Friday, December 29, 2017

Year-end report shows CPS now top district (ever) in the U.S. and the world.


End-of-year tabulations are in from Chicago Public Schools. CPS reports that in 2017, 120% of entering freshmen graduated on time with every CPS grad being accepted at either Harvard or Yale on full scholarship.

To add icing on the cake, Stanford's Institute for the Study of Instant Success (ISIS) reports that Chicago's standardized test scores are now, 'the highest in the nation', even topping wealthy, white suburban high schools and totally eliminating the historic achievement gap between white students and students of color. All this, despite CPS remaining a racially segregated district with 90% of its students living in poverty, proving that “demography isn’t destiny “.

ISIS researchers attributed the miraculous gains to "early intervention". According to one ISIS team member, CPS leaders were able to identify entering kindergarten students who were coming to school "un-ready to learn" and encourage their families to relocate in the inner-ring southern suburbs or in Gary, Indiana.

Interventions also included the hiring of consultants who were well known to previous CEOs Forrest Claypool and Barbara Byrd-Bennett. 

Each deserves their share of credit for the district's turnaround, according to Mayor Rahm Emanuel, and for what's being called the new "Chicago Miracle" (as distinguished from Arne Duncan's Renaissance 2010 miracle and all miracles under previous administrations).

Saturday, December 23, 2017

Happy (dare I say it) holidays!


Escaping the Chicago winter for a few days in the Florida sun. I haven't had the time to do much blogging. Been too busy getting sand in my toes and worrying about finding a restaurant in Sarasota that's open on Christmas day. I think that's called a First World problem. Still tweeting though @mikeklonsky

Speaking of...Thanks to Pres. Trump for ending the war on Christmas and making it safe for us to say the C-word again and to sing White Christmas aloud again without fear of repression from the politically-correct, multi-cultural, "happy holidays" crowd. Next, DT should pardon all the C-sayers currently rotting away in America's prisons. #MAGA

I found myself nervous and fidgety yesterday with no Hitting Left show to do. Lumpen Radio is down for the holidays and doing re-runs. But Brother Fred tells me that we still had record podcast downloads of last week's show. You can listen to any and all of our 44 previous shows on iTunes or http://hittingleft.libsyn.com/ 

We'll be back on air at the usual time next Friday, the 29th, with in-studio guest, Chicago DSA activist Kenzo Shibata. Democratic Socialists of America, which claims a membership of more than 30,000, has experienced rapid growth on the heels of the Sanders campaign and Trump's election. For those unfamiliar with the organization, there's this recent, positive piece in The Nation.

One of the subjects I want to broach with Kenzo is DSA's electoral strategy which I've been critical of since they failed to support Democrat Doug Jones in the AL senate race against Roy Moore.

Tune in to www.lumpenradio.com Friday at 11 a.m. CT.

Happy holidays!!!

Wednesday, December 20, 2017

A 'menu of disinvestment' leads to mass exodus of black students from Chicago schools.

The artist Jacob Lawrence depicted the Great Migration in 1941.
“It’s a menu of disinvestment,” says Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who teaches African-American history at the University of Illinois Chicago.
Kalyn Belsha's excellent piece (Thousands of black students leave Chicago for other segregated districts), in the Chicago Reporter helps explain so much about the dramatic demographic shifts taking place in American cities. The whitening of the cities, and of Chicago in particular, isn't happenstance. Rather, it's the result of conscious planning and implementing a set of policies initiated by Mayor Rahm Emanuel which include disinvestment, the closing of schools and elimination of basic social services in already devastated black communities.

The result in Chicago has been a mass exodus or reverse migration by thousands African-American families. That exodus is larger than in any other metropolitan area in the country. It's cleared the way for gentrification on a mass scale and a weakening of black community political power, historically a key oppositional base for resistance to both Republican and Democratic machine politics.

Belsha writes:
Chicago was once a major destination for African-Americans during the Great Migration, but experts say today the city is pushing out poor black families. In less than two decades, Chicago lost one-quarter of its black population, or more than 250,000 people.
In the past decade, Chicago’s public schools lost more than 52,000 black students. Now, the school district, which was majority black for half a century, is on pace to become majority Latino. Black neighborhoods like Austin have experienced some of the steepest student declines and most of the school closures and budget cuts.
A common refrain is that Chicago’s black families are “reverse migrating” to Southern cities with greater opportunities, like Atlanta and Dallas. But many of the families fleeing the poorest pockets of Chicago venture no farther than the south suburbs or northwest Indiana. And their children end up in cash-strapped segregated schools like the ones they left behind, a Chicago Reporter investigation found.
The loss of so many thousands of students living in poverty may also explain the sudden, "miraculous" bump in test scores and graduation rates at CPS, now being lauded by the mayor. This, in a school system marked by instability, where there's been no corresponding input of resources or classroom/teacher supports. Neither has there been marked improvement in the lives of most CPS students outside of school that would account for such a bump.

We can only conclude that this addition by subtraction has to do with changing the students rather than with the mayor's "reforms".

On the other hand, as African-American families leave Chicago, the percentage of poor black students in the suburbs has grown dramatically, straining already cash-strapped school districts.
High-poverty districts in northwest Indiana that took in many CPS transfers have also seen their budgets slashed in recent years after lawmakers rejiggered the state’s school funding formula and also spent more on charter schools and private-school vouchers. 
“It’s a menu of disinvestment,” says Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who teaches African-American history at the University of Illinois Chicago. “The message that public policy sends to black families in the city is that we’re not going to take care of you and if you just keep going away, that’s OK.”

Sunday, December 17, 2017

One of the great misuses of the word 'Trust' ever.

Rahm flew Randi out to build union support for the Trust
"We've debated this long enough. I'm not in the position of analysis. I'm in the position of getting things done." -- Rahm to the City Council in 2012 
Back in 2012, Rahm Emanuel's proposed Infrastructure Trust got him him great press, especially with flack David Axelrod pumping it like it was the second coming of the Marshall Plan. The New York Times hailed it as the $7 billion plan that would "transform the city’s infrastructure from the skies above to the pipes underground".

This at a time when the mayor was closing half of the city's mental health clinics and school system was reportedly on the brink of collapse.

Rahm even flew in AFT Pres. Randi Weingarten to laud the Trust at Bill Clinton's Global Initiative Conference, even while the CTU was taking its strike authorization vote. Teachers were angry as hell after Rahm reneged on the 4% raise promised them the year before and the last thing on their minds was new grand privatization plan from the mayor.

I wrote at the time that this was one of the great misuses of the word trust ever.  I and others pointed out that rather than creating jobs or saving schools, the Trust would more likely line the pockets of a handful of Rahm's billionaire patrons and give the mayor an unregulated slush fund to use for his own political advantage. No city program had ever been rushed through the City Council without careful review since the great parking meter heist during the Daley administration. As it turns out, the Trust did nothing and all Rahm's big "investors" were all show and no go.

Why the question mark?
Fast forward to read today's headlineRahm’s trust a bust? Fails to raise a dime but has cost taxpayers $5M

S-T Watchdog Tim Novack writes:
But the infrastructure trust has fallen short of the expectations the mayor laid out. It has yet to raise a dime in private financing for a single public works project, records show. At the same time, it has cost Chicago taxpayers more than $5.1 million to pay for its handful of employees, offices on Wacker Drive, consulting fees and other expenses.
A top city official, who spoke only on the condition of anonymity, wonders why the mayor hasn’t shut down the trust.
“There’s no excuse for the mayor to avoid closing down this thing that’s been a complete failure,” the official said. “They’ve done nothing that can’t be done by [the Department of Fleet and Facilities Management] or the Public Building Commission.”
The agency’s five-member staff is overseen by a seven-member board headed by Emanuel’s appointed city treasurer, Kurt Summers. The board includes Ald. Matt O’Shea (19th), four business leaders and Jorge Ramirez, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor, which is an investor in the Chicago Sun-Times. There’s also a four-member advisory board that includes Ald. Michael Scott Jr. (24th).
 If this all sounds to you a lot like the mayor's current scheme to entice Jeff Bezos into moving his Amazon's HQ2 here with the promise of 50,000 new jobs, you're on to something. You get it.

Wednesday, December 13, 2017

...and the horse he rode in on.

Best headline: Alabama Voters to Roy Moore: F*ck You and the Horse You Rode in On
The real horse that he rode in on, of course, was the broke-back nag of racism, misogyny, religious zealotry, and confederate revivalism.

Listening to the Republican talking heads on cable news this morning whitesplaining Doug Jones' amazing win in AL, you get the feeling that the revolt by black, women and young voters had nothing to do with it. They're mostly bemoaning the coming Democrat "tsunami" in 2018 and finger-pointing at Steve Bannon, as if the so-called "mainstream" GOP didn't rally behind white supremacist, child molester Roy Moore. 

Their claim is that Moore was just a poor candidate and that Bannon somehow "dragged the president into a losing race” (Actually quoting the Guardian here). Trump hilariously plays along with this assessment, claiming that he wasn't really backing Moore after all and that he knew all along that Jones would win.
Maybe that was a typo and DT meant his dick was stacked against him.

But from my perspective, there was so much more to this race than individuals Bannon, Trump, or Moore vs. Jones. This was mainly a major body blow against the white supremacy and the resurgent racist and neo-fascist confederacy that Moore, Trump and Bannon embody and that have been a hallmark of the first year of Trump's administration.

I'd be careful not to overstate this. Alabama is still Alabama and still comfortably a red state steeped in segregation and Jim Crow. That didn't change yesterday and Democrats still have their work cut out for them in busting up the "solid South".

Campaign mastermind Joe Trippi, will get a lot of credit for Jones' win (as he should) as will the DNC leadership who came late, but came, with money and support for black voter turnout. The Sanders left and groups like MoveOn  were visible  in their support. But it was mainly black civil rights organizations like NAACP and black student groups that did the ground work getting people to the polls despite all the Republican-made restrictions on voting aimed specifically at black voters.

Showing off their white blindspot were some local DSAers who refused to back Jones because he wasn't socialist enough. 

It's one thing to dis the current Dem leadership, which needs to be replaced. It's another to show up on the battlefield.

Monday, December 11, 2017

WEEKEND QUOTABLES


CTU V.P. Jesse Sharkey on Claypool
“His own arrogance did him in...Because, in his mind, there was no such thing as unethical as long as it applied to him.” -- Sun-Times
Ald. Sue Sadlowski-Garza on hearing news of Claypool resignation
“I shouted out the F-bomb when the mayor’s office called me, like ‘F yeah!’ ” said 10th Ward Ald. Susan Sadlowski Garza, a CTU member and a school counselor of 22 years. -- Chicago Tribune 
Ben Joravsky 
 With the Cortland TIF, it seems as if Christmas has come early for Amazon. It's Rahm's way of saying "I love you, Jeff Bezos." Of course, the mayor's generosity would be backed by money that could otherwise go to dead-broke public schools. -- Reader
Barack Obama on rising fascist threat
The danger is "grow(ing) complacent," Obama said. "We have to tend to this garden of democracy or else things could fall apart quickly." --  Q&A session before the Economic Club of Chicago
Paul Ryan
Providing free lunch to hungry school children gives them a "full stomach and an empty soul".  -- Time
Roy Moore 
Getting rid of amendments after 10th would "eliminate many problems." -- CNN


Monday, December 4, 2017

Are schools really 'too small' to succeed?

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

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

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

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

SHRINKING HIGH SCHOOLS TOO SMALL TO SUCCEED?

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

According to the Trib:
In Chicago, where funding follows students, Tilden is one of more than a dozen shrinking neighborhood high schools that has been starved of resources, leaving students like Averett to prepare for their futures in largely empty buildings that can make dreaming big a daily struggle.
 Nearly all of these 17 high schools are deeply segregated, serving impoverished African-American and Latino students who already struggle to attend and graduate from college at comparable rates to their white or Asian peers. Yet many of these schools cannot offer what are considered basic classes elsewhere, including the bare trio of science courses that will soon be part of a new district graduation requirement.
Now, as many of these schools continue to shrink and Chicago approaches the end of a five-year school closing moratorium, civic and community leaders must weigh whether some of these buildings are too small to succeed.
The writers place the onus on the schools for being "too small to succeed" as if someone consciously chose 250 as the optimal capacity size for these high schools. Like this just happened and without even an attempt to question what "success" means under current conditions. It's as if surrounding these schools with privately-run, better-resourced charters and selective-enrollment schools had nothing to do with their decreasing populations.

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

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

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

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

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Fred Klonsky

Fred Hampton 
(August 30, 1948 – December 4, 1969) 
I'm not going to die slipping on no ice.
Sen. Orin Hatch after GOP killed Children’s Health Insurance Program
"I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves – won’t lift a finger – and expect the federal government to do everything.” -- Mic 
Sen. Bernie Sanders
 “This is class warfare, and we’re going to stand up and fight.” -- Washington Post
Steve Askin on Harold Washington
"Harold was a mensch. He reached into many different directions, listening to many different voices, many different people." -- The Reader
 Harper Local School Council Co-Chair Clifford Fields
"If these schools have to go, the mayor has to go." -- ABC7 News 

Prexy Nesbit, striking Columbia College part-time faculty
Students are having their best teachers laid off or having to live out of their cars because of low salaries. It's really sad. I also think about what it would mean to the founders of this great college to see where the current leadership has taken it. -- Hitting Left

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Why I can't vote for Pritzker

Gassing the water protectors
“JB personally and through his businesses and trusts has both active and passive investments in many different economic sectors,” Pritzker spokeswoman Galia Slayen said. “If elected, JB is committed to putting in place best practices to ensure that no conflicts ever exist.”
It's not just that he's another white male billionaire. No, I've more or less made peace with that, given the record high cost of running for governor and that there are no women or people of color in the race with a realistic chance of defeating Public Enemy #1,Gov. Bruce Rauner.

And it's not just that J.B. Pritzker, a partner in the union-busting Hyatt Hotel chain, is another mainstream Democrat who is bound to sell out the very unions that have rallied behind him. After the pension-theft debacle with Gov. Quinn, I've almost gotten used to that.

Company thugs set dogs on DAPL protesters.
I guess the killer for me was when I read the Sun-Times this morning and learned that Pritzker, like Donald Trump, is a big investor in Energy Transfer Partners LP, the pipeline operator that constructed and is a part owner of the Dakota Access Pipeline. That's the notorious pipeline which carries oil underground, through Native American sacred burial grounds, from North Dakota all the way to an oil tank farm near Patoka, Illinois.Yes, the very same company that turned hired thugs and vicious dogs on the water protectors at Standing Rock.

Yes, I know that candidate Chris Kennedy, who has tried to rebrand himself as a leftist, is also a global capitalist with major investments in oil and defense companies. He even stands to profit from his holdings in Amazon, the corporation that Rauner and Rahm Emanuel are trying to lure, with huge tax breaks, to Chicago.

At Standing Rock with Chicago students.
I have disliked Kennedy ever since he used his position as head of the Univ. of IL Board of Trustees to tarnish or destroy the careers of educators like Bill Ayers and Steven Salaita because of their political views.

But Standing Rock is where I draw the line. I went to Standing Rock twice last year, once with a dozen Chicago neighborhood high school students, to join the protests. The time spent there left an indelible mark on me and on those students. For over a year an international movement has called on cities, universities and other investors to divest--to get rid of their holdings connected to the Energy Transfer Partners and to the Dakota Access Pipeline.  So the fact that J.B. Pritzker fattens up his investment portfolio with pipeline blood money makes it impossible for me to vote for him, much less support him.

I'm hoping against hope that Dan Biss can pull an upset in the primary and go on to defeat Rauner.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

Luis steps down. I'm good with it. Stirs the political pot in Chicago.


Normally, I would take the news that a progressive Democrat was leaving congress, as a bad thing. But I didn't take Cong. Luis Gutiérrez' announcement that way. On the contrary, I think his announcement yesterday that he won't run again in 2018 and his endorsement of Chuy Garcia in the primary, is good news.

For one thing, Gutiérrez will be easily replaced by another Democrat as part of the anti-Trump wave in 2018. For another, the announcement disrupts the current political inertia on the part of progressives in a good way. Already, potential candidates, including Garcia, Ald. Carlos Rosa, Ald. Joe Moreno and others, are mobilizing their supporters to go out, knock on doors, gather signatures and speak to the issues that Gutiérrez championed. These include: Trump's impeachment, immigration rights (including several arrests for acts of civil disobedience); defense of the Dream Act and support for DACA students, Puerto Rico's post-hurricane rebuilding, maintaining Chicago as a sanctuary city and many others.

I also think Gutiérrez can be much more effective in the years to come, working on these issues outside of congress. Twenty-four years should be enough for anyone.

While some on the left are bemoaning the idea of a primary race among progressives, I think it will generate a lot of excitement and should improve voter turnout and increase votes for progressive candidates up and down the ballot. Dan Biss and Fritz Kaegi, among others, should be smiling this morning.

I was also impressed that Luis and Chuy, who were close allies back in the Harold Washington days, were able to come together and set aside recent differences. Remember, Gutiérrez supported Rahm Emanuel over Garcia in the last mayor's race. I assume that Rahm's sticking to his support for Sanctuary Cities is part of the return on the deal. Luis' endorsement of Chuy should also help rebuild bridges between the city's Mexican and Puerto Rican communities.

More possibilities open up, including Progressive Caucus Ald. Rick Munoz replacing Chuy on the County Board and some younger progressive (I hope) replacing Rick in the 22nd Ward and on the City Council.

Some pundits, like Politico's Natasha Korecki, claim that this is part of a deal brokered by Rahm, to pull Chuy out of the next mayor's race, thereby "clearing the path" towards Rahm's re-election. But that doesn't seem plausible to me. First of all, I don't believe Chuy would have been part of such a deal with Rahm. Second, I'm not convinced Chuy had any serious intention to run again for mayor. Third, I'm not sure that Chuy, despite having, against all odds, forced the mayor into a runoff last time around, had much chance of defeating him this time. Having said this, I still don't agree that the mayor can't be beaten in 2019 by any one of a number of other candidates. Certainly no "clear path" as Korecki claims.

Rahm is still running scared this morning.

Brother Fred and I will be discussing these issues and more with Friday's guest on Hitting Left, veteran Chicago media and political consultant Delmarie Cobb. Tune in Friday at 11 a.m. CT on www.lumpenradio.com or download the podcast  at iTunes.

Monday, November 27, 2017

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Remembering Harold Washington, Chicago's first black mayor who died 30 years ago. 

Conrad Worrill
“It’s hurtful because that was a time when black people had come together in unity around a common purpose...And the personality of Harold Washington and his ability to communicate the desires of not only his own community, but the city as a whole, is the reason why his untimely death impacted the spirit of the black community.” -- Sun-Times columnist Mary Mitchell 
Rachel Weber, professor of Urban Planning at UIC
“Let’s hope, though, that CPS has some more creative ideas for how to deal with this problem than just radical surgery.” -- Will Chicago close another 50 schools? (WBEZ).
10-year-old Ronyde Christina Ponthieux
“We are not criminals. Like my parents, like your parents, like you, they are hardworking honest people who just want a safe place to raise their families.” -- Daily News
Charles Barkley, an Alabamian 
 “Roy Moore is running with Steve Bannon as his righthand man who is a white separatist. I’m not even going to get into the women stuff. But the guy, how can you be a white separatist and represent all the constituents in your state?" -- Guardian
 Democratic political strategist Phil Singer
But overall it's a weak [Democratic] field, “You have a bunch of Celine Dions but there’s no Beatles." -- Yahoo News

Friday, November 24, 2017

THANKS

We're taking the day off to recover from last night's turkey fest. But if you missed last week's show with in-studio guest Fritz Kaegi, it's re-running this morning at 11 a.m. CT on WLPN FM 105.5 in Chicago, streaming wherever you are at www.lumpenradio.com.  We will return to the airwaves next Friday, Dec. 1st, same time, same station.

Local holiday thanks go out to...
State's Attorney Kim Foxx whose first year uin office ended on a high note, including the release of two black men serving life sentences for a 1994 rape and murder, set free based on DNA evidence that links the crime to another suspect. In other words, Nevest Coleman and Derrell Fulton, doing life life in prison, were obviously framed for the 1994 murder of Antwinica Bridgeman and served 23 years when a fresh round of DNA testing this spring showed semen stains on Bridgeman's clothing matched a serial rapist.

Foxx should credited with the release of Jose Maysonet, and Arthur Brown, who have served 29 years after being falsely convicted and the exoneration of 15 men, en masse, who had 18 convictions between them - all tainted by crooked cop Ronald Watts and his officers who terrorized residents of the Ida B. Wells public housing complex for years before they were caught by federal agents.

Thanks also to Alds. Scott Waguespack (32nd), Carlos Ramirez-Rosa (35th), and John Arena (45th) the only three aldermen who had spine enough to stand up to "Mayor 1%", Rahm Emanuel and vote no on his budget.
Ald. Ramirez-Rosa: "It is time we demand that the rich and wealthy elite of this city pay their fair share. We can and should reinstate the corporate head tax, enact substantive TIF reform, implement a commercial lease tax, and create a municipal bank."
Ald. Waguespack: And yet, again through this year's budget, the Emanuel administration adds to the load of regressive fines, fees and taxes that working families must bear. We cannot in good conscience vote to advance this irresponsible approach." .
And thanks in advance to groper/assaulter, Al Franken, for voluntarily stepping aside and allowing MN Gov. Mark Dayton to replace you with another Democrat, hopefully a woman or even a real progressive like Keith Ellison. Yes thank you for saving the party from humiliating defeats in 2018 and allowing fellow Dems to speak out on women's issues in Congress without being rightfully  ridiculed. 

In case you need more reasons, consider recent polls and let me remind you of the fact that you used your super-delegate vote at the 2016 convention in Philly to override the votes and voices of Minnesotans who wanted Bernie Sanders as their candidate. 

Thanks and don't let the door hit you on the way out. 





Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Broad and loud opposition to DeVos' voucher plans


Trump's Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos is determined to use the Dept. of Education's federal grant program as a weapon against public education. DeVos' stated number-one priority for the program is to “maximize” “educational choice". This means taking billions of dollars away from public school classrooms to promote school vouchers and privately run charters.

States that adopt her program, will be heavily rewarded, while those that don't will be punished. I should note that Obama's former Ed Secs, Arne Duncan and John King also used their $5B grant program to push charters and punish states that wouldn't adopt their failed "Race to the Top" program which included massive school closings and teacher firings. But DeVos' plan is Duncan squared with vouchers and "scholarships" for private schools put at the top of the list.

DeVos' Proposed Supplemental Priorities and Definitions for Discretionary Grant Programs has been met with loud opposition from a coalition of 50 school, community and civil rights organizations. The National Coalition for Public Education which includes both national teachers' unions, AASA: The School Superintendents Association, the National PTA, disability rights groups, the NAACP, and others is dead set against DeVos's priorities.

Their statement reads in part:
The Department should not reward states for adopting voucher programs that do not serve all students, fail to improve academic achievement, undermine public education funding, harm religious freedom and lack critical accountability for taxpayers. Instead, the Department of Education’s first priority should be funding, supporting, and strengthening our public schools, where 90% of our students attend.
It's a strong statement on vouchers, but unfortunately makes no mention of privately-run charter schools, the second leg of the destructive, right-wing Trump/DeVos "choice" initiative. While some groups within the coalition, like the NAACP, have been highly critical of charters, others haven't. So I'm assuming that the anti-voucher statement was the best possible without splitting the group.

In any regard, I doubt that DeVos (if she remains in power) will pay much attention to the statement unless it is backed up with protests in the streets and at schools.

Side note on charters...

Charter school operators who stand to gain from Trump/DeVos initiatives as well as from the biggest private foundations, have put their stamp of approval on DeVos' "choice" priorities. However, they do have one small criticism. They want the word "quality" put in front of "charter schools".

Quality is NACSA code language to signify that only the largest and richest charter school chains get the grants and that small, teacher-run, unionized, or "mom & pops" charters are eliminated.

Monday, November 20, 2017

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Harold died 30 years ago. 
To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men. -- Ella Wheeler Wilcox ("Protest" 1914 poem)

 Forrest Claypool (Doing his best Jeff Sessions)
“However differently I recalled my past conversation, the documents you shared with me this week make it clear I did do that." -- Sun-Times
Diane McWhorter, author of Carry Me Home: Birmingham, Alabama, the Climactic Battle of the Civil Rights Revolution
...noted the city’s history as the industrial centre of the south and the related rise of trade unionism. “What made Alabama different from other deep south states is that it did have this pesky progressive tradition."
For the state to have gone through so much agony and now be in this position is “deeply heartbreaking”, McWhorter added, describing Alabama as something of a bellwether for the nation. “Looking back at George Wallace, we thought he was a fading and terrible relic, but he’s now in the White House, effectively. After Trump, we’re all Alabamans now.” -- The Guardian
Rev. Dr. William Barber
This is not Christianity. Rather, it is an extreme Republican religionism that stands by party and regressive policy no matter what. It's not the gospel of Christ, but a gospel of greed. It is the religion of racism and lies, not the religion of redemption and love. -- NBC News 
Fritz Kaegi
Fritz Kaegi
Within Chicago, we have a lot of cynicism ("Oh, this is just the way the system is and that's the way it's always been") but people in the rest of the country who see what we see, they see an anomaly. They see a problem. They can't quite believe it's like this. And it's become a national story. -- Hitting Left
Joshua Tepfer, attorney for victims of Chicago police corruption
“This group of police officers led by Sgt. Watts had been doing this for 10 years; corruption on this scale is unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s truly astounding. This represents great hope for the future of our county.” -- Sneed
 David Figlio, economist at Northwestern University
"I think the best evidence from the best recent research ... if anything, it looks like that maybe kids going to private school on voucher programs might do worse in reading and math than they do in public [schools]," -- Edweek


Tuesday, November 14, 2017

Fact-checking the checkers on miraculous CPS test score bump

Stanford researcher Sean Reardon conflated test scores with learning. 
I don't trust meteoric rises in student test scores or graduation rates. I didn't buy George Bush'"Texas Miracle" or Arne Duncan's "Chicago Miracle". I don't want to bust anyone's bubble, but there is no "magic sauce" leading to such miraculous gains. If there was, everyone would be eating it.

Neither do I accept the idea that student learning can be accurately or usefully measured by high-stakes standardized testing. More on that later.

Chicago's Better Government Association (BGA) just fact-checked the claim that “CPS students are learning and growing faster than 96% of students in the United States.” I'm glad somebody checked. But unfortunately the BGA got it only partly right and ended up joining CPS in conflating test score gains with learning.

Thank you,BGA, for pointing out that CPS leaders were cherry-picking the results of a recent Stanford study  reporting miraculous test score gains. Unfortunately, they confined their fact-checking to the study's own limited, narrow use of test data and therefore missed the forest (no Claypool pun intended) for the trees.

BGA fact checkers missed the forest for the trees.
The Stanford study shows CPS students making the fastest academic progress of the 100 largest school districts in the country. But even the researchers aren't quite sure how or why that happened or what to make of it all. For one thing, the gains are uneven across the grades. For another, they are percentage gains, and use a metric that can be interpreted in many ways.

Let me use a baseball analogy to explain. A batter strikes out his first 8 times at bat. Then he gets two hits, thereby raising his pitiful batting average from zero to .200, a 200-point increase in just one game. It's the fastest rise of any of his teammates. But at the end of the day, he's still a weak .200 hitter and will likely soon be sent down to the minors to work on his batting stroke.

In other words, rapid percentage increases often mean that the counting began and ended in a very low place. That's the most credible interpretation of the Stanford/CPS study.

According to the BGA:
CPS’ fast-paced gains were assessed in a report prepared recently by Sean Reardon, a professor of education inequality at Stanford’s Center for Education Policy Analysis.
By comparing Chicago Public Schools students’ scores on standardized tests to those of students nationally, Reardon found that the scores of CPS students in grades three through eight improved more from 2009-14 than did the average scores of all U.S. students during that time.
But, asks the BGA,
Improvement aside, how does CPS’ overall academic performance stack up against the rest of the country? Here, the picture was not as rosy. Third- through eighth-graders in the nation’s third-largest district still perform at roughly one half to one-and-a-half grade levels below the national average, which the report describes as a “significant concern.” 
In short, CPS test scores started low, may have improved rapidly, but remain subpar. District leaders, however, were jubilant about the report, even though earlier in the week, the state released scores from the PARCC test it has administered for the past few years, showing that barely more than one in four CPS elementary students can read, write and do math at grade level. CPS officials have refused many requests to discuss those scores.

But I will.

By looking only at standardized test scores, Reardon's study is limited in the insights it can offer as to  whether or not real progress is taking place at CPS. Dramatic increases or sudden drops in test scores could be the result of many things, completely unrelated to any change in district policies or anything new going on in the classroom. For example, they could be driven by a dangerous overemphasis on test prep or a dramatic loss of student population.

Reardon's team never set foot in a CPS classroom.

CPS' student population has decreased by nearly a hundred thousand as more than a quarter-million mostly-black Chicagoans left the city over the past few decades. Many of these children in the out-migration were likely among CPS' poorest and most academically challenged students. This alone could account for the increase in scores, since standardized test scores have been shown to more closely align with parent incomes that with any district policies or professional development strategies.

Stanford researcher Reardon doesn't believe this is the case since
"...the consistency across race as well as similar growth on a nationally administered no-stakes NAEP test convinced him that CPS’ growth was real and not from a demographic shift in students or from holding lots of kids back a grade."
It may have convinced him, but not me. Test score growth may be real. But what does it really show?

As for consistency across race, CPS remains 93% students of color going to mostly segregated schools. Even if test scores increase across race, the gap across race and class remains intact. Inequality is merely reproduced. Not exactly a recipe for increased learning or for educational equity. As for the similar gains in the more highly-regarded NAEP exam, they could also be connected to changes in demographics.

CPS Chief Education Officer Janice Jackson attributes the gains to staffers now "using data to guide instruction", and principals being "empowered to lead schools." You'd think she would have at least tossed a bone to the district's classroom teachers, especially those in special ed, who have been working overtime, with reduced staff and severe district program cuts.

Stovall & Radinsky
Even if the test-score gains are real, this doesn't mean that authentic student learning has improved. As UIC prof and CReATE researcher David Stovall put in on our Hitting Left show Friday,
"We're conflating test taking with learning and if you remove thousands of the poorest students who are are struggling, why wouldn't you have an increase (in CPS test scores)?
 HL guest Josh Radinsky, another CReATE researcher, called all the focus on test scores a "dangerous discourse." The danger being how you generate higher test scores in Chicago Public Schools by minimizing subject areas that aren't tested. There's also danger in the way these reported test score increases are used to justify bad school reform policy.

Says Radinsky:
We have been trying to get reading and math scores pumped up by artificially stimulating student performance on these bubble tests...Walk into any school in Chicago and ask, what are you doing in social studies right now. Social studies has been eviscerated by the focus on test scores. This is one example among many and we can talk about music and art. Teachers who love their kids and teach their hearts out every day are put into this straitjacket of test prep. 
I'm going to save my last point for a future post. But here it is in short. If in fact, dramatically rising test scores show that Rahm/Claypool/Jackson reform policies are working and that increased student learning has brought CPS to number-one in the race to the top, then why did the mayor support the recently-passed voucher bill to grease the exit of students from public to private schools?


Meanwhile in the burbs...While parents and students in mainly white, wealthy, high-scoring suburban districts decry the debilitating pressure resulting from high-stakes testing, CPS continues to mandate more and more testing along with more time spent on test prep.

The Tribune reports:
Parents are sending their kids to therapeutic day schools at hospitals that treat adolescent mental health issues. Teachers are changing their curriculum to factor in students' anxiety and stress. And kids are facing what they say is a constant, grinding strain throughout their academic careers. 
"There is a double-edged sword. We want kids to challenge themselves, but not at the expense of their mental well-being," said Emily Polacek, a social studies teacher at Hinsdale South High School in west suburban Darien.

Monday, November 13, 2017

WEEKEND QUOTABLES


UIC Prof. Josh Radinsky 
"We're getting the (CReATE) band back together... Vouchers or vouchers by any other name is just onc way of minimizing choices. They call it 'school choice' but it's actually forced choice and lack of choices." -- Hitting Left
UIC Prof. David Stovall
"We're conflating test taking with learning and if you remove thousands of the poorest students who are are struggling, why wouldn't you have an increase (in CPS test scores)? -- Hitting Left
Gloria Ladson-Billings, new president of the National Academy of Education
 "For kids, it's the 'so what' question, and we typically don't have good answers for them. Our answer typically is, 'You're going to need this next year,' and kids figure out by 4th or 5th grade that we're lying." -- EdWeek  
Judge Roy Moore tells Hannity
I don't remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother. -- Real Clear Politics
Alabama State Auditor Jim Ziegler
“Take Joseph and Mary. Mary was a teenager and Joseph was an adult carpenter. They became parents of Jesus.” -- ShareBlue Media 
Report...
 “Our wealthiest 400 now have more wealth combined than the bottom 64% of the US population, an estimated 80m households or 204 million people,” the report says. “That’s more people than the population of Canada and Mexico combined.” -- Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett are wealthier than poorest half of US
Letter: Say no to vouchers
Not only does it allow individuals to take money meant for public funding and put it in their private little piggy bank, but it will ultimately put a greater burden on the rest of us to come up with more money to fund our school system. -- Wayne Fuller, Concord Monitor 

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

A web of political intrigue involving the schools

Flynn (top left), Gulen, Prince & DeVos. 
Education is too important to be left solely to educators. -- Francis Keppel, U.S. Commissioner of Education (1962–1965)
One of the central themes running through this blog over the past 15 years has been the nexus between education and politics. It's been impossible to understand or make sense of schooling apart from the social and political environments in which it takes place. Trying to "take the politics out of education," as some have suggested to me, is like trying to teach in a dark room with the shades pulled down.

A web of intrigue... 

Two examples of this nexus appeared in the news recently. The first is the web of intrigue surrounding Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her brother Erik Prince, who is apparently considering a run for senator in Wyoming. DeVos was appointed to run the DOE and its budget, because education was too important a political piece to be left to educators, parents and community members.

Prince, the founder of the Blackwater mercenary group, will likely challenge John Barrasso, a senior member of the Senate Republican leadership. Prince has been urged to run next year by "alt-right" founder Steve Bannon, who is currently leading an attack on the Republican leadership with financial backing from the New York hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer and his daughter Rebekah Mercer.

Prince was an avid supporter of Trump. After the Republican convention, he contributed $250,000 to Trump’s campaign, the national party and a pro-Trump super-PAC led by GOP mega-donor Rebekah Mercer, in a likely deal to have his sister appointed as ed secretary.

Then we learned that the United Arab Emirates arranged a secret meeting in January between Prince and a Russian close to President Vladi­mir Putin, as part of an apparent effort to establish a back-channel line of communication between Moscow and President-elect Donald Trump.


***********

The second story of intrigue involves charter schools and disgraced Retired Army Lt. Gen. Mike Flynn. It seems that Flynn, Trump's first appointed national security advisor, who now admits working as as an agent for the fascist Erdogan regime in Turkey, was involved in a possible conspiracy. Its objective: to "extract" reclusive Turkish billionaire Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, one of the largest charter school operators in the U.S., from his fortified retreat in Pennsylvania, and to turn Gulen over to the regime in Turkey.

According to the Wall Street Journal
The discussion... involved ideas about how to get Fethullah Gulen, a cleric whom Turkey has accused of orchestrating last summer’s failed military coup, to Turkey without going through the U.S. extradition legal process, according to [former CIA director] Mr. Woolsey and those who were briefed.
Without getting into the internals of Turkish politics, it does seem strange that states and school districts would continue to grant charters to Gulen. Those include the Des Plaines-based Concept Schools network here in Illinois.

Look no further than the perks and junkets Gulen hands out to U.S. politicians. Gulen's Niagara Foundation hosted dozens of trips to Turkey for elected officials including Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and other Springfield lawmakers in recent years. Madigan also recorded a video testimonial for a Concept school.

Following the failed coup attempt in Turkey and the ensuing repression, things were bound to get more complicated,with hundreds of schools and thousands of students' futures hanging in the balance.

Now comes word that DeVos may resign, since her very presence brings the schools into the middle of all this.

If trying to make sense out of the Gulen-Prince-Bannon-charter school web of intrigue makes your head spin,welcome to the club. But one thing should be clear to all of us. There's more than one game being played out here, and the schools and school reform are a small part of a much larger agenda.

Monday, November 6, 2017

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Juanita Irizarry, director of Friends of the Park on Hitting Left. Listen to podcast n iTunes. 
Donna Brazile
“I want to talk about the arrogance and isolation of the Clinton campaign and the cult of Robby Mook, who felt fresh but turned up stale, in a campaign haunted by ghosts and lacking in enthusiasm, focus, and heart....Three titanic egos – Barack, Hillary, and Debbie – had stripped the party to a shell for their own purposes.” -- Hacks
Mark H. Haefele, Chief Investment Officer at UBS
“Investors have never felt less secure, even though we are eight years into a bull market." -- New York Times 
Bernie Sanders
 I can’t tell any one person what to do, but I will say this: despair is not an option. Now more than ever, we need you to fight back. -- Boston Review
Mehdi Hasan
We bomb them, they bomb us. They bomb us, we bomb them. Will it ever end? -- The Intercept 
Donald Trump
 According to the Japan Times, diplomatic sources confirm that with a Monday meeting with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe looming, our very lucid leader has set low expectations with complaints that “he could not understand why a country of samurai warriors did not shoot down the missiles.” -- Gizmodo

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Behind Randi Weingarten's secret meeting with Steve Bannon


The Washington Post reports that neo-fascist, white supremacist Steve Bannon, Pres. Trump’s former chief strategist (replacing the recently-indicted Paul Manafort) secretly met with AFT leader Randi Weingarten in April to talk about "education issues".

The meeting was set up by right-wing media mogul and Trump ally, Chris Ruddy, chief executive of Newsmax Media Inc. who, according to the Post, "is a friend of both Trump and Weingarten". Ruddy approached Weingarten about the secret meeting because Trump “likes her” and supported opening a conversation to see whether there was common ground", says Ruddy.
The idea for a conversation between the White House and Weingarten developed, Ruddy said, when he was talking to the president about education and mentioned he knew Weingarten. Trump also knew her — both were prominent figures in New York in their own fields.
“The president knows her and likes her,” Ruddy said. “He obviously knows her from the New York world. . . . So I mentioned this to the president as an opening to communications with her. Steve [Bannon] was excited about that. I set up a meeting and they had a private meeting outside the White House.”
Actually, Trump's rationale for the meeting is much clearer than Weingarten's. Trump had already been successful in driving a wedge in the labor movement through meetings with Teamsters President Jim Hoffa and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka. Each applauded Trump for pulling out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership and threatening other international trade agreements. Trumka even took a seat on Trump's manufacturing council (which never met) and supported Trump's plan to build the oil pipeline through the Standing Rock reservation in North Dakota.

Also, around the same time as the Bannon/Weingarten meeting, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was holding his own closed-door meeting with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. Nobody knows what went on behind those doors. But within weeks, a voucher bill was passed in IL by a majority Democratic legislature, without any resistance from Emanuel.

Weingarten however, offers no strategic or tactical rationale for her consenting to hold the secret (from her own membership) meeting. When she tries, she sounds like someone who has drunk the  populist kool-aid.
She says, she thought Bannon sought the meeting [she thought? m.k.] because he believed there was common ground; she and her union have been critical of the power of hedge fund managers and “crony capitalists,” as has Bannon. 
Bannon, an enemy of the hedge-funders???

No, no, no. Not true... Bannon's rise to power has been largely underwritten by hedge funders and crony capitalists like billionaire Robert Mercer, a long-time Trump crony who up until this week ran Renaissance Technologies and it's crown jewel, the Medallion Fund, which, according to Bloomberg, is perhaps the world's greatest money-making machine. Medallion is open only to Renaissance's roughly 300 employees, about 90 of whom are Ph.D.s, as well as a select few individuals with deep-rooted connections to the firm. The fabled fund, known for its intense secrecy, has produced about $55 billion in profit over the last 28 years.  

Weingarten tells the Intercept:
“Look, I will meet with virtually anyone to make our case, and particularly in that moment, I was very, very concerned about the budget that would decimate public education,” Weingarten said. “I wanted it to be a real meeting, I didn’t want it to be a photo-op, so I insisted that the meeting didn’t happen at the White House.”
Weingarten didn’t take notes at the meeting, which was held at a Washington restaurant, but told The Intercept she and Bannon talked about “education, infrastructure, immigrants, bigotry and hate, budget cuts … [and] about a lot of different things.”
Her takeaway: Bannon is no Martin Luther King. Really?
The [Martin Luther] King philosophy of jobs and justice is not the Bannon philosophy, let’s put it that way.”
But on the other hand, she did buy some of his faux working-class populism.
“I think he sees the world as working people versus elites. And on some level, he’s thought about educators as working-class folks."
Lots of questions here... Why did it take seven months for this meeting to be revealed, and only then by a Bannon friend? Why, with the AFT and the labor movement in general in a state of crisis, bleeding members and money, would Weingarten look to Bannon for common ground?

I'm not saying or implying that Weingarten cut a back-room deal with Bannon. I'm not sure that either of them had the power to make any kind of deal. I think this was more of a feel-out meeting that was intended to be kept secret on all sides.

Weingarten and the union leadership seem lost at sea with no real sense of direction. She has nothing to deal. Her first instinct seems to be to scramble for her own personal seat at the table. Or as she puts it...
“If you are the president of the union and you’re fighting fiercely to get budget restorations and to not have a dismantlement of public education or of higher education and the administration asks to – or it’s made clear to you that they want to meet – you meet,” she said. “You don’t not meet. You meet.”
 At the same time she was secretly not not meeting with Bannon, she was also asking DeVos to do joint school tours with her. This even while DeVos was being picketed by parents and teachers at local public schools.

But her meetings with Bannon and DeVos did nothing to get adequate funding for public ed. Since the meetings, the federal public school budget has been slashed to pieces and billions of dollars shifted over from public schools to privately-run charters and school vouchers.

Meeting with Elites... Intercept explains:
Hearing Bannon attack elites, including the types of hedge fund Democrats who fund the charter school movement, in the same way she would, was surreal. “He hates crony capitalism,” Weingarten said. “The same kinds of things [we say], you could hear out of his mouth, and that’s why it’s so — you sit there in a surreal way, saying, ‘How can you sit right next to all these elites?'
That would be a great question for Weingarten herself to answer.

No, this is not a time for secret meetings with fascist demagogues. It is a time for organizing and mobilizing rank-and-file resistance.