That’s Right Nate

Today, Arne Duncan came to Chicago for a summit on youth violence with Mayor Daley.   I’m not actually, sure what made it a summit as community leaders were shut out from the event at Chicago’s posh Four Seasons Hotel, but Arne Duncan was able to proudly proclaim that the school reform he helped to implement was not part of the issue.

I am reminded of the great scene in Casablanca where Claude Raines as Major Renault announces he is shocked and appalled to find gambling going on at Rick’s place just as he’s being handed his gambling winnings.   It was with the same condescending arrogance that Duncan was able to declare himself innocent on all charges, but the spike in Chicago’s violence among teenagers since the beginning of Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 can’t be denied.  Through every step of the process of closing down the other schools around Fenger, parents warned Duncan that violence would happen if charters were allowed to open which would force the neighborhood kids to cross multiple gang territories.

It didn’t just happen at Fenger either.   All throughout Chicago, parents and community leaders have come out to warn about the dangers of this sort of school reform and at each school and each community they were ignored.   Daley then compounded matters this year by replacing the faculty and administration at Fenger in a wholesale house cleaning in the name of education reform.   Even the lunch ladies and janitorial staff were replaced.   The adults who had relationships with the students and could help keep tensions from boiling over were put out on the street.  The amazing thing about Renaissance 2010 isn’t that there has been a spike in violence, but that the spike hasn’t been even bigger.

The Obama administration’s big new Race to the Top education initiative, rewards states for opening more charter schools. Innovative charters have a place, but much of the charter movement has not been innovative nor successful.  Instead, public education has been privatized and the result is a two tiered system.  Whether they are allowed to or not, charters do not educate the most difficult students.  Those students wind up in the public schools.   As a country, we need to make sure that we do not have two educations systems–one for the privileged and one for everybody else.  Our country should be better than that.

Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley designed many of the policies responsible for increased violence at Fenger High School

[First, I'd like to let my regular readers know that this will be a very different type of post from me. This is a serious issue that any real reporter should have been able to unravel in about 5 minutes.  Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of journalism in many places in Chicago.  I felt compelled to write about it and I can't see how to make this pithy or humorous.   Somethings do need to be serious I guess.  It's taken me 880+ posts to get to a serious story and I really hope it is at least 10 times that many before I get to another one.]

Last week a 16 year old high school student named Derrion Alberts was brutally killed during a violent battle between rival students from Fenger High School.   Nothing can possibly absolve his attackers from their responsibility in this tragic death.   However, there are explanations for what happened and how a public became a war zone that I think deserve a second look.

Fenger High School is located on Chicago’s Far South Side at 116th and Michigan.  The neighborhood has been a pretty tough neighborhood for a long time, but it was in the early 1980s when a lot of area’s jobs went away never to return.   At one time Fenger had been a pretty solid school.  It had outstanding shop programs that were designed to help students make their way into the work force, but of c0urse those classes eventually got phased out in favor of a 100% college preparatory curriculum.  This one size fits all education has been a mainstay of high school in Chicago since the 1990s.

Located at 131st and Doty, Carver High School was a neighbor and rival of Fenger.   The children of Altgeld Gardens Housing Project went to Carver High while the children of a neighborhood nicknamed “The Ville” went to Fenger.   Five years ago, as part of Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 program, Carver High School became Carver Military Academy and the students from Carver High School were displaced to Fenger.   Immediately, trouble began between the kids from Altgeld and the kids from “The Ville”.   This unfortunately has become an all too common problem with education reform as practiced by Mayor Daley and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.  In one of the most gang ridden cities in the United States, the constant closing of schools has frequently forced kids to cross into different gang territories to go to high school.   The result has been a skyrocketing youth homicide rate.

Fenger High School was a powder keg, but the one thing that seemed to keep the situation under control was a dedicated faculty.    One by  one the schools around Fenger were replaced by charter schools.  Calumet became a campus of Perspectives charter school and Englewood became the Urban Prep charter school and a small school with admission by lottery.  Fenger sadly received all the students that the other schools wouldn’t take.   Then the inevitable happened.   Because of poor test scores, the Chicago Public Schools announced that they would make Fenger a turnaround school for the 2009 school year.

There is an excellent writeup of the hearings by Kristine Mayle at Substancenews.net. The community came out to argue against doing so, but the board went ahead with their plans.  If you aren’t familiar with the term turnaround school-it is being pushed by President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan nationwide.  In a turnaround school, the faculty and principal of a school are removed and replaced by new teachers.   Sometimes, the schools close for a year and a lot of money is spent of rehabbing the school.  Unfortunately, by doing this, the CPS got rid of almost everybody in Fenger High School who knew the students and new the neighborhood.  The result was a dramatic increase in gang related violence both inside and outside the school.

On the day of the shooting, shots were reportedly fired at Fenger High School and a call was made to the police, but apparently nothing was done to deal with the trouble bubbling just below the surface of a normal Thursday at the high school.  Would a more experienced faculty and administration who were familiar with the students and the neighborhood have been able to act to stop the violence from escalating?  It’s impossible to say.   However, it is schools just like Fenger nationwide that are targeted for these kind of changes as part of education reform.  Parents, faculty, and community leaders warned of escalating violence that could happen, but they were ignored.   A 16 year old honor student was killed.   Sadly, he was not the first victim of school reform and he probably will not be the last.

Nate Peele: I’m here with Tony Federko who is a Chicago Public Schools teacher.  I wanted to get his thoughts on Obama’s proposal to extend the school year and school day.

Tony Federko: Thank you Mr. Peele, but when you asked if we could have a conference, I expected that you wanted to talk about your daughter Emily.

NP: Well, she’s doing fine–isn’t she?  She loves your class and I think she’s really learning a lot so far this year.

TF: Yes, but…

NP: Good, now how do you agree with the liberals or conservatives on education?

TF: I don’t really see a difference honestly.   Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton are currently promoting the President’s education reforms.

NP: Really?  I wasn’t aware of that.   What do you think of the President’s idea to expand the school year?  He says we’re falling behind other countries because we don’t spend enough time in school.

TF: He’s wrong.  Don’t get me wrong I voted for him…

NP: Oh really?

TF: Anyway, Obama said that he wants our children to go to school as much as they do in Korea.   An American eighth-grader gets about 1,150 instructional hours per year while a South Korean would get 923.  Our kids have more instructional time than Taiwan, The Phillipines, and Japan who score higher than us on aptitude tests.

NP: Right, because we have teacher’s unions.

TF: Most of those countries do too.  The difference is we have a third world rate of child poverty and a third world medical system where children are forced to go to school sick and malnourished.   We also count everybody on our tests, but they only count citizens.   We do better on these tests than most developed countries like Germany and England.

NP: Germany and England are socialist countries you know.  Still, education reform is a good thing.   Don’t we need to run schools like a business?

TF: Business isn’t doing too well right now.  Maybe we should run businesses more like schools.   If we wanted to run it like a successful business, we’d start with the employees who are in the trenches everyday.  Instead, reform seems to stem from corporations who want a chance at all the money in education.

NP: Liberals are like that with social programs.

TF: It isn’t just liberals.  The very people who attack the Heritage Foundations of the world on Health Care and demand a public option are the same people joining forces with the Heritage Foundation on education to push for more charter schools.   Charter schools do the same thing insurance companies do and do not always take the students with pre-existing conditions like behavioral issues or learning disabilities.  Despite all that, test data shows that the charters don’t do as well as the regular schools at educating kids.

NP: Don’t you think that the school day should be longer?   I’d love to have a job like yours where I get out at 3:00

TF: Before we talk about adding more hours to the school day, maybe we could talk about paying teachers for the hours they already work.   Georgia has started furloughing teachers and states like California are hemorrhaging jobs.  I work a 10 hour day of which I get paid for 6 hours and 15 minutes.   Even if I was paid for an 8 hour day, they couldn’t afford it.  You know I always tell people who say they’d love my job, that they should go to school and become teachers–or go to a charter school where you wouldn’t even have to take education classes to teach.

NP: I think I’d be a great teacher.   I have a way with kids you know.   Don’t you think we need to have tougher standards for teachers though?

TF: With charters, we’re actually making the standards lower, but here’s the problem.   If you have 1000 apply for 1000 job openings, you can’t be selective.  In the wealthy school districts and the schools where they have new computers and good security they can hire good teachers.   In inner city schools some good teachers are working hard, but sometimes they have to scrape the bottom of the barrel.

NP: So how would you improve schools?

TF: First, I’d pay teachers more for working at those inner city schools.   Then, I’d try and reduce class size.   People who say that it doesn’t make a difference haven’t taught.  I’d give teachers more preparation time because many of us work almost as many unpaid hours as paid hours.   I’d keep tenure because  due process is important in this type of job, but I would make it easier to terminate somebody who was obviously not doing their job.  I’d focus more on public education and only allow charters that did creative or experimental curriculum that could be studied and possibly implemented in the public schools.  Doing those things would give you a better pool of candidates for teaching jobs.  Then comes the next two big steps:

I’d search out successful people in business, sports, the arts, you name it and I’d ask them what was it in school that helped make them successful and I’d try and reproduce it.   Everything is so geared for tests now and I don’t believe those are the most important things.   Then, I’d pass very strong health reform with a public option and I’d make childhood poverty a major focus.

NP: So is it too late to get my daughter transferred to another class?

TF: I’m afraid so.

NP: OK, well thanks.

An ungrateful community resident complains about UNO

I hate to write about local stories because I know that I am shrinking my audience.   Why would anybody care about what’s going on in Chicago if they lived in New Jersey.   I’m happy to say that with Arne Duncan as our Secretary of Education, this Chicago miracle may well be exported to a school district near you.   I’ve talked about charter schools before and raved about them.  They’re a great way to crush the teacher unions and at the same time use the free market to make some good money educating children.

The UNO Charter School Network has been around Chicago since the early 90s and  now has 9 schools in the Chicago area named after important Hispanic figures like Bartolome de las Casas who was an important figuring in bringing African slaves to the Americas.  The United Neighborhood Organization began as a grassroots movement on the Southside of Chicago, but has since moved way beyond that.   Their charter schools are now nationwide and they are very close allies with Chicago’s Mayor Daley.   In fact, they had a back to school celebration this week that doubled as a rally for Mayor Daley’s pet project bringing the 2016 Olympics to Chicago.   They just took $100,000,000 in stimulus money to build new charter schools, but now let’s get to the educational miracle.

Up until June, De la Cruz middle school was a top performer.  It had won the Spotlight Award from the state board of education for 2008 and despite being in a neighborhood with a lot of students still learning English and a serious gang problem, De la Cruz had managed to be a rare educational success story in the city of Chicago.   Unfortunately, when the city cut bus service to the school attendance dropped and while small classes are a selling point for charter schools, in public schools it is called “under utilization.” At an emotional meeting last year in front of Arne Duncan it was announced that the school would be closed and the building demolished.

At that point, most urban school districts would have given up the building for dead as it closed out the year, but Chicago is the city of broad shoulders.  A new phone system was put in, a perpetually leaking basement was plugged, installing new windows, and  repair and renovation was taking place all the way up until the last day of school.  Yesterday, at the Chicago Board of Education meeting all that repair paid off.  It seems that UNO needed a building for its Octavio Paz school and now with all the repairs the former De La Cruz building is now inhabitable.   The city was able to lease that building to UNO for $1.  Now everybody’s happy, right?

Unfortunately, we still have the ungrateful parents of the neighborhood aren’t thrilled to have a UNO moving into the building.   They can’t understand why their school was too small, but UNO would be able to cap their enrollment at 480 students for the year.   UNO continues to build an amazing power base.  Big-time national players have taken notice. Former President Bill Clinton once courted UNO. The group has promoted the interests of North America’s largest waste hauler, Waste Management Inc., utility giant ComEd and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.  However, it was yesterday’s educational miracle that makes me think they have friends in even higher places.  They are truly blessed.

Wow! Two stories in two days about public transportation must be some sort of record. Chicago continues to break the mold when it comes to education reform under the expert tutelage of Mayor Daley. Arne Duncan became the head of the Chicago Public Schools 8 years ago with a resume that most featured playing professional basketball in Australia. Now our mayor has outdone himself by replacing the basketball playing Duncan with CTA chief Ron Huberman.

What makes Huberman such an exceptional pick is that while he has been in charge of the buses that take many students to school as head of Chicago’s buses and elevated trains, Huberman has absolutely no experience with education. The Mayor then chose a former school principal to replace Huberman as head of the CTA. I love this out of the box type thinking and I hope that the Mayor will apply it to the Police and Fire Departments as well. Too often education has been left to educators in the past. That is no way to reform anything. Educators are poisoned by their experience in the classroom which makes them incapable of pushing through the kind of reform our students need to learn. On the other hand, this experience would in now way hinder their ability to drive a bus or run a public transportation authority. There is very little in my mind about education that can’t be learned by a viewing of To Sir With Love followed by Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Huberman immediately began rolling up his shirt sleeves by announcing his first two priorities were to make basketball games safer and to close over 20 schools. This is the kind of progress I believe we can all get behind for our children and their future. Who knows, in 5 or 6 years when you step on a bus in Chicago you just might see them.

Now that he has been appointed as Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan will be tasked with the responsibility of doing for the nation’s schools what he has done for Chicago.  However, before leaving, a list of the newest schools to witness the miracle of turnaround was leaked to PURE Online. The turnaround program involves closing down schools for a year and then reopenning them a year later ideally as a charter school without the same students and children that brought the school to turnaround status in the first place.

The great news for Chicago is that once again the 60622  zip code has been targeted.  This time a couple of underutilized schools are getting shut down.  As neighborhoods improve and gentrify the upwardly mobile families moving into a neighborhood don’t want to send their children to a school that is overrun with poor often minority kids who aren’t from the same social milieu.  I mean part of the reason for moving into a gentrifying neighborhood is to get a taste for real Chicago, but sending your kids to an old dilapidated building teaming with potential future criminals is a bit too authentic.   This proven Chicago strategy of putting in a new and well-funded charter into improving neighborhoods is something that needs to be replicated in other cities.

When the landmark Board vs Brown of Education decision was handed down, educational leaders throughout the country were left with the challenge of finding a way to provide cost effective education for poor minority students, while still giving wealthier students who pay more taxes the high quality of education that they deserve.  Chicago has found a way to do both through its Rennaisance 2010 and turnaround programs.   I know that Arne Duncan is moving on to bring this educational miracle to the rest of the country, but he will definitely be missed in Chicago.

Seperated at birth?

Being a Conservative Republican, I haven’t agreed with much that Barrack Obama has done, but his choice of Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education is a great move.  Arne Duncan is not only an Illinois politician, he’s a Chicago politician.  In this day and age that should certainly count for something.   He has presided over the Chicago education miracle over the past 7 years which in many ways was the continuation of the Paul Vallas miracle in the years before Duncan took over and like much of the Bush administration Duncan has plenty of experience with no bid government contracts.

Arne Duncan has a very impressive resume.  After graduating college with a degree in sociology in 1987, Duncan went to Australia to play basketball professionally.  Returning to Chicago in 1992 he went to work as director of a childhood friend’s educational program on the South Side of Chicago.  In 1998 he became Chicago School Chief Paul Vallas’ Deputy Chief of Staff.  In 2001 he became head of the Chicago Public Schools.  I don’t think you’ll find many people with that kind of depth of experience interested in a  cabinet job.

In Chicago Duncan made a name for himself by closing down poorly performing schools for a year to turn them around by replacing the faculty and many of the students.  In the case of Orr High School he did this twice.  As most poor schools are African-American, Arne Duncan has personally fired over 2,000 African-American teachers this way.  This is a very impressive quality–the ability to see that the poor performing schools are in African-American neighborhoods and the foresight to take the moves necessary to improve them.  This strategy hasn’t always worked, but in neighborhoods that have simultaneously undergone gentrification, the results are quite impressive.

Duncan is part of a new breed of school administrator whose minds have not been poisoned by working in the classroom.  Instead they believe that the needs of children can best be met by the free market.  In his time in Chicago, Duncan has frequently reached out to business leaders to do for the schools what they have already done for corporate America.  The cornerstone of the Chicago Education Miracle is Renaissance 2010–A program designed to replace public schools with charters.   The program seems poised to reach its pinnacle next year with the opening of The  Transportation Academy of Chicago which will have the mission statement of training the city’s future bus drivers.

I believe that the Charter School System is our best hope for the future of education and charter schools couldn’t have a better friend than Arne Duncan.  Through charter schools parents who are concerned with their child’s education and have a little political pull can get a public  education at a newer school without the dangerous element that often can be found in the public schools.  If anybody can export the Chicago Education Miracle to the rest of the country its Arne Duncan.

There have been several people mentioned for Barrack Obama’s selection as Secretary of Education.  Whoever takes on this job will have a daunting task in continuing to dismantle public schools in this country in favor of for-profit charter schools, remove useless classes from our public school curriculum, and continue to punish those lazy union teachers in all ways possible.  The first big challenge is No Child Left Behind’s reauthorization–a brilliant program that works by using testing to single out struggling schools and punish them. I have heard several people mentioned for Secretary of Education and I thought I’d handicap them:

Arne Duncan – A basketball player in Australia before being tabbed by Chicago’s Mayor Daley to lead the city’s schools.  A childhood friend of singer R. Kelly, Duncan has helped Chicago usher in a host of new charters schools which let the free market take control of large chunk of Chicago’s public schools.  These charters appear are the future of universal public education  as they are able to have more rigorous standards than public schools that must admit everybody.

Paul Vallas – Arne Duncan’s predecessor in Chicago he is responsible for turning around the Chicago Public School System before Duncan.  He then went on to create the educational miracle that is Philadelphia and the soon to come miracle in New Orleans.

Inez Tennenbaum – I do not like her at all.  Back when South Carolina was #50 in ISAT scores she clashed with John Stossel.  Her scores went way up to #18 as she had said they would, but I think Stossel was onto something.  The big reason she should be eliminated is that unlike the other candidates she’s a former teacher which to me is a conflict of interest.   If you’ve been in the teacher’s union, how are you going to be expected to crush the unions.

Linda Darling-Hammond – Totally in the pocket of the unions.  How can we impose reform on them if they have the Education Secretary on their side?

Joel Klein – Has been responsible for the New York Education miracle.

Michelle Rhee – Has been head of Washington D.C. schools for a miraculous year.

Millenium Park remains a triumph of the Daley administration despite coming in $350,000,000 over budget.

GQ Magazine has just named Chicago as its city of the year. Its been a banner year for the windy city which was highlighted in the Dark Knight movie this summer.  Though I thought that particular movie was a piece of left wing propaganda it definitely showcased what a fun and livable city Chicago is. A lot of the credit goes to our mayor.

Mayor Daley is about as forward thinking an individual as you will find. When Barrack Obama was elected President, Nelson Mandela said, “Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place.” France’s Nicholas Sarkozy said, “At a time when we must face huge challenges together, your election has raised enormous hope in France, in Europe and beyond.” Chicago’s Mayor Daley said, ““You can bring your Olympics…[only] so far. Your prime minister [or] your president has to then carry the football…It helps us tremendously, but you can’t take it for granted. That would hurt us…in the eyes of the International Olympic Committee.”

Mayor Daley has Chicago on a firm financial footing. By privatizing Midway Airport, The Indiana Skyway, our parking meters, and many of our schools, Chicago has managed to bring in much needed revenue to keep our sales tax at a rate of only a bit over 10% and still afford to pay for many of our streets to be plowed in winter. The parking meter thing is a new innovation where parking rates will quadruple under a program by the city to lease the meters for the next 75 years. I suppose some would say that getting rid of every revenue generator in the city for a one time cash payment is fiscally irresponsible. Fortunately, Mayor Daley isn’t one of these people.

Daley has not been afraid to make unions toe the line either. When it comes to police protection, Mayor Daley found a kindred spirit in Jody Weis–the kind of cop who isn’t afraid of public relations work and put him in charge of the whole department. With murder up nearly 20% since he took over, that PR background will serve Weis well. For school chief, Daley chose a basketball player from Australia named Arne Duncan as his top man. Together they have worked to dismantle the public school system by using charters to privatize. Despite limp ISAT scores and increasing violence in the schools, Duncan has been the kind of man to work for change. He hasn’t been afraid to fire all the teachers at a failing school and replace them with the best teachers he could find repeatedly in some cases.  Daley longs for a days when Chicago will have schools like the Chinese where students will raise chickens to supplement the cost of their schooling.

There have been some investigations into the Chicago mayor’s office, but fortunately most of the problems no matter how large have been the fault of one faceless middle manager or another. Our mayor is above reproach.  Daley may be a Democrat, but that is more a matter of the party that controls the city.  In principles, our mayor is the type of free enterprise Republican that any city should be envious of.  Through him Chicago remains a dynamic 20th century city.