Pandemic schooling spaces

Mike Klonsky pic.

Driving down Lake Street on the city's west side Monday, I stopped to take a look at the former Dett Elementary School. Dett was one of the 49 schools closed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2013 for "underutilization" after its population dropped precipitously. Instead of being re-purposed, now, eight years later, the building still sits boarded-up and graffitied, a costly, dangerous blight on the neighborhood. 

Back in 2016, there was a plan to turn Dett into a center for women and girls or an artist incubator but potential buyers for the building backed out. So CPS was stuck with it. Neighborhood students were instead assigned to nearby Herbert or enrolled in charter schools.  

Today students are back in school in Chicago with classrooms packed to overcapacity. Many schools are overcrowded with some kindergarten classrooms stuffed with more than 30 children, a horrifying thought in the middle of this deadly pandemic when there's not yet a vaccine available for young children. 

The lack of available classroom space forced the board to roll back its distancing requirement from six feet to three feet "wherever possible" with unmasked kids often eating together, shoulder-to-shoulder in school lunchrooms. In the high schools, we're seeing images of students, many unvaxed, packed together in crowded hallways between classes.

I can't even imagine being a short-handed teacher, trying to keep up with 32 or so kinders, keeping them masked and at least three feet apart, all the while trying to do some great teaching. And yet, like so many heroic doctors, nurses, and front-line medical staff, teachers are giving it their best shots. But I doubt this mode is sustainable.

CPS is operating in crisis mode in a churning sea of divisive state politics, racial segregation and inequities, all exacerbated by the resurgent Delta variant.

Schooling in a pandemic and preparation for post-pandemic schooling offers a chance for school planners and educators to take a more holistic approach and to try and undo the damage done by the mass closing of schools a decade ago. 

The idea that we still have boarded-up school buildings and schools in some neighborhoods with excess classroom space, while in others, students are dangerously jammed together, is mind-boggling. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

George Clooney and a group of A-listers, including Don Cheadle and Kerry Washington, are working with the Los Angeles Unified School District to fill that gap by launching an academy that promises to provide education and practical training in the arts and sciences of filmmaking to marginalized communities.

Linda Darling-Hammond on Clooney's new school

 “Charity is no substitute for justice,” said Linda Darling-Hammond, the president of the California State Board of Education. “It’s great that people are making these investments, but we have a bigger job to do.” -- New York Times

Joe Rufo, Trump's new point man on education

“We have successfully frozen their brand—'critical race theory’—into the public conversation and are steadily driving up negative perceptions. We will eventually turn it toxic, as we put all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” -- Washington Post

 Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker 

...said today that families can expect school to look "a lot more like it did before the pandemic." -- Boston Herald

Tucker Carlson spews anti-Lightfoot racism

We want to start with an insurrection — an insurrection against the rule of law, against civilization itself — that’s been going on for more than a year in the city of Chicago. Since the death of George Floyd last May, Chicago’s mayor, Lori Lightfoot, has embraced every part of the equity and inclusion agenda. --RCP

Fareed Zakaria 

The decay of American democracy is real. It’s not a messaging or image problem. Until we can repair that, I’m not sure we can truly say America is back. -- Washington Post

Hunter Biden (Oink!)

 He referred to Asian women as “yellow” in a January 2019 text to his cousin who was asking about the type of women he preferred. -- Daily Mail 

Dr. Anthony Fauci

"The people who are giving the ad hominems are saying, 'Ah, Fauci misled us. First he said no masks, then he said masks. Well, let me give you a flash. That's the way science works. You work with the data you have at the time." -- Axios

Anti-China cold warriors threaten pandemic recovery and progressive ed

“I made clear the US will defend our national interests, stand up for our democratic values, and hold Beijing accountable for its abuses of the international system.” -- Sec. of State Tony Blinken

It shouldn't take fear of China's economic power to jumpstart our post-pandemic economy or adequately fund our public schools. But that is the logic of the cold warriors and regime changers who play leading roles in Biden's State Department and in many foreign policy think tanks. 

The current revival of cold-war nationalism, following in the wake of Trump's racist "Kung-flu" fear-mongering and white-supremacist populism, presents formidable threats to post-pandemic recovery. It's also responsible for the spike in anti-Asian racism and violence since the start of the pandemic.

Escalating tensions with China could also negatively influence educational priorities the way they did with the Obama administration's so-called Race To The Top. 

Yesterday's WaPo opinion piece by columnist E.J. Dionne Jr. asks the question: Will China get our country moving again?

Our response to this fear does not have to descend into warmongering, and it shouldn’t mean abruptly cutting off cooperation with China in areas where, as on climate action, partnership is necessary...But the danger China poses could fundamentally reorder U.S. attitudes toward government’s role in domestic economic growth, research and development in ways that leave the United States stronger. 

That all depends on what you mean by "stronger".  

For example, while competition for the vaccine market this past year did lead to some great achievements in the field of medicine, vaccine nationalism also caused a widening of the gap between the vaccine haves and have-nots (read: rich and poor countries), leaving the latter with collapsed economies and with millions suffering and dying needlessly from disease, child poverty, and hunger. We can only imagine the possibilities offered by a multi-national effort in the war to defeat Covid. 

Do we really think we are safe from this horrendous disease that has already killed 2.6 million worldwide, when millions more are dying in other countries? Do we really think we can successfully rebuild our own shattered economy if the economy of more than half the world remains in tatters?

Even in China, where the virus has been under control for months, a variant strain entering the country on a visitor or in a shipment of food, could force the entire country into another lockdown. The same is true for this country. 

Big-power confrontation and competition for global supremacy is nothing new and we've come to expect it as normal. It's not only embedded in the new globalism, it's been a function of imperialism since the turn of the last century. It's what led to the start of both world wars as well as the rise of the military-industrial complex, and the economic imbalance caused by the militarization of our society. 

During the Trump years, it was represented by the Republicans' America-First demagogy which precipitated the MAGA attack on the Capitol on January 6th. I'm still hopeful that the Democrats' victory will bring about a turn away from MAGAism. 

But recent threatening statements by Pres. Biden, and his appointed Sec. of State Tony Blinken, are discouraging. The Biden administration has an opportunity to tone down the Trumpian rhetoric and reach new trade and anti-COVID agreements with China for the sake of world peace, health, and stability. 

As for education... the perceived China threat also impacts the conduct and content of schooling. 

As Dionne points out:

When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial Earth satellite, it set off a national panic...One result was the 1958 National Defense Education Act, as Congress “began searching for ways to produce scientists and engineers who would equal Russia’s.” Another, of course, was the space program.

Cold warriors at that time raised the chilling specter of Soviet missiles raining down on American cities from outer space and blamed "failing" public schools for our lag in the race into space, or as it became known during the Obama administration, "the race to the top."

One result was the rise of heavily-tracked mega high schools and an over-reliance on high-stakes, standardized testing. This is nothing new. During the Obama administration, then Sec. of Education Arne Duncan used the fear of U.S. students lagging behind China to impose a regimen of punitive high-stakes testing on the nation's schools and teachers. Obama even called it "our Sputnik moment."

Now, schools and educators are again forced to confront the question of educational purpose. Is it the schools' purpose to train a new army of anti-China cold-warriors? Or rather, to prepare a generation of critical thinkers with the skills and habits of mind necessary to build a democratic society? I'll go with the latter. 

To participate in an ongoing discussion on post-pandemic schooling, follow @Smallschools on Twitter. 

On the way to the picket line...

William Estrada, CTU member, Visual Arts teacher, Telpochcalli Elementary School. (Alan Maass)

It's a cold and blustery morning in Chicago. We're heading over to walk the picket line with my teacher/daughter and her colleagues at Telpochcalli Elementary in Little Village. Telpochcalli is one of the few remaining original small schools started by activist teachers, including Jennifer, back in the '90s. Its dual-language curriculum is focused on Mexican culture and the arts. My grandson Oscar, now 19, went there.

As we always do when there's a teacher strike, Susan & I will stop first to pick up a box of coffee and some donuts for the teachers (and me).

The Nation begins its story on the strike by interviewing Telpochcalli art teacher William Estrada.

Estrada teaches visual arts to classes [at several public schools-m.k.] as large as 36 students, and he doesn’t have enough chairs to go around, much less supplies. “The chairs that we have in my classroom, we actually got them out of storage from other schools that closed down because we didn’t have enough money to buy them ourselves,” he says. “We want to make sure we’re given the resources that we need in order for us to do our job and to support the students and the needs that they have.”

Yesterday, CTU Prez Jesse Sharkey told the teachers to prepare for a "short-term strike". I hope so but I'm not so sure. I don't know how he is either. Soon after union leaders had announced that they saw a path to a settlement and agreement on a contract, talks broke down and the strike was called. It seems like the list of unresolved issues is always changing and being argued out with lots of heat and not much light, mainly in the press.

I'm hoping that both sides stay focused on achieving a fair contract and on the important teacher issues, such as teacher pay, smaller class size, and staffing, including librarians, nurses and social workers, and that attempts by some in the media to frame the collective bargaining process simply as a power play between CTU leaders and Mayor Lightfoot fail.

By some, I mean Greg Hinz at Crain's, who writes:

In the end, maybe it had to come to this. A strong-willed rookie mayor who needs to establish her bona fides as the leader of a tough city vs. a labor union with new leadership and a chip on its shoulder, seeking to reclaim some of its lost glory.

It didn't help that AFT Pres. Randi Weingarten flew out for a CTU rally and announced, “We’re about to teach the new mayor a lesson.” I'm not sure what "lesson" she plans on teaching Lori Lightfoot but the idea of Weingarten teaching a lesson to Chicago's first black, gay, woman mayor sounded patronizing at best and...well I'll leave it at that. I hope she apologizes.

Yesterday, the parent group, Raise Your Hand, issued a statement on the strike which made a lot of sense.

Please remember to be good to each other out there. At the end of this contract negotiation, we are all parts of school communities that are part of a larger community, the Chicago Public Schools. Our children need all of us working together.

An ABC/Sun-Times poll appears to show nearly-half of surveyed voters supporting the teachers and also giving high marks to Mayor Lightfoot. That pretty much sums up where I'm at.

The Wind River Arapaho Immersion School

To celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary, Susan and I road-tripped out of Salt Late City, up through the Uinta mountains of northern Utah, to the the Wind River Arapaho Reservation in Wyoming. That's where our old friend Mary Headley runs the small Arapaho Immersion School.

I first met Mary and fellow veteran teacher Sadie Bell at the Standing Rock encampment in 2016, outside the encampment school. We spent a couple of hours talking about small schools and language acquisition and they invited us to visit Wind River. They told me about the work they were doing, trying to save Arapaho language and culture by starting a school based on language immersion.

Mary Headley and Sadie Bell at Standing Rock

The school serves a reservation community hard hit by poverty, unemployment, and high male incarceration rates. The town of Arapahoe itself has few businesses and no grocery stores. To shop or eat at a restaurant, you need to travel outside the reservation, to white-run Riverton. But the community has a proud history of struggle and cultural tradition that binds it together and has survived more than a century of genocidal attacks on Native American tribes.

Currently, this small school, which operates (at least for now), outside the public school system,and with little money and few resources, is a model for other tribal educators as far away as Oklahoma. For the veteran educators who created it, this school is a legacy project; today, they estimate there are fewer than 100 fluent Arapaho speakers. They are laying the foundation for what they hope will be a strong cultural identity and linguistic fluency and comfort among a new generation of Arapaho youth.



Children at the early-childhood school are immersed in Arapaho culture and learn literacy though play, story telling, song, dance, and other group activities. For many, the two meals a day at the school are their main source of nourishment.

We spent yesterday observing and talking with school leaders and teachers like former Principal Wayne C'Hair, one of the authors of the Dictionary of the Arapaho Language. The project of crafting a written language and preserving the language has been underway since the 1980s. Recently a team has launched a new Arapaho app for the iPad. Mary Headley and others are working on dubbed editions of several children's movies into Arapaho, the first of which is "Spirit Horse," soon to be followed by an Arapaho "Bambi."
Folkloric tales for children, especially animal stories, are being translated and published for use in the schools.

Ella Fitzgerald. Born on this day in 1917.

Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong

ELLA FITZGERALD sang jazz in a voice so pure and perfected that it admitted no pain -- and America loved her for it. In her sound we soared over the darkest passages of our nation's history, to a place where race and class lost all dominion. -- Nina Bernstein, New York Times

Growing up in poverty and a shattered home life, Ella survived on the streets of Harlem by hustling and engaging in petty crime. Smithsonian Curator of American Music John Hasse says they were terrible days. "It was a really tough time: segregation, the Great Depression, poverty, unemployment."

She was confined to a reformatory for more than a year after she was an orphaned teen-ager.

According to Bernstein, 

The unwritten story survives in the recollections of former employees of the New York State Training School for Girls at Hudson, N.Y., and in the records of a government investigation undertaken there in 1936, about two years after Miss Fitzgerald left. State investigators reported that black girls, then 88 of 460 residents, were segregated in the two most crowded and dilapidated of the reformatory's 17 "cottages," and were routinely beaten by male staff.

At a time of renewed calls for institutions to rescue children from failed families, this lost chapter in the life of an American icon illuminates the gap between a recurrent ideal and the harsh realities of the child welfare system.

Like Miss Fitzgerald, most of the 12- to 16-year-old girls sent to the reform school by the family courts were guilty of nothing more serious than truancy or running away. Like today's foster children, they were typically victims of poverty, abuse and family disruption; indeed, many had been discarded by private foster care charities upon reaching a troublesome puberty.

Later, E.M O'Rourke, one of Ella's teachers remembered her as a model student.

"I can even visualize her handwriting -- she was a perfectionist," she recalled. There was a fine music program at the school, she said, and a locally celebrated institution choir.

But Ella Fitzgerald was not in the choir: it was all white.

"We didn't know what we were looking at," Mrs. O' Rourke said. "We didn't know she would be the future Ella Fitzgerald.

After her talent was finally recognized, Ella was paroled to Chick Webb's band. The rest is history.

Food for thought for teachers... Her former school superintendent Thomas Tunney recounts:

If she was almost lost to us, how many like her have been? "How many Ellas are there? She turned out to be absolutely one of a kind. But all the other children were human beings, too. In that sense, they are all Ellas."

How many Ella's are sitting in your classroom?

Another look at school size and the Parkland shooting

A year ago, after taking $30M from NRA, Trump signed order loosening Obama-era gun sale restrictions.

Broward County, FL -- School's back in session here today and it will be interesting to see if the student protests continue to gain strength and capture prime media space. National anti-gun school walkouts are being planned for March 14 and again on April 20th, the anniversary of the Columbine shooting.

One thing I've learned is that my original comparison of Marjory Stoneman Douglas with Columbine doesn't hold up across the board. It's true that both were large schools -- Columbine had about 2,000 students while Douglas has more than 3,000 -- and that large school size correlates with increased incidents of violence and often breeds the kind of anonymity that prevents intervention before a Parkland-type event can take place.

A closer look makes me think that school size wasn't the big problem at MSD. While the FBI may have botched handling the tips they received about shooter Nikolas Cruz, the school's teachers and administrators didn't. Despite the size of their school, they were in touch with students well enough to anticipate Cruz as a potential violent actor and intervened in his case as best they could. Interventions took place going back to his middle-school days. Cruz faced a long string of escalating disciplinary measures throughout his academic career for insubordination, profanity, disruption, fighting and assault. Those attempts ended with Cruz's expulsion from high.

Washington Post reports:

The real problems started at least as early as middle school and quickly intensified. There were the vocal outbursts, disturbing drawings of stick figures with guns, constant disciplinary issues. There were threatening statements written on his homework and scrap paper, including a reference to killing President Barack Obama, saying he should be “burned alive and eaten.”

His middle school and high school teachers referred him to individual and family counseling, the records show. They held parent conferences and called social workers. They sent him to in-school suspension, and they sent him off campus. For a time, they sent him to a school for emotionally disturbed youth. Finally, after he was disciplined for an assault at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, they asked for an assessment of the threat he posed to his school, and ultimately he was expelled, about a year before he returned with a gun.

Up until the time of the attack, teachers were actively engaged with Cruz and acted professionally. During the attack, many acted heroically and were instrumental in saving student lives. This included football coach Aaron Feis who gave up his own life while shielding students from the gunfire.

Even if the FBI had properly followed up on tips they received about Cruz, it's unclear what actions might have been taken. The point here is that nothing the 19-year-old Cruz did up until the time of the shooting, including his purchasing of an assault rifle at local gun store, was illegal. Keeping an automatic weapon out of his hands would have been the only way to prevent the massacre in Parkland.

Pres. Trump's attempt to blame the FBI and even the student victims themselves is indicative of his own sociopathy. It was Trump who one year ago, after accepting more than $30 million from the NRA, signed an order loosening gun sale restrictions.

In a vapid response to the mounting student protests both parties are offering up meaningless bills which, even if passed (doubtful) will do nothing to prevent more massacres of this type, let alone the daily deaths from gun violence in cities like Chicago. The GOP bill simply tweaks existing state rules on gun registration.

Sen. Diane Feinstein and the Dems want to raise the legal age for buying AR-15s from 18 to 21. Democrats once again seem willing to snuggle up close, but slightly to the left of Trump and the GOP.  Nothing they could do could breed more cynicism among the protesting students and potential young voters. It seems the Dems have once again come up with a recipe for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory in 2018.

Are schools really 'too small' to succeed?

Blaming school closings on small size is like shooting someone and then claiming they died from a lack of blood.

We started the Small Schools Workshop back in 1991 based on an abundance of research showing that smaller, more personalized learning environments served children and their families better and were generally safer than large mega-schools. Then we worked with teachers, schools and school districts across the country who wanted to rethink school design, curriculum, assessment, and issues of democracy and equity to create small learning environments as a critical force within the public school system.

Parents and educators created hundreds of new, highly-autonomous small, many of them teacher-led schools and restructured large high schools into smaller learning communities. This was back before the power philanthropists like Gates, Broad and Walton entered the picture and leveraged billions of dollars in grants to turn small-by-design schools into privately-run charters where unions were banned and teachers disempowered.

The Small Schools Movement, was just that -- a movement of teachers -- with close connection to parents and communities. It was the antithesis of today's so-called "choice" movement, where schools choose kids and test-scores rule the roost.

Smallering urban schools...From the beginning, we made it clear that these new schools and learning communities needed to be small by design, not by attrition. So I once again got that bizarro-world feeling when I read this headline in Sunday's Chicago Tribune:

SHRINKING HIGH SCHOOLS TOO SMALL TO SUCCEED?

The article barely scratches the surface of the historical issues facing Chicago's racially segregated and inequitable school system and is basically a defense of the Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his hand-picked school board for their latest round of school closings. Like the 50 closings in 2013, these latest are all in the black community and are being carried out under the banner of "under-utilization". Like their predecessors, the closed schools will leave thousands of students in limbo and neighborhoods blighted. They will also serve as an addition to the long list of reasons black families are leaving Chicago by the thousands.

According to the Trib:

In Chicago, where funding follows students, Tilden is one of more than a dozen shrinking neighborhood high schools that has been starved of resources, leaving students like Averett to prepare for their futures in largely empty buildings that can make dreaming big a daily struggle.

 Nearly all of these 17 high schools are deeply segregated, serving impoverished African-American and Latino students who already struggle to attend and graduate from college at comparable rates to their white or Asian peers. Yet many of these schools cannot offer what are considered basic classes elsewhere, including the bare trio of science courses that will soon be part of a new district graduation requirement.

Now, as many of these schools continue to shrink and Chicago approaches the end of a five-year school closing moratorium, civic and community leaders must weigh whether some of these buildings are too small to succeed.

The writers place the onus on the schools for being "too small to succeed" as if someone consciously chose 250 as the optimal capacity size for these high schools. Like this just happened and without even an attempt to question what "success" means under current conditions. It's as if surrounding these schools with privately-run, better-resourced charters and selective-enrollment schools had nothing to do with their decreasing populations.

And all that begs the deeper question of how these same schools went from being too big in the 1980s and '90s, to too small in just a couple of decades? Of course, they didn't just become small but were the product of planned isolation, disinvestment, and disempowerment of Chicago's black  communities.

There are many other reasons, including the out-migration of more than quarter-million African-Americans from Chicago in the past few decades. But none of them occurred just naturally. Most of the reasons are systemic and the result of policies of disinvestment, ie. closings of plants, factories and surrounding business, cuts in social services, closing of medical clinics and mental health facilities, and now schools.

The same monumental demographic shifts are happening in every major city in the country and are impacting investments and therefore measurable outcomes, often in dramatic ways.

So the question isn't whether some schools in disintegrating neighborhoods are now smaller. Of course they are. It's like shooting someone and then claiming they died from a lack of blood. Wealthy families pay a small fortune to get their kids into smaller, more personalized schools. Rather, it's about adequate and equitable funding and support for public schools and their communities during these times of rapid change.

These Schools Belong to You and Me

My old and dear friend Deb Meier and her former Mission Hill School colleague and co-writer, Emily Gasoi have a new book out and it's well worth the read. These Schools Belong to You and Me is an elegantly-written call to defend and preserve the public or democratic part of what's left of public education itself.

They cover a lot of ground in 180 pages, including a biting critique of Trump's Ed Sec. Betsy DeVos, privately-run charter schools, the misnamed "accountability" wave, and Deb's reflection on the cooptation/disembowelment of the small schools movement which she helped launch at Central Park Elementary School in East Harlem more than 40 years ago.

Deb and Emily are among the few practitioners still writing about democracy and education. John Dewey lives.

'School killer' Rahm still on the hunt

Rahm uses Chief Ed Officer Janice Jackson to push his latest school closing scheme. 

Rahm's latest scheme calls for the closing of at least 7 more high schools in Chicago's black community. I know, I know -- he promised the community a moratorium on school closings after blighting the neighborhoods with his 50-school closings four years ago. But now he's promising the Englewood neighborhood a brand new, consolidated $76M large, shiny new high school to mollify the expected opposition.

The mayor's using the same old "underutilization" argument to board up more south-side schools. And it's true that there are about 15 predominantly African-American high schools in the city with enrollments of under 250 students. But there's several things missing from discussion of the consolidation plan (assuming that the decision hasn't already been made and the discussion isn't just for show).

1. Why is enrollment dropping? The obvious answer has more to do with the whitenizing of the city, including the push-out of more than a quarter-million African-Americans over the past few decades, than anything about the schools themselves. It's about neighborhood gentrification and switching neighborhood populations. Disinvestment, loss of jobs, combined with the closing of schools, businesses and community social-services have left these neighborhoods blighted and dangerous. The Chicago Reporter attributes the enrollment declines and eventual school closings to "a legacy of disinvestment and segregation".
2. What's the downside to more mass high school closings? Past closings, done despite massive community opposition, haven't saved the city or the school system much, if any money. After a previous round of closings, internal documents leaked to the press showed how school administrators failed to inform the public of associated transition costs for closing and consolidating a proposed 95 public schools. The cost of maintaining the buildings and problems of reuse often led to even greater debt for the city. Four years after the last round, two-thirds of the closed buildings are still vacant. Closings also failed to improve measurable learning outcomes for those students affected by the closings. But they have disrupted the lives of thousands of students, destroyed relationships between students and teachers, and exacerbated the threat of neighborhood gun violence and gang conflicts. 
3. What's wrong with consolidation? It lessens parent and community participation in school affairs. It creates a larger, more anonymous, more highly tracked learning environment. It leads to lost jobs on the south side for teachers, staff, janitors, clerks, and in adjacent businesses. There's also a greater threat of violence with more students having to cross gang territory lines just to get to school. 
4. What are the alternatives to more mass school closings? Smarter usage of existing buildings for adult education, housing badly needed community health and other surrounding services. Shifting city high schools to a (non-charter) small-schools model as we have been advocating for 30 years. 

Dyett hunger strikers

In a statement Wednesday night, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said: 

“The Mayor and his handpicked cast of school killers are proposing new obstacles to high school graduation with zero resources. And once again, he’s proposing a new round of school closings in one of the most violent spaces in this city. He continues to prove that he has zero capacity for sound and compassionate leadership. He’s gone from bad to worse.”

Can Rahm's school-killer plan be stopped? Yes it can. Remember how a small group of committed parents and community activists went on a hunger strike and saved Dyett from closing? Just imagine what a much larger and equally committed movement to save our schools could do.

On the so-called 'failure' of the small schools movement

Holy Cross prof, Jack Schneider, writing at EdWeek, makes a pretty fair assessment of the small schools movement.

In the eyes of Gates and company, the problem was with small schools as a particular policy fix rather than with the thinking behind the fix. Collective faith in silver bullets—in finding "what works" and "taking it to scale"—remained absolute. Never mind the obvious disregard for the importance of context or inescapable complexity of improving schools. The backers declared small schools a failure and moved on.

But while the modern small schools movement, which began as a teacher-led movement in East Harlem, for social-justice and democratic education and met its death when it was trampled by the top-down, corporate-style reform wave of the past two decades, was never envisioned as a panacea or a technical reform for ailing schools. Rather it was seen by us early educator/activists as a way to drive change from below. Small, was about far more than the size of buildings or even school population. It was a metaphor that gave us a way to confront anonymity and talk about schooling in personalized, human terms.

Gates money, translated into Gates' takeover and proved to be the irresistible kiss of death, as many of us suspected it would be.

Writes Schneider:

As it turns out, small schools do exactly what you might expect. Smallness can create more opportunities for young people to be known, both by one another and by the adults in the building. The relative intimacy of small schools can foster trusting, caring, and attentive relationships. Deborah Meier, the godmother of the small-schools movement, consistently made this argument in the 1980s and 1990s when explaining the importance of size. As she put it in a 1989 op-ed essay, small schools offer young people better opportunities to learn forms of participation" necessary to becoming a member of a democratic society." But they are, at best, only one piece of a complex puzzle. And early proponents of small schools were clear about that. As Meier, who also writes an opinion blog for Education Week , prudently observed: "Small schools are not the answer, but without them none of the proposed answers stand a chance."

For more on the life and death of the small schools movement, read our book, "Small Schools: Public School Reform Meets the Ownership Society." Maybe it's time to reopen the conversation on small schools.

Little Village schools fighting school crowding hold the line

Community activists gather outside Saucedo/Telpochcalli to demand that CPS postpone its co-location plan. 

I'm told that CPS has pulled its plan to move Spry Community Links High School into Saucedo/Telpochcalli, off the agenda of the February board meeting and agreed to protesters' demand to review the plan with community input. While there's nothing in writing yet, community activists who staged last week's sit-in against the consolidation plan, are calling it a victory.

This from Progress Illinois:

The district faced community pushback, including a sit-in staged by parents, students and community stakeholders last week, over its plan to co-locate the high school grades of John Spry Community School in the building that houses Maria Saucedo Elementary Scholastic Academy and Telpochcalli Elementary School, at 2850 W. 24th Blvd. 

"CPS has postponed the proposed Saucedo/Spry co-location at the request of the community," CPS spokesman Michael Passman confirmed in a statement Wednesday. "We will hold regular meetings with stakeholders to seek more input."

Writes Telpochcalli teacher Maria Cosme:

Thanks to all the groups for all we have done and accomplished. We have yet to get something in writing from CPS regarding postponing this proposal, but we had agreed that we want it completely off their agenda so we may come together as a community (parents, students, teachers, administration, and community agencies) to develop what is best for our students. So, them postponing is a victory but the hard work of developing this plan begins today. United we will have more successes.

This from Saucedo teacher Sarah Chambers:

This is definitely a victory for the Spry Community Links High School, Saucedo Academy, Telpochcalli, Spry and the community at large. The parents, community members, teachers and students made their voices loud and clear against this top-down proposal. Christina Lopez, mother of a student at Saucedo School, says “we will not accept anything less than a positive and safe school for our students. Our school is named after Maria Saucedo, an activist, educator, and mother who believed in education, equality and justice. We will continue to stay vigilant and engaged until there is a community created plan.

And from Jennifer Rocque, a teacher at Spry Community Links High School

"We commend CPS's decision to postpone the proposal. We look forward to working with key stakeholders to create a well suited proposal that provides [Spry] Community Links High School the opportunity to continue serving our families." 

Community says 'no' to Claypool's latest consolidation plan

Saucedo/Telpochcalli

This morning, parents, teachers and Little Village community activists are mobilizing opposition to the co-location of Spry's high school grades (Community Links H.S.) into space currently used by Saucedo and Telpochcalli. Co-location is part of CPS' latest school-closing/consolidation plan which was hatched by CEO Forrest Claypool without any community input.

While the high school does need a new space of its own, the move would severely compromise the two schools which already are forced to share limited space. 

Says Telpochcalli counselor Erin Franzinger Barrett:

“Telpochcalli is intentionally a small school so we have less than 300 kids and we try have small class sizes. We end up technically under the efficiency model. Can we cram more kids in? Yes. Is that what we do? No,” she said, “Because it’s not good for kids.”

CTU's Rebecca Martinez is asking supporters to gather this morning at 10 a.m. in Saucedo's parking lot (24th and California) and then move on to Ald. Cardenas' office to ask his support.

R.I. P. Alex Poinsett

I'm deeply saddened by news of the passing of old friend and renowned journalist/author, Alex Poinsett at age 89.

Poinsett spent three decades as Ebony Magazine's senior editor. He was author of five books: “Black Power Gary Style: The Making of Mayor Richard Gordon Hatcher,” and “Walking with Presidents:  Louis Martin and the Rise of Political Power.” He received the 1999 University of Michigan Book Award for his work.

He also wrote extensively about Chicago's inner-city schools and communities.

I met Alex back 1996 when he interviewed me for some stories he was writing about the small schools movement. Later we traveled together to South Africa to look at schools and the emerging post-apartheid educational system.

Here's a piece Alex wrote for Catalyst in 1996 about DuSable High School's attempt to restructure into small schools.

DuSable’s 8-year journey toward small schools
February 1, 1996
By Alex Poinsett  

Eight years ago, Charles E. Mingo made a crucial career move. Leaving prestigious Whitney Young Magnet High School, where he was assistant principal and then district administrator, he became principal of DuSable High School, one of the nation's worst schools. 

Roughly 80 percent of DuSable's students resided in the Robert Taylor Homes, located in one of the nation's three most poverty-stricken communities. Many were and still are poorly prepared, poorly motivated and poorly informed about the potential of education to empower them. Over the years, no more than 65 percent have attended school regularly.

Clearly, the veteran, politically astute administrator was challenged to salvage the seemingly unsalvagable by raising academic achievement while reducing truancy and dropout rates. Eventually, he would reinvent DuSable by sub-dividing it into smaller schools. But first he had to complete several housekeeping preliminaries.

Early on, the principal bought alarm clocks for some students, sent emissaries knocking on doors to rouse others, even visited homes himself. "He's in the bed," one mother told him.

"Well, you get him to come," the principal pleaded.

"I'm tired!" the mother responded...

Read the entire article here (It's mis-dated 2005, in the Catalyst archive). 

Behind Rauner's call to 'end unfunded mandates'

Rauner and Smith

Unfunded mandates. I hate 'em. Schools and school districts hate 'em.

It didn't take our demagogic, education-know-nothing governor, with help from his much-smarter State Supt. Tony Smith, very long to figure that out and issue a call to end all unfunded mandates -- which these days virtually means ALL mandates.

Former Oakland supt. Smith is a veteran of the old Coalition of Essential Schools and founder Ted Sizer's less-is-more philosophy. In Oakland, he talked the Sizer Essential Schools talk in order to close public schools, fire teachers, and replace them with privately-run charters in their place.

Sizer's progressive vision, expressed beautifully in his book, Horace's Compromise (a seminal text and must-read, especially for high school educators) was about smaller schools (including charters) and classrooms which were more like learning communities than shopping malls, where skilled teachers were empowered to make the most important educational decisions (and yes, compromise between what's nice and possible), to teach and not just test, and where students could engage in meaningful learning based on their interests and experience.

For Sizer, who served as dean of Harvard's Ed School, less-is-more was never about union-busting or forcing schools to choose between basic necessities because of draconian state budget cuts to public education. It was never about austerity and do-more-with-less.

For Rauner/Smith that's exactly what the call to abolish mandates means. Rauner wants nothing less than to privatize all public space and eliminate civil rights protections and public employee unions altogether.

Yes, let's get rid of unfunded mandates like, Rahm Emanuel's longer school day, like Common Core and PARCC testing madness. But we need to keep mandates that ensure student safety, special education, ELL, class size ceilings, caps on charters, and school desegregation as well as all other fundamental civil and human rights -- including teachers' right to bargain collectively with elected school boards.

The response to necessary, but unfunded, mandates, should be to adequately fund them, not abolish them.

Dyett hunger strikers keeping the PUBLIC in public schools

A SmallTalk Salute goes out to the 12 Dyett hunger strikers who are putting their bodies on the line to keep the public in public education. The community-based movement to put a real public, neighborhood school back into Dyett has drawn support from a coalition that includes the Chicago Teachers Union, the Chicago Botanic Garden, Teachers for Social Justice and other groups.

The movement to save Dyett, first from the condo developers and then from cynical attempts by the mayor and Ald. Will Burns to make it a charter -- or its bastardized version, a "contract school" -- is a fitting response to the mayor's closing of 50 schools. Other communities, ie. Humboldt Park, are watching closely as the idea of re-opening shuttered school buildings as new schools or public mixed-use sites, percolates.

Dyett activists begin hunger strike. (DNAInfo)

All this takes me back to Mother's Day, Sunday May 13th 2001, when parents and neighborhood activists in Little Village, launched their hunger strike to get a new high school (a campus of 4 small schools) built in their community. The school had been promised by the board. $30 million had been allocated and spent elsewhere, and the land already purchased. But like Dyett, the process kept dragging out and parents became desperate.

The Little Village hunger strike lasted 13 days, drawing widespread support from the entire community, until finally the Mayor Daley, new CEO Arne Duncan (Paul Vallas had been canned, in part because of his mishandling of the strike), the school board relented and victory was declared. A new public school -- not a charter -- was built at 31st and Kostner. It stands as testimony to people power and public decision-making.

Chuy speaks truth to power at the City Club. Picks up more key endorsements.

Mayoral candidate Jesus "Chuy" Garcia greets Mary Russell Gardneron at his West Loop campaign office on March 30, 2015, after receiving the endorsement of a coaliition of African-American women. (Michael Tercha, Chicago Tribune)

Chuy laid it all out there yesterday while speaking to the City Club.

“Chicago is becoming a city of the very rich and the very poor with fewer and fewer people in between,” Garcia said to a packed audience before the City Club of Chicago. “We’re becoming a city with glittering buildings surrounded by crumbling neighborhoods. A city with the finest restaurants, surrounded by communities full of people who can’t afford a decent meal. A city with some job growth in a small area downtown, surrounded by a vast area where unemployment rates are 25 to 30 percent. A city with fancy shopping areas surrounded by other areas with boarded-up business districts.” -- Natasha Korecki in the Sun-Times

Indian American community leaders stand up for Chuy

Along the way he picked up some important endorsements from a coalition of African-American women,  a prominent group of Indian American leaders (Indo-American Democratic Organization [IADO]) and the American Muslim Task Force On Civil Rights.

I was happy to see Chuy elaborating on his education views, many of which were shaped by his experience working with schools, educators and parents in the Little Village community.

His education platform is laid out here, including this statement, which as you might expect, put a smile on my face.

I would like to establish more small schools, such as the one I helped create in Little Village, which includes students from North Lawndale, where several specialized schools operate creatively in a single high-school building. We can add more excellent schools within the public system rather than adding more charters.

And speaking of schools, check out SEIU's latest sponsored TV ad for Chuy.

KABOOM!!! @SEIULocal1 drops another bomb on Rahm. https://t.co/TakLrRpxMy
— Charles Thomas (@CThomasABC7) March 27, 2015

UIC study makes compelling case for an elected school board in Chicago

In 2012, 87% of 80,000 Chicago residents voted in 13% of the city’s precincts for an elected school board in a nonbinding referendum. A similar referendum is on the ballot next Tuesday in 37 of Chicago’s 50 wards.

A new study out of UIC's College of Education makes a powerful case for junking mayoral control of Chicago's public schools and replacing Rahm Emanuel's hand-picked school board with a representative, elected board.

Chicago is currently the only district in the state that doesn't elect its school board. In 1995, the state legislature gave then Mayor Daley, full authority over the schools, including the appointment of the board members. But UIC researchers, Pauline Lipman, Eric (Rico) Gutstein, Rhoda Rae Gutierrez, and Tirzah Blanche, find that after two decades of  of mayoral control, the appointed Board’s policies have become increasingly contentious, leading parents, community and education organizations, academics, civil society leaders, politicians, and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) to call for an elected representative school board.

The study finds that after 20 years of mayoral control in Chicago, the research paints an alarming picture—Board policies and actions have resulted in a school district that is more unequal on nearly every measure leading to the recreation of a "two-tier" school system.

Here's what else it finds:

• There is no conclusive evidence that mayor-appointed boards are more effective at governing schools or raising student achievement. 

• The Board prioritized selective programs and schools while neighborhood schools serving low-income students of color lost resources and bore the major impact of misuse of tests to enforce punitive accountability and narrowed curriculum, and to close schools. 

• Under the mayor-appointed Board, racial disparities in educational outcomes persisted and in some cases widened. 

• The Board’s policy of closing neighborhood schools has not improved education for the majority of affected students and has had harmful consequences, particularly for African American communities, students, and teachers who were disproportionately impacted. 

• The Board’s privatization agenda has not generally improved education. Charter and contract schools are on the whole doing no better and are more punitive than neighborhood public schools. Privately operated schools are also further removed from public accountability. However, the Board turned over one-quarter of the district’s schools to private operators. 

• Chicago’s Board engaged in questionable and risky financial arrangements and was a poor steward of public resources. 

• Mayoral control and Board structures and processes limit public input and democratic accountability. The Board has been markedly unresponsive to outpourings of public opposition to its policies and essentially indifferent to advice and proposals of parents, teachers, and others with expert knowledge and who have a primary stake in students’ education.

The study makes the case that  an elected board that is representative of the community it serves is no guarantee—but it would be a significant step to strengthen and improve public education in Chicago

Alternatives to closings...For me, one of the most interesting parts of the study, focused on the appointed board's disastrous closing of 50 neighborhood schools. The study points to significant attempts at reform before and after the 1995 take-over that might have posed an alternative to the closings, but were scuttled by the appointed board after Gates and the big Chicago foundations pulled their funding. Among those cited was the Chicago High School Redesign Initiative (CHSRI).

Before CPS embarked on a broad policy of closing neighborhood schools, the district embraced small high schools through CHSRI, creating 23 small, neighborhood high schools between 2002 and 2007. These were not special programs or selective enrollment but whole school initiatives. In August 2008, the Board ended the program with 17 of the original schools still in existence. Yet, a comprehensive 2010 report on CHSRI outcomes found that CHSRI schools offered a promising alternative for low-performing students in the city.

CHSRI was a promising initiative to improve educational opportunities and outcomes inneighborhood public schools open to all students. However, the Board dropped CHSRI and directed resources to closing neighborhood schools, expanding charters, and opening turnaround schools.

The UIC researchers conclude with a question: "The Board’s policies under mayoral control are so educationally insupportable that we are pressed to ask: Whose interests does the Board serve? The majority of CPS students, or political and financial interests?"

The question answers itself.

Belmont's Blues

Roybal Learning Center

There's a pretty good piece in yesterday's L.A. Times about the trials and tribulations of the once-giant Belmont High School. I wrote extensively about Belmont more than a decade ago, opposing the board's decision to replace the 5,000 (mostly Mexican) student school with another humongous school-- the Belmont Learning Complex (now named the Roybal Learning Center), built on a toxic site at the highest cost ever for an American high school.

After years of restructuring, destructing, re-designing and clean-up at a cost of around $200 million, today's Belmont is a trimmed-down community school. While it's lost some of the wonderful tradition of the old neighborhood school, relationships between students and educators are stronger, students feel safer, and measurable learning outcomes have improved. The problem now is that the school is being surrounded by an ever growing number of privately-run charter schools competing with Belmont for scarce dollars and trying to skim off the school's best students.

The 'culture' of CPS

Byrd-Bennett ponders the “social-cultural aspects of children coming to school.” 

CPS' new per-pupil budgeting system punishes schools for being small. It's more of the same theory of "under-utilization" that led to the closure of 48 neighborhood schools. Rahm is also pouring millions into elite, small, selective enrollment schools like Walter Payton College Prep (you remember, the school where billionaire Bruce Rauner, with help from Arne Duncan, clouted his kid's admission), to make them bigger.

Dozens of CPS schools were facing the loss of $20 million in additional funding because they did not enroll as many students as the district had projected they would. But faced with mounting parent protests and opposition from the CTU, CEO Byrd-Bennett (where has she been?) announced Monday that she will give schools a one-year reprieve before she slits their throats. It makes you wonder, doesn't it? Where do all these millions come from in a system that's supposed to be broke?

“Those schools that did not meet their enrollment projections, we’re going to hold those schools harmless. They will receive the dollars that we assigned them based on the projected enrollment numbers,” said Byrd-Bennett. Schools that surpassed their enrollment projections will get their per-pupil increase. -- WBEZ

BBB says that CPS enrollment numbers are down and her instincts are to punish the schools. But as RYH has pointed out, CPS numbers are questionable. To the degree that enrollments have shrunk, it could be due in large part to the huge decrease in the city's African-American population as thousands of black and poor residents are pushed out of public housing and out of the city altogether. I also think that many students were lost in the school-closing debacle.

WBEZ seems to agree and refers to designated “welcoming schools” that got millions of dollars in capital and technology upgrades but actually took in far fewer children from closing schools than the district had said they would.

But BBB has her own theory. She says that there are “social-cultural aspects of children coming to school” that mean some students don’t show up until well after the first day. She also said the district had a group of “lost children” who left eighth grade and have not entered high school.

While she never says what she means by "social-cultural aspects" and apparently was never asked by reporters, the racial implications are clear. And as for "lost children", they're not lost. They've been abandoned or at least, "lost" in the shuffle. It's not about their culture, but the culture of CPS.