Teachers, parents, students and other allies rally downtown in Chicago on September 10, Day 1 of the Chicago Teachers Union Strike. (Photo: Sarah Jane Rhee/Chicago Indymedia.)
The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is so cash-strapped that it plans to close and consolidate under-utilized schools, with rumors that it could be upwards of 120 schools this coming year. Many people would consider this to be fiscally prudent. Mayor Emanuel is of course going to blame the soon-to-be agreed upon new union contract.
What the public does not understand, however, even though both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times have been writing about it for months, is that CPS is also simultaneously planning to open 60 new charter schools in the next few years. That decision was made last year under the “Gates Compact” in which CPS went into an agreement with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to increase charter schools in Chicago.
The CPS district has seen declining enrollment over the last decade, as have many other urban districts, because urban sprawl is sending our families to far-flung suburbs like Oswego where the housing is much larger and much cheaper than in the city. This is not because Chicago schools are “failing”–this is an urban planning phenomenon that we have seen many times in the last century. Illinois’ farmlands are being converted into towns and just as the highways of the 1940s and 1950s allowed for suburban commuters to live comfortably outside the city and quickly get to work downtown every day, the Metra and I-355 have been expanded out to Oswego and other suburbs to help push that housing development.
Thus, the decline in enrollment in CPS District 299 is a natural phenomenon. Populations ebb and flow over the decades.
But what is not natural is the city’s push for unprecedented charter expansion. The mayor loves to tout unsubstantiated statistics about how popular charter schools are among Chicago parents. Today he used a new number: now apparently the waiting list is whopping 19,000 students. Wow–that’s a lot of children who were “so unfortunate” to not get a seat at a coveted charter school.
Really? Then why did only a few hundred families show up at last year’s New School Expo, even though Chicago’s corporate elite spent so much money on promotional advertisements and even provided a free shuttle bus to Soldiers Field. Why did the UNO Charter School Network admit at the press conference at St. Scholastica last month that its organizers were going to go door-knocking in the neighborhood to try to recruit a couple hundred families to open the school this fall? Why did Andrew Broy of the Illinois Charter School Network say this week that there are 3,000-4,000 slots still available at Chicago charter schools for parents who didn’t want to wait out the strike?
Chicagoans need to understand what is happening to our school system. The mayor and his hedge fund allies are going to replace our democratically-controlled public schools with privately-run charter schools. This will have such disastrous results and people need to rise up and refuse to allow this to happen. As a parent, do you really want your child wearing a three-piece polyester suit every day to school and pay a fine every time your child’s tie isn’t on straight? Do you really believe that it’s okay for a school to punish your child with a three hour detention because he or she wanted to eat some Flaming Hot Cheetos?
And then of course, there is the dismal achievement outcome of the majority of charter schools. Urban Prep brags about its 100 percent college-bound rate when the average ACT score of its student is only 16. Where are those students going to college?
Finally, and most importantly, there is the cost. Mayor Emanuel says we will have to close and consolidate public schools to save money to pay for the new union contract. Does anyone in the public have any idea how much money it costs to open a brand new charter school and pay for the first few years while the school gets up and running? Hundreds of millions of dollars! CPS has an entire department dedicated to soliciting charter proposals, reviewing them, and then supporting the charter during its “incubation period.” Also during this incubation period, the school is not held accountable for its test scores because CPS understands that of course the school will not do well initially.
This is what we want for our children? Parents don’t want their kindergartner, 5th grader or 9th grader acting as guinea pigs for a charter school that might eventually become a good school. There is not a single charter management network that can say that all of its campuses are doing well.
Mayor Emanuel and his charter school friends are complaining that the Chicago Teachers Union strike has kept students out of school for a few days. What about the years that students suffer in low-performing charter schools that are still trying to figure out how to manage themselves as an academic institution? Even the hedge fund billionaires that are behind this push admit that every charter school is not going to succeed–so why are we doing this? Why aren’t we simply looking at what already works, at the 30 percent of CPS’ neighborhood elementary schools that are scoring 85 percent and above–some at 100 percent– on state tests. Why aren’t we replicating that?
Karen Lewis
President, Chicago Teachers Union
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(My apologies. For dome reason the site is refreshing whilst I’m typing, causing my comments to begin to post before they’re done. Hopefully this will be the entirety.)
As a Deactur Classical and Coonley RGC parent, and resident of a neighborhood (Gale, East Rogers Park) with an 86% Low-Income, failing for 14 years neighborhood school (in a ‘hood where a fixer-upper SFH is minimum 750k) making our choice to seek Selective Enrollment more a desperate need than simply a desire to consider our options, I agree with most of your letter, Karen. However, let’s be real. The reasons the 30% of schools that test above 85%… Much less the several that indeed test at 100%… are because these students are SELECTED. EVERY. ONE. OF. THE. 100%. SCHOOLS. IS. SE. Classical or Gifted, these students, including my own, are at *worst*, the top 5% if all students tested. In reality, they’re the top 1%. Both my kids, one classical, one gifted, tested in the top 1%. The second didn’t even get a first-round gifted offer with a 99% score; my first got the classical offer first round (pre-tiers) with a 99.9%. That’s literally CAPPING the test. That makes his score, in actuality, the top .01%.
You cannot replicate this district-wide. It isn’t possible. The parental involvement (and real talk: SERIOUS heavyweight connections to bring in those exorbitant finds going to singular schools like Nettlehorst, leaving nothing for other struggling parental-takeover-schools)
needed will only actually work in the affluent communities to the degree they have at schools like Nettlehorst, Coonley, etc.
Magnets such as Stone Academy and Hawthorne may be a more prudent study. Lottery choice is the only mitigating factor in admission other than the simple actuality of that pool consisting exclusively of children from families with parents savvy and invested enough to actually research theiir options and consider alternatives to the neighborhoI’d school, thus tightening the pool somewhat to those without severe social disadvantages typical in inner city youth. However, indeed there are no, ZERO, intellectual advantages at play in their success. More options like these are what are needed. Not more charters. More alternatives for those of us with severely failing district schools and zero, even under NCLB, guaranteed safety nets.
As a parent of a child in a magnet school, I realize my kids are fortunate. This school was a lottery based school and the poverty rate is only 30%. Have you ever driven by Hawthorne(selective enrollment) or Bell(neighborhood and selective enrollment) the majority of those kids are white – does not sound equitable to me. Both are located in affluent areas. Doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure this all out. The question is how to we get minority students to reach these levels – it is no secret = the majority of students who score well on these tests come from families with a higher socioeconomic level. Guess who most of those people are in the city????? We are so diverse yet still so divided in the schools. It is a shame! I want neighborhood schools to be awesome – so I could send my kids 3 blocks away – not 4 miles away!
Charter schools are not the answer to low performing schools in high poverty areas. They siphon off funds and higher performing kids from neighborhood schools, and all too often they provide a military style approach to schooling.
Statistics indicate charters skim the top performers by enrolling more students with involved parents, fewer kids who are English Language Learners and less children in special ed –and those with the least severe disabilities. They have high attrition rates, too, as they expel a lot of kids who don’t meet their expectations.
Replicating higher performing schools means providing more resources where there are high needs. What we are growing now is a two tiered system of education, with the neediest and most challenging children in neighborhood public schools that have the least resources. Funds earmarked for opening new charters need to go to high needs neighborhood schools instead, including to reduce class size.
The government must address poverty on multiple fronts, not continue to delegate that to teachers to eradicate and then blame them for not being able to do so, all by themselves and with the least resources.
It’s interesting how charters are not held accountable for their first few years so they can “get up and running.” Brand new traditional public schools aren’t afforded the same opportunity in my state.
I haven’t seen the movie, but I intend to when I can. I’d noitced from the previews that charter schools were going to be touted as the solution, but I don’t really see charter schools that way.You do raise an interesting point though: If what matters, ultimately, is the skill level and accomplishment of the teacher, how is it that the best teachers would flock to generally lower-paid and less-secure jobs with private schools and charter schools? It sounds like you’re asking why do good teachers sign up to teach at private schools where the positions are lower-paid and less-secure? I went to a Catholic high school in San Francisco and some of my teachers talked about this. For them it was the quality of the student. They felt that they were teaching and not babysitting. Prospective students have to apply (and be accepted) and once enrolled, the students and their families know that they can be kicked out. These factors make the students easier to teach that your typical mix of public highschoolers.Of course, Caroline would love to point out that charter schools have a similar selection process and that probably accounts for a lot of their success. I’d argue that Lowell’s selection process is a large part of what makes that school so successful. I think selective high schools can be good, but it’s not an appropriate model for kindergarten.