Chicago is one of the larger cities in which the mayor has control of the school system. Also with mayoral control are New York, Boston, and Cleveland..among others.
It has gone nationwide as a goal now with Arne Duncan as Secretary of Education.
An education blogger pointed out that we could learn a lot from seeing those with whom Rahm Emanuel has been meeting as he starts his campaign.
Hanging with the wrong crowdIf Rahm Emanuel were to become Chicago's next mayor, expect more of the same--more school closings, more teacher firings, more privatization. Why?
Emanuel is talking to all the wrong Chicago people about education. It's the same old Ownership Society crowd that dreamed up Renaissance 2010 (I know. We're not supposed to mention that word any more). Even the Civic Committee called the results, "abysmal."
They're the Pritzkers; they're Mayor Daley's patronage boys, like Juan Rangel; they're the hedge-fund charter guys like Bruce Rauner; and they're the power philanthropists who long ago ceded leadership of Chicago's foundation community over to Bill Gates. Missing from the back room was...well, you know who was missing. Who's always missing?
Classroom teachers I suspect he means are missing.
Here is more about those at the meetings with Rahm:
Emanuel plotting school policyThe former congressman and White house chief of staff met with nine local education organizers, including Penny Pritzker, who also served as President Barack Obama’s national finance chair in the 2008 campaign, an Emanuel campaign official said today.
I knew I had heard the name Pritzker earlier today. Turns out they are a loud voice in eliminating teacher pensions.
Hyatts' Pritzkers out to destroy teacher pensionsOne of the loudest, most powerful corporate organizations in the state, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, has been the leading voice in advocating the destruction of public employee pensions, most particularly the Teacher Retirement System.
The President of the Civic Committee is R. Eden Martin, a lawyer and vocal advocate against public school teachers and our retirement system.
And who else sits on the Civic committee?
Why Tom Pritzker and Penny Pritzker.
Back to the
Tribune article linked to aboveLast week, Emanuel trickled out some details about his education platform to the Tribune, saying he would like to see a local, privately funded version of the federal education competition called Race to the Top, the signature Obama administration plan that rewarded states vowing to reform public schools. He also talked about increasing parental involvement.
Among those Emanuel met with included Ellen Alberding, president and a board member of the Joyce Foundation, which helped work on Illinois’ losing Race to the Top application; former state Rep. Judy Erwin, who later became executive director of the Illinois Board of Higher Education; and Juan Rangel, who just signed on as a co-chairman of Emanuel’s campaign. Rangel is CEO of United Neighborhood Organization, or UNO, one of Chicago’s most influential Hispanic organizations that has opened several charter schools in Chicago.
In addition, he met with venture capitalist Bruce Rauner, chairman of private-equity firm GTCR and Mayor Richard Daley’s appointed chairman of the Chicago Convention and Tourism. Rauner serves on the board of the Chicago Public Education Fund and his wife, Diana, is executive director of the Ounce of Prevention Fund education organization. Others who met with Emanuel: Brian Simmons, a founding partner of the private equity firm Code Hennessy & Simmons LLC who has been on the board of directors of the Chicago Public Education Fund since 2007; Julia Stasch, a vice president with the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and Mayor Daley’s former chief of staff; Robin Steans, executive director of the education policy group Advance Illinois; and Beth Swanson, executive director of the Pritzker Traubert Foundation and former budget officer of Chicago Public Schools.
Another article tells his quest for private money for school reform.
Emanuel wants private funds for Chicago school reformRahm Emanuel wants to raise private money to fix public schools and continue the aggressive expansion of O'Hare International Airport. But he's not ready to address some of the other sticky issues he faces in his run for Chicago mayor.
...When he sat down for an interview with the Tribune on Monday, he made it clear his goal was to pitch part of his education platform in advance of a weeklong tour of city schools. But he wasn't interested in addressing other issues ranging from his political history to his plans for the city's out-of-control budget.
"It's not that I don't want to tell you. I'm trying to talk about education. ... I'm not going to just lay out an entire year's worth of campaigning just in one interview," Emanuel said during an hourlong discussion at the Atwood Cafe just blocks from City Hall.
..."Emanuel also criticized teachers unions, a significant political force in the city, for their opposition to the federal Race to the Top program, closing underperforming schools and charter school expansion."
Hovering over all of the plans being made by Rahm Emanuel is the fact that Chicago schools are not doing that well.
The Chicago Tribune got hold of some test data from last year that the school officials decided not to make public. That is in itself not fair at all. If you live and die by the test then you can't hide the scores from the public.
Data explodes Chicago turnaround myth
The CPS document stolen by the Tribune shows the grade ranges that corresponded with the schools' numeric standardized test scores. Shades of the Tribune Co.-owned L.A. Times' release of internal rankings of supposed value-added, based exclusively on students' standardized test scores.So the sneaky bastards at the Tribune somehow got hold of Ron Huberman's secret stash of school ratings and published them. Oh, goody!
.."Because this time around, it's Huberman and outgoing Mayor Daley who are being (apologies to Shakespeare) hoisted with their own petard. Huberman came up with the A-B-C-D-F rating system for schools, to use to justify his massive school-closing scheme under Renaissance 2010. This, after the legislature forced the district to show some rationale for its arbitrary punishment and closing policies .
Among city elementary schools, 47 of 474 received As, while just 4 of 92 high schools met that mark. Meanwhile, 104 elementary schools and 39 high schools got Fs. But these grades have little, if any validity when it comes to judging the quality of individual schools or teachers. In most cases they are just coded measures of school or neighborhood poverty. Without mentioning any school names, I know of several excellent schools that received grades of C or C-, based only on standardized test scores.
Huberman said he did not "release the grades because they need to be more nuanced." The data does not take individual student growth into account, and school-wide comparisons can be imperfect, he said.
The funny thing is that teachers have been saying the same thing for ages about all the high-stakes testing.
The late great Gerald Bracey had some words about mayoral control in July of last year.
Mayoral Control of Schools: The New TyrannyThe usual rationale for a mayoral power grab is it brings more accountability and a clear line of authority. School boards are generally elected in off years and few people vote, allowing special interest groups (usually education unions, some claim) to essentially rig the elections. School boards are fractious and try to micromanage. They are amateurs and prisoners of deeply rooted school bureaucracies.
But do mayors do better? Depends on how you feel about democracy. The Spring 2009 issue of Rethinking Schools said that, as Daley's man, Duncan "has shown himself to be the central messenger, manager and staunch defender of corporate involvement in, and privatization of, public schools, closing schools in low-income neighborhoods of color with little community input, limiting local democratic control, undermining the teachers union and promoting competitive merit pay for teachers."
The most important corporate involvement involves the 132-year-old Commercial Club of Chicago. Yet that organization recently published Still Left Behind, slamming Chicago's public schools as awful and that the reforms they've endured were designed to make the adults running the schools look good, not improve the lives of children. You could say the Club stabbed Arne in the back except that they did it upfront in the open, without once mentioning Duncan's name. The Club report backs up its case with many data.
If we look at the other most visible case of mayoral control, we see an even more autocratic system in place. When the New York legislature handed control of the schools in 2002 to Mayor Mike Bloomberg and his Chancellor, Joel Klein, it created the Panel for Educational Policy, attempting to establish a "balance of authority." The group is universally referred to as the Panel of Educational Puppets. The panelists, "an investment banker, a lingerie store owner and an expert on electromagnetics among them -- rarely engage in discussions with those who rise to address them. They do not debate the educational issues of the day, but spend most sessions applauding packaged presentations by staff. Some have barely uttered a public word during their tenures" (New York Times, April 23, 2009).
This cartoon which Gerald Bracey was said to have worked on actually says it all.
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