Re: Bill Clinton: Fix NCLB

[aburke5054@aol.com]

The only sense I can make out of this rant is that Chicago is putting 
more money and better teachers into schools where large numbers of kids 
are learning below grade level.  How is that a bad thing?  Because they 
keep trying new stuff?

Art

-----Original Message-----
From: Csubstance@aol.com
To: arn-l@interversity.org
Sent: Sun, 3 Feb 2008 3:16 am
Subject: Re: [arn-l] Bill Clinton: Fix NCLB


2/3/08

Thursday, January 30, I covered a press conference hosted by Chicago's 
public
schools and Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley to tout the new "turnaround 
model"
for fixing "broken" schools. As some here know, Mayor Daley has now 
abandoned
the "Small Schools Model" after nearly ten years of it in Chicago and 
now
wants to have a group of corporate officials train cadre of "turnaround
specialists" to take over schools that are "failing" and whip them into 
shape.
The
press conference was held at the "Sherman School of Excellence" which 
is
(supposedly) Chicago's first "turnaround school."

The press event also included an announcement by the Gates Foundation 
that
Gates was giving $10 million to fund the "Turnaround" center, a Chicago 
thing
called the Academy for Urban School Leadership, founded by millionaire 
Martin
(Mike) Koldyke. Koldyke is the former head of the Chicago School 
Finance
Authority and the Chicago School Reform Authority. One of his 
contributions to
Chicago's corporate version of "school reform" more than a decade ago 
was to pay

Checker Finn hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to be the lead
consultant on Chicago's school reform.

The "Turnaround" model is less than two years old, by the way. It was 
put
into Sherman Elementary School, a K-8 school located in one of the 
bleaker
sections of Chicago's vast South Side ghetto, after CPS closed Sherman 
for
"academic
failure." From the opening of the "Sherman School of Excellence" (the 
new
name of the school now that it's been placed in the hands of the 
Academy for
Urban School Leadership) the turned around Sherman has had a great deal 
of
corporate media attention, including a three-part series in the Chicago 
Tribune
last
September and recent hagiographic coverage on NPR (courtesy of Chicago 
Public
Radio). Not mentioned in the hype, of course, is that there are as yet 
no data
-- let alone significant trend data -- to validate any claims about the
place. As with many of the miracles Chicago has announced since 
corporate school

reform began here in 1995, they announce it and then craft the 
narrative to fit.

The trouble with the new iteration of the corporate narrative in 
Chicago is
that it is banging up against the last one.

For the past decade, Gates money has been funding a great many "small
schools" initiatives across Chicago, especially in the high schools. 
These have
taken
two main forms, all of them in the general high schools of the inner 
city.

In a few Chicago high schools (Orr; South Shore; Bowen; DuSable), the 
schools
were broken up into "Small Schools". Each Small School had its own part 
of
the building. Each had its own principal and administration. The result 
was that

a building like Bowen High School (where I was teaching -- and serving 
as
union delegate and school security coordinator -- when I was purged 
from CPS
nearly ten years ago after the mayor and Paul Vallas had me sued for a 
million
dollars for publishing the odious and ridiculous CASE tests) becomes 
three
"Small
Schools." Each had its own principal, office staff, and assorted other
overhead.

Not surprisingly, the dollars always ran out before the virtues of 
smallness
got to the classroom in terms of smaller class sizes or additional 
staff for
the most challenged kids, so things remained fundamentally the same. 
The
teachers and other staffs sodiered on despite the contradictions, with 
only
Substance ever mentioning some of the stranger results (including that 
huge
internal
administrative overhead). Small Schools was (were?) by definitiion a 
good
thing, and millions of Gates and other outside dollars flowed into them.

Orr High School, in Chicago's West Side ghetto (Pulaski and Chicago 
avenues)
was unique among the Small Schools experiments. It became four Small 
Schools
on the "Orr Campus." One of them was a "military academy" (the Phoenix 
Military
Academy) where the kids wore Army uniforms and supposedly had extra
discipline courtesy of that military them. The others had other themes, 
and the
whole
place, which had once been "Orr High School" became the "Orr Campus."

The Orrs (as I called them) had another distinction: every year, in 
October
or November, its "Principal for a Day" was Chicago Mayor Richard M. 
Daley.
Principal for a Day is a major event every year in Chicago. Corporate, 
civic,
and
athletic leaders (many celebrities) spend a morning in a school, hang 
out with
the principal and some teachers, do photo ops in classrooms, and 
generally
have a nice day before going for a massive downtown dinner where 
everyone thanks

everyone else. The most recent Principal for a Day events have had more 
than
1,000 participants (for out total of 600 schools).

Every year, Mayor Daley went to the Orrs, often after proclaiming how
important Small Schools were for transforming "failing" schools.

Two years ago (November 2, 2006), I ran into Daley during the Orr 
Principal
for a Day event and covered his media remarks. Orr had covered most 
major bases
in its Principal for a Day people. One was Victoria Chou (University of
Illinois at Chicago). Another was Torey Malatia (Chicago Public Radio). 
Daley
was
the main one, though.

In addition to doing Principal for a Day, Daley was going to make a 
major
announcement about some Ed Department money coming into Chicago. 
Daley's media
people had set up a podium in the main hall of the school, and all the 
media
were supposed to face towards a wall in front of which was Daley's 
podium. A
nice
mural was the background. We were facing south (the usual bank of TV 
cameras;
print reporters seated in the front row, knees crossed and notebooks 
perched)
towards the mayor's official portable podium. The school's main 
entrance was
to our left (east) and a cross hall was to our right (west) leading to 
the
school lunchroom.

Daley began speaking, while a major gang fight broke out less than a 
hundred
feet from where they had set up his podium to announce some more U.S.
Department of Education dollars for Chicago's miracle school reforms.

I was the only reporter who went down the hall to witness a platoon of
security people suppress the gang fight while the mayor and assorted 
others
droned
on. (CPS had provided three different security teams for Orr that day). 
Three
security people quickly shut a door and blocked me from taking 
photographs of
the suppression of the gang fight, which was making quite a bit of 
noise. I got
a few photographs, but mostly they show a swarm of security through a 
door.
Within two minutes, calm had been restored.

When I turned east and looked at the scene, every other reporter was 
still
perched facing Daley's podium, busily ignoring a very loud event taking 
place a
short distance away. I returned to the press pack and continued taking 
notes
and photographs. It was clear that whatever benefits had happened at 
the "Orr
Campus" as a result of Small Schools, an end to the violence that comes 
with
the drug gangs on Chicago's West Side was not one of them.

Over the years, it became clear that there had been very little 
movement or
"improvement" of the kind measured by test scores and other "matrices" 
of "data
driven management" -- at Orr or at any of the other major Small Schools
experiments in Chicago.

As far as test scores went, at Orr or any other the other Small Schools 
CPS
had created during that iteration of corporate school reform, the 
bottom was
still the bottom.

The reason has been simple. During the same time Orr and the others 
have been
forced to take the leftover kids, Chicago has been increasing the 
number of
selective enrollment schools at the high school level. The intensity of
selection prior to 9th grade has never been harsher in Chicago. Neglect 
of the
general high school; slight privileges for others.

This process began almost as soon as Mayor Daley was given dictatorial
control over Chicago's schools (1995). It began first as a series of 
"college
preparatory magnet high schools" (the number of which has doubled since 
Mayor
Daley
took over CPS in 1995). For the past three years, selective Charter 
High
Schools (foremost right now, a group called the "Noble Street Network 
of Charter

High Schools") have been added.

More and more, children with resources were applying to the city's 
selective
high schools (which can usually kick out the "bad" kids after they've
pre-screened their 9th graders). That left the "leftover kids" (a 
phrase you'll
hear
in Chicago, not just in New Orleans) for the general high schools, 
including
those that had gone to Small Schools (and a less major thing, "small 
learning
communities").

Despite all the Small Schools hype, the Orr Campus stagnated, to the 
point
where they couldn't keep the gangs quiet even on a day when Mayor Daley 
was
there with his entourage from City Hall, CPS, and the U.S. Department 
of
Education.

On January 30, 2008, Mayor Daley announced that Chicago was now 
promoting
"Turnaround Specialists" for "troubled schools" and one of the first he 
would be

closing was -- Orr.

He told a major press conference that he was glad that the Gates 
Foundation
was giving Chicago another $10 million for school reform. This round of 
money
is going straight to the "Turnaround" group, a quasi corporate cult 
called the
Academy for Urban School Leadership. Even the Chicago Sun-Times asked 
what
happened to Small Schools, and why Orr was being closed when Orr had 
done what
it
was supposed to have done during the last iteration of sure fire how to 
fix
it school reform things.

Daley ignored the question, Gates dodged it, and when I asked whether 
Daley
was going to meet with the Orr teachers and explain why they were being 
fired
after having done Small Schools for the better part of the decade, 
Daley's
press people ended the event without answering my question (or the 
follow up
question I had for the fraudulent parent they cart around with them to 
sing the
praises of their newest thing).

George N. Schmidt
Editor, Substance

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