Mayor Lightfoot is sticking with schools CEO Janice Jackson for now. That's a good thing.

There's hope that CEO Jackson, once liberated from Rahm's self-serving, autocratic rule, will become a real change leader. 

Even though I've had my issues with CEO Janice Jackson's role as Rahm Emanuel's front person on school closings and charter expansion and her opposition to an elected school board, I think the mayor made the right move here. To replace her now, especially in the middle of contract negotiations with the CTU, would only further destabilize a system already in a state of chaos.

Jackson was Rahm's 5th CEO in six years.

Remember how Rahm changed school chiefs like he changed wardrobes, including dumping J.C. Brizard in 2012, the middle of contract talks and replacing him with Barbara Byrd-Bennett. The result was the first teachers strike in 25 years followed by a regime so corrupt that BBB wound up in prison and scandal-ridden Forrest Claypool had to flee or risk following her.

There's the hope that Jackson, now liberated from Rahm's autocratic and self-serving brand of ed politics, can rediscover her educator roots and become a real change leader. I hope so.

Next on Mayor Lightfoot's agenda will be choosing a new school board and here is where wholesale change (draining the swamp) is necessary and I am told, coming.

What a shame that we still have to wait years before there's finally an elected school board in Chicago. Rep. Martwick's ESB bill, was badly written. Even if passed as is, (without considering questions about the board's unwieldy size, raised by the new mayor) it wouldn't take effect for four more years and then have to be reauthorized. The whole setup would be phased out after the 2027 election unless lawmakers in Springfield vote to extend it. What kind of law is that?

There's some good ed news coming from Springfield (did I really say that?). Yes, the State Charter School Commission is on the way out. The unelected Commission has the power to override decisions made by local school boards that reject charter applications. A Democrat-backed bill passed the Senate in April, and a vote is expected in the House before the legislative session ends May 31, despite opposition from INCS and charter school lobbyists. Gov. Pritzker has said he’ll sign the bill. Gov. Rauner vetoed a similar bill last year.

Also House Bill 424, the bill that requires the ISBE to establish standards for interpreters for non-English speaking parents, passed the Illinois Senate yesterday on a vote of 53 yes, 0 nos, and 0 abstentions. The bill will now go to Pritzker for his signature.

Change is in the air.

Rahm and his schools CEO try and sell their discredited reforms in D.C.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is so discredited on his education and policing policies that he's been forced out of a re-election bid. But that didn't stop him and his ever-faithful schools CEO Janice Jackson from putting in an appearance in D.C. on WaPo's Education in America forum recently to spread the good news about all things terrific going on in Chicago's public schools.

Jackson offered a few comments when she could get a word in, but it was obvious that Rahm had her there as window dressing.

Was there any discussion of the regime's continuing disastrous mass school-closings policy mostly in underserved black communities, or the dramatic plunge in CPS enrollment during Rahm's tenure? Glad you asked. No.

District officials report a loss of 10,000 students since the last school year, one of the largest single-year declines in more than a decade. In the last three years, 31,000 students have ghosted CPS classrooms. But the Post's Jonathan Capehart never asked about that.

But he did ask Rahm about his closed-door meeting with Ed Secretary Betsy DeVos. At first, Rahm and Jackson giggled as if trying to distance themselves from the right-wing buffoon who currently occupies the D.O.E. That was followed by a seemingly unending speed rap about all the great ed initiatives flowing out of the 5th floor at City Hall; i.e. longer school days, not allowing "failure," onus on the principal, full-day Pre-K and free community college (if you get B's on your report card)...and the list goes on.

"We explained to her [DeVos\ that this was not about choice, but about quality...", Rahm assured Capehart, as if he actually believed it.

As we later learned, the secret Rahm/DeVos meeting was ALL about "choice," meaning Rahm's willingness to push a school voucher program into Chicago in exchange for federal dollars and a release by Republican Gov. Rauner of the state's school budget.

But Rahm's cover was blown when the Sun-Times got hold of his emails through an FOIA request. It turned out that Cardinal Blase Cupich had emailed the mayor after learning that U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was scheduling meetings with big-city mayors on Trump administration education priorities.

“I am personally interested in the proposal to fund a $20 billion federal education tax credit as part of the federal tax reform. I am convinced that this could be an enormous boost to the Chicago schools and the thousands of parents who use our [Catholic] schools,” Cupich wrote. “I am grateful that you understand the importance of school choice for poor families who see this as a viable way for the family to move out of poverty.”

The "tax credit" for the state's wealthiest turned out to be a voucher program to benefit Catholic and other private schools at the expense of public school students.

In his letter to Rahm, Cupich laid out the rationale that moved Rahm and the Democrats to support the bill. He claimed that by enticing students and families out of CPS, Rahm would save taxpayers $1 billion a year through lower public school enrollment. By extension, one can only imagine how much money taxpayers would save by getting rid of public education entirely. Zero students, zero cost per/student to taxpayers.

Who would have thought that blue state Illinois would become the showpiece for DeVos' "school choice" agenda?

I shouldn't have implied that Capehart never mentioned school closings. He did ask Rahm if the community's negative response to the closings accounted for him not running for a third term. Rahm did his usual. "Do I look like someone who runs from a challenge?... No, I just wanted to spend more time with Amy and the kids." OK.

More to come on this. Stay tuned

My memo to Rahm: Killing Petunia not a good look

Fired Animal Care Director, Susan Russell, left, holds Petunia alongside state Comptroller Susana Mendoza 

Memo to Mayor Rahm Emanuel...Your poll numbers are in the dumper. 23 shot, including 5 children 15 and younger this past weekend. Your administration is ridden with scandal. For the next few months leading up to election time, that video of the Laquan McDonald shooting will be playing over and over again. Black families are leaving the city in droves. Your police Supt. Eddie Johnson claims he has never seen any police misconduct in all his years on the force. Yet he's pushing for a new, $95M cop training academy. This while many schools are in ruins, filthy and disgusting. The sexual abuse scandal at CPS goes all the way to the top. You, your hand-picked school board president, Frank Clark and schools CEO  Janice Jackson all appear culpable. While you still have tons of money to spend on reelection, your main opponents are raising lots of cash from your former patrons. Even some of your closest pals are dropping hints that you may drop out of the race. I could go on.

So what do you do? You fire Animal Care Director Susan Russell, for "warehousing dangerous animals".

Not a good look, Rahm.

You sure you're really up for this campaign?

CPS response to sexual abuse scandal is just what you'd expect

CPS BUTT COVERERS:  Board Pres. Frank Clark, CEO Janice Jackson, and Board V.P. Jaime Guzman

Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his hand-picked school board have responded to the ongoing CPS sex-abuse scandal in the same ass-covering way we've come to expect. It can be summed up as follows:

• Create another new department in the bloated bureaucracy without any input from community groups or even from their own team.
• Rationalize: "Not our fault. It's always been this way." 
• Throw a couple of principals under the bus with no due process.
• Impose new bureaucratic rules (annual fingerprinting??) that put the onus on teachers and makes them suspect (i.e., meeting one-on-one with their students) and makes it more difficult for them to do their jobs. The Tribune, whose reporters broke the story in the first place, wasted no time in placing equal blame for the scandal on the CTU.
• Do an end run around your own appointed IG.
• Above all, cover the behinds of the mayor, his schools CEO and Board President.

Jadine Chou, CPS’s chief of safety and security, now says all employees are required to report suspected "grooming" behavior on the part of colleagues. At first I thought she meant whether teachers smelled bad or were having a bad-hair day. But, it obviously means something else. Please give us a checklist of such behaviors, Jadine, so we can turn colleagues in and have them fired immediately.

Inspector General Nicholas Schuler, who is supposed to work with the new department, said Wednesday that he was largely in the dark about the new plan.

"Figuring out how we're going to interface with CPS and the new unit they've started today is what I would have liked to have seen some more details about before today," he said.

After an uproar in the press, Schuler was nominally put in charge of the investigation. But he will remain under the watchful eye of CEO Jackson.

Chamala Jordan, parent to a CPS student, said the announcement left her confused.

"As a parent, honestly, those things were told to us that they were in place. So to create or construct a whole new entity, that was supposed to be in place already, doesn't really make sense to me," she said. 

Jesse Sharkey, CTU Veep

"While tutoring a student alone in your room puts you under a cloud of suspicion, I think we have to be concerned about what that would mean for the work that we do as educators."

Sharkey also raised doubts about the new department's origins. The formation of the office was developed with Maggie Hickey, a former federal prosecutor who is overseeing the comprehensive review of CPS policies as state inspector general.

"The bottom line reaction is that I'm surprised by this and I don't trust its political independence," Sharkey said.

RYH calls for Pres. Clark to "step down".

Jennie Biggs, CPS parent and Raise Your Hand (RYH) Communications Director.

President Clark and his predecessors were briefed on rampant reports of sexual abuse in our schools over time and did NOT act to ensure this situation was better managed, and did NOT demand that procedures and policies were implemented beyond very basic and clearly insufficient mandated reporter trainings.

 We do not know how much Frank Clark or David Vitale or those before shared with respective board members, but we do know that they knew and did nothing.

Sure, some individual teachers, principals and staff are also complicit.

BUT YOU hold the keys to district policy making, and YOU did not act, YOU did not do your jobs, YOU did not ensure schools were being trained, and you should step down and admit that you are part of a flawed system of school governance that has no checks and balances.

Chicago Mayoral candidate Lori Lightfoot on Hitting Left

If you look at what's been happening in the Chicago Public School system, especially this past six or seven years, you see epic failure after epic failure. You can't have a good, well-run public school system when you have five CEOs in the last seven years...Yes, I do support an elected school board. -- Hitting Left 

If Rahm intended to run for re-election on CPS progress, his campaign may be over before it's begun

Rahm Emanuel is beginning to look like a politician whose re-election campaign may be on the brink of collapse before it's even officially begun. His political achilles heel surprisingly turns out to be his autocratic control over Chicago Public Schools. Most everyone thought his greatest vulnerability would be his cover-up of the Laquan McDonald police killing.

What should have been his strong suit, running as an "education mayor," is now buried in a volcanic lava flow of school privatization, corruption, inequality, and dysfunction.

His new schools CEO, Janice Jackson, the fifth CEO in six years, has gone from looking like a source of hope for change, to being little more than Rahm's political functionary, in just a few months, even fronting for the mayor in commercials touting the progress at CPS, bankrolled by a nonprofit with close ties to MRE.

Instead of talking about alleged increases in standardized test scores and graduation rates, the mayor could spend the next eight months leading up to the election dodging questions about the mountain of scandals piling up at CPS.

These include hundreds of recently revealed cases of sexual assault and abuse of students over the past decade, cases that were ignored or covered up by CPS' law department and the mayor.

My alderman, Scott Waguespack (32nd), put it bluntly:

“This is about more than politics, it’s a core issue of our humanity. We’re calling for a City Council hearing on what the Tribune found. Every alderman should be demanding to have CPS there and the mayor’s people, too. He’s the boss. Emanuel is the mayor.”

Then there's new reports of mountains of filth and vermin in the schools since custodial services were privatized by Rahm and former CEO Forrest Claypool, who resigned in December after being charged with "ethics violations."

The Sun-Times reports that SodexoMAGIC and Aramark Corporation have received nearly $800 million in contracts to privatize school engineers and custodians and bust their union. Coincidentally, SodexoMAGIC made an extraordinary campaign contribution of $250,000 to Emanuel. And Aramark has charged CPS with over $20 million in cost overruns.

U of C Lab School fired Aramark over mouse droppings

Chicago Public Schools officials have now agreed to give $259 million in additional work to Aramark. They will be handed control of all facilities work at most of Chicago’s schools on July 1, according to its contract, which CPS officials tried to keep under wraps.

The irony of all this is that the University of Chicago Lab School, the expensive private school where elites like the mayor and former Ed Sec. Arne Duncan send their kids, just gave Aramark the boot after finding mice droppings in school food. Looks like mouse poop is only OK for other people's children.

There's more, so much more, including pay-to-play scandals involving Rahm's hand-picked board members like Deborah Quazzo, who colluded with former CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, now doing time in prison, to enrich herself at the expense of the schools.

If Rahm had any intentions of building his campaign on his running of CPS, it's looking more and more like his campaign is over before it's begun.

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

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

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

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

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

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

According to the Consortium Report:

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

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

The study concludes:

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

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

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

Shout-outs... West Virginia wildcat strike [Updated]

“We’re furious,” said Spanish teacher Jenny Santilli.  “All hell is breaking loose.”

Updated Thursday, March 1 -- As of Wednesday afternoon, W. Virginia teachers and school workers are still on strike. Rank-and-file union members rejected the agreement reached between WVEA leaders and Gov. Justice and have shut down all 55 school districts in, what is now, a wildcat strike. 

Turns out, the strikers apparently don’t trust the the promise made by the governor will be accepted by the Republican legislature, and fear that increased health costs could wipe away their raises. The deal didn't include a fix to the Public Employees Insurance Agency (PEIA), which employees say requires them to pay premiums that are too high. That so far remains a major sticking point.

Today marks the 6th day that the militants have kept the schools closed. 

Earlier: First, a shout-out to the teachers of West Virginia who showed us all the right way to respond to Janus and the latest wave of attacks on workers and their unions. Their three-day strike ended with teachers winning a 5% pay raise. West Virginia ranks 48th out of 50 states and the District of Columbia in teacher pay, according to the National Education Association.


From Splinter:

While 5% is a mere hair’s width higher than a standard, annual cost of living wage adjustment, it’s actually a huge victory for the teachers. [Gov.] Justice initially offered them a pitiful 1% salary increase, which would amount to about $400 annually. And just three weeks ago, the West Virginia State Senate rejected a measure to increase teachers’ wages by 3% annually. So it’s clear that union power and strike power did what it’s supposed to do. When you see that, you understand why conservatives are pushing so hard to destroy unions.

WBEZ-- Activist Jitu Brown speaks at a press conference on Monday, Feb. 26 about a Chicago Sun-Times report that key supporters of closing four Englewood high schools don’t live in the community and have contracts with Chicago Public Schools. He and others called on CPS to cancel Wednesday’s planned Board of Education vote on the plan.

Next, a salute to Chicago parents, students and community activists in Englewood who are fighting valiantly to to save the last remaining public high schools in their community. As the community struggle against the latest round of school closings gains momentum and takes on a national focus, Rahm Emanuel and his hand-picked schools CEO Janice Jackson are up to their old tricks again.

Remember when Rahm was paying folks off the street $25/ea. to be bused in to City Hall as fake  counter-protesters when real school/community members were protesting the mayor's mass school closings.

Now, community members protesting the latest round of school closings are being confronted by a group supporting the closings, appearing at the meetings in matching West Englewood Coalition hats and sweatshirts. They're supporting the plan championed by new CPS CEO Janice Jackson to close Harper, Hope, Robeson and Team Englewood high schools. But when questioned about who was behind them and where they’re from, it became clear that many weren't school/community members at all, but rather a rump group organized by some CPS contractors.

Right now downtown, CPS higher ups are voting on whether to close 4 predominantly black & brown schools on the southside. This mirrors the ineffective and unfair closing of 50+ schools by Rahm Emmanuel in 2013. WHY OUR KIDS EVERY TIME? #cpsboard pic.twitter.com/gUUSmrETpU

— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) February 28, 2018

'Underutilization': The devastating language behind school closings.

It's time to reconsider the word, "underutilized" as CPS code language for schools in black communities, in the same way "Norwegian" has become code for white in the Trumpian lexicon.

Chicago Public Schools finally released data last month, showing that it considers more than 200 of its schools -- almost a third of the total, and nearly all with black or Latino student populations -- to be underutilized and therefore primed for closure and possible replacement with privately-run charters. CPS no longer calculates space use for privately-managed charter or contract schools.

Some 229 buildings now are considered underutilized, nearly as many as CPS considers to be efficiently used. That’s according to a newly-revised formula CPS employed to compare numbers of classrooms in a school with the number of students enrolled, calculating approximately 30 kids per classroom.

Another 29 buildings have been deemed overcrowded, including a few selective enrollment schools that can screen applicants and limit who gets in. That leaves 231 “efficient” buildings — now defined as where enrollment constitutes between 70 and 110 percent of a school’s ideal capacity. The efficient range used to be between 80 and 120 percent.

The study's release, timed with the lifting of the self-imposed cap on school closings, immediately caused confusion since officials had once again, changed the way they calculate “space utilization,” leaving principals and parents unclear about how their schools’ capacity grew since CPS last made the calculations.

Whether it comes to evaluating test scores, graduation rates, special education, or crime rates, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has never been adverse to juking the stats for political advantage.

More importantly, in communities, where the needs for learning spaces as well as for youth and adult social activities are great, there's no reason for so many schools to be shuttered, left as vacant hulls contributing to blight and crime and destabilizing the lives of so many children and families.

This is especially true in neighborhoods like Englewood and South Loop where the city is about to close even more schools while spending hundreds of millions of dollars for new school construction, only blocks from the school buildings they are about to abandon. The question as always, is who are the new schools for?

**********

I'm looking forward to the release of  Eve Ewing's new book, When the Bell Stops Ringing: Race, History and Discourse Amid Chicago's School Closures. I caught up with Eve last night at the Read/Right Library in Humboldt Park, reading from Electric Arches and talking CPS school closings. She was right on time. 

********** 

It's impossible to understand so-called underutilization or shrinking school populations without coming to terms with the forced mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Chicago's African-American families over the past three decades. It's an exodus which gov candidate Chris Kennedy, for his own opportunist reasons, laid on MRE's doorstep, for what Kennedy called the mayor's “strategic gentrification.”

Kennedy caught hell from the media for "playing the race card" and the Rahm-protecting Sun-Times even called him a "Stalinist". But he was only saying what everybody already knew, although the push-out of black and poor people from the city predates Rahm's regime. It's been part of well-documented initiatives to whitenize Chicago that goes back decades involving not only previous mayors, but the city's biggest investment banks, corporations and real estate developers, including Kennedy himself.

So whenever a new study on school utilization by CPS comes out, you can bet that the plans for the next wave of school closures have already been laid. Why even bother to go through another round of phony community hearings. Parents, students and community members have consistently voiced opposition to closing their schools only to have their voices ignored.

With former school CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett in prison and former CEO Forrest Claypool forced to resign in the face of corruption charges, it will now be up to Rahm's newly appointed CEO Janice Jackson, to sell "underutilization" to the community.

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.

The cat's out of the bag. CPS I.G. admits attack on Troy LaRaviere was political

CPS Chief Ed Officer Janice Jackson fronting for Rahm at Blaine. 

“I can honestly say this was not a politically motivated decision,” said Janice Jackson, CPS’ chief education officer, speaking to a crowd of about 300 inside the auditorium at Blaine. -- Sun-Times

How do you know Jackson is lying? Whenever somebody begins a sentence with, "I can honestly say...", nine times out of ten what follows is going to be a big fib.

The thing that jumped out at me while reading the Sun-Times' story of yesterday's Blaine parents support rally for their award-winning principal, Troy LaRaviere, was this sentence.

CPS’ inspector general Nick Schuler confirmed that his office was looking at LaRaviere’s participation in the Sanders campaign “to see if there are any possible violations” of CPS’ ethics policy.

Not politically motivated indeed.

I'm told that Jackson has finally informed LaRaviere about the dozen or so charges against him. They haven't been made public as yet. But no matter what they have, or think they have on him, the whole thing smells to Blaine parents and community, like another of Rahm's political hatchet jobs.

More from S-T:

LaRaviere is up for election in May to lead the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association, which would give him a larger voice within CPS “and that’s something that a lot of people didn’t want,” [parent Betsy] Melton said.

He also has recorded ads for progressive presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, as well as Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, who ran against Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year.

Last year, sources said LaRaviere was reprimanded after the inspector general dinged him for “improper political activity” for Garcia, though he was not named in the annual report released to the public.

Could the motivation behind LaRaviere's firing be any clearer?

The mayor, who has turned CPS into a wing of City Hall, is pleading (according to Brother Fred) Et Ego Nescieban (I do not know). He more aptly should be pleading non compos mentis. Rahm and the beleaguered school district need this new debacle right now like a fish needs a bicycle.

Hunger strikers say: It's not over 'til it's over.

Dyett hunger strikers meet this afternoon. Decide to continue the strike. 

"We need to unpack this," said Jitu Brown of the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, one of about a dozen activists who began a hunger strike Aug. 17. "But I think they have underestimated our resolve." -- Chicago Tribune

There's no doubt about that or about the fact that the Dyett hunger strikers scored an important victory yesterday when Rahm was forced to do a complete 180 and accept their demand for an open enrollment high school for Bronzeville. But if the mayor and Forrest Claypool thought the strikers would go home and end the struggle here, they were mistaken.

From the beginning, the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett made it clear that their fight was about something much larger than just opening a school.

Remember, CPS leaders already had a school at Dyett and intentionally ran it into the ground as part of their planned neighborhood gentrification. To just let them have it back; to let them make all the important leadership and curriculum decisions as they had done before, with no community input would be a hollow victory.

Hunger strikers Jitu Brown and April Stogner had not even returned from their D.C. meeting with Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten and Lily Eskelsen García when the announcement came down that Dyett would be opened as an "arts school". What duplicity, coming from a leadership that has for years, diminished and de-funded arts education throughout the Chicago school system.

There's been no report yet on what was discussed or resolved in D.C. with Duncan.

Catalyst quotes Brown on his return to Chicago:

“We are happy the school is opening as a neighborhood CPS-run school,” says Jitu Brown, a longtime activist with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO) and one of the 12 hunger strikers. “All is not lost. But what we want is what the community demanded.”

Invited to the CPS press conference were a handful of local pols who had done nothing to support the hunger strike. To make matters worse, the hunger strikers were locked out of the conference altogether -- Rahm's revenge for getting run out of his own budget hearing by protesters, the night before.

Claypool announced the plan for Dyett at the district's Loop headquarters alongside Chief Education Officer Janice Jackson, senior adviser Denise Little and a group of Rahm-loyal African-American elected officials including Congressman Bobby Rush, Ald. Will Burns, and state Rep. Christian Mitchell.

Jackson, who a day earlier had given all the reasons why no new school would never be allowed in Dyett -- too many under-enrolled schools in the area; we don't want schools competing for students -- now was proclaiming a "victory" for the community.

"We should see this as a win for the community, because after all, the request was for an open-enrollment high school that gives access to the children in the community which they so truly deserve," she said, portraying the decision as a resolution to the debate.

Then came the kicker:

 Jackson said, adding that the district will identify and install a principal for the school "immediately," someone who will be responsible for community outreach and building out the new school. "We believe that this is the best resolution, and the best solution to meet the demand," Jackson said.

Then came Claypool to explain the 180 turnabout. Earlier, he argued that the school would have trouble attracting enough students to keep it sustainable without harming enrollment at neighboring schools. On Thursday, the very same Claypool, showing amazing agility, said the district's proposal would be sustainable.

"Dyett may have been closed before for under-enrollment and poor performance, but we believe with this concept we're going to have good enrollment and without in any way hurting the other schools in the area that are struggling with enrollment issues." 

Brown on Friday announced today that the group will continue to fight for their demands, including green technology and global leadership in its curriculum; a ‘sustainable school village’ with a coalition of local school councils; for the school to be open until 8 p.m. every day with programs created by the community; an immediate publicly elected local school council; and at least six members of their coalition part of their design plans. The demands also include a voice in the hiring of the new principal.

The group has named Duane Turner as their pick. Turner is a former CPS teacher and principal who lives three blocks from Dyett and helped put the Green Tech proposal together.

They've also enlisted Rev. Jesse Jackson to serve as their negotiator.

Jitu Brown summed it up this way:

“When people say it’s a win. ‘You all won something. You should be happy.’ There was no negotiation with the Coalition to Revitalize Dyett. There was no negotiation."

I think there will be now.

In this case, 'autonomy' is just a four-letter word

Rahm and Jackson offering a few principals "autonomy".

Blaine principal, Troy LaRaviere gets into it with Rahm's new CPS’ chief education officer, Janice Jackson after she dutifully defends Forrest Claypool's so-called "principal autonomy" plan, otherwise known as Independent Schools Principal (ISP) program.

I'm a great fan of teacher autonomy. But whenever you hear the word autonomy coming down from one of the world's great top-heavy, command-and-control bureaucracies, you have to ask yourself -- autonomy from whom and for what?

In this case, Claypool and Jackson want to give a gaggle of top principals, a little freedom (mostly what they already have) from their own network chief's bureaucratic oversight and offer them a taste of professional community -- meeting with each other.

It reminds me of the day former CEO Arne Duncan asked us to start a charter school instead of a small neighborhood public school, so that the system wouldn't "fu*k with you". I replied, "But you ARE the system. Why don't you just not fu*k with us?" He looked befuddled but finally relented.

The outspoken LaRaviere, whose school rates among the district's highest, smells something fishy. He's not just after some autonomy for himself FROM the system. He wants to change the system and is forthright about it. He thinks that the strongest school leaders should be working together with and sharing their knowledge and experience with the others, rather than forming their own elite club.

JJ says:

Exempting participating principals from network oversight is not just popular with principals — it also enables our district to focus our energy and the limited dollars we have available on the schools that most need our support and guidance. 

Interesting to note that prior studies of the first wave of Chicago school reform found that the schools that progressed the fastest and farthest were those which had the least heavy-handed intervention from central office.

TL responds

 The solution to this situation is to ensure that skilled and competent educators lead networks–not to entice effective principals to leave those networks while principals who need support are left with the least effective network leaders in the system.

 Actually, this sounds a lot like the old charter school argument. If charters are so great, why have them split off from and compete for resources with the rest of the district, rather than having them share their innovations (if there are any to share) with the rest of the schools)? Two-way learning is always best.

Sounds to me like TL and JJ (or maybe RE) ought to switch jobs.