/AFGE

"Ed reformers are just waiting for their turn to talk. They only want to talk about themselves. Anything you say, they just want to tell you, 'Charter schools are great.' A parent can tell them, 'I broke my foot.' And a reformer will say, 'You know what's good for that? Charter schools!'" -- Education Post's Chris Stewart 

For most of the past three decades, school reformers have been focused on dismantling traditional, mainly urban public school systems, replacing traditional public schools with a hodgepodge of market-oriented, tech-driven, resegregated and union-free "choice" options -- mainly, privately-run charter schools and school vouchers.

The unintended, or sometimes intended, consequence of these reforms is a steady rollback of the genuine reforms won by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s (the second Reconstruction period in our history). It was those reforms, limited and fleeting as they may have been, which, from 1968-88, generated the greatest educational gains for poor children this nation has ever seen.

But what we're seeing now is an increasingly racially re-segregated, two-tiered system made up of unregulated selective, heavily-resourced, high-performing schools for the few, and a collapsing infrastructure of resource-starved public schools for the many, especially in areas of concentrated urban and rural poverty.

Market-driven reform crosses traditional party lines and is based within a handful of conservative think tanks and policy groups like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Fordham Institute, and underwritten by high-powered philanthropists like billionaires Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg,  the Walton Family, the New Schools Venture Fund, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), and others.

It's actually difficult for me to call them "reformers" since, for the past 16 years, they have captured (or been captured by) the U.S. Dept. of Education bureaucracy, which under a string of ed secretaries (Paige, Spellings, Duncan, and King),has become a bulwark of standardization, privatization and failed top-down initiatives. In other words, the status quo.

But the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of choice supporter Betsy DeVos as the next secretary of education, have ironically thrown the current corporate and choice reformers into a state of panic and confusion. Why? Because even though they and Trump/DeVos share a common view of choice, charters and vouchers (a sticking point for some), throwing in with Trump's confederacy of alt-right white nationalists and educational know-nothings would widen the chasm between themselves and their potential customer base. A no-no for anyone working in the corporate world.

That potential base is mainly the sea of dissatisfied, largely black and Latino public school parents, many of whom have looked to charters and vouchers as potential escape routes from their faltering, underfunded and shuttered neighborhood schools.

The election of Trump has also thrown a monkey wrench into their efforts to organize, co-opt, or at least engage with that base as well as with union teachers, young progressive educators and policy people (ie. Teach for America alums) and school/community activists who are repulsed by Trump and the Republicans.

This hoped-for dialogue with progressives was a task assigned to former Duncan assistant Peter Cunningham and his on-line Eli Broad-funded journal Education Post.

So far, Cunningham's "let's find common ground" approach to the progressives has been little more than a veil. A trap set to draw them in without budging on any important issues. And the real problem is that it hasn't produced the hoped-for results. That's because the reformers are self-critical about style, but so far, not about content.

Sensing this failure, Cunningham has dropped all pretenses and sharpened his attacks on teacher unions, opt-out parents, and polemicising against school integration efforts. He's really sharpened his polemical knife for any and all who want caps on charter school expansion. Since the campaign began, national civil rights groups like the NAACP and Black Lives Matter have actually hardened their stance against charters and vouchers.

So much for "common ground"...

More proof that forced integration didn't work. @mikeklonsky Lamenting segregation is just an excuse to avoid improving schools.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 16, 2016

@leoniehaimson Recruiting a small percentage of POC doesn't change the fact that opt out is largely driven by middle class whites.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) April 24, 2016

At a recent AEI conference, choice reformers appeared to taking a self-critical approach and re-evaluating their strategies. Among the hottest topics was, what they called, "race-based" reform.

AEI's Rick Hess, who hosted the conference, writes: 

There was a willingness to talk frankly but in measured tones about disagreements. Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute pointed out that, for more than a decade, education reform has been approached as a race-based endeavor and questioned the wisdom and the desirability of this shift...

 There was a recognition that groupthink is a problem for all of us. AEI's Andy Smarick observed, "We all tend to surround ourselves with people who agree with our views. Then we wind up with an echo chamber. 

It's nice to know that some reformers are reconsidering groupthink, at least for now, in the face of Trumpism. Maybe others will follow. As for civil discourse about race and reform...I'm not holding my breath.

But the Trump/DeVos assault on public education should push choice, charter and voucher proponents to reconsider, not only their style, but substance as well.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Quarter-million marched in Chicago

Donald Trump

Mentioned education only once in his inauguration speech, referring to, "...an education system flush with cash, but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge." -- Transcript

 Elizabeth Warren

We Can Whimper, We Can Whine, Or We Can Fight Back. -- Huffington

Conway 

KellyAnn Conway on Alt-facts

"You're saying it's a falsehood and Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that," she told NBC's Chuck Todd. -- NBC News

Dan Rather

These are not normal times. These are extraordinary times. And extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. -- Facebook post on Alt-facts

Valerie Strauss

But the record shows that Democrats can’t just blame Republicans for her ascension. It was actually Democrats who helped pave the road for DeVos to take the helm of the Education Department. -- Washington Post

Lindbergh

American First-er Charles Lindbergh in 1941

The “greatest danger” Jews posed to the U.S. “lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio, and our government." -- L.A. Times

Peter Leyden,  founder & CEO of Reinvent

I think the backlash will be fast and furious. And it won’t just be Trump that goes down — it will be large swaths of conservative Republicans who will be almost helpless to stop Trump or distance themselves from him. -- Medium

Day One of the #resistance. Took us 5 years to get numbers this big against G.W. Bush. Only 24 hours against Trump. pic.twitter.com/h6RMm5bkkn

— Van Jones (@VanJones68) January 22, 2017

Look what they've done to the GED. Aligned with Common Core and handed over to Pearson

Back in the '80s I got my start in adult education, teaching GED classes in a little classroom in the back of the public library on North and Pulaski. My students were mostly dropouts from Clemente, looking to finish high school so they could go to a community college or apply for a decent job. Most were good students, capable, thoughtful and curious. Many had dropped out because of the gang situation at Clemente or for personal reasons -- they needed to work to support their families.

The curriculum was geared to the test and involved mainly basic math and literacy. But I did my best to get to know my students and learn as much as possible about their previous schooling and out-of-school learning experiences. We managed to turn the classes into much more than an exercise in test preparation and most of my students passed the test and got excited again about learning.

Now I'm hearing that the GED exam has been overhauled, aligned with the Common Core and handed over to Pearson, the giant British testing and textbook corporation in order to supposedly prepare students for 21st-Century jobs. The new test is now much harder. The test prep classes are given on-line. No more personalization. It's also become much more expensive in order to build in a big profit margin for Pearson, making it less accessible to the kinds of students I was teaching back in the day. The changes have caused thousands to drop out and give up.

NPR reports there's been sizable decrease in  the number of people who took and passed the test, according to local and state educators and the organization that runs it. In addition, at least 16 states have begun offering or plan to offer new, alternative tests.

What effect did all of these changes have on test takers?

"Our number of graduates for this last calendar year has dropped about 85 percent," says Myles Newman, who helps coordinate GED preparation for one school district in Lexington County, S.C. States including Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Colorado are reporting large drops as well.

"Teachers are telling us that the new test is virtually impossible for students to pass," says David Spring, who with his wife, Elizabeth Hanson, runs the website Restore GED Fairness in Washington state. Both are educators who have spent years helping people prepare for the GED.

Here's some hard numbers:

--- In 2012, a total of 401,388 people passed the GED test.

--- In 2014, only 58,524.

What a disaster!