Boycott March 24 Houston Independent School District

The Fight in Chicago to Stop Mass School Closings: Model for the Nation

From SubstanceNews:

Thousands march, 127 arrested in massive March 27 Chicago Loop protests against school closings, Emanuel dictatorship

George N. Schmidt - March 28, 2013

More than 3,000 teachers, parents, students and other citizens rallies and marched against school closings in Chicago on March 27, 2013, and 129 were arrested during civil disobedience to protest the largest number of public school closings in U.S. history, according to a number of Substance reporters and other sources who were present at the events. The rally, marches, and sit-ins, are a continuation of the protests that began when the current "Chief Executive Officer" of Chicago's public schools, Barbara Byrd Bennett, announced in October 2012 that she had secured an extension of the deadline required by state law to announce the closing list for the 2013-2014 school year.

Protesters filled the block alongside Chicago's City Hall (right in the above photograph) and numbered in the thousands despite the attempt by Rahm Emanuel's out-of-town Chief of Police, Garry McCarthy, who ordered the police to downplay the size of the protest in a move reminiscent of the days when the Nixon administration was downsizing official estimates of anti-war protesters against the Vietnam War. Substance photo by Susan Zupan.On March 27, 2013, the protests, coordinated by the Chicago Teachers Union, others unions, and a broad range of community groups and faith-based entities, began the final assault against the mayor's drive to privatize and sabotage the public schools in the nation's third largest school system.

Press reports begin below here

Broad Academy Alum, John Covington ('08), Shuts Half of Kansas City Schools

The Kansas City School Board was enthused when they hired John Covington (Broad Class of '08) as Superintendent. So was the Kansas City Star's Editorial Board:

Covington earned good reviews for his work as superintendent of Pueblo City Schools in Colorado over the last three years. He also is a 2008 graduate of the Los Angeles-based Broad Superintendents Academy, a program aimed at improving education in urban school districts.

School Board President Marilyn Simmons said the Broad experience, which includes continuing support and advice, was a plus for Covington.

Yes, that continuing support and advice from Eli and the Boys. Now with half the schools empty by this coming Fall, they will be ripe pickings for the property-hungry corporate welfare charters that will likely kill off most of the remaining public schools. The Board voted 5-4 to support the Broad plan to pull the Kansas City Public Schools into the bath tub for drowning. From the AP:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Kansas City's school superintendent said Thursday the plan to shutter nearly half the district's schools, while "painful," will move forward quickly so that all the closures will be complete by fall.

The school board narrowly approved the plan Wednesday night to close 29 of the district's 61 schools to try to stave off bankruptcy. The closures have angered many parents, students and teachers, but administrators say they had no choice because without them, the district would have been in the red by 2011.

"It has been a difficult and painful and emotional process that affects our entire community," superintendent John Covington said at a news conference. "No one likes closing schools."

Now officials have to focus on the massive job of downsizing the district — reworking school bus routes, figuring out what to do with vacant buildings and slashing its payroll.

Covington said he has been working on the transition plan for several weeks and that it would be in place for the start of the school year. He gave few details, but said the plan would likely involve staggering start and class schedule times for middle school students who would attend school with high school students.

"We will be moving forward with deliberate speed to put together a transformation plan that we will be using to make sure that the quality of educational opportunities and the services that we provide for all children in the Kansas City schools that will remain open is of high quality," Covington said.

Administrators have said the closures are necessary to keep the district from plowing through what little is left of the $2 billion it received as part of a groundbreaking desegregation case.

Although other districts nationwide are considering closures as the recession ravages their budgets, Kansas City's plan is striking. In rapidly shrinking Detroit, 29 schools closed before classes began this fall, but that still left the district with 172 schools. Most other districts are closing just one or two schools.

Emotional board member Duane Kelly told the crowd of more than 200 people Wednesday, "This is the most painful vote I have ever cast" in 10 years on the board. Some chanted for the removal of the superintendent, while one woman asked the crowd, "Is anyone else ready to homeschool their children?"

Kansas City Councilwoman Sharon Sanders Brooks said the closure plan had prompted some housing developers to consider backing out of projects.

"The urban core has suffered white flight post-the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court decision Brown v. the Board of Education, blockbusting by the real estate industry, redlining by banks and other financial institutions, retail and grocery store abandonment," Brooks said.

"And now the public education system is aiding and abetting in the economic demise of our school district," she said. "It is shameful and sinful."

Under the approved plan, teachers at six other low-performing schools will be required to reapply for their jobs, and the district will try to sell its downtown central office. It also is expected to cut about 700 of the district's 3,000 jobs, including about 285 teachers. . . . .

And this from the Christian Science Monitor:

. . . .The city received $2 billion in a landmark desegregation suit in 1985. In an attempt to bring back students who had fled the public system, it proceeded to build schools with amenities such as an Olympic-sized swimming pool.

“The theory of trying to draw in middle-class families from the suburbs is a good one, but there was no sophistication to that effort,” says Richard Kahlenberg, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation in Washington. Cities such as Hartford, Conn., were more successful after thorough research on what would truly bring families back, he says.

“Without addressing the larger issue of concentrations of poverty, the Kansas City public schools are likely to continue to spiral downward,” Mr. Kahlenberg says. “Kids in Kansas City public schools ... already feel shut off from mainstream society. Now, the government is telling them even the schools that they had aren’t going to survive.... There’s likely to be even greater alienation that stems from this.”

If funding for education isn’t stepped up when the current federal stimulus dollars disappear after the next school year, more districts will be faced with dramatic choices beyond shutting underutilized buildings, warns Alberto Carvalho, superintendent of Miami-Dade County Public Schools: “Do you give up your art and music programs, or close a magnet center even though it’s popular?” he asks. “These are issues that will impact equity and access mainly in underserved communities.”

Obama-Duncan Go with the Failed Chicago Solution

From PURE (ht to Monty Neill):

Obama plan to close 5,000 schools illogical

President Obama needs to hear some noise from us here in Chicago because he has just about lost his natural mind with this idea. He's getting behind the destructive strategies of Renaissance 2010 in a way that may just destroy the heart and soul of hundreds of communities across the US.

Obama wants to see 5,000 schools closed and "turned around." Yeah, you know, he wants to take what Fed Ed Head Arne Duncan has done here in Chicago

...which hasn't worked...

and multiply it about 100 times across the U.S..

And he's going to use the precious stimulus money - you know, the money that's supposed to help create new jobs - to fire thousands of experienced teachers.

Duncan says that "The point is to take bold action in persistently low-achieving schools."

Boldly go where?

I disagree. I think the point should be to try to do something that works, not to BOLDLY go expand a program that doesn't work and actually creates worse problems.

For example, William J. Mathis, adjunct associate professor of school finance at the University of Vermont and a superintendent of schools, reviewed the existing body of research on each of the five NCLB restructuring options (the final sanction for failure to meet adequate yearly progress) and found that

• “there is little or no evidence to suggest that any of these options delivers the promised improvements in academic achievement”" and
• “negative side effects are frequently recorded including increased segregation, substantial, short-term drops in achievement scores and organizational instability.”

Need to hear more?

Laura Varlas wrote this about another presentation at the recent Education Writers' Association conference:

"In a later panel, University of Chicago professor Charles Payne presented data from his latest book, So Much Reform, So Little Change, which emphasizes the importances of maximizing schools' social capital, and how many reform efforts neglect this keystone to supporting any lasting improvements.

"Payne said in schools with low academic achievement, building high levels of trust makes academic improvement three times as likely than in schools with low levels of trust among educators and students. He cited a ten percent improvement in graduation rate in schools where students say they know and trust their teachers.

"The way schools are being closed in Chicago has eroded an enormous amount of social capital by not including parents in the process. These parents care about their kids and schools, and have been marginalized by people doing things for their children, without including them in the process."

It can't help the level of trust, either, when the entire school staff is fired and replaced. Illogical.

What to do instead?

We agree with Dr. Mathis and will forward his recommendations on to Obama and Duncan:

• stop expanding the number of charter schools and relying on takeovers, privatization and other restructuring efforts for school improvement, and
• focus on making sure that all schools have adequate resources and support so that they can improve, and support such proven strategies such as early education, smaller class size, small school communities, intense personal intervention, and strong counseling and social support systems.

Reach out to Arne

Let's all start communicating our concerns to the President and to Arne- he must miss us, after all.

You can e-mail the President at http://www.whitehouse.gov/CONTACT/

Here's Arne's contact info:

Primary Phone:

(202) 401-3000

Principal Office: (OS) Office of the Secretary

Department of Education Organizational Structure and Offices

E-Mail Address: arne.duncan@ed.gov

Location

Region: HEADQUARTERS

Building Name: LBJ EDUCATION BUILDING

Building Address: 400 Maryland Avenue, SW, Washington, DC 20202

Room Number: 7W311

Bloomberg's Autocracy Sued: Parents and Teachers on the Move to Resist

From the NYTimes:

By JAVIER C. HERNANDEZ

Published: March 25, 2009

The United Federation of Teachers and the New York Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit Tuesday charging that the city’s Department of Education violated state law by moving to replace traditional public schools with charter schools without proper consultation of neighborhood school boards.

The suit, filed in State Supreme Court on behalf of the teachers’ union and parents with children at Manhattan and Brooklyn schools, argues that the city needed approval from local school boards before it decided to close neighborhood schools and hand their buildings over to charters. Those schools are publicly financed but managed independently, and generally admit students via lottery. . . .

And this from Education Notes Online:

Will charter schools and small elite schools drain away the highest performing students, leaving the public schools and the teachers in them to be branded as failures because they are working with the students who need the most help but are denied the resources to do an effective job? Have we seen the end of the zoned neighborhood school in poor urban school systems? (See today's NY Times on how parents can't get their kids into kindergarten in their own neighborhood schools.)

Conference/Strategy Session on fighting testing/school closings/ATR

We see this conference as a first step in building a coalition of teachers, parents and students to plan campaigns to take back public education from the privateers.

When: Sat. March 28, 12 pm
Where: John Jay College, Room 1311 North Hall Building
445 W 59th St Manhattan