WEEKEND QUOTABLES

“The new contracts ensure that hotel workers will keep their health care if they’re laid off in the wintertime,” UNITE HERE Local 1, the union representing the striking workers, said in a statement. 

Rebecca Solnit

This has been a truly remarkable decade for movement-building, social change, and deep, profound shifts in ideas, perspective, and frameworks for broad parts of the population (and, of course, backlashes against all those things). -- On Hope in Dark Times

 Weekend Update co-anchor Michael Che

"Typically, when you’re asked about a sexual assault and you’re drinking problem at a job interview, you don’t get the damn job." -- SNL

Peter Greene

 Parents can try to do their due diligence, but part of running a business is doing marketing, and charters are not going to market themselves with phrases like "financially troubled" or "featuring a curriculum made up by unqualified amateurs" or "barely hanging on." -- Forbes

D.T. on Kim Jong Un

 "...And then we fell in love, OK? No, really, he wrote me beautiful letters, and they’re great letters. We fell in love.” -- WSJ

CA Sen. Scott Wiener, Net Neutrality law’s author 

“This is a historic day for California. A free and open internet is a cornerstone of 21st century life: our democracy, our economy, our health care and public safety systems, and day-to-day activities." -- Sun-Times

Back in school with heads held high

Chicago Teachers Union delegates embrace after voting to end their strike. (Scott Olson, Getty Images / 

Who won?

They put on their red T-shirts and commanded the attention of the nation and the admiration of millions of teachers. Powerless no more, they showed that unity made them strong. Ninety-eight percent voted to authorize the strike, and 98% voted to end it... Regardless of the terms of the contract, the teachers won. -- Diane Ravitch, Washington Post

We won so much more than a contract says TSJ

In this strike, so much more was won than a contract. After 17 punishing years of corporate, neoliberal policies, Chicago teachers stood up, and they stood up for the whole country. This courageous strike was born of a new kind of teacher unionism - democratic, activist, allied with parents, and fighting not only for fair compensation but for a richer, more humane and just education. -- Teachers for Social Justice

The Monitor

The strike focused attention on a national debate over how to improve failing schools. Emanuel, backed by a powerful reform movement, believes poorly performing schools should be closed and reopened with new staff or converted to "charter" schools that often are non-union and run by private groups. -- CSM

Delegate Haley Underwood, a physical education teacher. 

"I am jumping up and down," she said. "I'm so excited, excited to see my kids. I feel we won. ... We'll continue to fight for the soul of public education." -- L.A. Times

Rauner

Rahm's billionaire Republican pal Bruce Rauner

Rauner, a wealthy venture capitalist who is helping lead a drive for more charter schools in the city, predicted the final details of a new contract would not "end well" for critics of the teachers union because "I think we've given in on a fair number of critical issues." But he called the intense contract negotiations "one battle in a very long-term fight." -- Tribune

At least he got that last point right.

LABOR DAY WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Social Justice High School firings

“The foundation from which Social Justice High School was built on was from unity and the need to rectify an ongoing injustice. What set SoJo apart was its strong connection between teachers and parents, but now that’s changed.” -- Patricia Buenrostro, original Little Village H.S. hunger striker

As strike approaches in Chicago

"The strike obviously is a big piece of the picture, but it's not the only thing out there. It feels like there's complete chaos across the system." -- Jonathan Goldman, a Local School Council chair at Drummond Elementary

Clint Eastwood

"...we own this country. “We own it." -- Speech at RNC

Ravitch warned White House

 I told them how disheartened teachers were by their whole approach, that they had aligned themselves with the GOP agenda. I warned that they would lose the 2010 elections if they didn’t get a different agenda. I told them that what they were doing would not succeed and would have terrible consequences. They didn’t listen. -- About That Meeting at the White House

Jeb Bush 

Everywhere in our lives, we get the chance to choose. Go down any supermarket aisle - you’ll find an incredible selection of milk. You can get whole milk, 2% milk, low-fat milk or skim milk. Organic milk, and milk with extra Vitamin D. There’s flavored milk — chocolate, strawberry or vanilla — and it doesn’t even taste like milk. They even make milk for people who can’t drink milk. Shouldn’t parents have that kind of choice in schools? -- Washington Post

Students sit-in at SoJo to protest firings

Little Village hunger strikers and community members started the school.

Teachers for Social Justice posted a summary of the issues behind yesterday's student sit-in at Social Justice High School. This small school within Little Village High School, was born out of community struggle -- a 19-day hunger strike by parents in 2001.

Sojo's very existence as a neighborhood public school serving low-income African American and Latina/o students with the vision of community self-determination-as exemplified by its inspiring and dignified student sit-in-is antithetical and a threat to the current top-down, CPS corporate model of schooling. Read the rest here.

The Race To The Top teacher purges at LVHS actually began two years ago at the Multi-Cultural Arts School. The recent firings at SoJo are a continuation of CPS' top-down "reform" plan which leaves out the community when it comes to real decision-making. CPS has been trying to wrestle back complete authority over LVHS since it opened as a campus of small schools in 2005.

The SoJo students' action yesterday was heroic. But the students can't do it alone.

The Econometrics of Rwandan Pear Blossoms at Duke University

I rarely post anything of this length. But this piece by my friend and Duke Univ. prof Tim Tyson, was much too compelling and beautifully written to pass up. Had to post it in full. Enjoy.

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The Econometrics of Rwandan Pear Blossoms at Duke University
Timothy B. Tyson
Senior Research Scholar
Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University
Visiting Professor of American Christianity and Southern Culture

Genius glinted off every sentence she wrote. A sophomore in my first class at Duke University in the spring of 1991, she sat in my office three hours each week, both wrists wrapped in bandages; we rarely spoke of that. She read to me from her stories; I read to her from Zora Neale Hurston. A natural-born English major, she majored in Econ, for which she cared not a fig. Her tyrannical father refused to pay tuition for any major but Econ. Hospital gauze hid the wounds of her war with him.

I thought about her as I read the study by Peter Arcidiacono and Kenneth Spenner, who insist that African American students at Duke remain less well-prepared than their white counterparts. Evidence that black students catch up quickly is mistaken, they say; the mirage of their progress reflects that African Americans select “less demanding” majors at far higher rates than whites.

African American undergrads here are fodder for this attack on affirmative action and liberal arts. “What Happens After Enrollment” is a political tract disguised as scholarly inquiry. Arcidiacono speculates disingenuously that all the attention might be “because others are using the study in a lawsuit against racial preferences in admissions.” How can “others” use his unpublished work without him? How can a Duke prof be “very surprised” that the newspapers follow a racially-loaded U.S. Supreme Court? History, anyone? Who appointed him to weigh the merits of black folks being allowed into the room?

No one disputes the academic freedom of these professors to engage in politics around their own points of view; Duke’s treasure, the late Dr. John Hope Franklin, whose legacy Arcidiacono treads upon, provided research for Thurgood Marshall in Brown. But there is no constitutional right to r-e-s-p-e-c-t, as Aretha might put it. BSA members who question “the research’s intent, methodology, analysis and conclusion, in addition to its validity,” display a generosity and deliberation far exceeding those of this study.

Arcidiacono and Spenner dress their Little Lord Frankenstein in academic robes, an unconvincing costume. In their bizarre econometrics, our African American students, failing to choose the “more challenging” majors, bear the blame for the lack of minority “representation” in economics, engineering and the natural sciences. Other explanations abound; possibly the company. But the authors’ pretense of caring is undercut by their crusade to reduce the numbers of black students at the elite institutions where research careers begin. Stingy polemics, yes; good scholarship, not so much.

Their pamphlet expounds on "racial difference” without contemplating what “race” might be. Nor do the authors consider the very nature of these decisions. Their inquiry into the deeply personal choices of black students fails to ask even one black student, not that we should take anyone’s words at face value. Apparently white males at Duke once devoted to Econ and Engineering in high school mostly cling to their calculators, despite this claim that “the average student finds Engineering the most challenging field, followed by Economics.” Less-average students might diagnose lack of curiosity or fear of the unfamiliar. But to explain would require individual inquiry; we would have to check our assumptions, not just boxes on a questionnaire. Neither God in Her Divine Wisdom nor our destiny as a species would make us all engineers or economists; to major in econ when poetry holds your heart defines failure, not success. Is it possible that African American students, each one unique, on the whole come from cultural and intellectual traditions different than—not less than--most white students at Duke?

Econ majors in my seminars complain of the staggering amounts of reading. And the paucity of “right answers” in history, literature and theology intimidates many, though they catch up quickly. Once they stop inhaling the economist’s elixir--the hokum that crazy humanity is a profit-maximizing choice-machine--people often blossom in sunlight.

I have watched fire seize the minds of erstwhile econ majors, causing bad grades—in economics. They just can’t “value-maximize” anymore, not drunk on James Baldwin and James Brown. If you want a “more challenging” major, get entangled in Ellison’s “blues impulse” and trace the dust tracks from Bethlehem to Rwanda; “finger the jagged grain” of humanity, sharp with our “myriad subtleties.” Sit on the steps of Atlanta University with Du Bois, shotgun cradled on his lap, and wait for the mob; let Eliot’s “The Journey of the Magi” behold Armstrong’s genius of jazz; wander with Hughes among “the people of the night,” who “will give even a snake / a break.” How then to stumble home to mute econometric formulas? Sometimes these renegades light out for territory unseen. If only we built higher walls around Duke, we might bar such fools that learn and lose their way; resolute youth could scale the heights of Economics without leaving their own intellectual cul-de-sac, unimpaired by poetics—or by education.

Not long ago, I saw her walking her dog near East Campus. No more bandages; her little family and her part-time teaching job leave a light on her face never seen on that sophomore. Inspired by Hurston’s heroine, Janie, she told her father to go to hell. He groused about it, but she’d finally majored in English—double-majored in Econ to shut him up. She couldn’t remember much Econ, she said, but she still reads Their Eyes Were Watching God every spring when the pear trees blossom.

Sound the alarm! The "activists" are coming

The “democratic engagement” faction within civics education has recently re-energized and is pressing hard on schools to push kids into activism. -- Chester Finn

Finn (right) and his Fordham crew

The Occupy Movement, the Wisconsin recall initiative, and other signs of increased youth and student activism have education conservatives jittery. Chief among them is think-tanker Chester Finn, head of the right-wing Fordham Institue. His latest screed, "Should schools turn children into activists? And should Uncle Sam help?" is aimed at, what he imagines as the activist wing of civics education.

 On the other side, we find much greater emphasis on civic participation and activism, on voluntarism and “service learning,” and on what is often termed “collective decision making” (or problem solving) and “democratic engagement,” which often boils down into the communitarian view that issues facing society are best dealt with through group action, by people joining hands and working together rather than through the political process.

 Worse yet, moans Finn, is the role of the Dept. of Education and Arne Duncan in promoting this "democratic engagement" faction and Duncan's use of the words, "action civics". I must have somehow missed all that. The last thing I remember about Duncan was his mad attempt to head off Matt Damon at the airport in D.C. last summer, to keep him from speaking at the national Save Our Schools March & Rally. That must have been before he joined the "democratic engagement" faction.

But what really has Finn's toga all in a knot, is "A Crucible Moment," a  publication, written by D.O.E. higher-ups Martha Kantor and Eduardo Ochoa.While I admit, I only scanned the tract, it looks pretty good to me. Obviously, Finn is not me.

He is pissed that the D.O.E. awarded a contract to the Global Perspective Institute, Inc. (GPI) and a subcontract to the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) to lead a national dialogue that would result in recommendations about strengthening students’ civic learning and democratic engagement as a core component of college study. The result was the formation of a National Task Force on Civic Learning and Democratic Engagement headed by Larry Braskamp, who I remember as a progressive educator and decent guy from his days as dean at UIC's College of Education back in the early 90's.

Civics without action is an empty shell. Finn's attack on people for "joining hands and working together," shows how much disdain the ed-cons have for participatory democracy.

What the new year will bring

Sociologists are worried about the Republican takeover of the House. They damn well ought to be. 

The new majority in the House believes that the election provided a mandate to change the course of policy from extending the Bush-era tax cuts, repealing health care reform, and cutting federal spending. Another concern is the capacity of the new majority to attack science it doesn’t like from climate change to social and behavioral research. 

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Can someone please explain why it will "take months" for the Pentagon to implement the end of DADT?

Under the bill approved by a Senate vote of 65-31, the president and Pentagon must first certify that lifting the ban won't hurt troops' ability to fight. After that, the military will undergo a 60-day wait period before any changes are made.

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Teacherken is well worth following at the Daily Kos. Check out his latest on "The Cost of War." 

We're spending $100 billion a year on a country that had a gross domestic product of a little more than $2 billion when we invaded in 2001. By 2014, this administration will have spent more than $700 billion on Afghanistan directly. Those are direct costs, the 2nd figure being what we are not getting because of the extension of the Bush tax cuts to the rich.

Past is prologue

Vacationing here in West Virgina, it's hard not to think about the state's rich history of struggle for social-justice. Signs are everywhere, especially in these difficult times. I got a good history lesson reading this editorial in yesterday's Charleston Gazette, showing once again that past is prologue.

In 1920, a strike at Matewan turned into a shoot-out that killed seven Baldwin-Felts guards who had been hired as strikebreakers. Town Police Chief Sid Hatfield, a champion of the strikers, was charged in a different fracas. As he and a companion walked up the steps of the McDowell County Courthouse, they were gunned down by other Baldwin-Felts agents. The murder inflamed miners, who gathered for a second march. In August 1921, 10,000 to 15,000 armed workers entered Logan County. Their advance was halted at Blair Mountain, where Sheriff Chafin's forces had installed machine guns behind breastworks. Full-scale warfare ensued for several days, and perhaps 20 were killed on both sides. President Warren Harding sent Army units and even a squadron of fighter planes to suppress the uprising. Afterward, UMW leaders were tried for treason, but juries found them innocent.

The locus of struggle now seems to be the hotel workers, among the lowest paid in the nation. Hyatt has now become the main target because of their refusal to negotiate a union contract in good faith. Yesterday in San Francisco, about 150 union marchers were jailed.  Hyatt becomes especially significant as it is owned by one of President Obama's richest and most powerful backers, Penny Pritzker and the Pritzker family. They became notorious for firing 98 hospitality workers at a Boston hotel and replacing them with non-union workers who they were forced to train before being put out on the street.

Connections to education reform and current administration policies couldn't be clearer as the fate of teachers and their right to bargain collectively also hangs in the balance. Hopefully Obama, who has backed union rights in the past, won't turn into Warren Harding on this one.

Standard Deviations

Arizona State prof, David Berliner gets all bell-curvy on us in today's Answer Sheet. But his conclusions are unmistakable and inarguable. If you want to be successful in school and in life, don't be both poor and go to school with other poor kids. The combined effect is devastating. But if you come from a wealthy family and attend a school with other wealthy kids, your life chances are enhanced greatly. While good teachers and schools can and do play a vital role, the compound affect of poverty, segregated schools and housing, on average, have a much more powerful affect on student learning than anything that may happen inside the classroom.  I'm sure the "no excuses" crowd will go ballistic over this.

It is not pleasant to contemplate, but when poor children go to public schools that serve the poor, and wealthy children go to public schools that serve the wealthy, then the huge gaps in achievement that we see bring us closer to establishing an apartheid public school system. We create through our housing, school attendance, and school districting policies a system designed to encourage castes—a system promoting a greater likelihood of a privileged class and an under class.

Of course there are schools (mainly small) and groups of students who continue to beat the odds. In most cases they become the focus of media attention and benefit from the kindness of wealthy patrons, power philanthropists, and an effective PR campaign. But on the whole, Berliner's equations hold up. It's not about "excuses." It's about an increasingly two-tiered system of education.

15,000 of us in Detroit

If you're looking for lots of energy and hope for the future, the US Social Forum in Detroit is the place to be. 15,000 registered, the woman at the registration desk tells me. And there's many more without orange wrist bands.

Lots of educators and school activists. Ed workshops (some 50) line up bumper to bumper. Our's bumps heads with some of my favorite folks. Then there's the big assemblies that break down into smaller discussion groups. One today was introduced by Bill Ayers and featured the venerable Grace Lee Boggs and Vincint Harding. Wow!

The Detroit Free Press runs an interesting piece today about the increased participation of religious groups in USSF.

"Faith is about justice," said the Rev. Ed Rowe, pastor of Central United. "Without justice, faith is living a lie. If your faith is just about helping only the people who are inside stained glass windows, we ought to quit." The US Social Forum is attracting thousands of activists from across the U.S., mostly leftists and progressives. But can the far left and religious groups get along? Referring to a biblical verse in Acts about the distribution of wealth, Rowe said: "That's not a communist plot. That's a Christian principle."

One more note from Motown. It has to do with Arne Duncan's mantra about mayor control of the schools. The problem here is that the old mayor Kilpatrick has just been indicted while the newt Mayor (what's up with these former NBA stars) Dave Bing is crying for control of the schools.

New York's segregated, 2-tier school system

GRITtv interviews ed activist Donna Nevel

"Education may not be able to change the hearts of men, but it can change the habits of men."

On March 14, 1964, Dr. King accepted the John Dewey Award from the United Federation of Teachers and delivered this speech.

... For most of the past decade the field of education has been a battleground in the freedom struggle. It was not fortuitous that education became embroiled in this conflict. Education is one of the vital tools the Negro needs in order to advance. And yet it has been denied him by devises of segregation and manipulations with quality.

Historically, to keep Negroes in oppression they were deprived an education. In slave days it was illegal to teach a slave to read or write. With the ending of slavery and the emergence of quasi freedom, Negroes were only partially educated—sufficient to make their work efficient but insufficient to raise them to equality.

It is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second-class status. Therefore as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education....

...The richest nation on Earth has never allocated enough resources to build sufficient schools, to compensate adequately its teachers, and to surround them with the prestige our work justifies. We squander funds on highways, on the frenetic pursuit of recreation, on the overabundance of overkill armament, but we pauperize education."

TFA--Not like "Freedom Summer"

Freedom Summer 1964

A new study, suggested by Teach For America's Wendy Kopp herself, shows TFA grads exhausted, burned out, disillusioned with TFA on issues of ed equity. Kopp, of course, doesn't like the study's findings.

“Back in the ’60s, if you signed up for Freedom Summer, it was perceived to be countercultural,” said Professor Reich, who taught sixth grade in Houston as a member of the Teach for America corps. “But unlike doing Freedom Summer, joining Teach for America is part of climbing up the elite ladder — it’s part of joining the system, the meritocracy.”

QUOTABLES

Dr. King's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1964

So man's proneness to engage in war is still a fact. But wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete. There may have been a time when war served as a negative good by preventing the spread and growth of an evil force, but the destructive power of modern weapons eliminated even the possibility that war may serve as a negative good. If we assume that life is worth living and that man has a right to survive, then we must find an alternative to war...So if modern man continues to flirt unhesitatingly with war, he will transform his earthly habitat into an inferno such as even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

Barack Obama's Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech today: An homage to war

There will be times when nations -- acting individually or in concert -- will find the use of force not only necessary but morally justified...I begin with this point because in many countries there is a deep ambivalence about military action today, no matter what the cause. And at times, this is joined by a reflexive suspicion of America, the world's sole military superpower... The United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms...So yes, the instruments of war do have a role to play in preserving the peace.

Did they give it to the right guy?

As President Obama wrapped up his remarks at the acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize Thursday, it's easy to imagine the members of the Nobel Committee saying to themselves, "wait – we gave it to that guy?"(Political Hotsheet)

Right-wing goes bananas over social-justice teaching

"They're even playing dominoes at Banana Kelly"

The two words that strike fear into hearts of right-wingers everywhere are SOCIAL JUSTICE. Right-wing think tanks like Manhattan, Fordham and the American Enterprise Institutes go ballistic every time they hear of a teacher raising issues of of racial injustice or gender equality in the classroom. Not to mention the growing number of small schools that focus on the social-justice theme as a way of tapping into student interest in social causes like the environment.

The latest diatribe against social-justice teaching comes from the filthy little tabloid, the N.Y. Post ("Crackpot schools--City lets ACORN, other radicals run wild"). Post writers use age-old red-baiting tactics to try and pin social-justice teachers to ACORN's philosophy of "reform and change" (I thought that was Mayor Bloomberg's campaign slogan. Maybe he needs some investigating). They even drag up my favorite witch-hunter Sol Stern, who's made a fair living hunting down S-J teachers.

In their never-ending search for evidence of S-J teaching, Post investigators actually find kids at Banana Kelly High School in the Bronx playing dominoes in the classroom, not to mention their use of "restorative justice techniques" to deal with discipline problems. At Bushwick Community High School, they even found "an illustration of Che Guevara wearing a graduation cap" (Che did graduate from medical school).

The Post diatribe was, as expected, picked up by the more respectable S-J hunters Mike Petrilli and Chester Finn at the Fordham Institute:

Then there’s the Vanguard High School in Manhattan that recently hosted a “radical math” conference--not to be confused, mind you, with “Social Justice Math.” That no-doubt enthralling confab included a session on “how to use the history of the Black Panther Party to fuel an algebraic curriculum.”

OMG!

Side note: If you are interested in teaching math or literacy using dominoes, here are some good sites: Teaching Pre-K-8, Sen Teacher, Domino Theory, AAA Lab at Stanford.

And here's one of dozens of S-J teaching tip sites.

Math literacy & social change

The Young People’s Project uses Math Literacy as a tool to develop young leaders and organizers.

In the same way that Ella Baker helped fashion a space for the students who sat-in to think and organize for themselves, the Algebra Project provided a space for YPP to grow and develop. Twelve years later, here we are. (Omo Moses, YPP Founder)

Why School?

I can't wait to get my copy of Mike Rose's latest book, Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us. I've ordered it, having thoroughly enjoyed his previous works, Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievement of America’s Underprepared, and Possible Lives: The Promise of Education in America, and having used them both in my classes.

In this Edweek interview, educator, author Rose, who teaches at UCLA, gets to say a little about the purposes of education in a democracy:

...we’ve defined the purpose of schooling almost solely in economic terms and we’ve measured success with a score on a standardized test. There has to be a better way."

Mike also blogs here.

Teaching with social-justice in mind

Greg Michie

His book, Holler if You Hear Me: The Education of a Teacher and His Students, became a favorite of young urban teachers when it was first published a decade ago. Now it's in its second edition. Greg is interviewed by Teacher Magazine.

I don’t think we can look at kids in poor neighborhoods, on the South Side of Chicago, for example, and think, “Oh well, kids are kids everywhere. They’re just like kids in a wealthy suburb of Chicago.” In some ways they are. I think twelve- and thirteen-year-olds have many of the same worries, fears, anxieties, and joys, but at the same time there are some real stark differences. It’s really important as a teacher to get to know that child, that context, that community, and not just say, “I teach 7th graders.”

Good News--Martin in, Evers out at DOE

I hear that Carmel Martin has been named by the Obama team to be the head of Planning and Evaluation at the DOE. If true, that’s good news. Martin is competent and politically savvy. She was an adviser to Sen. Kennedy and then Sen. Bingaman’s (NM) point person on the Smaller Learning Communities (SLC) initiative. Martin was very helpful to us small-schoolers, working with Bingaman and Congressman Obey (WI) to save the initiative during the Bush years.

The main thing is--she replaces Williamson ("I hate social justice") Evers.

The "union problem"

Diane Ravitch at Bridging Differences

The unions don't seem to cause low performance in the wealthy suburban districts that surround our city. They don't seem to be a problem for the nations that regularly register high scores on international tests. If getting rid of the unions was the solution to the problem of low performance, then why...do the southern states—where unions are weak or non-existent—continue to perform worse than states with strong unions? And how can we explain the strong union presence in Massachusetts, which is the nation's highest performing state on NAEP? I suggested that low performance must be caused by something else other than teachers' unions.

Latte economy

Forbes is good bathroom reading if you want to know what the Ownership Society crowd is thinking. In this week’s commentary, “Education and Economic Recovery,” Hal Raveche starts out with a sensible proposition:

A service-based economy that can stand and prosper by itself is pure fiction. Our economy will remain fragile if it is driven in large part by the latest Wall Street deals and "jobs" that consist of selling each other insurance and steaming lattes or painting nails and flipping burgers.

True enough. But his piece heads downhill after that, calling on universities to turn away from serious intellectual work to become simply high-tech skills training centers. You’ll never guess how Raveche makes his money.

Begging for better schools in Chicago

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

More than a dozen Chicago public school students testified Thursday that a 28-year-old desegregation consent decree has failed them. They begged for more diversity, more and better books, and better teachers in those schools CPS says it has been unable to desegregate -- all of which the 1980 decree was supposed to address.A parade of students from Social Justice High School in Little Village opened the first day of a hearing at which students and parents, for the first time, were invited to testify about whether CPS has lived up to the decree. U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras did most of the questioning -- and even threw in some advice and compliments...Read the rest here.