Just how much abuse will we accept?

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. -- Frederick Douglass 

If the great Illinois pension robbery holds up in the courts, many career teachers and other public workers stand to lose upwards of $200,000 in retirement income over the next decade or so as their cost-of-living adjustments are capped. This is not money that was being "given" to them as a gift. It's money that we have contributed to our own retirement accounts and money that was contractually promised us and Constitutionally protected by the state. It is also, the only money teachers get when they retire. They are excluded from Social Security.

If Tuesday's vote wasn't bad enough, it was followed by this degrading cartoon in yesterday's Tribune, portraying us and the union as a castrated dog. Just how much more abuse will teachers and public employees receive? The exact amount they will accept, said Douglass.

Writes teacher Michelle Gunderson:

I don't think anything I've seen in this fight has horrified me more. The depiction of union workers who lost the pension fight as neutered dogs recalls propaganda of Goebbels and the lynching of black men in the south. Please decide to comment on the Tribune site, and share with others. Fred Klonsky's blog is the best response I've seen. 

In case you are taking names, which we damn well better be, here's the list of who voted how.In the House.  In the Senate.

Quinn: "I was put on earth" for this. 

I'm interested to see how the state's union leaders will respond to the great pension robbery. Gov. Quinn, who will likely sign the new bill into law today, claims that he was "put on earth" to engineer the pension heist. I'm hoping he, and other sellout Dems won't be rewarded for their despicable actions. SEIU, formerly Quinn's biggest supporter, sent members an email Tuesday reminding them that a "yes" vote on pension reform "means a 'no' vote on Election Day,"

According to the San Francisco Chronicle:

The single biggest contributor to Quinn's war chest, the Service Employees International Union, told The Associated Press that there could be "two big strikes" against endorsing Quinn for governor in November. Besides Quinn's support for the $160 billion savings plan, he also has been under fire from the union for considering signing legislation that would alter the pensions of Chicago Park District employees. Quinn is expected to sign state pension legislation early as Thursday in quiet ceremony, a nod to the political sensitivity of the issue affecting employees across the state.

The Worst Pol in the World Award may go to Senate President Cullerton who endorsed the bill even while calling it "unconstitutional." The Sun-Times reports that Cullerton is having "serious heartburn" over the vote. Poor him.

Thanks to Senator Willie Delgado who condemned the bill as “morally wrong, morally corrupt” legislation that will “punish retired teachers, the janitor, the woman who serves lunch to your child in school.”

Kudos also to Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon, who has refused to run with Quinn for a second term, and who openly split with him on the pension bill, which she says, "puts too much of the burden on lower income workers and retirees." Simon is instead running for State Comptroller. She's the daughter of late U.S. Senator Paul Simon.

This from Counter Punch:

Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle — a Democrat whose county houses Chicago and its suburbs and employs 20,000 workers in the system’s jails, public hospitals and other frontline agencies — says she may use the bill as a template for her upcoming raid on Cook County’s pension fund. Chicago Mayor 1%, Rahm Emanuel — who jammed through NAFTA for Bill Clinton and derailed the public option in Obama’s insurance company bailout scheme — is also a big fan.

Chris Hayes on PISA: 'Global capitalism is like the Olympics'

Hayes says he's "skeptical of the American schools are failing line." But, he says, "global capitalism is like the Olympics."

AFT Pres. Randi Weingarten, former elementary school teacher and schools activist Sabrina Stevens (union hunter Russo tweeted, she worked for the AFT -- horrors) and Gov. Christie's charter school guy, Durrell Bradford offer their takes of the latest  PISA scores.

I like the sports metaphor. I call PISA the World Cup of standardized testing. Only difference is, in the World Cup, the soccer field is even. PISA, like all standardized testing regimens, tilts towards the wealthiest schools and nations. Wealthy U.S. scores high. Poor U.S. scores low. If we entered the race with our rich team (China enters only Shanghai) we might win. Win what? I can't say.

No Tolerance for Zero Tolerance

Finally, it appears that school districts are rethinking their Zero Tolerance policies. Many of us have been arguing for years that ZT does little to reduce school violence and does great harm to the culture and content of schools. Now, according to the New York Times, cities and school districts around the country are rethinking their approach to minor offenses.

Broward Supt. Runcie

Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward Cty, Florida, are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep lawbreaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior. Broward previously had the distinction of   having more students arrested on school campuses here than in any other state district, the vast majority for misdemeanors like possessing marijuana or spraying graffiti.

     “A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward County Schools superintendent, who took the job in late 2011. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”

In Broward County, the shift has shown immediate results. School-based arrests have dropped by 41 percent, and suspensions, which in 2011 added up to 87,000 out of 258,000 students, are down 66 percent from the same period in 2012, school data shows.

Nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic, according to federal data.

Taking Names

Retirees put sellout Rep. Mussman up against the wall

Carol Marin on Chicago Tonight: "It's like WWIII down there [in Springfield] in terms of phones ringing off the hook."

Ralph Martirie, with some support from IFT Pres. Dan Montgomery, did a great job on last night's panel. He blew away each and every point made by pension thieves, Msall and Tillman. His main point -- the pension bill is bad news, not just for retirees who've paid into the fund their whole working lives, but for the taxpayers as well. Martieie made it clear that the bill is clearly unconstitutional and like its counterpart in Arizona, will be overturned by the courts in a few years with the state having to pay back to retirees what's legally owed them -- with interest.

At Sen. Biss' office

The vote on the great pension grab is likely to come late today. So retirees were out in force yesterday, calling out their elected officials and taking names of the sellouts. There are somethings we retirees don't forget. Add to the list, sellout Rep. Michelle Mussman who was confronted by Brother Fred and troops outside her Schaumburg offce yesterday. Mussman is married to a teacher who was a local union president. She ran for Representative with the backing of the teacher’s union. But like most of her lickspittle Housemates, when Boss Madigan snaps his sticky fingers, Mussman jumps.

Brother Fred blogs:

Teachers addressed her as “Michelle.” They knew her. They expected something different from her. But she insulted us, not only by her plan to vote for #pension theft. She kept people waiting in the cold for half an hour past our appointment. When she made her appearance it was a weird cross between repeating talking points about actuarial numbers and blaming pensions for cutting social programs. Kids go hungry in Illinois because of teachers. What a terrible thing to say to a group of teachers.

IEA Pres. Cindy Klickna didn't even bother to show up to testify at this morning's hearings. She sent a deputy in her place. That's probably a good thing. You never know whose side she will be on -- her own members or the pension thieves.

PISA -- The World Cup of Testing

It's that time again -- the silly season when the countries of the world have their schools rated on the basis of the PISA tests. It's like the World Cup of standardized testing. And like the World Cup, the U.S. continues to wind up in the middle of the pack, somewhere behind Ireland and Poland. Look for a new round of racial theories about Asians being smarter, and lots pissing and moaning about "failing schools" and "bad teachers" and the need for more privatization of public ed.

While it's premature to draw any deep conclusions from the latest round of PISA testing, I think I can safely predict that once again the scores will show that wealthy and well-resourced U.S. schools scores right at the top of the heap while the poorer resource-starved ones score right around the bottom. 

“The United States’ standings haven’t improved dramatically because we as a nation haven’t addressed the main cause of our mediocre PISA performance – the effects of poverty on students, says NEA Pres. Dennis Van Roekel.

“Our students from well-to-do families have consistently done well on the PISA assessments. For students who live in poverty, however, it’s a different story. Socioeconomic factors influence students’ performance in the United States more than they do in all but few of the other PISA countries.

“It’s time for our nation to face up to that challenge, and we must start by acknowledging that the effects of poverty are pervasive. Children can’t learn in school if they lack nutritious food, a safe place to sleep or access to health care, and our society must address those needs.

So far, so good for Van Roekel. But then he closes out with an ode to Common Core Standards which he hails as "a step in the right direction" and a "game changer." But DVR never says how Common Core with it's even bigger testing and teaching-to-the-test regimen is making a difference in the lives of the growing number of students living in poverty. That's because it can't and the disparity in the all-important test scores, the great gate keeper, will remain. And the union being in bed with the administration and the power philanthropists on this, can only hurt the cause.

SHANGHAI NUMBER 1

Who's number-one in the world this year? It's Shanghai. Hey wait, Shanghai is a city, not a country. How did China swing that? Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institute writes:

For one thing, China as a whole does not take the PISA test. Shanghai is a city, not the nation. It is a huge city, to be sure, but it is not typical of the nation. Other provinces take PISA, but China has an unusual arrangement with the OECD (which administers the tests) by which the Chinese government is allowed to review the test scores and decide which provinces will release their scores. -- Diane Ravitch Blog

Loveless points out that Shanghai with its concentrated wealth, has historically attracted the nation’s elites. About 84 percent of Shanghai high school graduates go to college, compared to 24 percent nationally. Shanghai’s per capita GDP is more than twice that of China as a whole.

EPI's Rich Rothstein and Martin Carnoy respond to Arne Duncan and the D.O.E.'s "manipulation" of the PISA results. Duncan has already proclaimed the results, a "picture of educational stagnation."

Today, threats to the nation’s future prosperity come much less from flaws in our education system than from insufficiently stimulative fiscal policies which tolerate excessive unemployment, wasting much of the education our young people have acquired; an outdated infrastructure: regulatory and tax policies that reward speculation more than productivity; an over-extended military; declining public investment in research and innovation; a wasteful and inefficient health care system; and the fact that typical workers and their families, no matter how well educated, do not share in the fruits of productivity growth as they once did. The best education system we can imagine can’t succeed if we ignore these other problems.

I wonder what would happen if we matched up Shanghai with Winnetka in the World Cup of testing?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Peter Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren on the conflict between capitalism and humanism: "You can't have both." -- Big Philanthropy and Philanthro-Feudalism

Retired teacher, Randy Fritz

Hey General Assembly: your job was/is to return my money to me—you took it in the first place and promised to return it, under specific circumstances, in the form of a pension. You promised to match my contributions. In fact, you have a fiduciary responsibility to do so. That’s not just what you promised, it’s what the 1970 Illinois Constitution promises. -- Fred Klonsky Blog

IFT Pres. Dan Montgomery

“This is a grotesque taking of employees’ retirement security that seems both patently illegal and unfair. It’s a sharp jab in the eye — and the heart — of public employees. There’s a lot of anger out there.” -- NY Times

Billionaire Kenneth Griffin 

"Right now, government workers can retire about a decade before the rest of us can — and we are the ones paying the bills." -- Tribune

Rep. Raymond Poe, R-Springfield 

"That's not enough time to digest it. You don't give the people it affects enough time to do some research and crunch the numbers and see how it works. I think it puts everybody who's affected by it at a serious disadvantage." -- Journal Star 

Nekritz    (Fred Klonsky)

Pension grabbing State Rep. Elaine Nekritz 

"I can argue both sides of it because what we end up doing . . . is sort of digging ourselves back into the hole we’re in now by failing to make an actuarily adequate payment.” -- Sun-Times

Delaware public school teacher

 My students like to tell me that I’m old school.  They are right.  I’m from the school of teaching CHILDREN, not standards.  I’m from the school of student needs, not student data.  I’m from the school of thinking and discovery and choice; not canned, watered-down, one-size-fits-all, global curricula. -- Washington Post

Chicago teacher and 'urban mom' responds to Duncan on Common Core

Carolyn Alessio, a teacher at Cristo Rey Jesuit High School in Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, has a piece on the Common Core in today's Tribune. Allessio is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Illinois Arts Council. She's also a writer of nonfiction and fiction.

Notice, she refers to the Common Core as a "curriculum" and not just as state standards. I mention this because some, including Ed Sec. Arne Duncan, claim that CC is NOT about curriculum, as if the bevy of tests tied to the standards, not to mention how schools and teachers interpret the standards, doesn't drive what and how teachers teach.

Alessio, who also describes herself as a "white urban mother of children in the Chicago Public Schools," says that Duncan's recent remarks about the opposition of "white suburban moms" to the new Common Core curriculum made her wonder whether the secretary of education had read the sixth-grade state standard for effective "Presentation of Knowledge and Ideas."

She says that at Cristo Rey, "my colleagues and I are fortunate that we implement only Common Core curriculum adjustments that make sense and fit with our overall instructional goals. I have not had to toss 'The Odyssey' back into the 'wine-dark sea"' or excerpt 'Hamlet' down to its greatest-hit soliloquies."  Read Alessio's entire piece here.

Rahm busts a move. Pushes elected school board off the ballot

Rahm and "Slow Eddie" Burke

Some Thanksgiving thoughts...

I just learned that a group of domesticated turkeys is called a rafter.

Thanks this morning, go out to the handful of stand-up aldermen (those very words have a strange sound leaving my vocal cords) who make up the Progressive Caucus. It must be hard to soar like eagles when you're surrounded by turkeys, meaning the rafter of lickspittles who make up the City Council.

Rahm and his boys pulled another fast one in the Council the other day when he got Ald. Anthony Beale (9th), chairman of the Transportation Committee, to introduce an innocuous resolution placing a non-binding taxi-cab fare hike referendum on the March 18th ballot. Then Ald. Balcer (11th) and "Slow Eddie" Burke (14th) introduced two more resolutions related to gun control.

But what people didn't see was that this filling up of the dance card for March 18th means that there's no room left on the ballot for a referendum on an elected school board.

Rahm and Burke must be high5-ing each other over their shenanigans. But there's more than one way to skin this turkey.

THE PROGRESSIVE WAVE

Speaking of that, I'm giving a drumstick salute to the emergence of a new political movement that has the potential to shake up national and especially urban politics to its foundation. The Nation calls it, "the Progressive Wave", a national trend that has produced powerful grass roots victories, not the least of which was the election of Bill de Blasio in New York. The N.Y. City Council will have also have twenty-one new members, many of them elected with backing from the Working Families Party.

WFP executive director Dan Cantor said, in reference to de Blasio’s presence at the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests, “We are living in the world Occupy made. We are the beneficiaries of what they did in terms of making this [about] inequality, which is from our point of view the core issue of our time.” What OWS did, yes—along with the organizing and electoral infrastructure patiently built by labor and community groups.

Next stop -- Chicago, I hope.

Byrd-Bennett, the Great Disruptor, is at it again

“This is reflective of the [schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s] commitment to bring stability to our communities after consolidating underutilized schools.” -- CPS Liar-in-Chief Becky Carroll.

Last week we heard this from CPS' number-two, Tim Cawley: “It is highly disruptive to relocate people from their existing school to another school.” He meant, of course, that it's disruptive only when kids from wealthier Lincoln Park were facing being moved to "underutilized" (100% black) Manierre. 

Today we read that Byrd-Bennett, while not currently planning more mass school closings this year, is still working on more smaller-scale disruption. In this case, she is planning to move Frazier into Herzl. Aside from increasing the chaos in the lives of kids and families, the move will double the size of Frazier (research, schmeesearch) and force turnaround school Herzl to compete for space and resources within its own home.

Natasha Edmondson, whose 8-year-old daughter attends Herzl, is concerned about the plan to move a new school in. She said she hadn’t heard about the proposal until a reporter called. Herzl, she said, is a “turnaround” school — a low-performing school that was academically overhauled — and the kids are just now getting used to the new teachers and principal, among other changes. “I really don’t think the kids need another change,” she said. “They’re finally starting to adjust to the changes that have been made.”

 In Bronzeville, BBB wants to move Urban Prep into Doolittle West. Urban Prep in Bronzeville, an all-boys charter school, currently shares a building with Drake Elementary School. Doolittle West is now occupied by the Chicago High School for the Arts — known as ChiArts — which sources have said will move into the building that once housed Lafayette Elementary School, one of the schools that was closed.

Sorry if all this makes you dizzy. Just imagine how the students and their parents feel. Safe passage, everyone.

Making learning authentic

With attacks mounting on colleges of education, including from Sec. of Ed Arne Duncan, I'm happy to read the occasional story about good young teachers who learned their skills in good teacher training programs. Yesterday's piece in DNAinfo gives us a snapshot of 5th-grade teacher Heather Reed at Chicago's Pritzker Elementary, teaching the way it's supposed to be done. Ms. Reed comes out of DePaul's teacher ed program.

Now in her eighth year of teaching at Pritzker School, Reed said her approach to teaching "relies heavily on making learning authentic to my students" because "if a topic doesn't matter to them, or they can't find something interesting in it, they're not very likely to understand or remember it."

Quotables

Billionaire Rauner

Bruce Rauner

“Capitalism is the greatest poverty-fighting machine in the history of mankind, and I’m proud of the role I’ve played in it,” says Rauner who reported his last year net income at $53 million. -- Sun-Times

Alderman Harry Osterman

"We don't need a charter school. we don't need another high school in Edgewater. We have one." -- DNAinfo

Jitu Brown (KOCO)

"That is not a choice. This [closing of Dyett H.S.] is displacement by force. This historic neighborhood, we feel, is being gutted." -- DNAinfo

Diane Ravitch

 It seems to me that we are thinking about children, teachers, and schools the same way we think about sports teams. In every league, there are winners and losers. But if we think about education as a culture that is very different from that of a competitive sports league, then the picture and the questions change. -- Huffington

What Vallas did in North Chicago

“Vallas ushered in an era of massive expansion of standardized testing; the privatization of public schools through outsourcing and charter school expansion; and the devastating policy of school turnarounds, which resulted in the firing of scores of black and veteran teachers,” Lewis said after Vallas was picked by Quinn.

Before he was booted out as superintendent of Bridgeport, Paul Vallas, one of the great double-dippers of all time, was brought into North Chicago, IL, as a high-paid consultant to "reform" the largely low-income, African-American and Latino school district. IL State Supt. Chris Koch gave a $311,000 consulting deal to the Vallas Group, even though they were outbid by other, more highly-rated consultants. For Vallas, contracts in North Chicago and Rockford, IL, would mark a back-door entryway back into Illinois state politics.

Once in North Chicago, Vallas did what Vallas does. He recommended closing four of the district’s nine schools and laying off 130 teachers and staff — 39 percent of the district’s workforce. That was his view of reform.

“The Vallas Group hopes that the recommendations in this report will help North Chicago become a model for school improvement,” Vallas wrote in his June 2013 report obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times through an open-records request.

 According to the Sun-Times:

For years, North Chicago’s school system has endured extreme financial difficulties; been poorly managed; faced declining enrollment, and seen its state and federal funding drop. Its enrollment of 3,814 students is heavily Hispanic and African American, with 78 percent of students described as low-income. 

In 2011, the district’s former school board president, Gloria Harper, and its one-time transportation director, Alice Sherrod, were charged in an $800,000 kickback scheme tied to student-busing contracts.

Surprising to some is that Vallas-style "reform" -- moving into largely African-American districts, firing teachers en masse and closing schools -- is also the model favored by "progressive" Gov. Pat Quinn. He says that's one of the main reasons he chose Vallas as his running mate,  praising the great union-buster and privatizer of public schools from Philadelphia and New Orleans to Haiti  as “an independent problem solver with a proven record of reform.”

Racing to the top?

Arne Duncan, as usual, is sticking to his misfiring guns. But criticism is mounting over his $5 billion in Race To The Top grants showing no real measurable improvement in schools. 

No surprise there, since the whole strategy was flawed from the get-go. The money was used to drive massive school closures in minority communities, the unfettered expansion of privately managed charter schools, standardized testing mania, and the firing of hundreds of thousands of public school teachers. What could go wrong?

Silly us

Trinity Washington University president Patricia McGuire asks, "Can anyone differ with Duncan ‘without being dismissed as silly’?"  -- Washington Post

I have this dream that those of us who have worked in the trenches of institutional reform might actually be asked how we make reform work, how we achieved results that stick. I keep hoping that our leaders will not drive out the good in their quest to create some kind of perfect world according to their own vision — a vision often informed only by other elites like themselves, or major philanthropists, unenlightened by the real lived experience of us lesser lights who are mere practitioners of the educational arts. Silly me.

The color of 'disruption'

Racist underpinnings of Rahm's school closing policies become more obvious every time CPS brass tries to explain them. The latest inanities come from the lips of CAO Tim Cawley (who I predicted will soon be moving on). When considering moving students from overcrowded Lincoln School in upscale Lincoln Park over to "underutilized" Manierre, Cawley suddenly realized that it's "highly disruptive to relocate people from their existing school to another school.” This from Byrd-Bennett's main cheerleader for the disruption of the lives of some 30,000 children from the school closings in the city's black community.

How creepy is this guy?
In September, Rep. Trey Radel voted for Republican legislation that would allow states to make food stamp recipients pee in cups to prove they're not on drugs. In October, police busted the Florida Republican on a charge of cocaine possession.


Mayor 1%
Don's miss Jaisal Noor's interview with Kari Lydersen. She's the Chicago journalist who wrote Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago's 99%. Some interesting stuff on Rahm's underestimation of the CORE caucus within the CTU leading up the the teachers strike.

Chicago Tonight's panel of "experts". No teachers allowed.

Just watched Chicago Tonight show on dropout prevention. Shouldn't have eaten first.

The panel, which included CPS' new accountability chief John Barker, must have set the world record for empty, meaningless cliches abut Common Core and data-driven this and new metrics that. Barker was aided in elevating data about freshman-on-track above any and all other issues, by Elaine Allensworth from the Consortium on Chicago School Research.

Accountability Chief Barker

The panel was sailing right along on Phil Ponce's soft-ball questions until a few people in the audience began raising issues of poverty, violence and other outside of school crises. The panel then turned into a gaggle of hand-wringing, head-nodding sympathizers of the poor with nothing responsive to add to the discussion.

The coup de grace came when a staffer from Amundsen High School (how did he get in the building?) asked about budget cuts and when neighborhood schools would finally get the resources they need, ie. for more counselors and smaller classes, to really make a dent in dropout prevention.

No teacher allowed

Barker responded that the system was in a "structural crisis" because of teachers' pensions. Maybe after the pension fund is raided on December 3rd, the problem will be solved and schools will finally be able to afford more data to scrutinize.

Wondering if armed guards were actually stationed around WTTW to make sure no classroom teachers or CTU folks would could sneak in? After all, what would they know about graduating students. and dropout prevention?

Mayor 1% and other good reads

I'm catching up on my reading. Here's what I'm plowing through:

Mayor 1%: Rahm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicago's 99% by Kari Lydersen (Haymarket Books)

Here's a handbook for the anti-Rahm candidate in 2015. It's well-researched and remarkably up-to-date considering how fast things are moving.

Filling The Seat; The Pathway to the Superintendency for One African-Americn Woman Superintendent by Shelly Davis-Jones (Brand N Stone).

Dr. Davis-Jones is the Supt of Dist. 149 in Chicago's south suburb of Calumet City. It's one of the growing number of mainly-black, working class suburbs affected by the push-out of African-Americans from Chicago's inner-city. Her first book is her doctoral dissertation. It's a qualitative study, an oral history of one African-American woman's childhood influences, educational background, and the barriers she encountered in her career path to the superintendency. She's a friend and I am proud to see her work in print. I'm sure there's more's to come from her. 

Ruth First and Joe Slovo in the War against Apartheid by Alan Wieder; foreword by Nadine Gordimer (Monthly Review). 

Ruth First and Joe Slovo, husband and wife, were among the many heroes of the war to end apartheid in South Africa. Ruth agitated tirelessly for the overthrow of apartheid, first in South Africa and then from abroad, and Joe directed much of the armed struggle carried out by the famous Umkhonto we Sizwe. Only one of them, however, would survive to see the fall of the old regime and the founding of a new, democratic South Africa.

That should keep me busy over the holidays.

Turning the neediest overcrowded Chicago schools into beggars

BBB calls parent protest a "knee-jerk reaction" to overcrowding

The Mayor runs the schools the way he runs the city. It's a two-tier system with wealthiest and politically-connected getting the lion's share of the resources while the poorest neighborhoods and schools go begging. As a result, his hand-picked, rubber-stamp school board has become the regular target of protests by parents who want equal  treatment for their children and their neighborhood schools.

Parents whose children attend overcrowded Chicago schools stood up and let their voices be heard once again at yesterday's meeting, making it clear that their buildings deserve improvements just as much as an elementary school in the affluent Lincoln Park neighborhood that is in line for a $20 million annex.

According to the Tribune:

Sun-Times

Parents from Prieto Math and Science Academy in the Northwest Side Hanson Park neighborhood — which is more overcrowded than Lincoln, according to Chicago Public Schools figures — said one fourth-grade class overflows with 60 students while eighth-graders are taking lessons in a hallway.

"Wealthier communities that ask for more resources to expand their schools, they are listened to," said Edilia Correa, who has a prekindergartner and a fifth-grader at Prieto. "We feel happy for their parents, but we are angry at CPS for denying those same resources to our low-income communities."

Byrd-Bennett responded in her usual fashion -- chastising the parents for not coming to the board with "a plan rather than a knee-jerk reaction to the overcrowding."

The arrogance of power.

School community votes and rejects the 'military coup' at Ames Middle School

This from the Logan Square School Facilities Council

Ames activists organize against military coup

The Results Are In!
Maldonado's Military Coup at Ames Even Less Popular than Anticipated97% of Parents and 94% of Students Vote to Keep Ames as a Neighborhood School, not Military School  

Last week, Ames Middle School LSC members held a vote among parents and students on the future of Ames. Alderman Roberto Maldonado and Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced a plan in October to convert Ames into a 7th-12th grade Marine Academy-affiliated school. 

The alderman’s plan got a powerful shellacking at the ballot box. The 808 voters sent a clear message – converting Ames into a selective enrollment military school goes AGAINST the will of the community.

Votes of parents and other adults from Ames and the two main feeder elementary schools, McAuliffe and Nixon, during Report Card Pick-Up on November 12:
For Community School – 309 (96.5%)
For Military School – 11 (3.5%) 

Votes of Ames students:
For Community School-459 (96%)
For Military School-29 (6%)

In addition, 2,481 parents from across all schools in the 26th Ward and Logan Square signed a petition to keep Ames as a neighborhood school open to all students, not convert Ames into a military school. These numbers blow away the 300-person survey that Alderman Maldonado purports to have.
Ames parents will present the ballots and the petitions to the Chicago Board of Education at the November 20th meeting.

Contact: 

Leticia Barrera, Logan Square Neighborhood Association (773) 727-9941
Emma Segura, Ames parent and LSC member (773) 531-9666
Delia Bonilla, Ames parent and LSC member (773) 708-9603 (Spanish preferred)
Maria Patino, Ames and Nixon parent (773) 410-3717 (Spanish preferred)
Ana Espinoza, Ames parent (773) 216-0539

At CPS there's a new colonel in town

Rumor has it that there's a shake up brewing atop Byrd-Bennett's CPS bureaucracy. The roundly-despised Tim Cawley appears to be out as BBB's Chief Administrative Officer, replaced by former Marine Col. Tim Tyrrell who is currently running CPS' school closing debacle. 

If true, Tyrrell's appointment could be the colonel's reward to commanding the "successful" closing of 50 Chicago public schools, nearly all in city's African-American community, which was done despite vocal opposition coming from tens of thousands of Chicagoans. With the threat of more school militarization hanging heaving in the air, the appointment of the former leader of prisoner exchanges in Kosovo seems appropriate.

No word yet on where Cawley will end up. I just hope the door doesn't hit him on his way out and back to the northern suburbs.

It was Col.Tyrrell along with Byrd-Bennett, who promised that by the first day of school, “all students attending welcoming schools will experience a safe and seamless transition and have an opportunity at a fresh start.”

As it turned out, only about half of the thousands of kids who were evicted from their former schools, ever made it to their assigned receiving school. Nobody, including Col. Tyrrell, seems to know were the missing children are. Kosovo prisoners apparently were much easier to keep track of.

Tyrrell has already been involved in a CPS hiring scandal involving Catherine Sugrue, the sister of Rahm's City Council floor leader, Ald. Patrick O'Connor (40th). Sugrue now holds the newly created title of CPS director of school transition, and reports directly to Tyrell about the Safe Passage program.

Sec. Duncan's attempt to silence, intimidate Common Core critics was a miserable failure

“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were, and that’s pretty scary.”

Duncan's racist and chauvinistic swipe at "white suburban moms" for their opposition to Common Core likely got him a spanking from Axelrod, Plouffe and Hillary Clinton's people. After all, it's her 2016 campaign that will be hearing the echo of Duncan's remarks as Republicans work to separate her from her strongest base of support.

His phony act of contrition that followed only made matters worse. The “white suburban moms” remark was first reported Friday by Politico, which later reported that Duncan back-pedaled, saying that he “didn’t say it perfectly.” You can read his official "apology" for "clumsy phrasing" on the D.O.E. website.

It's actually not an apology at all. As Diane Ravitch put it, "Arne Duncan made the grievous error of speaking frankly."

There so much that's rotten, embedded in the Duncan statement, it's hard to know where to begin.

• Does he really believe that white women all think alike or that their whiteness defines their view on ed issues?
• What about "white suburban moms"? Aren't they also workers, technicians, professionals. teachers, community activists ...? Why would Duncan want to characterize them by their whiteness? Was it a conscious attempt to divide his opposition of the basis of race or gender? Did it succeed?
• What about this use of power and position to try to intimidate critics of government policies?
• As for children of a certain women being "brilliant" or not so "brilliant," or their schools being better or worse --- what does any of that have to do with Common Core standards? Does Duncan really consider the testing associated with CCSS to be a measure of smartness? An IQ test?
• Even in his "apology," Duncan implies that wealthier suburban schools are failing, like urban schools. But the data reveals that it's not the schools, teachers or kids that are failing at all. Wealthier, mainly white suburban schools districts outperform poorer urban districts (or, for that matter, other countries), precisely because they are wealthy and well-staffed and resourced. Not because moms' children are smarter or dumber. 

This wasn't Duncan's first attempt at silencing Common Core critics. Just a few weeks ago, he lashed out, referring to them as "armchair pundits." His attempt at silencing was particularly directed at those who point to poverty and the resulting inequality of opportunity as a primary source of supposed "school failure." 

Nor was it the first time Duncan has had to back-pedal after making racially insensitive or outright racist remarks. Just go back to March of 2010 when he claimed that Hurricane Katrina was ""the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans." Four days later, after receiving a torrent of criticism and doing some political triangulation, Duncan retreated, saying, "“I said it in a poor way and I apologize for that. It was a dumb thing to say." 

Sound familiar? He's only apologetic for the way he says what he really means. 

Funny stuff: Students Last blog headline -- White Suburban Moms Declared A Terrorist Group 

Chicago teacher and union activist Michelle Gunderson tweets: 

Dear @arneduncan, do you have any idea what would happen to me during my Danielson framework evaluation if I used "clumsy phrasing"?

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Chicago Neighborhood Schools Fair  (Sarah-Ji Fotógrafa) 

Julie Kosowski, CPS parent

"We are standing on the shoulders of lots of other people who have worked hard for public education to be an opportunity for everybody, and we do feel that it's being dismantled," Kosowski said. "And we're responding to that." -- At the Neighborhood Schools Fair

Arne Duncan on Common Core

“It’s fascinating to me that some of the pushback is coming from, sort of, white suburban moms who — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were..." -- Speech to State Superintendents

David Axelrod (imagined)

"Duncan said what?" 

Jose Vilson 

I get the offense, and understand the need for flexing a bit of political muscle to hold Duncan accountable again. The package deal of the Common Core State Standards has me, at best, leery of the nonsense. Just don’t expect me to get riled up, either. I’ve been mad. Perhaps you should have been angry with us, back when the levees broke … TheJoseVilson.com 

'Hope springs eternal...'

Yesterday was the first official day of basketball practice. Alexander Pope said, "Hope springs eternal." Well, at least in November before we've played our first game. I've got a promising squad of hard-working, fun-loving kids and even have some height for a change. What Pope didn't say is that "you can't teach height". That was the old Utah Jazz coach, Frank Layden.  

Great news! Diane Ravitch's health has improved (I'm certain it was my matzo ball soup that did the trick) and she has been cleared by her doctors to travel to Chicago to speak on January 11th.

Saintly and patiently progressive Deb Meier lays out her views on democratic education in yet another round of debates at Bridging Differences. This time she's trying to find common ground with traditionalist educator and Common Core advocate, Robert Pondiscio. Pondiscio wrote in the Atlantic that he once considered himself a progressive teacher but now believes that he "damaged" his poor and urban students by teaching self-expressive writing instead of focusing on grammar, sentence structure, and mechanics (as if the two were separable to a good teacher).

Hopefully, this go-around will be a better than the last one when Deb took on the insufferable think-tank hack, Michael Petrilli. Makes me nostalgic for the days of the Meier/Ravitch blog tussles.

Arne Duncan's new flavor of the month is Career Education.

So I've changed my reform plan. Earlier I had advised Chicago schools to militarize their names, ie. Special Forces High School or Navy Seals Elementary, if they wanted to get adequate funding and survive the latest round of "reform."  But nationally, now I'm leaning more towards simply adding the words Career Academy to the school name in order to receive federal funding under Race To The Top. Take the case of Dunbar Early College High School in Dayton.

This from Huffington:

Dunbar was labeled underperforming, so in 2010, the school received money for an overhaul from the federal government, a favorite Duncan project known as "School Improvement Grants." At a later step in that transformation, Dunbar reinvented itself as an "early college" school. But recent visits to schools such as Dunbar, and Duncan's late October visit with President Barack Obama to a New York City school run in partnership with IBM, show that this mentality is shifting, at least rhetorically. At Pathways in Technology Early College High School in New York, Obama called on Congress to fund career education programs to help bolster the economy.

What's in a name? Shakespeare asked. Plenty, when it comes to funding schools.