What's happened to Chicago schools since Arne Duncan got Judge Kocoras to lift the deseg consent decree

Students wait for the bus in front of Bouchet Elementary Math & Science Academy in Chicago's South Shore neighborhood. More than 74% of students whose neighborhood school is majority black schools are bussed to majority-black schools. (Manuel Martinez/WBEZ)

I'm reading Sarah Karp's WBEZ story about Chicago's experiment with school desegregation and recalling how Arne Duncan helped get a federal judge to quash the city's deseg consent decree.

Karp writes:

Most of the city’s 78 magnet and test-in schools — including classical, gifted and selective enrollment — were created under the decree as a way to lure in a diverse group of students. But even after the court order was lifted, school district officials said they believed integration was important, and they started integrating by the socioeconomic status of children.

In 2009, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras lifted the consent decree ending three decades of efforts to integrate Chicago schools. The decree’s bilingual education provisions, according to Kocoras, duplicated protections in state law. The ruling came despite evidence presented by DOJ lawyers in court that the district repeatedly failed to enroll English learners in bilingual education fast enough or provide them with required services.

Since then, writes Karp, CPS has continued busing and spending extra funding on magnet and test-in schools and also added 13 new ones plus more charter schools that have been shown to contribute to segregation. This year, the school district plans to spend $50 million for bussing and extra positions at these schools, which serve 62,000 students.

But, says Karp, the WBEZ analysis finds only about 20% of magnet and test-in schools meet the racial makeup goal set out in the court order, compared to 35% a decade ago. Under that definition, the goal was for white students to make up between 15% and 35% of the student body and black, Latino and Asian students to make up between 65% and 85%.

Six schools of the 65 in existence 10 years ago went from being considered integrated to not, while only one of the new schools has that mix of students. Among the schools no longer meeting this definition of integrated are Skinner North Elementary School, which opened in the last decade, and Walter Payton College Prep High School — two schools often named as the best in the city and the state. They have both seen significant increases in white students. 

Magnet schools and busing programs that were created and funded for the purpose of encouraging racial desegregation have since been turned into their opposites. Now magnets have increasingly become privileged selective-enrollment schools, anchors for neighborhood gentrification with expensive busing programs taking children miles away from their neighborhood schools and into segregated ones.

Niketa Brar on Hitting Left

Niketa Brar, executive director of Chicago United for Equity, and a frequent guest on Hitting Left, says magnet and selective schools have been used as a way to allow families to avoid the problems of the public school system. This is especially true in gentrifying neighborhoods, she said, where parents put their children on buses to be driven away from their local schools.

Brar tells Karp:

“They become little havens of white people feeling like they are participating in the public school system while actually keeping their children segregated from the impacts of a local neighborhood school that have the same resources that every other child in their neighborhoods gets.”

It's worth recalling that it was Pres. Obama's Secretary of Education and former CPS school chief, Arne Duncan, along with Mayor Daley and Duncan's successor Ron Huberman, who pleaded with Judge Kocoras to scrap the decree a decade ago. They claimed that the city had done all it could do to desegregate its schools and that the deseg struggle was "futile and a drain on district funds".

This,  even though research has shown that the period in which school deseg was in full play was when the district had made the greatest gains in measurable student learning and closing the so-called achievement gap.

Duncan maintained that if the consent decree was lifted, CPS could save $300 million, mostly in eliminating bus service to magnet and selective enrollment schools. It was all a lie. Busing service and selective enrollment programs and charter schools have been expanded. Only their purposes have changed.

Under Rahm Emanuel, Chicago's selective-enrollment schools became even more exclusive.

During the period of 1981 to 2015, the total population of African-American students in CPS plummeted from close to 240,000, 60% of all CPS students, to 156,000 or 39% of CPS. The loss of so many poor and black children and an increase in wealthier white students have since been ignored as an explanation for claimed rising test scores and graduation rates.

I'd argue that they, along with school resegregation, have lots to do with it.

We'll see if and how things change over the next four years with a new mayor and city council. 

Duncan comes out against "forced integration." What year is this?

Arkansas Gov. Orville Faubus,  1958

"Forcing integration upon us is not a nimble concept."  -- Alabama Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, 1956

"The unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama today of the might of the Central Government offers frightful example of the oppression of the rights, privileges and sovereignty of this State by officers of the Federal Government. --Alabama Gov. George Wallace, 1963

"...the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty." -- Ron Paul, 2004

"So whatever we can do to continue to increase integration in a voluntary way – I don’t think you could force these kinds of things – we want to be very, very thoughtful and to try to do more in that area quite frankly." -- Sec. of Education Arne Duncan, 2013

So now it seems, despite the hard-won victories of the Civil Rights Movement, we've come full circle from 1964, when Georgia Gov. Lester Maddox stood in the doorway of his restaurant with an ax handle to prevent its "forced integration." It's 2013 and the current U.S. Sec. of Education seems to be assuring those "across the aisle" that he's not for forcing school deseg down white people's throats.

As if...

Duncan's latest blurt came out on NPR's Diane Rehm Show during a back-to-school panel discussion which also included National Journal's Fawn Johnson, Mike Petrilli from the right-wing Fordham Institute, and  economist Richard Rothstein. 

Duncan tipped his hat to the concept of racial diversity before assuring those who needed to be assured, that the administration was not going to break ranks by forcefully pushing school desegregation or affirmative action.

This at a time when Duncan's home town is facing several civil rights suits in response to Rahm Emanuel's mass closing of schools in the black community, and when the segregation of black students is increasing, not decreasing.

Why  Duncan would make such a pathetic statement more than half a century after the Supreme Court ruled school segregation illegal, is beyond me. Is there really somebody out there (even from within the Obama administration) trying to "force" the racial integration of schools?  What exactly are Secretary  Duncan and the Obama administration really afraid of?

Daley's man, Duncan,  fought Chicago's consent decree. 

We should recall that it was Arne Duncan, acting as Chicago Mayor Daley's hand-picked schools chief back in 2009, who went before a federal judge and successfully pleaded for an end to the thirty-year-old consent decree which "forced" some affirmative action on CPS. Duncan made his case by arguing that the district had already done all it could do and that the imposition of the consent decree was too costly.

Thankfully Rothstein was there to challenge Duncan. Certainly none of the others would have such an inclination.  Rothstein said he couldn't blame Duncan for thinking that integration is desirable only because it is good for students to experience diversity.

"His views on racial matters only reflect conventional thinking, including that of most liberal policymakers. As a society, much as we celebrate the achievements of the civil rights movement 50 years ago, we have abandoned racial integration as a goal and not only maintain segregation but have taken steps towards re-segregating children and communities."

Rothstein deepens his criticism of Duncan's "troubling" remarks on a blog post at EPI website (How Much We Have Backslid). It's re-posted on Valerie Strauss' Answer Sheet at WaPo.

Secretary Duncan’s comment on integration was even more shocking for another reason. He stated that we should “increase integration in a voluntary way—I don’t think you could force these kinds of things.” Secretary Duncan is young (only 48 years old) and may not realize that in 20th century discussions of integration, “voluntary” was a code word for massive resistance to desegregation, and saying you can’t “force these kind of things” was the most common rationale for maintenance of black subjugation.

He's not that young, Richard. He knows his history. He's a Harvard grad. Remember, it was Duncan who repeatedly told us that his version of ed reform was "the civil rights issue of our time." He just didn't say which side he was on.

Real reform vs. sham reform

 

Some readers misread my previous post on MN's sham police reform as an indictment of reform efforts in general. That certainly wasn't my intention. I know there are some who maintain that police reform (and all reform) is a waste of time and "has never worked". I'm not one of them. As I pointed out in that piece, there are meaningless, lollipop reforms that are simply diversions, as well genuine, deep-going, comprehensive reforms that arise directly from people's struggle and are worthy of our support. Consider the current George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. 

While the racist and repressive character of our criminal justice system remains a constant, the movement in the streets, combined with strong and committed political leadership, can drive change and force constraints on racist policing. A good example is Newark, where cops did not fire a single shot during  calendar year 2020, and where the city didn’t pay a single dime to settle police brutality cases. That’s never happened, at least in the city’s modern history.

From 2015 to 2019, the Newark Police Department killed eight Black men, according to The Washington Post, more than any other department in the state. 

The changes in Newark were partly the result of strong leadership from Mayor Ras Baraka and from the constant pressure applied by the city's historically strong community and youth organizations. Newark is also operating under also a federally enforced consent decree. Under Baraka, the police have met with community groups, giving residents some control over law enforcement. Pressure from below, from the Black Lives Matter movement, has constrained police shootings. Meanwhile, serious crime in Newark has dropped by 40% in the last five years dispelling the notion that constraining the cops will increase crime.

Larry Hamm, long-time Newark community organizer and  head of the People’s Organization for Progress, points out:  “Police brutality is still a problem, but it’s fair to say the consent decree has had a real impact." Hamm was a protege of the late Amiri Baraka, the writer/activist who helped shape Newark's modern history.

Hamm and the POP want state lawmakers to pass a bill that would make civilian complaint review boards with subpoena power possible for all municipalities in New Jersey. He also called on state legislators to pass another bill that would make police disciplinary records public.

The Star-Ledger reports:

The reforms are the results of a federal consent decree, the billy club used by the Department of Justice after a long investigation concluded in 2014 revealed the rot that had infested the department for decades. It found a rogue department that tolerated widespread brutality and racism, with no accountability, and zero training on how to de-escalate confrontations with civilians.

Questions remain as to whether the reforms in Newark can hold. Cops are still using force against Black residents, and activists remain split on the future of public safety there. Newark is a majority-Black city with a poverty level above 63%. Black people are still disproportionately stopped, frisked, and arrested. The new year also brought Newark’s streak to an abrupt end. At 12:03 a.m. on January 1, 2021, plainclothes cops shot and killed Carl Dorsey, a 39-year-old father. The state’s attorney general is investigating the incident. 

But it's wrong to ignore or minimize the gains that have been made and the victories won, especially in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder and a string of others. Yes, there's still a long, difficult road ahead but it's one worth taking. 

Chicago in violation of state law on ELL. Charters worst violators.

Most of the worst violators of state law were charter schools. Fifteen were run by the UNO Network of Charter Schools; nine were run by the Noble Network of Charter Schools. Source: Chicago Public Schools

Congrats to Chicago Reporter's Kalyn Belsha whose story on CPS's failure to meet the needs of English learners was named among this week's top education stories by Atlantic Magazine.

Belsha reports on a recent review of CPS records which found that, of the 342 schools audited, nearly 71%, or 242, had bilingual programs that were in serious violation of state law. As a result, English learners go without legally required services, such as books in their native language and teachers who speak that language or have English as a Second Language training.

Most of the worst violators of state law were charter schools. Fifteen were run by the UNO Network of Charter Schools; nine were run by the Noble Network of Charter Schools.

In 2009, U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras lifted the consent decree ending three decades of efforts to integrate Chicago schools. The decree’s bilingual education provisions, according to Kocoras, duplicated protections in state law. The ruling came despite evidence presented by DOJ lawyers in court that the district repeatedly failed to enroll English learners in bilingual education fast enough or provide them with required services.

I would be remiss if I failed to point out once again, that it was former schools CEO Arne Duncan who successfully pushed Judge Kocoras to abandon the consent decree. Thousands of the district's English language learners and their families are still paying the price.

Buttigieg's white blindspot on school deseg

“I have to confess that I was slow to realize ― I worked for years under the illusion that our schools in my city were integrated because they had to be because of a court order,” the Democratic presidential candidate said at a North Carolina talk with the Poor People’s Campaign. . -- Mayor Pete Buttigieg

There's no need for me to beat up on Pete Buttigieg any further, now that the master of the white blindspot has all but eliminated himself as a serious presidential candidate.

But I just have to say that I spent a good deal of time in South Bend high schools a decade ago and it only took me about a minute-and-a-half to notice that the schools were racially segregated. Why did it take him so long?

Of course, I wasn't the first to notice. The district has been signing onto consent decrees and deseg plans for the past 40 years, plans which were largely ignored. Last year's Focus 2018 plan, essentially did an end-run around the consent decree in favor of "school choice". It reminded me of the way Chicago failed to respond to deseg orders right up until 10 years ago when Arne Duncan got a federal judge to relieve the district of its obligations under its own consent decree.

South Bend schools are governed by the South Bend Community School Corporation, which has a board of publicly elected members. I say this only to remind myself and my fellow elected school board supporters that an elected board is hardly a panacea when it comes to racial desegregation.

According to the Notre Dame Observer:

In South Bend, "...black and Latino students are disproportionately punished, suspended and dismissed from schools, crippling chances of academic achievement and obstructing efforts for “equitable and supportive learning environments for all students.” Black students are disproportionately arrested in public schools as compared to white students, resulting in a school-to-prison pipeline fueled by zero-tolerance policies. Beyond school discipline, residential segregation and the ill effects of concentrated poverty further disadvantage minority students trapped in segregated schools.

The road to Democratic victory in 2020 runs through the black community, and I suspected the Buttigieg campaign was a loser when I watched his announcement to run back in April, in a cavernous South Bend former Studebaker factory, filled almost entirely with white supporters.

Buttigieg has led a rejuvenation of his city's downtown area, true. But his is a gentrification strategy that left out a quarter of the population living as outsiders and living at or below the poverty line. That's a quarter filling most of the seats in South Bend's public schools.

Last week, The Root’s Michael Harriot penned a viral op-ed billing Buttigieg as “a lying motherfucker” for stating eight years ago that lower educational achievement within impoverished minority communities boils down to a lack of role models.

Not my choice of words, but I understand.

Gated communities for children of privilege

Ald. Pat Dowell

Dowell is not about to use such divisive language. She just wants results. -- Sun-Times reporter Fran Spielman

Julie Woestehoff, executive director of PURE, is a straight shooter. She's quoted in PE&O, letting us know that since CPS leaders vacated the Consent Decree, the city's selective enrollment schools have been turned into “gated communities for children of privilege,” with soaring white enrollment. Remember, these schools were originally created under the deseg agreement as one way to combat years of racial segregation in city schools.

Tepid Ald. Pat Dowell (3rd) who walks a middle ground in the City Council, won't go that far. But even she and Ald. Burns are calling for hearings "with an eye toward modifying the controversial 'socio-economic criteria' put in place when the consent decree was lifted." OK, fine. Hold more hearings. Modify the socio-economic criteria or whatever.

But the usually reliable and accurate Sun-Time reporter Fran Spielman, has no business calling Julie's statement, "divisive" unless she's quoting someone else. It's poor reporting and it's wrong. What's divisive is Rahm using $60 million in TIF money to build another selective enrollment high school (Obama College Prep) in already saturated Lincoln Park. He's using $17 million in TIF funds to expand Payton by 400 seats. This, after closing 50 schools in black and Latino neighborhoods.

That's divisive!

King's dream vacated by a court in Chicago

Dr. King attacked by racist mob when he came to Chicago in 1966

While Arne Duncan was invoking the name of Dr. Martin Luther King, in an effort to rally support for NCLB re-authorization, a federal court, in his home town was putting the final nail in the coffin of Chicago's 29-year-old school de-seg agreement.

Catalyst's Sarah Karp reports that,

U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras scrapped the CPS desegregation consent decree--a move that likely will result in the district abandoning the use of race as a factor in the admissions policies of magnet and selective schools. The move by U.S. District Judge Charles Kocoras also halted the court's monitoring of the district's bilingual program, which activists claimed is still inadequate and in need of supervision.

Kocoras' decision came only a long, intense campaign to have the consent decree vacated, led by Duncan, his successor Ron Huberman and Mayor Daley, who saw the deseg struggle as futile and as a drain on district funds.

Community and civil rights groups are rightfully worried that the decision will further limit access of black and Latino students to selective enrollment schools. The question now facing a school district made up 93% of children of color is: since Brown v. Board is dead, how about at least taking Plessy v. Ferguson (separate but equal) seriously?

Related:

Black population declines in Chicago's elite schools 11.28.07

LIFE IN THE 'POST-RACIAL' ERA

A SMALLTALK SALUTE goes out to NBA Players Assoc. Pres. Chris Paul and the rest of the L.A. Clippers players who hung together in protest against the racism spewed by club owner Donald Sterling. Even though they were beaten by Golden State last night, they acted with dignity and grace. Though their protest was silent, nobody could mistake the clarity and forcefulness of their message.

STERLING -- "Don't bring them to my games."  EMANUEL -- "Don't bring them to my selective enrollment schools."  WHAT'S THE DIFF? Somebody tell me please.

From the Sun-Times:

The increase in the number of white students fulfills the predictions of education observers that minority students would be edged out of slots at the city’s top schools as a result of a 2009 ruling by U.S. District Judge Charles P. Kocoras lifting a 1980 consent decree that had required Chicago’s schools to be desegregated, with no school being more than 35 percent white. -- "White students getting more spots at top CPS high schools"

Kocoras' 2009 decision came only a long, intense campaign to have the consent decree vacated, led by Arne Duncan, his successor Ron Huberman and Mayor Daley, who saw the deseg struggle as futile and as a drain on district funds.

I'll say one thing about Duncan. He's consistent. He's against "forced integration." Although he did support a little affirmative action for the daughter of billionaire Bruce Rauner.

CAROLYN EDGAR @SALON.COM:

As we approach the 60th anniversary of the landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, it is a good time to acknowledge that the tools that dismantled Jim Crow 60 years ago are inadequate to address systemic inequality today. We need new tools to repair a socioeconomic, political and judicial system that, despite the numerous gains made in the last 60 years, remains separate and unequal. -- Modern racists just repeat conservative talking points: Donald Sterling, Cliven Bundy and the ugly face of GOP policies

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.

Two-tier school system reproducing segregation and inequality

Modern school reform has become nearly synonymous with racial re-segregation and two-tier education. There's one tier for the elite and one big tier for the rest of us. Sociologists call it social-reproduction, wherein school systems become institutions that transmit social inequality from one generation to the next.

The election of Donald Trump and his selection of Betsy DeVos, with her single-minded emphasis on "school choice", as education secretary, promises to make the gap between the tiers even wider. But the use of charters, vouchers and selective-enrollment schools as competitive forces vis-a-vis traditional public schools predates Trump/DeVos by decades.

Ironically, selective-enrollment schools and charters originally were envisioned as tools for desegregation. Selective enrollment and magnet high schools in particular were created in the 1970s after consent decrees forced school districts to desegregate.

The news out of Chicago, where Mayor Rahm Emanuel has autocratic power over the public schools, is that the city's selective-enrollment high schools have become even more exclusive. In 2009 the Chicago deseg consent decree was liquidated by a federal judge with support from Arne Duncan and selective-enrollment and charters have dropped all pretense of being about racial equality.

DNAinfo reports:

Getting into a selective enrollment high school got even harder this year — so much so that members of next year's freshman class at Walter Payton College Prep High School who won one of the coveted seats outright earned at least 898 points out of a possible 900 points, according to cutoff-score data released by the district.

While some provisions are made to admit a quota of "economically disadvantaged" students to schools like Payton, those students are often re-segregated or tracked to lower tiers within the school itself.

The implications extend far beyond high school, impacting college admissions and job opportunities. The two-tier system also places enormous pressure on parents and students starting in pre-school and up through elementary and middle grades. It's this pressure that feeds the system of tracking and sorting based primarily on standardized tests.

DNAinfo reports that anxiety is running high across the city as eighth-graders learn whether or not they have been accepted into one of Chicago's selective-enrollment high schools.

"It's insane," 47th Ward Ald. Ameya Pawar said of the pressure on middle-schoolers."To try to build one's life around a test score of 99.8 or 99.7? That's not what an education is supposed to be about."

He's right.

Will this finally be the end of the line for Rahm? One can only hope.

Rahm's pal David Axelrod hints that Rahm may not run. 

Despite the many millions in his campaign warchest, there are signs that Mayor 1% is vulnerable in the upcoming election and possibly won't even make it to a runoff. Some of his closest friends and advisors are even dropping hints that Rahm Emanuel may choose not to run again, depending on how bad things look over the coming months.

I doubt it.

Sun-Times political reporter Fran Spielman says this about Rahm's chances:

The political deck appears to be so stacked against Emanuel, some political observers wonder why he’s running and whether he will finish first, second or even third.

 He has imposed a nearly $2 billion avalanche of tax increases to solve a pension crisis his predecessor left behind.

He’s caught in a vice between police reform advocates demanding a say in a consent decree outlining federal court oversight of the Chicago Police Department and police officers who accuse him of “turning his back” on them at a time when he needs those officers to fight violent crime aggressively.

African-American voters who elected him in 2011, then re-elected him even after he closed a record 50 public schools, are unlikely to trust him again after his handling of the Laquan McDonald shooting video.

And the trial of Jason Van Dyke, the white Chicago Police officer accused of firing the 16 shots that killed the 17-year-old McDonald is likely to be held in the run-up to the mayoral election now just nine months away.

Victor Reyes, a former Daley political consultant, thinks Rahm will make it, but...

To go into the runoff with the wind at his back, Reyes said Emanuel needs more than 50 percent of the white vote, 40 percent of the Latino vote and 35 percent of the black vote. 

The more Latino votes he gets, the more black votes he can stand to lose. 

“It’s very tough. It’ll be his hardest election. His path is narrow. But I think he’ll get it,” Reyes said.

“His fundraising advantage is No. 1. Incumbency is No. 2. And no Latino in the race is No. 3 . . . They don’t have money. They don’t have name recognition. It’s a younger community. And there’s not a lot of unity.”

Then there's Rahm's political advisor, David Axelrod who drops this on us...

Although Emanuel is raising money at a frenzied pace and positioning himself to run for re-election, he has not yet formally declared his candidacy for a third-term.

“Until someone says that they’re running there’s always a chance they may not,” Axelrod said.

“I don’t think he’s under any pressure to decide that today, tomorrow or in the next few weeks as long as he does the things that preserve the option, such as raising the money. My counsel to him would be, there’s no rush on this. Take a gut check at the appropriate time and make sure this is what you want to do.”

I heard the same, off-the-record, from a Rahm confidant a few weeks ago.

For more Chicago mayor-race chatter, observation, and speculation, tune in Friday at 11 a.m. CDT, to Hitting Left with the Klonsky Brothers, streaming live at http://www.lumpenradio.com/ with in-studio guest, political mover and shaker, Amara Enyia.

Then, just when people were starting to forget about Rahm's disastrous school closings, out comes a new damaging report from the University of Chicago showing that CPS closing of 50 schools, mostly in the city's African-American community, led to academic setbacks for the affected students.

“Academic outcomes were neutral at best and negative in some instances,” according to the 88-page report.

As one observer tweeted:

The mayor with overwhelming City Council approval, closed 6 of 12 mental health clinics and 50 public schools, claiming they can’t afford them ($803 million combined cost). But they suddenly found $95 million for a new police academy. 

To top it all off, CPS Inspector General Nicholas Schuler, whose investigation led the FBI to Barbara Byrd-Bennett, yesterday came out with a new report showing that Rahm's hand-picked school board appointee Deborah Quazzo was complicit in BBB's illegal kickback schemes.

The Sun-Times reports that Rahm's former school chief accepted lavish meals at some of the city’s priciest restaurants from a CPS vendor whose investors included Quazzo. 

Quazzo violated the school system’s ethics code by talking up her companies’ products to CPS principals and introducing them to company representatives — which she at first denied to Schuler she’d done but acknowledged after being shown emails proving that.

We'll see how much this blows back on the mayor or gives impetus to the push for an elected school board. 

S-T columnist Laura Washington, predicts a long, hot summer for the mayor.

This summer will host sizzling court trials involving allegations of deadly police misconduct. There’s plenty of hot water there, and Emanuel is stuck in the deep end of the pool.

How will Emanuel handle the heat? Some political insiders speculate that if his poll numbers don’t turn up soon, he may call it quits, and decline to run for a third term.

I expect he will keep his cool and carry on. Alas, his controlled, bloodless style may be part of the problem.

Another indicator of summer problems for the mayor is the potential for a rise in gun violence. Last weekend saw at least eight Chicagoans killed and 30 wounded in street shootings.

It's still early but no Latino candidate in the race certainly helps Rahm's chances. Right now it looks to me like Lori Lightfoot has the best chance of pulling away from Rahm's other eight contenders. She has strong fund-raising capabilities, creds in the police reform scene, and a strong team behind her. 

Paul Vallas and Garry McCarthy, the great white hopes in the race, have already cut a deal between themselves for one to support the other if one of them is more likely to win, thereby keeping a black candidate out of the runoff. But there's always the possibility that between them, they could pull enough white votes from the northwest and southwest sides to move Rahm into third place in the primary. 

Lots of ifs there, I know.

After the broken glass has been swept

Looting... An inevitable, spontaneous reaction to the widening wealth and racial inequality gap which has been expanding at a record pace globally during the COVID pandemic.

Sunday night, there was another police shooting of a young black man in Englewood. The details of the shooting weren't immediately clear and still aren't. Why not? The cops weren't wearing their body cameras in clear violation of the federally imposed reform consent decree. CPD claimed it was because of "budget constraints". What a load of crap? Rumors about the shooting spread. Things got hot and carloads of people headed to the Miracle Mile to voice their anger.

Yes, the community is frustrated, they’re demanding reform and, sadly, some people are looting.

But loot-pillage-and-burn is more the strategy of  Donald Trump and his grifter family than that of the urban poor and working class. Just take as an example, his move yesterday to loot the U.S. postal service of $25 billion rather than give COVID-free voters a chance to remove him from office.

Looting has never been the way of the Freedom Movement as the Rev. Jesse Jackson reminded us, and it's somewhat disheartening to hear a young, movement militant holding forth in front of the TV cameras, dangerously (to themselves) calling on people to "take anything they wanted to take" and rendering looting more profound by describing it as "reparations."

Predictably, fascist FOP President John Catanzara was armed and ready with a hand-delivered  letter to U.S. Attorney John Lausch's office at the Dirksen Federal Building Thursday morning, asking the federal prosecutors to step in to pursue charges against "looters" meaning the BLM protest leaders. I'm sure Catanzara's pals, Trump and Atty. Gen. Barr are ready to comply.

Catanzara obviously wants to misdirect fire away from the police violence which set off this unprecedented wave nationwide protests in the first place, and onto Mayor Lightfoot and State's Attorney Foxx for supposedly "letting suspects cycle through the system without consequences."

Currently, a gaggle of downtown business groups, Chicago's corporate media, with the Tribune editors and Crain's Greg Hinz leading the way have joined Cantazara in attacking the city's Black leadership and even threatening elected officials, who he claims have "lost control" of the city. He's ordering them to "do their job" and restore law and order, or else...

Who are these guys?

Hinz expects Lightfoot and Foxx to keep the city's downtown safe for investment, suburbanite shopping, and tourism.

This has to stop. Now. Downtown is the economic hub of the Midwest, with 600,000 jobs, including mine. It’s home to a quarter of a million people. And we are tired of having our neighborhood trashed because our mayor and our state’s attorney can’t seem to control things.

Note the emphasis on "our neighborhood". The people on the south and west sides are tired of life on the bottom as well. But "control" is an illusion under the current conditions. Police or even Trump's federal troops only play their role after the fact and have been the purveyors of violence rather than protectors. Take Portland as an example.

It's also worth remembering that the Mayor and State's Attorney don't just work for your patrons, Mr. Hinz. They're elected officials who ran and won in opposition to your machine candidates.

 Remember, Mayor Lightfoot defeated your law-and-order guy Bill Daley who threatened to put camera-equipped drones on every street corner in Chicago. It was Daley who you proclaimed was, "the best guy for business." Obviously, Chicago communities didn't agree.

Kim Foxx is doing just what she was elected to do. She prosecuting violent crime while reforming the racist mass incarceration policies which have been plaguing Chicago Black and Latino families and communities for decades. To think that looters are looting because of her lowered bail policy is preposterous.

I'm especially glad to see that Foxx and Lightfoot are working it out after their initial falling out following Monday's looting. We need that unity.

According to Politico:

By afternoon, Lightfoot and Foxx were on the phone. During the conversation, they agreed to work together to come up with solutions for moving forward to avoid another night of destruction. It was “a very productive call,” Lightfoot said in a statement.

“They both have to navigate this really complex terrain — with intense scrutiny from every direction — and find a way to get the unrest and violence under control while still executing on the reform agendas they ran on,” Joanna Klonsky, a comms consultant with close ties to both women, told Playbook.

Remember, the Miracle Mile was built by the city's working people who now can't afford to shop in those stores. People will find a way.

Are you now or have you ever been...?

With his usual disingenuous I'm-just-saying innuendo, Russo launches a get-to-the-bottom-of-this investigation ("AKA's too powerful in CPS?") of a black sorority with lots of Chicago educators and administrators among its members. Funny, I still remember when Chicago was forced by a deseg consent decree (still in effect) to first hire black/Latino principals.

Russo rallies his readers to name names and tell stories out of school. Several do it gladly, regaling us with tales of a sorority "sistah" being promoted in the bureacracy's ranks, over someone more deserving.

But as Russo well knows, the real power in CPS, doesn't reside in any black or Latino frats or sororities. Not on Daley's plantation, that is. Remember, Huberman was picked over logical choice and sorority member, Barbara Eason Watkins, to run the mayor's schools. Before Huberman, there was Duncan and before Duncan, Vallas. This in a district where 93% of students are children of color. Thousands of black teachers have lost their jobs and dozens of schools in the black community have been closed under Daley's Renaissance 2010.

Maybe it's the Chicago Civic Committee (CCC not AKA) that Russo should be investigating. Does he even have a clue about why black sororities and frats were created in the first place?

Racing to the bottom

California's already ravaged school districts are ineligible for federal Race to the Top dollars, reports Edweek's Michele McNeil. So are states like New York and Wisconsin. The reason? They all have laws barring the use of standardized test scores to determine individual teacher salaries, in violation of RTT guidlines.

******

Fernando Camberos often comments here on SmallTalk. Check out his compelling piece, "Expected to Fail: Making the Familiar Strange," on the Demockracy blog. I'm adding it to my course syllabus for the fall.

CHICAGOANS, SAVE THE DATE

Diversity & Desegregation

THE HISTORY OF CHICAGO MAGNET
SCHOOLS & THE PENDING THREAT OF RE-SEGREGATION

Tuesday, September 23rd

6 - 8 P.M.
1335 N. CALIFORNIA AVENUE
CASA CENTRAL

Valerie Johnson -- Professor, Political Science DePaul University
Ricardo Meza -- MALDEF Regional Counsel
Roberto Maldonado -- Cook County Commissioner & Event Moderator

On November 10, 2008, federal Judge Kocoras will consider releasing the Chicago Public School (CPS) system from its consent decree to desegregate. Such a determination effectively would abolish existing racial diversity goals in all Chicago magnet schools. Join us to learn the history of desegregation in the CPS system and how racial diversity in magnet schools may be
preserved.

This event is free and open to the public.
Reservations are preferred but not required.
KeepMagnetsDiverse@yahoo.com or call
Veronica at (773) 569-6169

Sponsored by: Drummond Families Together; Cook County Commissioner RobertoMaldonado; American Friends Service Committee; DePaul University College of Law Diversity Committee; Parents United for Responsible Education (PURE); Collaborative for Equity and Justice in Education; Center for Anti-Oppressive Education; UIC Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy; Chicago FreedomSchool; Small Schools Workshop; The Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles

Chicago follies

"It's a good (I mean) bad thing..."

Chicago high school admissions/clout scandal has federal Civil Rights implications. Selective enrollment magnet schools were set up to enforce deseg consent decree. Arne Duncan tried like hell to get out from under it.

Federal subpoenas have now been issued. Duncan/Daley are still playing dumb. Russo thinks it's "slowly heading Duncan's way." Duncan tells his media people: stonewall it.

Duncan is still leveraging $100 billion in stim money to push the Chicago model. Oy!

Mather H.S. principal says he felt pressure "from parents and politicians." But which politicians? He doesn't say.

Daley's hand-picked board prez, Michael Scott swears, "I've never called about a student.'' Translation: he called.

Daley first says, "it's a good thing" that clout heavies are trying to back-door their kids into elite schools. He even thanks God for sending them. But after talking to his law dept., he says, "it's a bad thing."

NPR:

Federal investigators are among those looking into the city's elite public schools. The investigation suggests there is more to the admissions process than just the lottery that several thousand students enter each year. There are allegations parents use their clout to get their kids into certain schools. (Listen to the NPR story here).

Poor Huberman. He inherits Duncan's mess:

"We are carefully reviewing the existing selective enrollment policies and guidelines, and we will be implementing additional controls in the near future," Huberman said in the news release. (Trib)

Despite all this...I wish Duncan good luck

I like Arne Duncan personally and appreciate the fact that he has been trying to lead a large, under-resourced urban school system out of its doldrums for the past seven years. I don’t doubt his commitment to kids and their families. While I would have preferred an educator/reformer like Linda Darling-Hammond, Duncan will make a good Secretary of Education, especially compared with what we've had for the past eight years.

But despite all the understandable hype Duncan is getting ("he personally raised test scores by 40 percent"), any of us who have been around the schools these past few decades know that there’s been some positives and lots of setbacks. Neither are owned exclusively by Duncan.

Mayor Daley runs this school system and Chicago school reform basically moves in tune with the political interests of the Daley machine and the Civic Committee. Those interests include neighborhood gentrification and the privatization and selling-off of public space. State funding is inadequate and discriminatory and hits hardest at districts like Chicago, which is 93 percent black and Latino.

Walk into any of the neighborhood high schools on the city’s south or west side today, which still look and run like 20th-century factories, and you will find basically the same deteriorating conditions, under-staffing and revolving-door leadership you would have seen 20 years ago. While there’s been some great new schools created for the city’s middle and professional class, and lots of good small and charter schools for those who can get in, they have also deepened the divide within this two-tier system and failed to significantly close the so-called “achievement gap,” which is in fact a resource and equity gap.

So despite all the things NOT mentioned in yesterday's hype, despite Chicago’s 52% graduation rate (up a few points since Duncan took over, but still 17th from the bottom among large cities), and despite the data showing that only 6.5% of CPS freshman go on to earn a college degree by the time they are in their mid-20s, and despite four straight years of declining high school test scores, and despite the administration's buy-in to NCLB’s testing madness, and despite the disaster that is Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 school-closing, teacher firing campaign, and despite the epidemic of youth violence and deaths, fueled at least in part by Ren10, and despite the nearly 10,000 kids arrested each year out of their CPS classrooms, and despite CPS’ ongoing efforts to kill the deseg consent decree; despite efforts to weaken or abolish the Local School Councils, despite all this and much, much more, I still wish Arne Duncan all the success in the world in his new job.

I hope he and the whole Obama education team can do what the Bush team couldn’t—lead the way in transforming urban public schools, supporting teachers with adequate resources, and in rebuilding school communities devastated by the current crisis.