The Chicago plan for union-busting and privatizing that Obama appointed Duncan to nationalize. It's the end goal of NCLB: to proclaim schools failed beyond recovery, fire the staff, and turn them into charter schools, which has the benefit of union-busting and privatizing in one step. It didn't work so well in Chicago, but Obama appointed Duncan anyway.
When ex-President Bush was elected in 2000, he brought with him former Houston Superintendent of Education Rod Paige to be Secretary of Education. He also brought the "Texas miracle"—supposedly increased test scores attributed to Texas' strict accountability system. All eyes smiled on Texas as those measures quickly became part of No Child Left Behind, passed into law in 2001 by both political parties. Before the end of Bush's first term, Paige would leave in disgrace, thanks to revelations of cooked scores, forced-out students, and other barely legal means of inflating test results.
With the appointment by Barack Obama of Arne Duncan—a noneducator from the business sector who was Chicago's "chief executive officer"—as U.S. Secretary of Education, this phenomenon may repeat itself. For the past several years, Chicago's model of school closings and education privatization has received national attention as another beacon of urban education reform. This may have special relevance as the number of schools "identified for improvement" by NCLB criteria grows, numbering 11,547 nationally in the 2007-08 school year. Other school districts across the U.S. have already undertaken programs similar to Chicago's—New Orleans, in the wake of Katrina, has had a massive privatization of schools (see the special report on New Orleans in Rethinking Schools Vol. 21, No. 1), New York City has proposed closing and phasing out schools using criteria similar to Chicago's (e.g., test scores), and Philadelphia has followed suit as well, with a number of new charter schools. As Chicago Mayor Daley said in a 2006 press conference, "Together, in 12 years we have taken the Chicago Public School system from the worst in the nation to the national model for urban school reform." The Chicago Commercial Club's Renaissance Schools Fund Symposium, "Free to Choose, Free to Succeed: The New Market in Public Education," in May 2008, was attended by school officials from 15 states. The headline for a Dec. 30 article in the Washington Post claimed, "Chicago School Reform Could Be a U.S. Model." And outgoing Secretary Margaret Spellings praised Duncan as a national leader for his teacher incentive pay program.
Not exactly change to believe in; it's more Bush than Bush. Of course, the propaganda touting Renaissance 2010, the supposed Chicago "success story," just like the "Texas Miracle" Bush brought to the national scene with NCLB and Rod Paige, is based on a crumbling tower of non-truths.
So it is important to describe the agenda in which Duncan is complicit. Two powerful, interconnected forces drive education policy in the city: 1) Mayor Daley, who was given official authority over CPS by the Illinois State Legislature in 1995 and who appoints the CEO and the Board of Education, and 2) powerful financial and corporate interests, particularly the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago whose reports and direct intervention shape current policy. As Pauline documented in her book, High Stakes Education, the mayor and Civic Committee are operating from a larger blueprint to make Chicago a "world-class city" of global finance and business services, real estate development, and tourism, and education is part of this plan. Quality schools (and attractive housing) are essential to draw high-paid, creative workers for business and finance. Schools are also anchors in gentrifying communities and signals to investors of the market potential of new development sites. For Chicago's working-class and low-income communities, particularly those of color, this has meant gentrification and displacement, including of thousands of public housing residents. As in other U.S. cities, Chicago has also handed over public services (public housing, schools, public infrastructure) to the market and privatized them, and public education has been in the forefront. Although not the architect, Duncan has shown himself to be the central messenger, manager, and staunch defender of corporate involvement in, and privatization of, public schools, closing schools in low-income neighborhoods of color with little community input, limiting local democratic control, undermining the teachers union, and promoting competitive merit pay for teachers.
http://www.rethinkingschools.org/archive/23_03/arne233.shtmlI don't know how any democrat could support an agenda like this one. As has been posted here before,
Too little research goes into fact-checking what comes out of the U. S. Secretary of Education's mouth. That said, it seems fitting to start the new year by rereading then-Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan's July 2008 testimony to the House Education and Labor Committee. As Duncan offers bribes to the states that agree to deform the very roots of how they do education in hopes of getting a share of the money pot, it is vital to examine the misrepresentations, exaggerations, and downright lies on the agenda he's selling. He's holding $3.5 billion in bribes to school systems to follow his turnaround plan and $4 billion for states to pursue standardization.
http://www.susanohanian.org/show_research.php?id=324That brings us to the way it plays out under a Democratic administration: The Central Falls, RI "Turnaround." Firing all the teachers.
All the teachers at Central Falls High School in Rhode Island were fired by the board of trustees this week. More such cases are likely to arise across the US in the coming year because of pressure from the Obama administration – and the incentive of billions of federal dollars.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2010/0225/All-teachers-fired-at-R.I.-school.-Will-that-happen-elsewhereOf course, none of this addresses the sources of failure...none of it. We know what the most consistent predictor of school failure is, and it isn't teachers. We also know that teachers don't have a voice in any suggested reforms; if we did, they'd be more likely to work. The anti-teacher propaganda, the scapegoating of public education, has led too many citizens to be willing to feed teachers, and public education, to the lions. Some good points are made at the Schools Matter Blog:
The most constant and reliable predictor of standardized test scores is the income level of student families. Central Falls, RI has lots of families in poverty, almost 3 times the state average (30.1% compared to 12%). The percentage of families with income below 50% of poverty is more than twice the state average (12.5 to 5.2 percent). And these numbers were from before the Wall Street banksters ruined us.
Central Falls has only one high school, Central Halls High, and it has been on the NCLB "Needs Improvement" list for several years now. It is one of those schools that Arne Duncan has sworn to turn around, despite the fact that he nor anyone else plans to do anything about the grinding poverty that is the primary reason for the schools' low scores to begin with.
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/02/central-falls-ri-turnaround-fire-all.htmlIf the nation really wants to "turn around" public education, the first logical step would be to listen to educators. Ask us what works, what doesn't, and what we need to make fundamental changes to the system. We recognize the current system's dysfunctions better than anyone else; we have to deal with them on a daily basis. Ask us. We'll tell you.
If Obama, and Duncan, really wanted to "turn around" public schools, they'd start by eliminating poverty, and they'd continue by supporting flexibility and innovation WITHIN the system, instead of standardizing the system and reserving flexibility and some measures of local control for promoting privatizing and union-busting.
If the Democratic Party, and Democrats, continue to support the current agenda, we all lose. Public education is never a "flashy" issue that gets much time or attention. Right now it's slipping under the radar, with the nation focused on health care, the economy, and war.
How many people are writing and calling their representatives about the misuse of stimulus funds to coerce states into adopting these destructive "reforms?"
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