No, Gov.Rauner. Schools are not 'crumbling prisons'. But they are in big trouble.

When asked by reporters to name any ‘Crumbling’ CPS schools he’s visited, he couldn't come up with one.

Gov. Rauner is delusional if he thinks equating Chicago's public schools with "crumbling prisons" is a political winner for him. He has succeeded only in uniting forces, from classroom teachers to parents, unions, Rahm/Claypool and Dem machine pols, AGAINST HIM. The same forces that a year ago were at war against each other.

#Notaprison tweets have gone viral with hundreds of snapshots and positive stories of great teaching by great teachers and wonderful learning opportunities for city kids, despite old, dirty, worn out, and toxic facilities in which teacher/learning take place. Chicago teachers are responsible for the many gains that have been reported (some exaggerated for political purposes) in measurable learning outcomes.

Most recently, for example, we learned that it's the neighborhood schools (not charters), as run-down as many of them are, that have been driving increased graduation rates.

And all these great achievements by students and educators, are now being threatened as Rauner holds school budgets hostage for the past year.

When pushed by reporters to name even one school he visited that was like a "crumbling prison", Rauner couldn't come up with one. How could he? He's more familiar with elite selective-enrollment schools like Walter Payton H.S., the school he clouted his own daughter into, with the help of Arne Duncan. Payton certainly is no crumbling prison.

As we pull together in opposition to our sociopath governor, let's not lose sight of the fact that there are still two tiers of public schools in Chicago, by design, and that many of our schools, serving the neediest children and families are  crumbling and badly in need of repair. Code violations, peeling paint (some of it lead-based), health code violations, fire alarms that don't work... these are just a few of the problems facing schools in the city's poorest neighborhoods.

Let's not forget also how building maintenance and repairs were neglected for years at schools targeted by the board for closing.

Many others are blighted, and strewn with trash as a result of the privatization of the custodial force.

Lead has just been found in the drinking water at a dozen more schools, even while Chicago's whole water testing system is being called out for cheating.

I could go on.

CEO Forrest Claypool is now threatening possible 40% cuts in school budgets and there is a strong possibility that schools may not open in time in the fall. He's used the threat of cuts to attack the CTU and force concessions from teachers in the ongoing contract negotiations.

Rauner is the main enemy of public education in the state and his school=prison demagogy is aimed at playing off suburban and downstate school districts against Chicago and out maneuvering his rival, Mike Madigan. He's even calling adequate school funding a "bailout" (as if Rauner was ever opposed to corporate bailouts). But let's not prettify the horrid conditions that exist in many neighborhood schools.

Fighting Rauner can't mean taking the heat off of Rahm Emanuel and his hand-picked board of education, who are using austerity as a rationale to gut schools, privatize operations, and debase teachers and their union.

Let's fight for our schools with two fists. Not just one.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Comey is "confused"

FBI Director James Comey

 “To speak of mass incarceration, I believe, is confusing and can obscure reality.” -- Sun-Times

Pres. Obama

"Learning is about so much more than just filling in the right bubble. So we're going to work with states, school districts, teachers, and parents to make sure that we're not obsessing about testing." -- Fox News

Arnie Duncan

“It’s important that we’re all honest with ourselves. At the federal, state and local level, we have all supported policies that have contributed to the problem in implementation." -- New York Times

Dean Leslie Fenwick

Howard Univ. Dean, Leslie Fenwick

The lie is that schemes like Teach For America, charter schools backed by venture capitalists, education management organizations (EMOs), and Broad Foundation-prepared superintendents address black parents concerns about the quality of public schools for their children. -- Washington Post

Delmarie Cobb

Barbara Byrd Bennett didn’t betray us by herself. She had help. She was not alone in the room. -- Bean Soup Times

92,000 arrested in U.S. schools. Chicago leads in filling school-to-jail pipeline.

Rashe France was a 12-year-old seventh-grader in 2012 when he was arrested in Southaven, Miss., charged with disturbing the peace on school property after a minor hallway altercation. His family is concerned the arrest will have repercussions in the future. (STEVE JONES FOR WSJ)

The school-to-jail pipeline is overflowing. Thousands of students, mostly black and Latino, are being arrested in school, many for what are considered minor violations of school discipline codes in white, wealthier schools. The result -- U.S. has the largest prison population in the world and nearly one out of every three American adults now are on the FBI's master criminal database.

Today's WSJ reports:

A generation ago, schoolchildren caught fighting in the corridors, sassing a teacher or skipping class might have ended up in detention. Today, there’s a good chance they will end up in police custody...Over the past 20 years, prompted by changing police tactics and a zero-tolerance attitude toward small crimes, authorities have made more than a quarter of a billion arrests, the Federal Bureau of Investigation estimates. Nearly one out of every three American adults are on file in the FBI’s master criminal database.

 According to the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights, 260,000 students were reported, or “referred” in the official language, to law enforcement by schools in 2012, the most-recent available data. The survey also said 92,000 students were subject to school-related arrests. There are no earlier comparable numbers—the Education Department requested the data because it couldn’t find good national research on the topic.

CHICAGO AMONG THE WORST...More so than in other large school districts, Chicago schools are quick to call in police to handle student misbehavior and conflict, according to a Catalyst Chicago analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights for the 2011-2012 school year (the most recent available).  In Chicago, police were called at a rate of nearly 18 cases for every 1,000 students, while New York City’s rate was 8 per 1,000 students and numbers in Los Angeles were 6 per 1,000.

Overall, CPS referred 7,157 students to law enforcement in 2012, of whom 2,418 students were arrested, according to the federal data. As is the case with school discipline in general, black males are disproportionately targeted

Increasingly, issues of classroom management and discipline are being taken out of the hands of educators and turned over to law enforcement. This certainly doesn't bode well for the future of the teaching profession or for our society.

May Day Warning: 'We're rapidly returning to the conditions of Ludlow days.'

Ludlow: The striking miners and their families, 1914

BILL MOYERS' blog has an excellent piece on the 100th anniversary of the Ludlow strike and massacre, by Erik Loomis, "US Workers Were Once Massacred Fighting for the Protections Being Rolled Back Today." The headline says it all.

A century later, the bloody incident might seem a relic of the distant past, but the Ludlow Massacre retains a powerful, disturbing and growing relevance to the present. After a century of struggling against powerful interests to make American workplaces safer and corporations responsive to their employees, the US is rapidly returning to the conditions of rampant exploitation that contributed to Ludlow.

The same theme is picked up by Thai Jones, writing in The Nation. He writes, "One hundred years on, the Ludlow Massacre is a starkly contemporary tragedy." Thai's book, "More Powerful Than Dynamite" is the best thing written yet on that period. Here's Rick Ayers' review at Huffington.

BROOKLYN TEACHERS aren't going for it -- Common Core that is. Prospect Heights International HS teachers in Brooklyn are refusing to administer an English Language Arts test Thursday because they believe it is useless to their non-native-English-speaking students. Twenty-six of the school’s 30 teachers sent a letter to Schools Chancellor Carmen Fariña urging her to drop the test for the city’s immigrant students still learning English. School leaders said they will still administer the test. -- N.Y. Post

KIDS FOR CASH...Okay, I admit I'm inconsistent when it comes to my opposition to prisons. In the case of Judge Mark Ciavarella, I think the punishment of 28 years in the slammer, fit the crime. What I don't understand is why the builder of the for-profit youth detention centers, Robert Mericle, only got a year and a fine for his role in the notorious juvenile justice scandal in which thousands of children were sent to his facilities by the judges who took $2.1 million in kick-backs from him. Actually, the prosecutors only recommended 6 months. What?? The Pennsylvania Supreme Court thankfully, threw out some 4,000 juvenile convictions after the scheme was uncovered.

ANOTHER DUNCAN DONUT...When Washington State Legislators did not move to mandate that standardized test scores be attached to teacher evaluations, WA became the first state in the country to have their NCLB waiver pulled by Sec. Duncan. NCLB calls for 100% of students at all schools in the United States to  be fully proficient in reading and math, as registered by student test scores, by 2014. Was that a cruel joke?

The loss of this waiver means that every parent in the state should expect a letter informing them that their child attends a "failing school". It also means that school districts will lose control of how they spend a portion of the federal funding they receive—some $40 million statewide. Schools may also be taken over by the state and forced to replace all or most of the staff. Here's Jesse Hagopian's post on Duncan's labeling of his school as a "failure." Jesse is running on the RESPECT ticket to be President of the Seattle Education Association.

Reproducing inequality

Back to the Caucasus

My summer session Philosophy of Ed class just finished reading Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow and discussing the role schools often play in reproducing the social order. The framing question my students are asking is: How can I be an ethical, socially conscious teacher in an unjust, inequitable system? Can't wait to read final papers.

The new Jim Crow

Over the weekend, we were handed a gift in the form of a New York Times piece, Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning? by Times economic reporter Shaila Dewan. 

The use of Caucasian to mean white was popularized in the late 18th century by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, a German anthropologist, who decreed that it encompassed Europeans and the inhabitants of a region reaching from the Obi River in Russia to the Ganges to the Caspian Sea, plus northern Africans. He chose it because the Caucasus was home to “the most beautiful race of men, I mean the Georgians,” and because among his collection of 245 human skulls, the Georgian one was his favorite wrote Nell Irvin Painter, a historian who explored the term’s origins in her book “The History of White People.”

Language is an expression of power relationships. Who has the ability and power to define themselves and others and to privilege one language and culture over the other, or declare one "official" and the other not?

Jewish/Israeli charter school franchises. Really?

A charter school operator running a lucrative chain of Jewish charter schools is able to redefine Judiaism as a non-religion to avoid separation of church-and-state issues, even while using his schools to teach from religious texts and celebrate Israeli Independence Day.

For Deutsch, the whole point of Ben Gamla, which opened its first school in Hollywood, Fla., in 2007, is to draw Jewish children who otherwise would attend regular public schools into an environment where their Jewish identity can flourish. -- JTA

Jewish charter schools, run with public tax dollars, explicitly set up to draw kids away from public schools? It sets my mind awhirl with thoughts of the white Christian academies in the 1950s and '60s, created as alternatives to newly-integrated (at least by law) public schools in the south.

Racist attack on Arab language school in N.Y.

I'm also thinking back to 2007 and the anti-Arab uproar in N.Y., led by Bloomberg/Klein and racist N.Y. Post columnist Daniel Pipes, over the opening of the Arab language and culture school, the  Khalil Gibran International Academy. A manufactured crisis over the word “intifada” on a T-shirt made by a local Arab-American organization led to the defaming of the school's  founding principal Debbie Almontaser and ultimately to the school's demise.

In 2009, there was a move to ban all Arabic speech in the Dearborn, Michigan public schools and in Nashville, Tennessee.  And in 2010 there was the banning of a Mexican-American Studies curriculum in Arizona, supported by a court decision a year later.

In Chicago, the closing of public schools, mostly in the black south and west-side communities, while at the same time, opening dozens of new, privately-managed charter schools, is another expression of these racial power relationships, enforced by law.

In the field of sociology, there's a polite name for all of this. It's called social reproduction, emphasizing the structures and policies leading to the transmitting of social inequality from one generation to the next. The schools continue to be arenas in which the battles over social reproduction are continually being played out. 

Remember, they're doing this for the kids

Corporate school reformers love saying their assault on public education is all about the kids, as opposed to the interests of adults.

So when Philly schools fired nearly every counselor in the district this week -- 283 in all, along with 3,800 other school staff, I guess you could say they were really freeing kids up from those time-consuming meetings about college or getting help dealing with bullying, sexuality and other personal social and emotional issues. 

But not all adults were negatively impacted by Gov. Corbett's draconian budget cuts. Millions more were diverted from education to prison expansion.  Pennsylvania will house 49,000 inmates at a cost of $35,188 per inmate and spend $9.3 billion to educate 1.8 million students at a cost in state dollars of $5,305 per child.

Can't help but wonder what they're going to do next for to those Philly kids?

We must hate our children, Joan Walsh writes in Salon.com. We crush them with debt to go to college -- and now college loan  rates have actually doubled this week. "Are we out of our minds?"

Of course, the truly lucky kids – those blessed wealthy members of the Lucky Sperm Club – sail through higher education without debt. But today, even upper-middle-class kids are having to take out loans, as the average annual cost of a four-year public university soars above $22,000, while private schools are over $50,000.  Who the hell thinks this is a good idea?

And the thing about college loans is, you can’t refinance them, and you can’t get out from under them by declaring bankruptcy. "It’s more like indenture", writes David Dayen. There’s no statute of limitation on collecting student loans, and lenders can garnish wages, tax refunds and even Social Security checks.

But remember, it's all about the kids.

School house to jail house

My students are just getting into Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow. We're trying to understand the connection between the mass incarceration of young people, particularly African-Americans and the worsening conditions for poor and children of color in the nation's schools.

Furman Univ. prof, Paul Thomas, writing in Truthout makes the link between Reagan's War on Drugs, which began filling the jails in the 1980s, and corporate-style school reform.

For three decades, the War on Drugs has led to mass incarceration, primarily impacting African American males, the racially defined "others," and the education reform movement based on high-stakes accountability has targeted "other people's children"  in ways that suggest market-oriented education reform is a school-based component of the New Jim Crow grounded in the criminal justice system.

Mass incarceration and market-oriented education reform share more than their genesis in the 1980s, since both have been shown to cause far more harm than good and to further marginalize African American and impoverished youths and adults.

The United States still puts more children and teenagers in juvenile detention than any other developed nations in the world, with about 70,000 detained on any given day, according to the Washington Post.

A new paper by economists Anna Aizer and Joseph J. Doyle, Jr. offers strong evidence that juvenile detention is a really counterproductive strategy for many youths under the age of 19. Not only does throwing a kid in detention often reduce the chance that he or she will graduate high school, but it also raises the chance that the youth will commit more crimes later on in life.

Where's the outrage over Kirk's 'jail-'em-all' plan?

Sens. Durbin & Kirk proposing the jailing of 18,000 more black men. (Sun-Times) 

Thanks to Congressman Bobby Rush for using plain talk to discredit Sen. Mark Kirk's latest plan to imprison 18,000 more young black men in Chicago. Rush called it "Kirk’s ‘white boy’ gang plan."  As usual, the Sun-Times comments section is filled with racist remarks and obscenities aimed at our heroic congressman. No one, it seems, is outraged over the Kirk plan.

I call the plan racist, bordering on genocidal. Aside from Bobby, there's been a deafening silence from local pols and from the Obama administration or from the media, in response to this "bipartisan" jail-em-all plan. Well, then again, there is Tribune's Eric Zorn:

"This idea doesn't seem, um, fully formed to me. "

On Wednesday, Republican Kirk and his liberal senator sidekick, Democrat Dick Durbin, approached Zachary Fardon, the nominee for U.S. Attorney in Chicago, and urged Fardon to begin rounding up every member of the Gangster Disciples street gang. Kirk wants the Senate Appropriations Committee to give him $30 million “to go after gangs like the GDs . . . and pick the biggest and baddest for a federal effort.”

From his language, you can tell that North Shore suburbanite Kirk is really a street guy, the biggest and baddest dude in the 10th Congressional District, who has a real handle on solving the gang problem. That plus his award-winning role as a Naval Intelligence Officer... Oh wait, he lied about that. Never mind.

Rush lit into the Kirk-Durbin plan, calling it  “ a sensational, headline-grabbing, empty, simplistic, unworkable approach.” If there is $30 million for Congress to spend, better most of it be allocated for “job creation and job training,” to address the gang problem, Rush said. Rush said an arrest sweep “is not going to work. . . . It is not a law and order, lock ‘em up solution.”

Thank you, Bobby.

Incoming arrestees arrive at the incoming area of Cook County Jail on Wednesday. The jail is at a current 98 percent of maximum capacity. Al Podgorski~Chicago Sun-Times

Where do Kirk and Durbin plan to put the 18,000 alleged gang members? Cook County Jail is already stuffed to overflowing, mainly with young black and Latino men. The court system is so backed up, some prisoners have been held for up to 10 years without  trial. Chicago's Guantanamo?

I've got it. Maybe they can use the 50 schools Rahm is closing this fall to accommodate the ever expanding prison population. With only 5% of the world’s population, the U.S. has 25% of the world’s prison population – that makes us the world’s largest jailer. We incarcerate young African American men at a rate of 1 in 9 – higher than any other group of Americans.

See Michelle Alexander's excellent book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, for the real story behind the Kirk plan.