Decisions in a Vacuum

I’ve had a little push back on my complaints about full day kindergarten coming to my school.  I don’t look at full day kindergarten as evil or anything.  The problem is, to have it at our school requires something else to go.  We need 4 more classrooms.  We could lose the music room and the art room.  I think the library gets saved because we have computers in there for testing and close it for 1/4 the year already.   The other thing we can do is increase class size and have one less teacher at every grade level.  This will drive classes up from 32 to 38 per room.   Either way, we lose something and that’s what I’m not happy about.

School Closure Guide

This guide was put out a few years ago by the Broad Foundation.  It’s the basic script that CPS is following to close schools.

Aspira Charter Expanding as One School Closes

“Even as CPS announced last week that it was phasing out ASPIRA’s Mirta Ramirez Computer Science High School campus for poor performance, plans were under way to approve a new campus for the charter operator.”

Michelle Rhee: Wrong Again

“For instance, at the behest of corporate education “reformers,” more and more cities are moving to eliminate the democratic process of electing school boards, effectively telling students, parents and the larger community that republican democracy cannot be trusted to manage fundamentally public institutions. Similarly, corporate “reformers” are constantly demonizing teachers’ unions, effectively telling students and parents that the major vestige of workplace democracy in schools must be crushed.”

Chicago Style Disaster Capitalism

 

Charter Schools and Disaster Capitalism

“In Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine, she explains how immediately after Hurricane Katrina, Friedman used the decimation of New Orleans’ infrastructure to push for charter schools, a market-based policy preference of Friedman acolytes. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan was the CEO of Chicago Public Schools at the time, and later described Hurricane Katrina as “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.” Duncan is of the liberal wing of the free market project and a major supporter of charter schools.

There aren’t any hurricanes in the Midwest, so how can proponents of privatization like Mayor Rahm Emanuel sell off schools to the highest bidder?

They create a crisis.”

Who is Eli Broad and Why Does He Want to Destroy Public Education

“The historically unprecedented explosion of wealth in recent decades for the top one percent of the American populace is leading to a reshaping of the American economy in the interests of this one percent. Having more wealth than they know what to do with, many of the corporate leaders, hedge fund managers, and bankers are putting their wealth into “venture philanthropies”. They hope to advance an unregulated, free market economy which requires the destruction of the advances towards social equality made in American society during the 20th century due to the struggles of the civil rights movement in the sixties and the labor movement in the thirties. Incubated in the economic Wild West days of the G. W. Bush administration until the financial crisis of 2008, these venture philanthropies continue to seek to bring the business practices of the banking, corporate, and hedge fund manager world to all sectors of the U.S. economy through privatization.”

Harper High School, Part Two

Heartbreaking and all too familiar to some of us.  I can’t recommend these two radio programs enough.