U of C Study, out today, shows Rahm's 2013 school closings failed CPS students

Thousands of Chicago parents and community members protested the 2013 school closings. 

CPS’ current Schools Chief Janice Jackson called what happened “unacceptable.” But said the outcome will not deter her from closing schools in the future. -- WBEZ

Rahm Emanuel's mass school closings in have proven to be a disaster for the city and have offered none of the promised academic gains for the affected 12,000 predominantly-black students.

Aside from further blighting Chicago's south and west-side neighborhoods and likely contributing to the massive black exodus from the city, the closing of 50 CPS schools in 2013 led to a significant drop in student test scores. This according to a report being released today by researchers at the University of Chicago’s Consortium on Chicago School Research.

The report comes weeks before the city’s five-year moratorium on school closings expires. It's a moratorium that Rahm has already violated time and time again, most recently with the closing of high schools in Englewood as well as the National Teachers Academy.

According to the Consortium Report:

Despite the promised improvement in academic opportunities for students from the schools that were closed, the University of Chicago researchers found that their test scores fell in the wake of the closings and subsequent school mergers. And the drop in math scores lasted for four years. 

The researchers also said their interviews with CPS staff members revealed a “chaotic” plan for moving the students to other schools and too little support for blending the new and old communities of students and families, creating “challenging us-vs.-them dynamics.

The study concludes:

“Closing schools — even poorly performing ones — does not improve the outcome of displaced children, on average. Closing under-enrolled schools may seem like a viable solution to policymakers who seek to address fiscal deficits and declining enrollment, but our findings shows that closing schools caused large disruptions without clear benefits for students.”

CTU's Jesse Sharkey, said the report “validates” that the closures "were marred by chaos, a desperate lack of resources, lost libraries and labs, grief, trauma, damaging disruption, and a profound disrespect for the needs of low-income black students and the educators who teach them.”

Important to note... It wasn't just Chicago. Mass school closings were a requirement of then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan's Race to The Top policy. Unless school districts closed schools, they were threatened with loss of millions of dollars from the D.O.E. An epidemic of closings and teacher firings, mainly in urban districts, followed in the wake of RTTT.

KIPP and KOPP join Duncan in telling parents to boycott schools until gun law is passed

CHICAGO (WLS) -- It's been another violent weekend in Chicago, with at least 6 people killed and 32 others hurt in shootings across the city. [None shot in school.]

KIPP leaders and other corporate school "reformers" like Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, are telling public school parents to "pull their kids out of school until we have better gun laws."

The boycott proposition received momentum online, including support from parents and the founder of Teach for America, Wendy Kopp... 

...“I’m in — let’s pick a date and start a movement no politician can ignore,” replied Jim Manly, the superintendent of KIPP Public Charter Schools in New York City.

After taking 14 years before firing their co-founder for sexual misconduct, it's no wonder that KIPP charter network is now forced to offer cash and prizes to parents as recruiting gimmicks. But their call for parents to boycott public schools, even in the wake of the Santa Fe school shootings, smacks of opportunism.

As brother Fred Klonsky points out in this morning's blog post:

For many Chicago young people, their public school is among the safest places Chicago parents can send their children each day. But more to the point, those like Cunningham and Duncan have a dismal history in proposing ideas for public school parents and  as public policy for others to follow.

 Yes, we need strong gun control laws passed. No, that's not likely to happen with Trump in the White House and Republicans (many on the take from the NRA) controlling both houses of Congress without pressure from mass protests in the streets. Telling parents to keep their children home until that happens may be provocative, but it's hairbrained. Not serious. Poor leadership as usual.

In the same breath they propose it, they are already walking it back. 

“It’s wildly impractical and difficult,” Duncan said. “But I think it’s wildly impractical and difficult that kids are shot when they are sent to school.”

 “We will see whether this gains traction, or something does, but we have to think radically.”

Yes, r-r-r-radically indeed. But there's nothing radical about punishing public schools for the sins of the politicians.

I'm recalling how Duncan and Cunningham blasted the tens of thousands of activist parents who actually won some important victories for their children by opting-out of school testing madness.

But Duncan claimed the opt-outers were simply...

"white suburban moms who—all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were."

I also recall how, when Democrats had even a slim chance to pass gun-control legislation during Obama's first term, Atty. General Eric Holder was told to "shut the f**k up" by none other than Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Oh, and speaking of guns, remember how Duncan tried to militarize the D.O.E. back in 2010? His purchase of 27 assault rifles had me wondering back then, if we needed an assault weapons ban on Arne?

I think Duncan's and the reformers' credibility as advisors to public school parents has been used up. Maybe it's time for them to to hold that thought. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Police Chief Art Acevedo of Houston, center, walking with demonstrators during a “March for Our Lives” protest in March. After a school shooting in Santa Fe, Tex., on Friday, he wrote on Facebook that he had hit “rock bottom” about inaction on gun control.CreditDavid J. Phillip/Associated Press

Profs Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd 

Locking any human being in a cage is a moral abomination -- Guardian

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education

Peter Cunningham tells us not to blame any of the reforms he and his team of bloggers espouse.  In 2016, he told us what we need is “more rigor” and higher standards when twelfth-grade NAEP scores came out. On April 20, 2018, like Duncan, Cunningham blamed politics — specifically unions and local boards of education — for the lackluster NAEP scores.  --Washington Post

Sally Yates

 "There should be consequences when leaders feel they are not even loosely tethered to the truth. But when we normalize this..." -- CBS News

 Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo 

“I know some have strong feelings about gun rights but I want you to know I’ve hit rock bottom and I am not interested in your views as it pertains to this issue." -- Facebook post

Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala.

Rocks falling into oceans, not climate, causing seas to rise. "And every time you have that soil or rock whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise. Because now you’ve got less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up." -- USA Today

All these shootings because we have too many doors, sea levels are rising because of rocks falling into the ocean, hurricanes devasting cities because of gay sex. Maybe we shouldn’t put complete fucking morons in charge of anything anymore.

— J.D. Evermore (@jd_evermore) May 18, 2018

And then there's this from the school "reformers"...

This is brilliant, and tragically necessary.
What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe?
My family is all in if we can do this at scale.
Parents, will you please join us? https://t.co/Yo4wsFuJI5

— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) May 18, 2018

I should remind Mr. Duncan that his family is already "boycotting" Chicago Public Schools.

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.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

If elected, Lightfoot would become the city’s first openly gay mayor, and the first African-American woman to hold the job. She joins an increasingly crowded field of challengers looking to unseat Emanuel in the February 2019 election. She is the ninth challenger to announce a run.

Lori Lightfoot

“We have seen example after example of top-down dictates that do not reflect any interest in true partnership with parents, teachers and principals. How do we chart a new progressive course? How do we make sure we take our city on a new, different direction? I will start with listening to the needs of the people.” -- Tribune

Joanna Klonsky, Chicago political strategist

“There’s a misconception that you need to out-raise [Rahm Emanuel] to beat him." -- WBEZ

Sen. Elizabeth Warren

“Secretary DeVos has filled the department with for-profit college hacks who only care about making sham schools rich and shutting down investigations into fraud." --New York Times

CPS Parent Lawrence White

“We have to repair or try to regain those losses,” said White, who wasn’t even aware CPS had implemented a secret overhaul of special education until it was revealed in the WBEZ report. -- WBEZ

Eden Hebron, 15-year-old freshman at Stoneman Douglas H.S.

But since the March for Our Lives protest on March 24th,  the media attention to the issue of gun violence has also changed. “It’s starting to die down, a little, all the news and stuff,” she said. “When I see people moving on, it’s like, How can you?” -- Guardian

Dick Cheney

“I think the techniques we used were not torture. A lot of people try to call it that, but it wasn’t deemed torture at the time,” he told Maria Bartiromo. “People want to go back and try to rewrite history, but if it were my call, I’d do it again.” -- Crooks & Liars

Happy Mothers Day from D.T. 

“I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there. And she was married...

...I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” ~Trump https://t.co/mqcoEj5IKh

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) May 13, 2018

Can Lightfoot be the one?

Former Police Board President Lori Lightfoot is expected to officially announce today that she's joining a long list of candidates, including several other African-American candidates and progressives, running for Mayor of Chicago.

According to Politico's Natasha Korecki, Lightfoot has already brought on a powerhouse support team including:

Media Consultants - Snyder Pickerill Media Group. Ken Snyder and Terrie Pickerill are Chicago-based national political strategists who did work with the likes of U.S. Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) and Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle.

The group also handled three major mayoral races: Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, Nashville Mayor Megan Barry and St. Louis Mayor Lyda Krewson.

Pollster - Jason McGrath, of GBA Strategies, who's done work with Cook County State's Attorney Kim Foxx, U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly and U.S. Rep. Cheri Bustos.

Finance Director - Gina Natale worked as Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan's finance director from 2010-2014 and recently worked for the League of Conservation Voters in Washington D.C.

Direct Mail - Adnaan Muslim of Deliver Strategies - Longtime lead SEIU Local 1 consultant on aldermanic campaigns. Firm's most recently worked on successful primaries for Jesus Chuy García, Alma Anaya, Bridget Degnan, and Aaron Ortiz. And for other successful mayoral campaigns including mayors Keisha Lance Bottoms, Toni Harp, Sly James, Michael Nutter and Stephane Miner.

I'll leave it to you to parse the connections here to high-powered city Democrats. But the point is, Lightfoot isn't stepping lightly into this battle. While neither she nor any of the other candidates can match the size of Mayor Rahm Emanuel's war chest dollar-for-dollar, she apparently can raise enough to be respectable in that area and possibly find a pathway to victory.

Lightfoot, the only openly gay candidate in the race, says she's running a campaign based on the need for economic justice and police reform.

According to the Tribune:

Although she could struggle to find a base of support, Lightfoot indicated she plans to run as a progressive, a lane occupied in the 2015 campaign by Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who pushed Emanuel into the city’s first mayoral runoff election. Lightfoot said she’ll work to promote neighborhood redevelopment, rebuild neighborhood schools and back Democratic governor nominee J.B. Pritzker’s push for a graduated income tax.

She notes that a recent study showed that on the West Side, the life expectancy plummets to 69 years, compared with 85 years for someone living in the Loop, seven “L” stops away. She lauded a group called West Side United, which she said came up with a plan to “significantly improve the quality of life and the life expectancy in those neighborhoods.”

In a Sun-Times interview, she came out against Rahm's planned $95M police academy, which she calls "an edifice to policing in the middle of one of the most economically distressed neighborhoods in our city."

She's also critical of the way the mayor has closed all the high schools in Englewood as well as National Teachers Academy (NTA), and blames Emanuel for hiring Barbara Byrd-Bennett as schools CEO without doing the diligence to know her track record as a "crook...trying to line her personal pocket."

If she pursues this line of attack, she will need a strategy that directs blows not only at the mayor, but at Paul Vallas as well. Vallas, Mayor Daley's former schools CEO, has a similar track record of school closings and replacing closed public schools with privately-run charters. He also is the former partner of Gary Solomon, Byrd-Bennett's accomplice. Going after Vallas as well as Rahm and former top-cop Garry McCarthy will be a necessary piece of campaign strategy for Team Lightfoot if they are to get her into a runoff with the mayor.

The big question remains: Can Lightfoot be the candidate who can finally rally enough unified support from progressives, unions, and within black and Latino communities to elevate herself from the pack and give Rahm a run for his money? Definitely possible.

 ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

We'll be talking about the upcoming mayor's race and more Chicago politics tomorrow on Hitting Left with another potential mayoral candidate, Ra Joy.  Tune in at 11am CT on WLPN 105.5 FM Streaming at www.lumpenradio.com. Download the app Podcast on iTunes.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA

... also pushed to arm teachers and called on schools to be “the most hardened targets in this country.” -- Washington Post

Derek Black

 We Shouldn't Call Teacher Salary Hikes 'Raises' -- EdWeek

Chicago Tribune Guild 

'We did it... We have a union' -- Statement

Charles J. Johnson, Tribune editor & union organizer 

 "We have been badly mistreated by a series of corporate owners, Tronc only being the most recent, and we've decided to take some control over the future of our journalism in the city of Chicago." -- NPR

Atty. Lorna McMillion

“You have a charter school that can, in one breath, say, ‘Hey, we’re a public school, don’t sue us,’ and in the next say, ‘Hey, we’re not a public school, don’t sue us.'” -- Texas Tribune

Greg Hinz

 I'm particularly interested to see if Police Board Chair Lori Lightfoot gets in [Chicago mayor's race] because, more than most candidates, she has a foot in all sorts of political camps. -- Crain's 

Afghanistan 17 years later...

 “They’ve got to screen everybody who’s going to be working directly with the [brigade],” said an Army officer who was involved in preparing bases for the new adviser teams earlier this year and who, like others contacted for this story, agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. “That means screening basically the whole damn Afghan National Army, and we’re way behind the power curve on that.” -- Politico

Steve Doocy

"Keep in mind, whatever [Gina Haspel] did" to torture detainees, "she was doing it as a directive and it was all within the law". -- Fox & Friends

Vallas wanted Rahm to hire him to "fix" the Byrd-Bennett mess

Did Paul Vallas think we'd forget that he was Gary Solomon's partner? Former schools CEO Vallas, who, has already run losing campaigns for Governor (2002) and with Pat Quinn for Lt. Governor (2014), partnered with Solomon in forming Synesi Associates. Synesi was one of the indicted companies that hired Barbara Byrd-Bennett as a consultant, in return for her support in obtaining millions of dollars in CPS no-bid contracts.

It was Vallas who taught Solomon and many of the rest of his Chicago crew, the ropes in one of the great hustles of public schools ever. It often included placing Vallas underlings in district administrative jobs around the country, in exchange for lucrative consulting contracts, often to provide expensive, but worthless professional development (like SUPES) for district principals and teachers. Solomon, who once claimed to be using the "Vallas model", took Vallas' ball and ran with it, offering illegal kickbacks directly to colluding school officials.

When Vallas was Mayor Daley's hand-picked schools CEO, kickbacks for consulting contracts were common occurrences in Chicago schools.

Now Solomon and Byrd-Bennett are both doing time. Vallas is running for mayor against a weakened but still top-dog in the race, Rahm Emanuel. He tells the Tribune that he had the plan on how to control the mess caused by Solomon and BBB. Only Rahm, having brought the corrupt pair in to CPS in the first place, wasn't about the compound the fracture by hiring complicit, former Daley-guy, Vallas.

From Trib's Bill Ruthhart:

It turns out, though, Vallas has his own story of being rejected by Emanuel that left some lingering hard feelings. In 2015, when soon-to-be-indicted Barbara Byrd-Bennett left as CPS CEO amid a kickback scandal, Vallas said he called the administration to offer his services to help stabilize the district.

Those overtures, though, were rejected, Vallas said. Emanuel, whose campaign declined to comment on the matter, ended up tabbing Forrest Claypool as the next schools chief. He, too, left amid a scandal after facing a watchdog’s allegations he “orchestrated a full-blown cover-up” over a clouted legal contract.

“I was told that I did not pass the loyalty test. And, of course, I proceeded to tell everyone I know about that, because it really pissed me off,” Vallas said. “I knew what that was: It’s not about being loyal to the cause or the mission, it’s about being loyal to the individual. It’s all about politics first, and everything else takes a back seat. I didn’t forget that.”

From Sun-Times' Fran Spielman:

Notoriously thin-skinned, Vallas also tried to explain away the close ties he developed with now-convicted education consultant Gary Solomon.

Solomon worked with Vallas at schools in Philadelphia and New Orleans. In Chicago, he’s better known for master-minding a contract kickback scheme with then-Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett. Both Solomon and Byrd-Bennett are now in prison.

“Gary was the vice-president for Princeton Review, one of the largest education service firms in the country. They did business with hundreds of superintendents,” Vallas said.

“I’m not the one who gave Gary Solomon a $20 million, no-bid contract.”

True and yet...

Jean Gump, an American hero, dead at 90

It's May Day and thousands of us will be marching for social justice in Chicago, as we do every year. This year, I'm drawing inspiration from Jean Gump, who recently passed away at age 90. Jean grew up on Chicago's south side and was a life-long civil rights and an anti-war activist. She served four years in federal prison for her participation in an anti-war protest on Good Friday, 1986.

She organized against the racism of the Daley machine in Chicago and along with her children, joined Dr.  King in his 1966 march in Marquette Park against segregated housing. She also marched with Dr. King in Selma.

Sun-Times columnist, Neil Steinberg blogs about Jean this morning:

As a member of the Niles West High School P.T.A. in the late 60's, Jean Gump often sided with students against teachers and administration concerning Vietnam War protests. She became involved in protests against handguns and for rights for the handicapped. On two occasions, she supplemented her already large family by taking refugee families from Vietnam into her home.

According to the Chicago Tribune:

Gump was part of a group called the Chicago Life Community focused on protesting nuclear weapons and other tools of mass destruction. The group protested weekly outside the downtown Chicago headquarters of Morton Salt, protests aimed at the military weapons business of what was then Morton Thiokol Inc. Those protests, her daughter said, led to frequent arrests.

It was Good Friday, March 28, 1986, when Gump and two others cut a fence and approached a missile silo at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri. Gump and the others were arrested. She was sentenced to eight years in the Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia. Her sentence was later reduced to six years and she was released after serving four years and one month of the sentence. She refused to pay $424 in damages, a refusal that resulted in missing a son’s wedding because the conditions of her parole didn’t allow her to leave the state of Michigan during the parole period.

This Reader article from 1987 describes Jean Gump's moral conviction as well as her courage and commitment to civil disobedience.

 Ironically, Gump's sentence left her holding the key to her own jail cell, which she could unlock at any time. If she paid the damages and agreed not to participate in more protests, the government would be willing to free her for time served, says her husband, Joe. But for Jean that's impossible.

"It's hard being in prison, it's really hard, but I wouldn't be anywhere else. All the while I sit here everyone knows that disarmament is a crime but building weapons to destroy the world isn't a crime. It's something to think about."

Her husband, Joseph, died in 2014. In 1987, he was convicted of conspiring to damage another Missouri missile site. He was imprisoned for three years.

Jean Gump was last arrested in 2010 at the age of 84 following a protest at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

Here's a powerful statement from Jean's New York Times obit:

 Most people go to prison for violating their conscience. The Gumps were sentenced for rigidly cleaving to theirs. Ms. Gump’s moral code could be condensed into a single sentence: “If you don’t act against it, you must be for it.”

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Nobody's talking arming teachers any more. 

Lynne McKernan, seventh-grade AZ writing teacher 

Said Arizona lawmakers walked out of the Capitol on Friday without speaking to teachers. "In the middle of a crisis, they chose to adjourn rather than sit down with our representatives who have asked to speak with them for weeks."

"Other schools have the roof caving in," McKernan said. "We used to catch mice at our school. It was like a hobby: 'How many mice did you catch in your classroom today?'"    -- LA Times

Lydia Coffey, former KY teacher, now running for a state House seat

“I think women are just tired of feeling like we’re second class. We’re tired of white men in power telling all of us what to do.” -- Huffington

Mike Elk is a member of the DC-Baltimore NewsGuild

The teachers’ strikes have brought into sharp focus forces that have been reshaping the landscape for workers in America. Nissan, the union-backed Fight for $15 campaign for minimum wage workers and now the teachers have shown that after years of attack from anti-union powers, organized labor can still make a difference. -- Guardian

Michelle Wolf at WHCD 

“Trump is also an idea guy. He's got loads of ideas. You've got to love him for that," she said. "He wants to give teachers guns. And I support that because then they can sell them for things they need - like supplies." 

More Wolf...

"It is kind of crazy the Trump campaign was in contact with Russia when the Hillary campaign wasn't even in contact with Michigan. It's a direct flight. It's so close." -- The Hill

 Trump Lawyer, Michael Cohen

“Boss, I miss you so much." -- WSJ

R.I.P. Jean Gump

 A young, fully armed soldier who descended from an armored vehicle to arrest the trio had cowered as she reached into her purse. “Shoot if you must, sonny,” Ms. Gump said defiantly, “but I’ve got to blow my nose.” -- N.Y. Times

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?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Photo: Sporting News Archive, Sporting News Via Getty Images

Dave Zirin

It’s not for us to forgive Jack Johnson. The opposite is the case. -- The Nation

Ben Green, a fourth-year PhD student in applied math.

“The main thing that we [Harvard grad students] really want is to have a greater say, greater democracy, in our working conditions. By joining with UAW, we’re also joining with these other universities organizing with them. We’re building power not just for graduate workers at Harvard, but for graduate workers across the country.” -- Boston Globe

Colin Kaepernick on winning AI's Ambassador of Conscience Award

“In truth, this is an award that I share with all of the countless people throughout the world combating the human rights violations of police officers, and their uses of oppressive and excessive force." -- Guardian

Franklin Bynum

“Yes, I’m running as a socialist. I’m a far-left candidate. What I’m trying to do is be a Democrat who actually stands for something, and tells people, ‘Here’s how we are going to materially improve conditions in your life.’” -- New York Times

Leonard Pitts, Jr. 

 But racism is more than prejudice. It is, rather, the system by which prejudice is encoded into the laws and customs of a society so that, to take an example not quite at random, two black men can be arrested for waiting quietly on a prospective business associate to arrive for a meeting at Starbucks. -- Miami Herald

Mark Rudd

 The central role played by the Student Afro-American Society has never been acknowledged in accounts of Columbia ’68. The story has been about the white kids of the New Left, the S.D.S. and myself, as a singular protest leader. Ray Brown called the media’s erasure of the black students’ role “strategic blindness.” -- New York Times

Educators have no business supporting war

Damascus after the attack. 

War is the enemy of education, of children and families. Education leaders have no business supporting war or encouraging war-mongering politicians or militarists to invade or bomb other countries. But this is exactly what happened Thursday when Trump bombed Damascus and other Syrian cities in response to the Syrian government's alleged use of chemical weapons in it's war against rebel groups.

Without getting congressional approval, and with Gen. Mattis, and Sarah Huckabee-Sanders admitting there was "no conclusive evidence" the Assad regime had used those weapons (a day before inspectors from the OPCW were attempting to enter Syria) the U.S. launched, what turned out to be a largely symbolic missile attack on selected targets. Those targets may or may not have had anything to do with chemical weapons production.

Symbolic as the raid turned out to be, gaining no U.S. military or political advantage and obviously more for domestic political consumption, one can only imagine the terror felt by Syrian children and families as missiles rained down upon their already war-torn cities. So far, U.S. missiles have already reportedly killed more than 6,000 Syrian civilians. If anything, the attack seemed to rally more Syrians in support of Assad.

WaPo reports:

Hours earlier, civilians and soldiers gathered in Ummayad Square in Damascus for a show of support, waving Syrian flags and dancing to songs that praised the army.

More than that, the missile attack threatened to turn the cold war with Russia into hot war and lead to Israeli-inspired military action against Iran. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed. Reportedly, Pentagon generals were on the hotline with their Russian counterparts before the raid.

[Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] Dunford said the only communications that took place between the United States and Russia before the operation were “the normal deconfliction of the airspace, the procedures that are in place for all of our operations in Syria.”

You got to love this new word added to the war lexicon, "deconfliction".

Trump has personal interests in avoiding confrontation with Russia. More accurately, he's in bed with Putin and the Russian oligarchs. See how he pulled the rug out from under Nikki Haley after she announced Russian sanctions at the U.N. Meanwhile top Democrats and neocons continue to push for regime change in Syria and expansion of the Syrian conflict to include Russia and Iran.

The thing that angered me most was seeing support for Trump's bombing raid coming from top Democrats and AFT leaders like Randi Weingarten and Leo Casey. Their criticism of Trump was that his attack on Syria "didn't go far enough".

Weingarten called the illegal bombing raid, "a retaliatory strike" as if the U.S. was attacked by Syria.

Then she signaled approval for the attack with this tweet:

Absolutely important to put Syria on notice over Chemical attacks: Trump Orders Strikes on Syria Over Suspected Chemical Weapons Attack via @NYTimes https://t.co/qtMCAxuR06

— Randi Weingarten (@rweingarten) April 14, 2018

None of this is really news. Here's AFT's official statement from a year ago when Trump bombed Syria.

WASHINGTON—Statement by American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten on U.S. attacks on Syria:

“Syria’s barbaric use of chemical genocide required an immediate response, which President Trump’s missile strikes accomplished last night. While we believe Trump should have gone to Congress first, I find it curious that many members of Congress who are applauding the U.S. strikes had opposed former President Obama when he sought congressional approval for similar action.

Casey went even further, referring to those opposed to the missile attack as "isolationists" and "America Firsters", even accusing anti-war activists of being silent on the settlement of Syrian war refugees. A ridiculous charge.

My unpopular opinion: I see a lot of people who were silent on US' refusal to accept refugees from Syria waxing righteous about the bombing of chemical weapon facilities. It's an America First, isolationist wolf in sheep's clothing.

— Leo Casey (@LeoECasey) April 14, 2018

Pretty vile stuff.

When confronted with the illegality of the attack and it's violation of international law, Casey echoed Trump, tweeting:

If you actually believed in international law, you are a dollar short and a day late.

— Leo Casey (@LeoECasey) April 15, 2018

As expected, support for the bombing also came from top Dem leaders like Nancy Pelosi. 

“Tonight’s strike in Syria appears to be a proportional response to the the regime’s use of chemical weapons. -- Fox News

Shades of '68. It seems, there are now two pro-war parties in the U.S.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

"And all the boys there, at the bar, began to sing along..." -- Dixie Chicken (Little Feat)

Donald Trump

“Mission Accomplished!” Trump tweeted a day after the allied assault on Syrian facilities that the United States, Britain and France say are part of a large chemical weapons program. The phrase was the same one the last Republican president, George W. Bush, employed to his regret in 2003, when the Iraq War was far from over. -- Washington Post

Owen Jones

It was those who opposed war who were placed in the dock, our contemptuous prosecutors demanding: “What is your alternative, then?” We were deemed heartless in the face of despicable atrocities, and the useful idiots and dupes of Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi who – unlike many of the warmongers themselves – we had always opposed. -- The Guardian

Laura Washington

We have forgotten how to add. In this multi-racial city, we have forgotten that disciplined, multi-racial coalitions can prevail. Harold Washington’s “new Democratic coalition” was a combine of African-Americans, Latinos and “progressive whites” who found a common cause to beat the Democratic Party machine. Washington’s coalition disintegrated after his death and was never revived. -- Sun-Times

Wade Lead in the water

“Chicago’s water consistently meets and exceeds the U.S. EPA’s standards for clean, high-quality drinking water,” says Megan Vidis, a spokesperson for the city’s water department. -- Chicago’s drinking water is full of lead, report says

Working Families Party state director Bill Lipton 

“For eight years we tried to work with Andrew Cuomo to transform New York into a truly progressive state. For eight years he broke his promises and kept the Republicans in the State Senate, blocking critical legislation for affordable housing, women’s equality and criminal justice reform.” -- Politico

Joe Scarborough

 Despite playing tennis, golf and football during his college days, Trump took five deferments, four for college and one for bone spurs in his feet. On the day Trump graduated from college, 40 Americans were killed in Vietnam. -- Washington Post

Avery R. Young's "Lead in da Watah" (re-visited negro spiritual) from Elyse Blennerhassett on Vimeo.

My favorite Ryan moment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As NYT columnist Charles Blow put it:

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

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Kentucky Wildcats

A wildcat strike action, often referred to as a wildcat strike, is a strike action undertaken by unionized workers without union leadership's authorization, support, or approval; this is sometimes termed, an unofficial industrial action. Wildcat strikes were the key pressure tactic utilized during the May 1968 protests in France. -- Wikipedia

Attica Scott, first African-American woman to serve in the Ky Legislature in over 20 years

She explained how the Republican-controlled Statehouse gutted the state pension program last week, surreptitiously changing a sewage treatment bill: “On the Thursday before Good Friday, that morning, it was a sewage bill. And by that afternoon, it was the so-called pension reform bill.” -- Democracy Now

Rev. James Lawson.

“We cannot make our democracy succeed, be effective, if you do not have working people in organized units who can care for their economic benefits … who can care for the issues of justice.” --Democracy Now

Thomas Frank

“Amazon is the shining representative of a new golden age of monopoly,” is how the Atlantic journalist Franklin Foer put it in 2014, and what he said then is even truer today. -- Guardian 

Maria Villegas, who cleans Sayre Language Academy Elementary in Galewood

Says she has been told ahead of time by her supervisor when an inspector was coming. As a result, Villegas says, “When there is an inspection coming, we leave some things that we [normally] do daily. We leave them to clean the stairwells really well, they’re [inspectors] going to enter through there. Clean the first couple of bathrooms because they’re going to check those. The person who inspects enters the first floor checks the bathrooms, checks the stairwells — but doesn’t go to the upper floors.” -- Sun-Times 

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Attempts to silence players who refuse to accept their assigned roles fits right in with owners’ smarmy manipulation of the women cheerleaders through discriminatory Jane Crow “laws”.  -- The NFL's Plan to protect America From Witches

Where's the progressive coalition in Chicago's race for mayor?

Who will get the anti-Rahm vote?

The thing I worry about is that the Chicago mayor's race will be an expensive governor's race redux without a progressive/left coalition ready or willing to back an anti-machine candidate strong enough to take advantage of Rahm Emanuel's obvious vulnerabilities and at least make it to a runoff.

The Sanders-left seemed to have gone underground leading up to the gov's race, leaving us with tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum and tweedle-Pritzker to choose from. One unimaginable scenario in the mayor's race has the unions and community groups rallying behind Rahm or Vallas as the winnable lesser of evils.

The expensive part of the race was already assured when perennial candidate Willie Wilson gave his own campaign $100K, thus erasing all state-imposed fundraising limits. Not that there was any doubt, but now MRE and his growing field of challengers will be able to raise unlimited amounts of money. Of course, this favors Rahm and big-money candidates like Paul Vallas and Garry McCarthy just as it favored billionaires J.B. Pritzker and Bruce Rauner in the gov primary.

Natasha Korecki writes in Politico:

This time, as viable candidates line up to challenge Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2019 and slice up vote totals, there’s a prevailing theory: a runoff election already looks like an inevitability. Emanuel is sure to be one of the two top candidates who make it to the second round. 

So then the question really becomes this: who in the field (announced and unannounced) can take out the mayor in a one-to-one matchup? Three years ago, Garcia spent the opening weeks of the runoff on the road working to raise more money. The cash-flush Emanuel pounced to quickly quell Garcia’s momentum with oppo research dumps and subsequent negative TV ads. 

The political dynamics have dramatically changed for the mayor in this post-Laquan McDonald era. But if Emanuel squeaks into a run-off and is still the better-funded incumbent to beat, who is best suited to exploit his vulnerabilities, particularly within the African American community?

The growing list of candidates will badly divide the anti-Rahm votes, leaving him in position to win the opening round with only 30% of the votes. The word is that Vallas and McCarthy have already cut a deal, assuring that the one with the least votes will back the other in a runoff election.

Troy on Chicago Tonight

My choice so far, but campaign long-shot, Troy LaRaviere, did a nice job telling Chicago Tonight's Phil Ponce why he wanted the job.

As always, Troy was sharp on ed issues.

He spoke out against the privatization of school janitorial services, charter schools and the lack of sufficient funding for special education. He was especially critical of the use of what he said were excessive standardized tests to judge school and student performance.

 He also made it clear that the pension issue couldn't be resolved without a progressive tax and revenue system that didn't put the entire burden on the poor while ignoring those "who have more money than they can spend in their lifetime".

But aside from being able to garner black and Latino community support, unite the progressive movement (including the CTU, SEIU and other unions) behind his campaign and raise a hefty number of millions in his war chest (he told Ponce, he hasn't started fundraising yet), Troy's team needs to develop a solid campaign strategy. He's got to convince the unions and other potential backers that he can run with the big dogs. He's also got to take on more than Rahm, but Vallas/McCarthy as well, if he is even to make it into a runoff. The danger is that Vallas, the least vetted of the candidates, will skate unscathed into second place.

Troy has been a two-time guest on Hitting Left. Here's a podcast of an earlier appearance.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

50 years ago.

Dr. Martin Luther King 

“Fire hoses can’t deal with a million people … Dogs can’t bite a million people.” -- The Atlantic

OEA Pres. Alicia Priest

"Educators across Oklahoma have said, 'Enough!' Their frustration is justified, but that frustration — because of years of broken promises — turned into courage, and that courage turned into energy, and that energy into momentum, and that momentum created this moment that forced that legislature to act." -- FB Video

Rep. Trey Gowdy (Oink!)

Congressional investigations "leak like the Gossip Girls". -- Face the Nation

 Tu Xinquan, China trade expert on Trump tariffs 

“We are curious about what the U.S. side really wants and wonder whether the United States can tolerate the consequences.” --TPM

Remember Deborah Gist?

As in West Virginia, educators in Oklahoma have reached a breaking point, fed up with stagnant wages and cuts to education funding. The idea of a walkout began to gain traction in mid-February after a proposed salary increase failed to win enough support among lawmakers. A ­superintendent circulated a petition asking colleagues if they would support a teacher walkout.

I WAS REVIEWING the press for Weekend Quotables this morning, when I came across this Washington Post story on the growing revolt among low-paid Oklahoma teachers.

WaPo reports:

At a local restaurant, it was a teacher who served Deborah Gist recently. At the Reasor’s grocery, there’s sometimes a teacher behind the register. And then there was the Uber that the school district chief hailed to catch an early-morning flight — a teacher sat behind the wheel, trying to earn some money before heading to the classroom. There was a stack of student journals on the passenger seat.

“It’s just so wrong that it just hurts my heart,” said Gist, who has been superintendent since 2015.

My reaction to the hand-wringing quote -- Wait a minute. Could this possibly be the same Deborah Gist?

And sure enough, it was.

For those who don't know, or can't recall, it was Gist, fresh out of Eli Broad's training academy, who served as Rhode Island's state superintendent back in 2010. She's the one who pushed local Superintendent Frances Gallo to fire all the teachers and staff at Central Falls High School back in 2010. In the face of national blowback from unions and school activists, Gist was forced to retreat and most of the teachers were hired back. But the school and the entire town of Central Falls never fully recovered from the debacle.

The worst part was Obama's Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan giving his nod of approval to Gist's assault on the state's teachers and the President himself hailing her mass firing as an "act of courage". 

As teacher Paul Murphy wrote in a recent WaPo column,

The staff of Central Falls High School in Rhode Island sure didn’t sign up expecting the president of the United States and the secretary of education to endorse their collective firing. While we may have expected to be treated like dirt by Republicans, we didn’t sign up knowing the Democratic Party would abandon us in such a publicly humiliating way.

It's only fitting, I suppose, that after being run out of R.I., Gist would wind up in "right-to-work" (for less) state, Oklahoma, where public schools are miserably underfunded and teacher pay is at the nation's bottom (ranks 49th), lower even than West Virginia where the rolling teacher revolt began earlier this year.

So sorry, Deborah Gist. Your hand-wringing won't get it. We remember you.