WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Students from Chicago High School for the Arts cheer striking teachers.

Carlene Carpenter, Chicago charter school teacher

“We’ve been bargaining since last summer, and the process has been insulting to educators,” said Carlene Carpenter, a social studies teacher at the Latino Youth High School (LYHS), which is affiliated with the Youth Connection Charter School network. “If charter operators really cared about education, we wouldn’t be here today.” -- In These Times

Gov. J.B. Pritzker to Black United Fund of IL

 “We are taking a major step forward to legalize adult use cannabis and to celebrate the fact that Illinois is going to have the most equity-centric law in the nation. For the many individuals and families whose lives have been changed, indeed hurt, because the nation’s war on drugs discriminated against people of color, this day belongs to you, too." -- Sun-Times

Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center

“Hate groups and hate activity run pretty deep in southern California, and have for a very long time. This activity is deeply rooted in Orange county and northern San Diego." -- Guardian

Brooke Binkowski

[San Diego synagogue shooter] may have acted by himself, but as history and his Internet trail show, he was in no way a lone wolf. -- Washington Post

Calvin Ramsay, N.Y.U. student

“Food was a major obstacle,” he said, “especially in Manhattan.” Mr. Ramsay said that he will need to borrow about $40,000 more to graduate, but he is unwilling to take on more debt to do so. “Why do I need to go into debt,” he said, “to eat?” -- Tuition or dinner, NYT 

Jack Kelly, executive recruiter

I contend that the gig economy is dampening compensation growth. There is a huge trend glamorizing the gig economy. Articles extol the virtues of having a side hustle, taking control of your career, working when you want to work and other wonderful tales of success. The reality is that college-educated people who can’t find suitable jobs are now working for Uber, Lyft, Postmates, Instacart, DoorDash, Grubhub, TaskRabbit, temp work at corporations, assignments through Upworks and Fivver and seasonal jobs at Amazon warehouses. -- Forbes

Derby metaphor for 2016 election in unmistakeable.

The Kentucky Derby decision was not a good one. It was a rough & tumble race on a wet and sloppy track, actually, a beautiful thing to watch. Only in these days of political correctness could such an overturn occur. The best horse did NOT win the Kentucky Derby - not even close!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 5, 2019

What's the point of boasting about grad rates when most grads can't afford college?

There's been no hurricane here in IL, but the pandemic poverty in the state is every bit the disaster as any storm. It's dimming the life chances and educational opportunities for millions of young people.

While the mayor boasts about Chicago's alleged meteoric jump in graduation rates, here's another side to the story. The claims themselves, as I have often pointed out here, are misleading because, among other things, they fail to take into account mounting evidence that the recent bump in grad rates is closely connected with the decline in CPS enrollment, especially among the poorest African-American students, statistically the least likely to graduate on time.

But the story's epilogue is that college in IL has now become the domain of the wealthy and increasingly out-of-reach to the children of the poor, working and middle class, no matter which high school they attended. 

This from the Sun-Times:

Illinois’ in-state college tuition and fees ranked fifth highest in the U.S. last year, and a new report says those costs are a major reason that degrees are increasingly out-of-reach for low-income students.

Data from 2014 show low-income families in Illinois must set aside 63 percent of their total income for a student to attend a four-year institution, according to a report from The Partnership for College Completion. Middle-class families must set aside 25 percent, the study found.

About half of our state’s elementary and high school students live in poverty. The poverty rate among Chicago students is much higher -- nearly 80%.  Without massive amounts of state aid, Most students have little hope of going to college and completing their higher education. But under Gov. Rauner's regime, state aid has all but dried up. IL was one of four states that cut higher education funding over the last two years, a year-to-year difference of 68%. Those cuts mostly took place during the state’s budget impasse.

Among those threatened by the cuts are students with disabilities and special needs, also hurt by cuts in Medicare.

About half of students eligible for needs-based tuition help through Illinois’ Monetary Award Program, or MAP, didn’t’ receive it because of insufficient state funding.

Throw in the threatened deportation and loss of college funding of DACA (immigrant) students and you begin to see how bleak the prospects are for so many students.

Many of those who do graduate are fleeing the state for better college prospects.

Getting rid of the disaster that is hurricane Rauner will be a step forward, but only if it is part of a movement for radical change in state funding for education, including for free K-16 public education for all. I've yet to hear a peep about this from Rauner's leading Democratic potential opponents.

Let's keep pushing.

The IL Gov's Race: I don't like Kennedy.

To be honest, I just don't like this guy. 

Needless to say, dumping Rauner is our main goal in next year's race. But until then, I'm trying to sort out the gaggle of Democrats running in the primary. The way things look now, any of them --or Dave the cable guy -- could beat the billionaire incumbent, even in this, the most expensive gov's race in history.

Chris Kennedy is definitely not my favorite among the Dems running for governor. Yes, I know the Kennedy name still puts lots of liberals in nostalgia mode and the name alone may be enough to beat Rauner.

But to be honest, I just don't like the guy. It might have something to do with the way he tried to use his power as head of the U of I Board of Trustees and family wealth (president of the Merchandise Mart) to tarnish the career of my friend and former UIC colleague, Distinguished Prof. of Education, Bill Ayers over something "uncivil" Bill supposedly wrote 40 years earlier about Kennedy's father.

Then there was matter of Kennedy denying a UI teaching job to Prof. Steven Salaita over his tweeting critically about Israel. It was a move that ended up costing the scandal-ridden, cash-strapped university more than $2M in settlement and legal costs and the university president her job.

That kind of pettieness and propensity for taking revenge on critical writers, educators or journalists, belies the progressive line Kennedy is pushing now. Reminds me too much of Trump and Rauner. 

So I couldn't help chuckle while reading this. 

Capitol Fax's Rich Miller:

"Chris Kennedy spoke at the Mom+Baby governors candidate meet and greet yesterday. I didn't see anything on his Twitter page about it, but I'm told about 30 moms and 10 kids had to wait at least half an hour for him to arrive. And it went downhill from there."

And this...

 He was a hot mess. Shirt barely tucked in. He had on biking shoes. He spoke about Trump the entire time. Crazy! 

It was embarrassing. He misquoted stats that our members corrected him on. He got called out on lack of supporting single payer and marijuana legalization. He also starting talking education inequity and misspoke on the cps funding. It was nuts. Story here

Finally, Kennedy won't show his hand on hot-button school reform issues like charters and vouchers. Why not? Makes me suspicious.

Kennedy is welcome to come on Hitting Left and try and prove me wrong. We've already had candidate Ald. Ameya Pawar on and State Sen. Dan Biss will be our in-studio guest on August 4th. Others may soon follow.

It would be nice if there was at least one woman running.

Rauner appointment of Vallas will take CSU from frying pan into the fire.

“When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.” ― Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

If you want to see how disaster capitalism works in real time, watch for shock-and-awe Gov. Bruce Rauner to appoint Paul Vallas as head of predominantly-black Chicago State University.

Vallas may have cost Quinn the election.

Driven to its knees after years of corrupt leadership and deprivation of adequate funding by state leaders, CSU is now set up for privatization, dismemberment and final burial by a governor bent on destroying everything public in public education. And who better to lead the way to the academic graveyard than Vallas, the master of disaster himself?

If it was up to the voters, he couldn't be elected dog-catcher. Vallas, the faux Democrat whose selection as Pat Quinn's running mate was a major factor in Quinn's loss to Rauner in the gov's race, is one of the most despised figures in the field of education. As I recall, he even lost his own primary run for governor to none other than Rod Blagojevich. From Chicago to Philly, to New Orleans, to Haiti, to Chile, and Bridgeport, he has left chaos, and division in his wake.

His top-down, school reform approach, pushing so-called "choice", privatization and busting teacher unions, puts him on par with Trump and Betsy DeVos. 

His appointment comes at a time when his former partner in Synesi Associates, Gary Solomon, is on his way to prison, along with Barbara Byrd-Bennett in the SUPES corruption scandal. Synesi is one of the indicted companies that hired Byrd-Bennett as a consultant, in return for her support in obtaining millions of dollars in CPS no-bid contracts. Vallas not only hired Solomon and his companies when he worked in Philadelphia, but brought Solomon with him to New Orleans.

Vallas is no more qualified to run a university than he was to run a public schools system. In fact, the governor of CT tried to pass a special dispensation and failed after a state superior court judge ruled that Vallas did not complete a state-mandated school leadership program and was therefore not qualified to be superintendent of Bridgeport. He was then run out of town by voters.

I'm hoping CSU faculty and students will rally in opposition to Rauner's appointment.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Wesley Mann

Sankofa co-director Raoul Roach (son of Max Roach), Harry Belafonte and Gina Belafonte at the Many Rivers to Cross festival in Fairburn, Ga. 

 Harry Belafonte

“America has a cancer that’s at work, and it’s slowly distributing itself through the national body. There’s a million reasons to mobilize, but [now] Donald Trump has stepped into the space. It isn’t Trump the man, [it’s] the number of people who approve of him, who embrace him.” -- Billboard

Author Paul Mason

If we do not break this cycle, you can easily see capitalism being replaced by a stagnant neo-feudalism. -- Postcapitalism and the city

Michael Zilles, President Newton, MA Teachers Association

...once this cruel experiment in market competition has played itself out, we are left with chronically underfunded public schools, school closures, disrupted lives, and an ever more unbreakable pattern of segregation, inequality, and poverty. To avoid that risk, any reasonable person would vote “no” on Question 2. -- Boston Globe

Standing Rock Sioux Tribal Chair Dave Archambault II

"We need the federal government to step in and start protecting us from the state officials." -- Democracy Now

 Bill McKibben

 "The shocking images of the National Guard destroying tepees and sweat lodges and arresting elders this week remind us that the battle over the Dakota Access Pipeline is part of the longest-running drama in American history -- the United States Army versus Native Americans." -- New York Times

PARCC predicts college 'success'. So what?

Got this in my mail today from the right-wing think-tankers at the Hoover Institute: "PARCC and Massachusetts state exams predict college success equally well." 

My response: So what? So does poverty.

They're notifying us ed bloggers about a "first of it's kind" study comparing PARCC and MCAS as predictors of college success.

But unfortunately, there's still no better predictors of college success than poverty and race. That's especially true now that college tuition rates and the cost of student loans has made a college degree barely accessible to all but the children of the wealthy.

Without getting into all the methodological problems with this un-amazing new study, I will just say that it in no way measures the probability of high school students' college success -- meaning graduation with a degree in a reasonable and affordable number of years.

Instead, it looks at high school test-takers' grades in their freshman year of college. And guess what this break-through study finds? The same kids who scored high on PARCC and MCAS in high school also got high marks in their freshman year at college. Amazing discovery!

The study doesn't track students beyond that year and doesn't look at other factors, like creativity, perseverance, collaboration, vision and self-discipline, which are just a few basic qualities that correlate with college success. So the think-tankers are claiming way too much. And it made no difference which tests the students took. The results came out the same. 

College degree completion by race. 

Not to mention (but I will) the fact that MCAS was never designed as a predictor of college success. Rather it was supposed to measure students’ proficiency relative to statewide curriculum standards. That all changed with the adoption of Common Core and the PARCC exam, designed by Pearson, Inc. and underwritten largely by the Gates Foundation. 

The stated purpose of PARCC is to measure whether students are on track to succeed in college. Since standardized test scores align most closely with family income and education, school districts could have save billions by cancelling the tests and simply asking parents to send in the IRS forms. 

By pushing these tests as predictors, the think-tankers and test makers are actually turning them into gate keepers. 

The topper -- many of even the elite universities now pay little or no attention to applicants' standardized test scores. So much the better. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Ithaca College students in 'solidarity walkout'

Ithaca College Student Body President Dominick Recckio

"This movement has taken over the complete educational landscape of the entire institution. It has framed everyone at Ithaca College’s educational experience and will continue to do so." -- Democracy Now

Outgoing I.G. Faisal Khan

"We are the third biggest metropolis in the country. I would describe to you that the oversight in Chicago is comparable to the Wild West -- anything goes....

"...I could not believe how backwards the city was when it came to ethics. It needs to be blown up and started all over again ... I want Chicagoans to get their outrage back and say: 'enough is enough.'" 

Rahm & Ald. Joe Moore

Moore Khan...

Ald. Joe Moore called a female investigator from [Khan's] office a “bitch” and Khan himself a “bozo.” -- Politico

Sen. Ted Cruz

 “There is no meaningful risk of Christians committing acts of terror." -- Washington Post

Jesse Berney

Terrorist attacks in Western cities should make us more sympathetic to refugees fleeing Syria: The horror in Paris Friday evening is a daily reality of the civil war they're trying to escape. --Rolling Stone

Missouri student protests shine a light on campus institutional racism

One positive outcome from the Univ. of Missouri student protests is finally more media focus and light shined on the racist culture often embedded in post-secondary campus life.

John Eligon, who has been covering the protests since Ferguson, does a fair job of getting at it in his yesterday's NYT piece, "At University of Missouri, Black Students See a Campus Riven by Race."

But even from the headline you can see that his focus is more on black students' "perception" rather than the reality of campus institutional racism. It's more about "racial tension" than racism. But why shouldn't there be "racial tension" on a campus with a long history of systemic racism that's become a part of the fabric of university life and where black students, many away from home and from their own communities for the first time, have to shoulder the burden of change, often in isolation. All this, not to mention the ongoing physical threats to their safety.

Eligon begins to make the case here [My comments in brackets]:

Missouri, where the state university began accepting black students in 1950 and hired its first black faculty member in 1969, has faced distinct challenges in overcoming racial divisions. [Eligon assumes that's what the administration is trying to do. We still have to consider the possible purpose of the institution being social reproduction. - M.K.].

With Kansas City to the west and St. Louis to the east, the state has two urban hubs that account for most of the state’s black residents, about 12 percent of the population. The rest of the state is overwhelmingly rural and white. Both blacks and whites are underrepresented [Not sure how both are "underrepresented". -- M.K.] at the university compared with the demographics of the entire state. Eight percent of students are black, while nearly 80 percent are white, compared with about 84 percent of the state.

Educational outcomes at the university have also not always been equal ["Not always" ?Have they ever been? -- M.K.]. While about 83 percent of black freshmen return for their sophomore year, nearly 88 percent of whites and 94 percent of Asians do. And black students have the lowest graduation rate of all races, less than 55 percent, compared with 71 percent for whites.

Black students are demanding the hiring of more minority faculty members which they say would help improve "racial understanding" [Eligon's words -- M.K.] . About three out of four faculty members on this campus are white, and only about 3 percent are black.

Yes, that would be a good start. 

The struggle continues. Look for it to spread to other campuses. I hope so. 

AT CUNY: Bodies on the line

A SmallTalk Salute goes out to CUNY faculty, staff and supporters for putting their bodies on the line in their fight to win a contract. CUNY profs have had to work without a contract for five years and haven't received a raise in six. More than 50 were arrested in yesterday's protest including Queens College professor, Barbara Bowen, the president of the PSC, the union representing CUNY faculty.

Contract Now!!! #cunycontractnow pic.twitter.com/XnZMaOtqAl

— PSC_CUNY (@PSC_CUNY) November 4, 2015

Thanks Kenyon... Hey where's J.C. Brizard? ... Day 25 for hunger strike

Thanks to Kenyon super Prof. Peter Rutkoff for inviting us to come engage with students at Kenyon College yesterday. Undergrads we met, including some from Chicago, were reading Jonathan Kozol's "Savage Inequalities", analyzing it against conditions in urban schools today, and brainstorming ways to support struggling schools, parents and students in Knox County and other communities in Ohio.

Peter helped to create the college’s interdisciplinary American Studies program in 1990. His books cover subjects such as the origins of Bebop, styles of baseball, and social theory in Europe and America. Some of his titles include: his novel, Irish Eyes, New York Modern: The Arts and the City, Shadow Ball: A Novel of Baseball and Chicago, and Cooperstown Chronicles: Camp and Other Love Stories.

Rahm bounced Brizard

CONNECTIONS...Former Chicago schools CEO J.C. Brizard was a disaster for CPS. He was bounced unceremoniously by Rahm Emanuel to make room for triple disaster, Barbara Byrd-Bennett. But don't worry. His golden parachute landed him on his feet and Brizard will be using his insider connections to try and hustle big consulting contracts for Cross & Joftus.

Cross refers to Christopher Cross, a former Education Department assistant secretary who now is connected with the Broad Foundation.

DYETT PARENTS and Chicago community activists are now in the 25th day of their hunger strike. Essence Magazine reports:

Though Mayor Emanuel, who has shuttered nearly 50 schools since 2013, says that the school closures are beneficial to students and allow them to attend better high schools, many parents feel that the reforms target Black residents.

You think...?

The group announced that three activists, Brandon Johnson with the Chicago Teachers Union, Susan Hurley with Chicago Jobs With Justice and Asif Wilson with Teachers for Social Justice have now joined the hunger strike.

The fall of Chancellor Wise

 Asked if she was taking the fall for the Board of Trustees, Wise said, “no,” she was sharing the responsibility. -- Illinois Public Media, September 04, 2014

Phyllis Wise has been forced to resign from her $549,069/yr. job as University of Illinois Chancellor. I say, good riddance to you Chancellor Wise and may the rest of the Board of Trustees go with you. You have helped disgrace the name of a once-great state university system and made me ashamed to call it my alma mater. I received both my masters and Ph.D. from UIC.

Wise takes the fall but it was the Board of Trustees that violated the basic principles of academic freedom and the First Amendment when they rescinded their job offer to professor Steven Salaita over his controversial posts (critical of Israel's attack on Gaza) on Twitter. Rather than stick up for principle, the cowardly chancellor and trustees caved under pressure from a handful of wealthy and powerful donors who threatened to withhold their contributions if Salaita was hired.

This of course, is not the first time the U of I trustees have violated the rights of faculty members and the principles of academic freedom. I'm thinking back to 2010 when my friend and UIC colleague Bill Ayers was denied emeritus status by Board Chairman Christopher Kennedy who was bitter about an obscure controversial passage referring to the Kennedy assassination in a book Bill co-authored back in 1974.

Phyyllis Wise

But now the publicly-funded state university faces even greater losses of credibility and money with a barrage of suits being filed by Salaita, the ACLU and others.The Salaita firing has also led to boycotts by academics, who refused to visit the campus for conferences and criticism from some brave souls who are members of the university’s own faculty and student body. A letter protesting Salaita's firing, signed by dozens of Jewish U of I students and faculty members, was ignored by Wise and the trustees last September.

The American Association of University Professors voted earlier this year to censure the university.

All this not to mention the university's mistreatment of its athletes and its racist Chief Illiniwek mascot.

According to the Sun-Times:

The university also faces financial uncertainty due to the state’s budget crisis. The state has no spending plan for the current fiscal year, leaving public universities uncertain how much money they’ll receive. Gov. Bruce Rauner has proposed cuts as steep as 31 percent. State funding covers about 11 percent of the university’s operating budget.

A judge on Thursday denied most of the university’s request to dismiss the Salaita case.

Steven Salaita not "civil" enough to teach at U of I. But Chief Illiniwek OK. #Civility pic.twitter.com/qDBV0j7mMi

— Mike Klonsky (@mikeklonsky) September 3, 2014

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Dave Zirin

Dave Zirin

"This is about the rot of for-profit amateurism... [It's] educational money-laundering of young black men...the organized theft of black wealth... Having the NCAA investigating the North Carolina scandal is like having Tony Soprano come in to deal with the neighborhood drug dealer." -- Melissa Harris-Perry on MSNBC

Nicholas Kristof

A new Pew survey finds that Americans consider the greatest threat to our country to be the growing gap between the rich and poor. Yet we have constructed an education system, dependent on local property taxes, that provides great schools for the rich kids in the suburbs who need the least help, and broken, dangerous schools for inner-city children who desperately need a helping hand. Too often, America’s education system amplifies not opportunity but inequality. -- N.Y. Times

Jitu Brown

Jitu Brown

“It is a testimony to the commitment from people that live in this neighborhood who not only developed a full academic plan for the school in absence of a vision by the district, but also demonstrated, turned out to town hall meetings and showed their overwhelming support of Dyett. It is not the result of elected officials". -- Early & Often

 UTLA president Alex Caputo-Pearl 

“You had him [former L.A. Supt. John Deasy] supporting this community movement that had been brewing for about 10 years around positive behavior support and restorative justice. But he didn’t invest resources into the staffing, training or school reform that would be needed to really bring those things into practice.” -- Capital & Main

A real-estate and hedge-fund concern that happens to have a college attached

Annie Lowrey writes in NY Mag:

There's an old line about how the United States government is an insurance conglomerate protected by an army. Harvard is a real-estate and hedge-fund concern that happens to have a college attached. It has a $32 billion endowment. It charges its rich students — and they are mostly from rich families, with many destined to be rich themselves — hundreds of millions of dollars in tuition and fees. It recently embarked on a $6.5 billion capital campaign. It is devoted to its own richness. And, as such, it is swimming in cash.

If it wanted to maximize its $32 billion worth of utility, it could, say, admit more students, especially poor ones, reduce its focus on property development, and double down on its focus on research, which currently makes up $800 million of its $4.2 billion in annual operating expenses.

Harvard alum include a gaggle of current corporate school "reformers" and ed profiteers, including Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, TFA's Wendy Kopp, John Schnur, Geoffrey Canada and Joel Klein. This group alone may be reason enough to yank Harvard's non-profit status.

But it has also produced some of our best old (W.E.B. DuBois, Ted Sizer...) and current thinkers, researchers and progressive ed activists like... Well, I'm sure there are some (just kidding). There are some great and distinguished education faculty in the Graduate School of Education. Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot comes to mind as does Linda Nathan, Eleanor Duckworth, Marshall Ganz, Howard Gardner, Patricia Graham and others too numerous to mention.

Susan Moore Johnson

Here's a good one. Harvard GSE Prof. Susan Moore Johnson has produced several studies showing the positive effects of teacher unions on school practice. At Harvard, Johnson directs The Project on the Next Generation of Teachers, an ongoing research project addressing critical questions regarding the future of our nation’s teaching force. Since 1998, The Project has examined a range of issues related to attracting, supporting, and retaining skilled, committed, and effective teachers in U.S. public schools.

She dedicated much of her early career to the study of teachers unions, collaborative bargaining, and teachers’ working conditions. A modern pioneer in these areas, Moore Johnson has drawn attention to the contexts in which teachers perform their work, specifically highlighting the importance of schools’ collaborative culture in teacher retention.

Writes Johnson:

Many people think that national unions dictate school practice. They don’t realize how much is determined at the local level when contracts are negotiated. Contracts, each of which is locally negotiated, establish pay and working conditions — hours, class size, and evaluation — for teachers. Collective bargaining provides a legal, structured process in which local unions and management can develop reforms, such as peer review or performance-based pay.

Speaking of Kopp and TFA,

Members of  the Urban Teacher Education Consortium,  is a national consortium of teacher educators, have just released a position paper on the training of teachers, releasing it at a time of “encroaching dehumanization and disempowerment of both teachers and their students.”

The paper blasts some alternative teacher prep programs, including (though not by name) Teach For America, which gives newly graduated college students five weeks of summer training and then places them into high-poverty schools. -- Washington Post

WaPo's  Valerie Strauss has republished the statement in full including a list of signers:

Kenneth Zeichner – University of Washington
Esther Ohito – Teachers’ College, Columbia University
Lori Chajet – CUNY Graduate Center and Brooklyn College
Robert Lee – Illinois State University
Heather Johnson – College of the Holy Cross
Ann Burns Thomas – SUNY Cortland
Dale Ray – University of Chicago
Joseph Featherstone – Michigan State University (ret.)
William Kennedy – University of Chicago
Thomas DelPrete – Clark University
Victoria Trinder – University of Illinois at Chicago
Karen Hammerness – UTEC Coordinating Committee
Helen Featherstone – Michigan State University (ret.)
Jennifer Robinson – Montclair State University
Bernadette Anand – Banks Street College of Education
Cecilia Traugh – Long Island University, Brooklyn
Klaudia Rivera – Long Island University, Brooklyn
Sheila Resseger – Coalition to Defend Public Education (Rhode Island)
Sandy Grande – Connecticut College
Lisa Gonsalves –UMass Boston
Amy Millikan – San Francisco Teacher Residency
Jonathan Osler – San Francisco Teacher Residency
Les Blatt – Clark University (ret.)
Sharon Feiman-Nemser – Brandeis University
Andre Perry – Davenport University
Kathy Schultz – Mills College
Anna Richert – Mills College
Marvin Hoffman – University of Chicago (ret.)
Kavita Kapadia Matsko – University of Chicago
Kate Bielaczyc – Clark University
Eric De Meulenaere – Clark University
Ricci Hall – Clark University partner principal, Worcester Schools
Sarah Michaels – Clark University
Patti Padilla – Clark University partner principal, Worcester Schools
Jie Park – Clark University
Heather Roberts – Clark University
Nastasia Lawton-Sticklor – Clark University
Thea Abu-El Haj – Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Dirck Roosevelt – Teachers College, Columbia University
Beth Rubin – Rutgers University, New Brunswick

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Bruce Rauner

 "I've worked with Rahm Emanuel and (former Mayor) Rich Daley because they control the schools," Rauner told the Tribune earlier this year. "And we've talked about school reform fairly extensively. We disagree on many things ... but on school reform we see things the same way. He believes in charter schools and competition and choice. He's starting to come around and be supportive of vouchers, which I am a definite believer in." -- Chicago Tribune

 Melissa Harris-Perry 

So, see, Ed? There’s no need for your teachers to change the subject. Because what we do as teachers is to offer guideposts, context, and space for disagreement. We can teach our students not to be afraid of the unknown and the complicated, by confronting the hard topics as well as the easy. Now is the time to teach, not to hide. -- Open Letter: How to teach students about Ferguson

 Chicago Tribune Editorial from Feb. 4, 2007

"Terrence Carter represents a new breed of principals who entered the profession from business through an excellent principal training program called New Leaders for New Schools. The program, which operates in Chicago and five other cities and is about to add two more, imposes higher expectations on principals." -- The Courant

Univ. of Illinois faculty members

 “With this vote of no confidence, the faculty of UIUC’s American Indian studies program also joins the thousands of scholars and organizations in the United States and across the world in seeing the chancellor’s action as a violation of academic freedom and freedom of speech.” -- New York Times

The view from L.A.

The way schooling is supposed to be-- I'm out on the Left Coast. taking a few days off from Chicago tundra, watching a school field trip to Leo Carrillo State Park.

I'm in L.A. but still envious (no, really) of those who got to join the UIC picket lines or march yesterday  in Springfield in defense of public employee pensions. This show of strength, especially in anticipation of upcoming state and local elections, is bound to have some effect.

Now the question is, can this positive motion produce the kind of unity and organization needed to put a hurt on Rahm, Rauner, Madigan and their gang? I don't think the progressive movement really has a horse in the governor's race, but we should be able to use the growing rifts in the enemy's camp to our advantage.

Locally, the Will Guzzardi (39th) and Jay Travis (26th) state rep races are strategically key. The machine, including Boss Madigan's thugs, have jumped into the Guzzardi/Berrios race with both boots as Guzzardi's poll numbers continue to grow. Madigan's people are apparently taking  messaging and propaganda duties away from Toni Berrios' own incompetents. As a result the panicky Berrios campaign is headed straight for the gutter.

This from Gapers Block:

Maybe the memory of a close margin explains the recent outflux of advertisements from the 2014 Berrios campaign that range from the sensational to the horrific. "Will Guzzardi doesn't want you to know where sexual predators are hiding" declares one 8-by-10 inch card in red letters above a man's face emerging from the dark. "Sexual predators could be living near the park where our children play," Berrios's message continues on the back, "...and Will Guzzardi doesn't think we should know."

My feeling is that Berrios' gutter politics will backfire and Will will be able to pull it out.

DEBTORS PRISON?…The Illinois unemployment rate is now among the nation's highest and even worse than midwest neighbors Ohio and Michigan. Wow! And as public employees have their standard of living reduced, pensions threatened,  and face mounting debt and trouble paying their bills, feudal lord Rahm puts the squeeze on them to pay up quickly or risk suspensions or firings. He's even using increased teacher debt as a reason to undermine the CTU contract. What's next, debtors' prison?

FACULTY POWER...The two-day UIC faculty strike appears to have had a major impact. Hundreds of classes were cancelled as tenured and non-tenured teachers and profs flexed their collective muscle. Hopefully this show of strength will force the administration to negotiate a fair contract with decent pay for university workers and empowerment of faculty over curricular and other decisions that affect teacher/learning and student well-being.

According to the Ward Room:

Instead of simply being about who gets paid what and when, the school’s first-ever strike is as much about what kind of an institution UIC is and will be, and whether or not educators are in the business of adding value to students or adding value to a university’s bottom line. 

Writing in Jacobin Magazine, however, two UIC English professors, Lennard Davis and Walter Benn Michaels, make the case that UIC faculty are also committed to educating working-class students and say the strike is also about whether or not they’re able to fulfill that mission