A Thin Line Between Love & Hate

It's been a fascinating 48 hours in the life CPS: three cash-starved schools privatized, other neighborhood schools praised for improving a never-before tracked statistic called Freshman On Track, and the Northside discovering they are, yet again, the lucky recipients of a new Selective Enrollment school to be named after Barack Obama. Do CPS & Rahm love students, families, and teachers or do they hate students, families, and teachers?

Though our heads our spinning, let's take a deeper dive into the data, shall we?

• The three turnaround schools--Dvorak, Gresham, and McNair--will all be run by AUSL despite strong community protest. Up until 2009, David Vitale, current Board of Ed. president was also the chairman of AUSL's board. Conflict of interest, anyone, anyone?

• While the turnaround schools were starved of cash, AUSL gets a one time profiteer fee of $300,000 for each school they improve implode. It makes one wonder how CPS can suddenly find close to $1 million dollars to give to AUSL, but couldn't find that money to fund these schools at a functional level. Yep, that goes in the hate column.

• WCT hates to nay-say, but it's pretty suspicious that University of Chicago's Consortium on Chicago School Research "discovered" the Freshman On Track metric, and also published the study declaring such a metric, "the key to solving the dropout crisis." Sort of like a doctor diagnosing you with an unheard of ailment and then restoring you to health. Rahm Emanuel, too, was all emboldened talking about a new Chicago of neighborhood schools that can get the job done. So, we'll take the love where we can get it.

• Barack Obama College Prep will be built near the former Cabrini-Green public housing complex. The area is now described as burgeoning and will not be a school open to the neighborhood, but instead a $60 million TIF-financed selective enrollment. Rahm has been intractable about touching TIF funds for schools, but suddenly he can loosen the purse strings for a school in Lincoln Park. The irony is lost on no one that these funds could be used to keep teaching positions at schools that serve the other 99% of Chicago. It also seems undeserving to name a school after the president who's let Arne Duncan try to dismantle what's left of the public school system. This action has to go in the psychological warfare column since they're spending money on schools, but not in any areas that are in dire need.

Emanuel, touting the big turnaround  in Chicago education, offered former Secretary of Education William Bennett, "a one way ticket" back to Chicago to see the progress.  Instead, we'd like to offer Rahm, B3, and the entire Board of Education a one way ticket away from our schools.

Beware the Zombie Ideas

In Sunday's New York Times Paul Krugman talks about zombie ideas: "an idea that should have been killed by evidence, but refuses to die." While Krugman's op-ed is about an overstated skills gap in the American workforce, his point fits perfectly with CPS's current obsession with ideas that refuse to die. 

Some of these ideas are:

• B3's insistence in her latest From the Desk of the CEO that the school closures over the past year have been successful, "Data is encouraging and trends are promising." As our Thought Partners are wont to demand, "Show us the day-ta!" B3's newsletter is a little spotty on the, ahem, numbers.

• AUSL knows how to staff schools better than currently employed teachers, administrators, support staff, and maintenance crews. In fact, AUSL was just recommended to be the manager of three new turnarounds closings. This, despite a study from the organization Designs for Change which states that schools with democratically-led governing systems outperformed turnarounds. While we know Rahm and his ilk are likely to say, "Democracy, shmasocracy," this study shows how school-based democracies can be effective.

• Teachers created the pension crisis. Wrong again. The CTU lays out some facts and figures which illustrate the consequences of "successive pension holidays" between 1995 and 2005.

Zombie ideas are everywhere, arm yourself properly!

Conscious Uncoupling

The Internet has been abuzz for the last 24 hours trying to figure out what Gwyneth Paltrow meant by the phrase conscious uncoupling. WCT only hears such mystifying terms during professional development sessions with our Thought Partners. It turns out, psychotherapist Katherine Thomas is a Thought Partner to the stars because conscious uncoupling means saying goodbye, but feeling okay about it.

Perhaps our elected school board retains the services of Katherine Thomas. The school board seems to have no problem uncoupling themselves from money to buy new office furniture. $5 million dollars worth of new furniture. That's in addition to the $4.5 million dollars they already had earmarked for new furniture. Herman Miller chairs for one and all! That's close to $10 million dollars to move into new offices while over 50 schools were closed this year, and 3 school turnarounds closings were just announced. 

The stellar decision-making from CPS just keeps on rolling.

Management & Labor Agree?!

This weekend was the first Network For Public Education Conference. Sadly, WCT was snowed in, but a speech given there by Superintendent John Kuhn of the Perrin-Whitt Independent School District in Texas and Chicago's own CTU President Karen Lewis shows that it is possible for management and labor to agree on educational issues.

Click the link to watch the joint keynote address by John Kuhn and Karen Lewis. John Kuhn is up first with Karen Lewis's portion beginning around 13:00. Enjoy and try to imagine any CPS superintendent co-speaking with any union president.

A Questionable Legacy

If CPS families, teachers, and staff need further hints that Chicago's media and corporate elite are ready to make them a relic of the past, look no further than the Tribune's Thursday editorial subheading: "Let charter schools breathe life into empty CPS buildings." The editorialists seemingly believe these buildings are self-organized entities who chose to empty themselves. It's not as though CPS willfully underfunded schools and then, ahem, closed them or anything.

Today's Tribune shameless charter plug is for Legacy Charter in the North Lawndale neighborhood. The hot investment property (cha-ching!) Legacy would like to acquire is the former Pope Elementary School, located at 1852 W. Albany Ave. We're informed Legacy's possible probable expansion is, "a terrific idea for students, parents, and teachers...and the North Lawndale community." Nothing like a neighborhood being told by a bunch of non-residents what is or isn't good for them.

The Tribune describes the vacant Pope as "hollow," waiting for 500 learning children to populate it. We are to infer that no learning occurred when Pope was a public school, and the sanctimonious pearl clutchers who write today's column further this notion by quoting a central office pencil-pusher who talks about, "finding a good use for these closed schools." WCT wonders if said bureaucrat is aware the school was previously in good use as...a school. This fact is not lost on residents who WBEZ captured in an August report lamenting Pope's fate. Long a community hub, a former North Lawndale resident narrated her many family members who went there and the sense of loss she felt as Pope marched towards its inevitable shuttering.

Still, readers are exhorted to think of the "opportunity and positive change" schools like Legacy might bring to a community. As an afterthought readers are told, "any strong school" could generate this energy, too. 

Unmentioned in this unabashed endorsement of privatization is that by CPS's own measure Legacy is considered weak in the following areas: student growth, student attainment, culture & climate, and safety. WCT supposes that Legacy's hedge-fundy, corporate-y board members from Wealth Strategist Partners, Dentons, and Willis Stein & Partners make the school's meh performance acceptable because nobody knows education like the business world.

No Big Surprise

In the increasingly acrimonious public education landscape, it should come as no big surprise that Karen Lewis hints that teachers will not want to add the optional year to their contract: "In a recent interview with Catalyst Chicago, CTU president Karen Lewis laughed when asked whether the union plans to terminate the contract in June 2015 rather than renewing it for another year. She indicated she is pretty sure that teachers would not want to extend the contract." 

Jesse Sharkey, the CTU VP, furthers the argument stating teachers' displeasure over the new evaluations, lack of adequate substitute coverage, and the longer school day that's never been properly funded. Sharkey calls the language renewing the agreement "meaningless." 

CPS: always true to its meaningless form.

Looks like we might want to ready our strike gear for August 2015.

Thanks Karen, Again.

Last week, in typical CPS fashion, B3 issued a statement angering many parents and teachers. B3 kinda, maybe said parents could choose to opt their kids out of tests. That is only if parents talked to the principal and realized that by opting out they'd damage their child's future and the school's ranking. And probably make those testing companies less profitable with a bunch of unused tests sitting around. 

Some would call B3's statement an exercise in false choice, we'd agree. 

Less than a week later, Karen Lewis and the CTU have responded to Bennett's threatening, huffy email with good sense and logic for parents choosing to opt their kids out of tests:

• "The ‘low stakes’ test is administered over the course of eight days in all elementary schools. Formerly used to help qualify 7th grade students for selective enrollment high schools. The district recently issued a memorandum to teachers stressing the value of “rigorous, high-quality assessments,” in measuring student progress. The ISAT, however, is not aligned to any CPS curriculum, and in Chicago, it is no longer used to measure student progress, school performance, promotion, or for any other purpose."

CPS demands students use over a week and a half of school days to take a test that isn't aligned to any CPS curriculum nor will be used for measurement of any sort? Shocking. Good thing CTU provides the money trail for us:

• "Illinois paid over $18 million this year to Pearson Corporation for the ISAT. The portion attributed to CPS is roughly $3.4 million, impacting over 171,000 students. The total cost of administering the tests are the untold hours of preparation for the exam, and the loss of valuable instructional hours that could be spent on real learning."

$18 million dollars would certainly provide real learning opportunities in the form of smaller class sizes, adequate staffing so teachers can provide meaningful help to students, and quality materials with which to teach.

Thanks again Karen for standing up for the families of CPS.