If Mayor Richard Daley walks into your office and tells you to remove your car from his parking space, you will do it. If he sends in one of his flunkeys to tell you to move your bloody car, you will do it. The only distinction between the two requests is how much you grovel, bow, and scrape before doing as you are told. Past Chicago Public School (CPS) CEO, Paul Vallas, walked into the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) president’s office in 1995 and told her to move her union out of his way because the mayor said so. She did. You would too. That was the whole of Chicago School Reform. It didn’t make any difference at all whether the messenger was Vallas, Arne Duncan, new CEO Ron Huberman, or Pee Wee Herman. When Mayor Daley says make a hole, you get out of the way, and you do it with a smile.
Non-educator Vallas did nothing to make schools better for struggling urban youth; non-educator Duncan did less, and the new non-educator Huberman after three months on the job is on paternity leave following his announcing that he and his male partner have a baby. Real educators who previously sat in the CPS superintendent’s office did not have direct backing from City Hall. They were weak administrators that chose not to fight the CTU. They may have tried, but not one of them did anything except appear to be busy.
Mayor Daley was quoted by Fran Spellman in The Chicago Sun-Times article yesterday: ‘Years ago, no one even wanted to go to any Chicago school. We had Whitney Young, and you had thousands of applicants. Now we have Jones. You have North Side Prep. You’ve got Gwendolyn Brooks. We got Walter Payton. (All Chicago magnet high schools) And we hope to build four or five more as quickly as possible. What we have to do is build more magnet schools all over the city.’
Magnet schools are selective enrollment institutions that are free to ignore the children who live in the neighborhood where the school sits, and to take in students from all across the city. Translation: white kids. White kids come fully equipped with white parents. White parents have the cash for down payments on the new homes being built all over the city with starting prices at $400,000. These families are the future tax base for the city. Clearly school reform in Chicago means real estate boom. It has nothing to do with teaching and learning.
The schools are still atrocious, but Daley got exactly what he wanted: A reversal of white flight from Chicago to the suburbs. Fine, but don’t call a real estate program, ‘school reform’ and try to sell it to other cities. U.S. Secretary of Education and National Nice Guy, Duncan is jetting all across the nation selling mayoral control of schools; he says: ‘Part of the reason urban education has struggled historically is you haven’t had that leadership from the top,’ Duncan told the Associated Press. ‘That lack of stability, that lack of leadership is a huge part of the reason you don’t see sustained progress and growth.’
That’s true Arne, I agree, but how do you improve schools for kids?
Gerald Bracey, ‘fellow’ at the Educational Policy Studies Institute at Arizona State University wrote, “Our Secretary of Education has been on a ‘listening tour’ where he’s done most of the talking. He advocates repeatedly, that mayors should take control of urban schools. Obviously he cannot take an honest look at his own accomplishments under his governance (of CPS) system or, he’d have to shut up.’
Bracey continues, ‘Ron Huberman fired the faculty and staff of sixteen schools in less than three months after replacing Duncan. If Duncan had worked the miracles his PR machine claimed, Huberman should have been able to spend most of the day smoking cigars, tweeting, and embellishing his image on Facebook. (Or changing diapers). Newsweek said the district (CPS) is mired in urban woes, and in some cases, a sense of complacency. Complacency? Daley has had control of Chicago’s schools for 13 years and Duncan was there for seven of them, but the test scores are evidence that they didn’t do much to stir anything but the public relations pot.’
After returning from extended duty in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2005, I, as a lifelong and native-born Chicagoan was delighted with the improvements Daley made in beautifying my hometown while his administration pursues the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Upscale homes, Millennium Park, housing projects bull-dozed, and hundreds of axel-braking pot-holes repaired with pink filler. However, I was in between jobs and worked a few months as a CPS substitute teacher in several south side high schools. With the notable exception the Military Academy in Bronzeville, the schools were awful, the teachers exhausted, the students wild, and the principal well-dressed with a Mercedes in the faculty parking lot.
I am all for increasing property values and adding to the city’s tax base, and I love Mercedes-Benz; but it would be cool if we could get some real school reform as well.
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