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Blowing up bad Chicago schools did not work for Arne the Duncan
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Ron Huberman and Arne the Duncan
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan shut down 61 schools in which students failed to perform at a basic academic level and opened 75 new schools while serving as Chicago’s school superintendent for seven years. The University of Chicago has released a study saying most students who moved to other schools following school shutdowns showed no change in performance. Duncan countered by saying, ‘The reason was that the students moved to a similar level of schools, and students who moved to better schools saw their performances improve.’ All right Mr. Duncan, since you seem to understand this problem, why didn’t you prevent it? Were you just the superintendent for the better schools?
There are 662 schools in the Chicago Public School (CPS) system. Duncan claims he led a successful school reform initiative by shutting down ten percent of its schools and tossing those kids into other schools that probably should have been closed as well. He closed Carver High in Altgeld Gardens and send the refugees to Fenger. Fine. Nothing in Chicago government works as it should; everything is either broken, like our pothole-laden streets, or costs us more than it does other Americans, like our gasoline. So it is incredible that anyone would expect our schools to be anything other than what they are, abysmal. Fine. There is no crime in being Chicago inept and Cook County obtuse, indeed that is what the body politic here expects. But spreading our convoluted and ineffective methodology to other municipalities makes Duncan the sociological equivalent of Typhoid Mary.
Chicago schools shifted from closing schools to what is known as a turnaround strategy in 2006 after criticism on the closings. The strategy fires and replaces the staff of a low-performing school, keeping the students in the same location. Since Duncan flew the coop for a better job, as did his predecessor, analysis after analysis and study after study have proven that he accomplished nothing in seven years, and may well have made some things worse.
Despite the study’s results, Andy Smarick, distinguished visiting fellow at Thomas B. Fordham Institute in Washington, D.C., and the author of the Education Next article ‘The Turnaround Fallacy,’ said Chicago would have been better off sticking with school closures than changing to a turnaround plan. ‘Sometimes institutions or organizations are just broken,’ Smarick said. “Every other field or industry has a mechanism or a tool to get rid of persistent low performers.
The new edition of a CPS CEO, Ron Huberman, who knows even less about public schools than Duncan, has announced his plan to add six more charter schools to the system. Fine. However, seven years from now we will be looking back on Huberman just as we are doing with Arne and asking: Where’s the Beef, unless Huberman fixes his leg of the broken triangle, teachers.
Leg one is low-income parents that persist in generating low-income children without fathers; Huberman cannot fix that. Leg two is the low-income children that impede the education of other low income children by using such methods as railroad ties, handguns, and bad fashion. Huberman cannot change that. Leg three is the teacher that only shows up for the paycheck and cannot connect with low-income, parent-challenged students. Teacher personnel is the grid coordinate where Huberman should spend his time and our money. Otherwise, we are destine to wind up right where we started.
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