Hard to understand CTU's vitriol on these charter closings.

Arne Duncan with K12 Inc. founder William Bennett

I'm having a difficult time making sense out of CTU policy statements lately. Yesterday, the union leadership came out with a blistering, overheated attack on CPS leaders. Why? Because CPS recommended the closing of two privately-run charter schools for poor academic performance and financial mismanagement.

The two schools are Chicago Virtual Charter School (CVCS) and Frazier Preparatory Academy Charter School. Both schools opened as part of Renaissance 2010, a failed initiative of former Mayor Daley’s schools chief, Arne Duncan. The initiative called for the opening of 100 new schools by 2010 amid the closure of dozens of schools the district said were "underperforming."

Private charter school operators moved in like vultures, promising that their non-union schools would outperform neighborhood schools. It turned out to be a lie. The best of the charters did just about the same as the schools they were replacing. The worst either kept getting their charters renewed with little oversight, or were closed, either for poor performance, financial mismanagement or put on probation and given a few years to improve. Several more went out of business of their own volition, as with any failed business venture.

CTU leaders have responded to the recommendation with vitriol, calling it "racist and irresponsible."

I have been an outspoken opponent of public school closings, especially the mass school closings in the black community, under Rahm Emanuel's regime, closings that disrupted the lives and learning of thousands of CPS students and drove hundreds of families out of Chicago. But that doesn't mean that no charter school should ever be closed, no matter how poorly it serves its students and their families or how corrupt they are. I know very little about Frazier, except that it has been on academic probation for several years and has failed to meet the standards set by its own operators.

According to the Tribune: 

At Frazier Prep, a K-8 school in Lawndale, CPS further cited a failure to meet a contractual requirement to implement a successful remediation plan and improve the school enough to get it off the academic warning list. Students in the community have higher-quality options, according to CPS.

 Since 2015, the Chicago Board of Education has used a “quality policy” to review charter schools. In accordance with that policy, school officials conducted “comprehensive performance reviews” and said they found that Chicago Virtual and Frazier Prep were failing to provide a high-quality education to students.

I generally mistrust evidence of "low performance" based solely or mainly on test scores. But I'd leave this decision to CPS in consultation with the school community.

CPS has assured the community that if the Chicago School Board approves the closures, CPS will provide families of current students with transition support "to help them identify a new higher-performing school that best meets their educational needs and priorities."

But we heard that before from Rahm. He lied. So far, Lori Lightfoot has shown that she's not Rahm 2.0. CTU President Jesse Sharkey told me as much on Hitting Left, last Friday.

But I do know something about Chicago Virtual Charter, a subsidiary of K12 Inc., the worst of the worst when it comes to privatization and plunder of American public education. The largest of the virtual charter chains, K12 Inc. in particular, has been a sewer of corruption since it was founded by Ronald Reagan's Ed Sec. William Bennett. The company was forced to remove Bennett as chairman of its directors following a series of racist remarks and gambling scandals which threatened the company's marketability.

K12 Inc. has been under investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, which has been looking into K12's involvement in a project that received an improper multimillion-dollar grant from the Department of Education during Bennett's tenure at the firm. MEANWHILE...

A K12 Inc. company database that included information for 19,000 students was available for anyone with an internet connection to see for at least a week, according to a report from Comparitech, which describes itself as a pro-consumer organization that offers security services. -- Digital Education

Trump's Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos touts online learning and cyber charter schools as a viable alternative to public schools. But her support for these virtual schools and the private companies that run them may have more to do with her and her husband's investment portfolio than with any positive results for students. Her husband invested in virtual school powerhouse K12 Inc. before she became secretary.

According to The Nation:

K12 Inc.’s lobbyists helped author model legislation to develop sweeping voucher laws through the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative group that provides state lawmakers with template legislation.

K12, Inc. initially wanted to open a full-time virtual school in Chicago, but Illinois law prohibited full-time online learning. To comply with the policy, K12, Inc. compromised by adding a mandatory, on-campus attendance requirement and thus the CVCS was born.

It's a school that never should have been opened in this city. In fact, back in 2006, the CTU filed a suit intended to stop state and city payments to the Chicago Virtual Charter School. The union sued the charter school operator, the Chicago Board of Education, which approved the school as part of its Renaissance 2010 reforms, and the Illinois State Board of Education, which gave final approval for the charter to open.

So the question is, why the sharp attack by CTU leaders, who called the CPS recommendation to close CVCS racist and irresponsible? I can understand their making a case against the closing of any neighborhood school. But CVCS was not that. Whether to close Frazier is a question worthy of community debate.

I hope the charges of "racism" against CPS leadership and the mayor's appointed school board isn't just a continuation of the negativity directed at the mayor and the board, stemming from the election and the school strike. But I see no other basis for it.

There were three teacher strikes when Harold Washington was mayor

The 19-day CTU strike in 1987 was longest in city history

In 1983, Harold Washington made history in two ways. He became Chicago's first African-American mayor and the first whose election grew directly from a high tide of black resistance to racist machine rule. That movement was joined by a grassroots coalition of progressive forces citywide. During his first term, a racist cabal of 29 white aldermen, led by the two Eddies, Vrdolyak and Burke, blocked his every move in the City Council. However, by 1987, when Washington won re-election, court-ordered reapportionment of wards led to the election of some allied Latino aldermen and the mayor gained some breathing room.

At that time, the public schools, the most racially segregated in the nation, were in a state of deep crisis. Badly underfunded by Republicans in Springfield, who referred to CPS as "a black hole," and ruled by a self-perpetuating top-heavy bureaucracy, Chicago's school system was the picture of abject failure. Chicago-hating Pres. Reagan went so far as to send his racist Sec. of Education William Bennett to the city to denounce CPS as the "nation's worst" school system.

In the wake of the record 19-day teachers' strike (Sept. 8 to Oct. 2), angry and frustrated parents raised their demand for sweeping change. While the mayor met separately with the two sides in the strike, urging reconciliation, he refused to get involved directly in the talks or to dictate terms of a settlement.

''Everyone says I was not involved, but you solve problems through discussions,'' he said. ''I had some of our best people working on the problem. There was a constant quest on my part to resolve the strike.'' -- NY Times

The five-week shutdown, which became the longest teacher strike in city history, and the third during Washington's tenure, concluded with a tentative agreement of a two-year contract that the CTU membership ratified the following day. The new contract mandated a 4% pay increase the first year, followed by another 4% the second year, "if adequate funds could be found," and a reduction in class sizes by two students in grades K-3. But since neither side had a plan for generating new revenue, the raises came at the expense of the firing of 1,700 teachers, low-level administrators, and staff.

However, change was in the air, thanks to a resurgence of a powerful reform movement of CPS parents and community activists. Washington had been working behind closed doors on a plan to overhaul the school district. When the teachers’ strike hit, he seized on the political unrest and anger in the black community to make a public commitment to school reform.

He announced plans for an education summit that would search for a path forward that included all stakeholders. The Summit, held at UIC (Circle Campus) was attended by more than a thousand participants. Washington died of a heart attack before the summit could carry out its work, but the momentum for change remained alive.

It's important to note that at the time, black leadership of the school system was apparent. The city's mayor, school board chief, superintendent, and teachers' union president were all African-Americans.

The sweeping changes that followed were marked by a shift in power from the top of the bureaucratic machinery down to the local school level, including the creation of parent/community-dominated Local School Councils (LSCs). While the victories were short-lived and later reversed completely during the next Mayor Daley's regime, they still showed what is possible through grass-roots community organizing.

Of course, conditions today are markedly different. Since 1995, the schools are under mayoral control which the Daley and Emanuel regimes have used to maintain corporate control of the schools through privatization, charter schools and mass school closings.

Harold Washington didn't have that kind of power and didn't want it.  A new progressive tide has put the first African-American, gay, woman in the mayor's seat, along with her appointed school board, composed mainly of progressives and people of color. There's also a new crop of city council members including 6 who identify as "socialists" fresh off of election victories over the machine.

Oh, if only Harold had that going for him back in '87.

The CTU has lost its dynamic leader, Karen Lewis, but remains a strong and vital part of the progressive movement in Chicago.

One thing hasn't changed. CPS remains just as racially segregated as it was 30 years ago and has lost thousands of African-American students, teachers, and parents since then. While the legislature is now dominated by Democrats and a Democratic governor, the school system is still badly in debt,  underfunded and desperately in need of teachers, nurses, librarians, social workers, and wrap-around services.

Unfortunately, another CTU strike now seems inevitable. But strike or no strike, the union and the board will ultimately reach an agreement and hopefully move forward together.

Chicago's legacy of top-down school reform

Looking back... You could trace the beginnings of what now passes for Chicago's so-called school reform, marked by mass school closings and privatization, to 1987 when Reagan's Education Secretary William J. Bennett called Chicago's public schools the "worst in the nation" and suggested that parents send their kids to private school.

Mayor Daley went and hired Paul Vallas, and then Arne Duncan, to steer what he called his "national model of urban school reform"-- Renaissance 2010.

It only took a decade after Bennett's proclamation before politicians and the media were talking about the "Chicago Miracle" in education. In his 1999 State of the Union address, President Clinton took personal credit for Chicago's rise to the top.

So my balanced budget triples the funding for summer school and after-school programs to keep a million children learning. Now, if – if you doubt this will work, just look at Chicago, which ended social promotion and made summer school mandatory for those who don't master the basics. Math and reading scores are up three years running with some of the biggest gains in some of the poorest neighborhoods. It will work, and we should do it.

But a decade later, Chicago test scores were flat as a pancake and departing schools chief  Arne Duncan's "miracle" was being debunked by critics from right to left. The Chicago Tribune was reporting that

Six years after Mayor Richard Daley launched a bold initiative to close down and remake failing schools, Renaissance 2010 has done little to improve the educational performance of the city's school system.

 The architect of Renaissance 2010, former schools CEO Arne Duncan, is now the U.S. Secretary of Education -- and he's taking the Daley-Duncan model national as part of his Race to the Top reform plan.

From Renaissance to Dark Ages...The Rahm Emanuel era has brought new charges that Daley/Duncan school reform was a flop and that the new mayor would re-invent school reform with more seat time, mass teacher firings, the biggest school-closing move ever, and by one-upping the previous mayor on privatization.

My prediction is, that within the next few -- hopefully, post-Emanuel -- years, Rahm's top-down "reforms" will end up in the same waste bin of history as Duncan's.

The decision to turn Hancock into a selective-enrollment school was made "without any public hearings." -- Sun-Times

Here's my recommendation for one of the first to go. 

It's Rahm's fascination with selective-enrollment schools as a driver of neighborhood gentrification. In this case it's his plan to turn around Hancock High School on Southwest Side, which now is home to mostly poor Hispanic students, by getting rid of all the teachers and students and calling it a selective-enrollment school. The school will no longer guarantee any of its seats to neighborhood children, about 95% of whom are Hispanic and 97% low-income, according to CPS.

According to the Sun-Times,

Hancock is projected to need $10 million for the transformation, and that will be funded with state money. Five months ago, Emanuel announced plans to use $60 million in tax-increment financing money to build Chicago’s 11th selective enrollment high school and name it after President Barack Obama. 

That solves a political problem for Emanuel and could strengthen the mayor’s appeal to Southwest Side voters. The 13th Ward is home to scores of police officers and firefighters, who do not like Emanuel.

Hancock students speak out 

Jesse Delgado, a 16-year-old junior, said he feels bad for kids who counted on going to Hancock, but now won’t be able to. Other schools in the area are overcrowded, he said. “Some of them might not have the same chances they would have had.” | Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times

Jesus Patino, a senior, said the selective-enrollment status will create haves and have-nots at an already good school. He said Hancock should be open to everyone in the neighborhood.

“I think all kids deserve the same opportunity as someone who goes to [a] select enrollment” school, said Patino, 17. “It won’t affect me, but it will affect the community. They will get more money and better things just because they are ‘smarter’ students.”

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Potter (Sun-Times)

Jackson Potter, CTU

“We were promised a better day, not just a longer one, and that’s out the window. And that means you’re seeing 98 art programs either very much reduced or eliminated.” -- CPS layoffs hit arts, specialty subjects hard (Sun-Times)

Paul Krugman

The result is what we see now in the House: a party that, as I said, seems unable to participate in even the most basic processes of governing. What makes this frightening is that Republicans do, in fact, have a majority in the House, so America can’t be governed at all unless a sufficient number of those House Republicans are willing to face reality. And that quorum of reasonable Republicans may not exist. -- NY Times

Lisa Goldman on Bennett 

"That man has been distraction since the day he walked into the state," said Lisa Goldman, founder of Testing is not Teaching, an advocacy group in Palm Beach County. "He shouldn't have come." -- Parents cheer as Florida schools chief resigns (Sun Sentinel)

Larry Cuban on Vallas

Vallas’s operating principle, according to one journalist who covered his superintendency in Philadelphia, is: “Do things big, do them fast, and do them all at once.” -- The problem with the Paul Vallas brand of school reform (Washington Post)

Ownership Society News

Bennett

K12 Inc. buys Inc.'s high school online program

Kaplan has been the Washington Post's main profit center. But in the past year, the company has been riddled with student loan scandals and mismangement. Kaplan remains one of the biggest testing companies and has a distance-learning component which makes it compatable with the Republican connected K12 Inc. Kaplan Virtual Education, which provides online education for grades six through 12, bought Insight Schools Inc. from Apollo Group Inc. (APOL) in February. It is now selling that brand, as well as the schools branded under Kaplan Virtual Education, to K12.

"While our experience in online learning made the Insight Schools an attractive acquisition with long-term potential, we determined that the timing was not right for us to devote intensive energy and resources to this initiative right now," a Kaplan spokesman said in an emailed statement. "Exiting this business will enable us to focus on our core businesses of higher education and test preparation." -- WSJ

K12 has been expanding rapidly, using it's political connections to win lucrative contracts, as online schooling gains in popularity across the country. In November, the company bought American Education Corp., a provider of instructional software, and it snatched up KC Distance Learning Inc. in July. The company reported enrollment of 101,030 in the latest quarter.

K12 was started by Republican operative and former Sec. of  Education William Bennett but the company was forced to remove Bennett as chairman of its directors following a series of racist remarks and gambling scandals which threatened the company's marketability. K12 Inc. has been under  investigation by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), the investigative arm of Congress, which has been looking into K12's involvement in a project that received an improper multimillion-dollar grant from the Department of Education during Bennett's tenure at the firm. Meanwhile, during some of his television appearances, Bennett has continued to comment on administration education policy and the No Child Left Behind Act without mentioning the grant..

"We have to stop lying..."-- Duncan

Arne Duncan is still talking that civil rights talk. Only now he's moved the setting over from Robt. E. Lee H.S. in Montgomery, Alabama to a N.Y. session on CNN with neocon talk show host, Bill Bennett.

Some of you might remember Bennett as Ronald Reagan's education secretary. Younger readers may know him more as the gambling-addicted pontificator who wrote his preachy Book of Virtue, or the racist buffoon who liked to tell jokes genocide jokes, like: "[Y]ou could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."

Sorry Bill. Maybe you thought we forgot and put all that behind us. I haven't.

This is Duncan's version of bipartisanship. After all, the Democrat and the neocon found lots of areas of agreement. Bennett lauded Duncan for supporting the mass teacher firings in Central Falls. They both agreed that No Child Left Behind had been responsible for "lowering standards."

Hey wait a minute! Wasn't it Duncan who praised NCLB to the skies when he was Chicago schools CEO and put the district of a strict standardized testing regimen? And wasn't it Obama, just the other day, who was toasting Duncan's predecessor, Margaret ("NCLB is 99.4% pure") Spellings, as the reform leader who "helped to lead a lot of the improvement that’s been taking place and we’re building on"? Building on, indeed.

And wasn't Bennett previously a big cheer leader for NCLB, especially when his company, K12 Inc., was making millions after it somehow qualified as an NCLB "supplemental educational services" provider, giving Bennett access to huge NCLB grants. As I recall, one of K12's biggest customers at the time was Arne Duncan himself. Duncan and the board even granted K12's virtual school a charter and access to millions in state funding, without making the company go through the normal chartering procedures.

Oh, one more thing they were both certain of--Duncan's new mantra: "This is the civil rights issue of our generation."

I agree with one point Duncan made near the end of his interview.

"We have to stop lying," Duncan added.

Also see " Duncan and Bennett Share Same Forked Tongue" at Schools matter.

(Mis)educator Bennett Couldn't Help Himself (Archive)

Diarrhea of the Mouth

"If you wanted to reduce crime, you could - if that were your sole purpose - you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down."--William Bennett

It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress. --Mark Twain

Former Secretary of Education William Bennett likes to tell everyone how to live and preach from his Book of Virtues. But his gambling addiction and overt racism belie his righteous preachings. Why am I beating this dead horse? Because many small schools, charters and home schoolers are using Bennett's K12 Inc. curriculum and have made him a rich man many times over since he left the Dept. of Ed.

Bennett's remarks echo those from a decade or two ago by William Shockley, who suggested offering cash bonuses to welfare mothers and other social undesirables (i.e. blacks) who agreed to be sterilized and Charles Murray's Bell Curve. They also follow in a long trail of right-wing eugenicists, including President Bush's own grandfather, who pushed the ideas of white racial superiority. And now, even after his offensive remarks about aborting black babies to reduce crime are out on the table, some like Rush Limbaugh are defending him. It seems there is nothing too racist or outright criminal (as is the case of Tom DeLay) for them to stomach. As for Bennett himself, always a defender of the voucher system and an opponent of affirmative action, it seems that he is so filled with racist crap, that like the man who ate at the greasy spoon down the block from our office the other day, he can't control himself. He must let it out to relieve himself--even on the radio.

This time though, diahrrea of the mouth may prove to be costly. The Philadelphia Daily News reported exclusively Saturday that Philadelphia parents and education activists entered the fray to demand that the School District of Philadelphia end the approximately $3 million in contracts it awarded in April to Bennett's K12 Inc. By Monday morning Bennett,was out as K12's chairman of the board of directors, board member and part-time employee, said Ron Packard, who co-founded the multi-million-dollar company with Bennett in 1999. Packard would not disclose what Bennett was being paid but did say he would not be paid in any other capacity, such as that of a consultant.

Then Philadelphia Schools CEO Paul Vallas called the comments Bennett made on his nationally syndicated radio show "outrageous and offensive" and said "any extension of the contract could be jeopardized by his continued presence on the board." Not real strong words but old ties are hard to break.

Now the question is...what kind of contracts will the current DOE hand to Sec. Bennett? Maybe he can be put in charge of new schools for New Orleans or Bagdad.