RSS
Home
Chicago Public Schools test scores rise. So what?
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Chicago Mayor Richard M Daley celebrates a two-point increase in elementary school test scores, and the Cubs win a baseball game all in the same glorious day. Credit submitted when credit is due, but neither event means a fat, flying rabbit. The Cubs are doomed so long as their hip, urban fan base calls them cubbies, and Chicago high schools are suspect for as long as they are renamed career academies. Can you imagine a New Trier Career Academy or the Barrington Hills Charter School for the Privileged Few?
The Good: 320 of the Second City’s 519 elementary schools improved their performance on the Illinois standardized test in 2009. Most Chicago elementary schools are K-8; every grade showed progress with 8th graders showing the most, a 3-point improvement. Hey, when you are six touchdowns behind, your coach is blind, and the opposing team is Lake Forest Career Academy, a 3-point field goal is a big deal.
The Bad: Fewer than half of all black males in the United States graduates high school, and according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, Illinois ranks 43 out of 50 states, in graduating just 37%. I can tell you as a former Chicago teacher that getting a diploma from the Chicago Public School system (CPS) isn’t difficult. If you show up most of the time, limit your crimes to misdemeanors, and don’t protest having to read Heather Has Two Mommies, you graduate. Apparently 63% of Chicago black guys, 2 out of 3, cannot manage to do that.
The Inescapably Ugly: Sarah Karp, in CATALYST CHICAGO’S June edition wrote: In Chicago’s public schools, African-American males are suspended and expelled at a higher rate than any other school group. CPS has one of the highest rates of suspensions of any big-city school district. The racial disparity for African-American males is even starker with expulsions, which are also on the rise. More than 60% of expelled students last year were black boys, up from 53% just five years ago. (Hayes comment: Which coincides nicely with the seven-year CPS CEO reign of the wonderful Arne Duncan.) The statistics have stunned local and national educators and youth advocates, who say the disparity may warrant investigation by the Office of Civil Rights in the U.S. Department of Education. (Hayes again: that means Nice Guy Duncan would be investigating himself; who moved my white rabbit?)
Let’s talk about the boots-on-the-ground reality of black male adolescents from a retired principal who has disarmed over a dozen young men, squashed a few career academy drug trades, and intervened in multiple gang wars, and yes Virginia, raised test scores in my spare time. Black males get suspended and expelled from school because they violate the school district discipline code and bloody well deserve it. Left alone, black boys will destroy a school with threats, intimidation, violence and bad fashion.
Tip for new urban principals: Don’t waste your time suspending the bad guys for short periods of time; that has minimal effect. Understand that lawbreaking children come from suspicious homes where parents are sometimes engaged in dubious enterprises during the school day. Those parents don’t want the kids at home. Ever notice how the students with the worse discipline records have the best attendance rates? They’re never absent! Go for the max because you’ll get the parent’s attention. If you can’t trust the dude in school, ‘she’ can’t trust him at home and will have to miss work, curtail her home business, or beg someone to watch junior. It isn’t easy to find a friend or relative that will give up a week or two of their life to babysit a gangbanger. The result is that you’ll finally get parent cooperation because ‘she’ will kill the kid herself the next time he is sent home for a long suspension. My minimum suspension was 5 school days. (Note for non-educators: the maximum period a principal can suspend a student is 10 days, with recommendation for expulsion if the misdeed merits it, and the School Board takes it from there. Special education bandits are a whole ‘nother’ ball game, to be addressed in a later article.)
Gentle people, the issue is not whether tis nobler in mind to charter or not to charter, or if we test the kids until they are stir-crazy, or exhaust ourselves in some mindless search for the ‘best practice.’ This thing of darkness is simply the adult inability to communicate love, dignity, and concern to black male children. Black boys aren’t born thugs. What we have here is a system of teachers and administrators hostile to black males.
Yes, I doled out punishment in harsh terms, but I also knew that when the lawbreaker returned to school, he had at least one person in the building that gave a rabbit about him, ME! After working with the kid, behavior inevitably improved. What I failed to do in my education career was to remove the titanium barrier between white teachers, most usually female, and young black males. The rancid combination of unions, protective tenure laws, and gutless superintendents for whom I, and others, worked doomed an entire racial demographic group to abject human failure. That is our public school issue and until Arne Duncan and others we pay to solve problems deal directly and honestly with this problem, we will continue to lay the serpent’s egg.
.
Related Articles:
Comments
