Community group sits in over school ‘reform’

Parents, students and teachers in Chicago are resisting a long-lasting campaign against public education that has led to the closing of 200 schools over the last 20 years.

On Jan. 4, activists from the Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization began a sit-in at City Hall demanding a meeting with Mayor Rahm Emmanuel. From the very first day, they were threatened with arrest. After six days of sitting in while the mayor refused to meet with them, the group ended the action, vowing to pursue other avenues in the struggle against privatization and educational apartheid.

Jenette Teller-Smith, a parent leader of the community group, had this to say of the privatization program undertaken by the Chicago Public Schools system:

“Parents, teachers, students and communities reject the CPS failed reforms. We know that only 18 percent of the replacement schools perform well. Most of these schools are selective enrollment, run by CPS. Nearly 40 percent of the new schools are at performance level three, CPS’s lowest rating. We see through the sound bites: You’ve betrayed us, you’ve betrayed the public’s trust. You have failed Chicago’s children. … We value people over profits. Mayor Rahm Emmanuel, shame on you.”

Privatization means the theft by corporations of wealth and resources that belong to the working class. The rich, who have stolen workers’ homes through the foreclosure crisis, vacuumed cash out of our pockets through the vast expansion of consumer credit during the 1990s, and who now have their eyes on our Social Security, have also turned Chicago into a laboratory for the privatization of public education.

Eight years ago, Mayor-for-Life Richard M. Daley and CPS head Arne Duncan cooked up a plan to steal the public school system and turn it into anti-union, for-profit charter schools. Duncan, who seems to think CPS stands for Close Public Schools, dubbed this plan Renaissance 2010. Duncan prefers calling it “market-based choice” over “privatization” so people are less likely to notice that the privately owned and operated charters are still funded through the workers’ tax dollars.

Duncan did such a good job destroying public education in Chicago that the Obama administration put him in charge of implementing a nearly identical plan nationally, called Race to the Top.

At the Democratic National Convention in August 2008, union teachers were Barack Obama’s largest single group of delegates. The anti-union war on public education is how the administration has repaid them for their loyal support.

Renaissance 2010 was the official opening of what many have called the era of educational apartheid in Chicago, but the CPS privatization plan predated the Duncan regime. Daley touted charter schools as if they were some sort of solution to the perennial funding crisis faced by the public schools in Chicago. But this lack of funds for schools is the real problem that no one in the capitalist media seems to be allowed to talk about.

Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, points out that “in the last 20 years, CPS has closed over 200 schools and placed 300 on probation.” As is usually the case, school closings hit nationally oppressed communities much harder than the more affluent white communities.

In the historic Black community of Bronzeville on the city’s South Side, which was the home of Chicago’s version of the Harlem Renaissance, families have been hit particularly hard by the closings. With the destruction of public housing by the Chicago Housing Authority as the backdrop, 15 Bronzeville schools have been closed over the last 12 years. Students have been transferred to different schools, some of them two or even three times.

These school closures do nothing but further destabilize already marginalized communities. This is the educational component of the war on Black communities.

All sorts of cronyism, corruption and incompetence are behind the privatization drive. For example, CPS chief administrative officer, Tim Cawley, was a managing director at the Academy of Urban School Leadership. The Chicago School Board now wants AUSL to take over schools targeted for closure.

Only one Chicago School Board member has any actual classroom experience. The school board itself is untouched by democracy — it isn’t even elected.