Rahm Skips Chiraq for Aspen

Rahm Emanuel had a busy week: funding CTU's pension, laying off 1,400 CPS employees, and then borrowing $500M back from the pension to pay to keep schools open. Whew! After all of that, one might expect him to keep a low profile, or be around for the 4th of July weekend since in Chiraq it will mean bodies piling up. Nonsense, readers! Rahm jetted right to Aspen to be interviewed at the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival.

The Aspen Ideas Festival is billed as, "the nation's premier, public gathering place for leaders from around the globe and across many disciplines to engage in deep and inquisitive discussion of the ideas and issues that both shape our lives and challenge our times." People who live on planet Earth have *ideas festivals* all the time and they're called conversations. Aspen's fresh mountain air and spectacular vistas must make it a special place for plutocrats and profiteers of all stripes to exchange trade secrets.

Rahm Emanuel felt the need to announce, "I am not an education reformer. My job as mayor is to make sure you have quality."

Here are some key issues of education reform and Rahm's stance:

School choice: The more, the better. Words like excellence, rigor, and tran$formation are regularly bandied about. Headline after Rahm won his second election: "A victory for Rahm Emanuel is a victory for school choice."

Teacher tenure: It is lazy, complacent teachers who are the ruin of the school system. The Reader's Ben Joravsky points out that CPS has in effect abolished tenure by redefining positions and creating other bureaucratic workarounds to the union contract.

Teachers' Unions: It is union teachers who make it impossible to effectively teach the 21st century student. Chicago's 2012 strike, massive school closings, and teacher layoffs indicate Rahm agrees.

Privatization: The free-market, corporate-driven policies of ed reform will cure all education ills. Rahm and his elected school board recently privatized school nurses who work in our buildings, the janitorial staff in our schools, and have funded a wealth of external partners to come into our schools and indoctrinate staffs in corporate edu-speak.

Rahm fully embraces every tenet of education reform, but he's not a reformer. He's the quality guy. WCT can only guess what the Doublethink Dept. will come up with when, in several months, schools open with an unparalleled level of chaos and a dearth of funds to actually accomplish anything. Will he then say he's the austerity guy?

Spotlight on Anne Mueller!

Noble Charters have received some media praise recently for their excellent results in tran$forming the lives of inner-city students and eroding the foundations of public education.  Let's turn the spotlight on their Board of Directors' Community Leader:  Anne Mueller!

Communities served by Mueller:  low-income inner-city Chicago neighborhoods

Community of Mueller's residence:  Wilmette

Percentage of renter-occupied units within nearest Noble community to Mueller: 69%

Value of Mueller's Wilmette home:  $913,164.00

Wilmette public school attended by Mueller's  2 children:  New Trier

Private alternatives to New Trier: North Shore Country Day School

Cost of one year's tuition at North Shore Country Day School:  $28, 350

Charter alternatives to public or private options in Wilmette: 0

Glib statement made by Anne Mueller designed to alleviate the guilt of being wealthy and isolated from the factors causing dysfunction in many regular CPS high schools:  "Some of these charter schools are turning out to be the envy of the North Shore."

Percentage of current Wilmette residents sending their children to Noble Charter schools: 0

Percentage of current Noble Charter students permitted to join the Gay Straight Alliance: 0

Percentage of current Noble Charter students suspended at least once during the school year: 51%

Rock on, Anne Mueller!

All census info easily Googled.

Do That Crazy Charter Dance! [Update]

Tuesday's Tribune op-ed page picks up where Sunday's left off: the sweet, sweet sounds of the School Choice Rag. Get your dancing shoes out, today's steps are: admonishment, half-truths, and rhetoric! We hope you can keep up, readers!

Step 1: The editorial board criticizes Toni Preckwinkle for daring to speak out against what she sees as the transfer of public resources into private hands. The Trib tut-tuts , "...it's astonishing to see her [Preckwinkle] launch a pre-emptive strike on a Chicago school board that faces some hard decisions for the future of Chicago's children." 

Funny, but it's the Tribune who's launched a pre-emptive strike on city teachers by featuring a litany of guest editorials by non-educators BBB, Rahm Emanuel, and local profiteer Myles Mendoza. While they proclaim choice, excellence, and high standards, they are unwilling to invest in the resources we currently have.

Step 2: Deeming charter schools with questionable motives as "excellent." WCT wonders if the writer of this editorial bothered to Google, "Concept charter school" and learn anything about this organization. Dan Mihalopoulous over at the Sun-Times thoroughly dismantled Concept in December, citing trips by elected officials to Turkey as well as raising questions about the school's ties to the exiled Islamic cleric Fetullah Gulen.

Intrinsic Charter also gets the editorial nod thanks to their promise to staff "master teachers" as well as, "teachers who deeply understand what students need to know and be able to do...". We work in a building with many teachers like this. Unfortunately due to the consistent underfunding of neighborhood schools and shifting administrative mandates, their livelihoods are left to the whims of the me-first leadership from the Board of Ed.

What's left out of this unabashed endorsement of charters is the recent data analysis by Illinois Raise Your Hand which shows 11,000 empty seats in charters. Whoops!

Step 3: A form of the word innovate is used three times in this editorial. This appealing but vague term is apparently the only solution to the "staggering need" for new schools; the students who "languish" on waiting lists; and finally the "huge need" for quality schools. The students we see who have staggering needs, who languish, who are hugely in need don't need another choice, but they do need the schools they currently attend to be resourced at a functioning level.

When the Board of Education votes on the proposals tomorrow, they will undoubtedly add more confusing steps to this dance. They'll also likely add more money to the pockets of private charter operators and friends lining up to benefit from the crisis CPS has brought upon itself.

Update:

• B3 was absent from today's meeting. It must be in the SUPES handbook to be absent from important meetings. Our REACH evaluation would surely get dinged for missing "big days," does the BOE follow the Danielson model?

• The Board of Ed. approved seven charters today, the approved groups include Rauner-funded Noble Street, Concept, and Intrinsic. Mike Madigan and Bruce Rauner must be toasting somewhere. Cha-ching!

• Aldermans Arena, Fioretti, Wauguespack, and Sposato spoke in favor of neighborhood schools, while Alderman Howard Brookins said he welcomes Concept to his neighborhood. Might he also be welcoming a boatload of money?

• Boardmember Dr. Mahalia Hines said she was not aware that the Illinois State Charter Commission is able to overrule BOE approval, thus allowing denied charters to still open. It's helpful to know the rules before jumping into the game, Doc.

The School Choice Rag

It's a return to Ragtime for the latest musical craze sweeping our city: the School Choice Rag. The beat is a three-part harmony: 1. Stop funding public schools, 2. Declare them failing, and 3. Endorse choice at every turn!

The Tribune's op-ed "It's time for school choice in Illinois" cranks up the volume on school choice to a deafening level. Trendy as choice is, the op-ed loses its beat from the start:

• Leading with a 2010 quote from City Clerk Susana Mendoza about the lone educational choice parents have, "...to send their child to a poor, overcrowded, and failing school." Ms. Mendoza shows she's a choice fan from way back based on her not one, but two trips, to Turkey courtesy of Fetullah Gulen's Niagara Foundation (Cha-ching!). So inspiring must these trips have been that she visited the Gulen-centric Chicago Math & Science Academy to videotape a testimonial.

• Citing New Orleans as an education revolution of epic proportions. Yet, blogger Mercedes Schneider has found New Orleans and their change-making ways to be an education devolution of epic failure. Schneider specifically highlights a failed New Orleans school voucher program coupled with jug-headed John Arnold's misguided contributions as nothing more than a PR ploy.

• Touting Cleveland--and the entire Buckeye State--as savvy choice operators. Instead, Ohio has a rich charter operator (cha-ching!) whose schools continually rank below Ohio's urban districts. Also, an NPR report shows that Ohio perpetually has a number of unused vouchers. 

• The Editorial Board hedges its praise only in the slightest by the gentle criticism of vouchers stating, "[they] don't always perform miracles." Is Joan of Arc on the Board of Education or is that just BOE member Deborah Quazzo?

The Editorial Board states the obvious truths, "...luck should not determine who gets the opportunity for a better education. Wealth should not determine who gets a choice. ZIP codes should not determine who gets a choice."  

Yet, pricey ZIP codes win every time. No school voucher system will solve this:

• An $18 million dollar Lincoln School annex (ZIP Code: 60614, average home price: $461,000).

• The planned opening of GEMS World Academy, a Dubai-run school where tuition will run an astonishing $31,000 - $37,000. (ZIP Code: 60601, average home price: $386,000)

• Bruce Rauner's clout nonsense to get his daughter into Walter Payton College Prep. (Rauner has too many zip codes list, but know he owns homes that range from a New York penthouse to a Livingston, Montana ranch.)

The Tribune throws its full support behind a questionably effective program that knowingly defunds neighborhood schools and destabilizes neighborhoods along with the way.

If a mainstream media outlet in Chicago wanted to be truly bold, it would begin a discussion about poverty in our city and why what we're currently doing to solve the problem doesn't work. Along with this might be the realization that until poverty is addressed, successful changes will be few and far between. But nobody wants to sing that song, instead they want to keep doing that old School Choice Rag.

A Halloween Spook-tacular!

Boo!

Starring: Rahm Emanuel, BBB, and the Chicago Board of Education

Co-starring: School Choice

Featuring special guest: High standards

Just when we thought school closings were over, here comes news that Ames Middle School will become another branch of Marine Math & Science. Seems like a school closing to us, but maybe everyone just considers it some rebranding! It's a good thing BBB announced earlier this month the new, new rules on school closings!

Rahm is trying to silence all the whiners about TIF by bribing parents with $ 7 million in upgrades. We're to infer that rebranding means Marine Math & Science can deliver better results. And choice.

Let's look at how well Marine is doing on those test scores: 34% of Marine students meet or exceed Reading standards, and 31% of Marine students meet or exceed Math standards.

Compare that to Ames, where 36% of students meet or exceed Reading standards, and 39% meet or exceed Math standards.

Since Rahm & Co. are so big on tests, you'd think all of their number-crunchers would have pointed out that Ames scores are even a little higher. We're not the fairness police, but if one school is deemed low performing in the press, then the other one with nearly identical scores, should be, too.

Trick or treat, citizens!