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The horror of Chicago school reform
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In order to save Harper High School, we had to destroy it. That sentence is a variation on the infamous quote by a flustered U.S. Army officer in Viet Nam in February of 1968. It is very close to what actually happens at some of the Arne Duncan student warehouses that Chicago calls a school. Azam Ahmed, in the Tribune, reports the entire staff at Harper was fired at the end of the 2008 school year in the dreaded School Turnaround Program. Chicago Public Schools (CPS) are composed of 600 schools, over 100 of them are ‘regular high schools.’ Not one of them, not a single one of these neighborhood high schools in the magical, mystery reform program formerly managed by the new U.S. Secretary of Education meets state academic standards. No wonder Chicago parents are in a panic to get their children into one of the handful of selective enrollment magnet schools, a panic that is being investigated by the U.S. Justice Department.
Sadly, many urban parents drop off their cute five-year olds at the front door of a CPS elementary school, ignore their education for a decade, and then return thirteen years later to pick them up at the back door of a CPS high school. Only half of those little cuties graduate in this town, and the half that does ‘don’t read too good. ‘ Rather than run another gauntlet of boring academic statistics for all of the Chicago horror left behind by Duncan, let’s just look at the boring stats from this one storage unit in the notorious Englewood neighborhood I used to live in: Harper High.
In 2007, Harper, a school with a student body of 1,250, experienced 1,100 fights. I am shocked. How did 150 kids avoid fighting; were they hiding? If they were, it was likely in the library among the books. Less than seven percent of Harper’s students met the state standard on the Prairie State Achievement Exam (PSAE) IN 2008. If you drive through Englewood, you’ll see many of the young men on the street wearing oversized white t-shirts and baggy pants. That isn’t the uniform of any one gang. They do this so that they cannot be distinguished from one another if a police call goes out describing a young thug by the way he is dressed. I suppose if you must turn a school around, Harper is it.
But then, Harper High was turned around once before under a school reform plan called RECONSTITUTION when non-educator Duncan’s non-educator predecessor, Paul Vallas was stuffing the rabbit inside his hat in 1997. Duncan pulls the bunny out in 2008 and the school is still broken. But the school did change under Reconstitution. It got worse. In 2008, its PSAE meets-standard rate was seven. In 2003, it was 13.6%. But of course, while the Vallas rabbit was still cooking in the hat, quicksilver Paul got out of town before the locals could hold him accountable. The average length of tour for an urban school superintendent is three years; they’re all rabbit masters. Duncan lasted twice as long under the protective wing of Mayor Richard Daley, so it makes sense that Harper’s academic performance was twice as bad.
The Tribune’s Ahmed continues, ‘Harper’s Reconstitution was in ways eerily familiar to the current Turnaround. Teachers reported being extremely pleased with the principal, safety improved, and attendance rates rose. THAT WAS MORE THAN A DECADE AGO. Today, for all the reform, the most challenged students at Harper still read at or about a fourth-grade level. Reconstitution, a concept similar to Turnarounds, did not improve performance. The district (CPS) also brought in businesses and universities to consult with school administrators, to little effect. An effort to break up large sprawling schools into several smaller ones also proved no panacea.’
Reconstitution, like Turnaround ruins adult careers and accomplishes nothing for children. Educators and pretend educators alike send the public out chasing wild rabbits in desperate hope of acquiring a reasonable education for their children. Many families, black and white, left the city because of the horrid schools. Mayor Daley is luring them back to Chicago with his expensive Magnet school initiative. Good for him. But that isn’t school reform. If you look at your old car, see it is a clunker, and go out and buy a new one, you didn’t reform your old car. You abandoned it.
The first step in school reform is to identify the problem; diagnose the disease. When eighteen year old graduates are reading at the fourth-grade level, curriculum design isn’t the problem. The Quixotic search for the elusive Best Practice is a windmill chase; neither does it exist, nor is it important. Human beings thirst for knowledge and don’t have to have a perfect path for its acquisition. Cut the rabbit puckey.
The problem is personnel. Our urban, minority boys don’t connect, relate, or communicate with our urban teachers. I am not talking theory or textbook; I have seen it. And the statistics corroborate what I saw. For every ‘good’ white, female teacher in a predominately black school, I have experienced a half-dozen that are terrible. The union protected them and black parents did not hold them accountable in the same fashion as the parents in Naperville would. I have lived it, fought it, and lost. Arne the Duncan, in his simplistic non-educator approach to the problem probably understands this. That is likely why he is destroying schools and replacing them with charters. Good first step Arne, but where is your second?
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