“Crain’s Chicago Business” Explores the Damage of Rahm Emanuel’s 2013 School Closures

In an excellent report for Crain’s Chicago Business, Margaret Littman marks the end of a decade since, in June of 2013, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his appointed school board shut down 49 neighborhood public elementary schools.

Littman examines “a different educational landscape” today: “In the years since the mass school closings—the most at one time in the U.S.—the landscape for Chicago Public Schools, the nation’s fourth-largest school system, has changed. Chicago has a former middle school teacher and union organizer as a mayor-elect. Beginning in January 2025, the new school board will include 10 elected members, ending mayoral control.”

Chicago school reform with strong mayoral control under a fully appointed school board was accomplished in a 1995 state legislative plan carried out in the decades since by a line of mayors and their appointed CEOs, beginning with Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan. The city’s public schools have been ruled with a neoliberal bias for the expansion of charter schools, competition among schools, and student based budgeting. What has been missing is the kind of democratic oversight of public schools—by an elected board of education—that  most Americans take for granted. Littman explains: “Families of color and those in low-income communities disproportionately bore the brunt of the Emanuel-era closures, and many say they continue to receive short shrift. Even as CPS enrollment has decreased, the demographic breakdown of students has remained constant. About 47% of students are Latino, 36% are Black, and 11% are white.”

Did the 2013 school closures save money? Littman reports: “One of the sales pitches the Emanuel administration used at the time was that the school closings would save money, a constant need in any discussion about CPS. The school district’s balance sheet today shows that was built on naive assumptions… Some of the deficit is related to the teachers’ pension system, an issue not solved by school closures. As written in the 2018 CPS budget summary, ‘For many years, pensions have been the dominant driver of CPS’s structural deficit. Unlike other school districts in (Illinois), CPS is required to fund its own teacher pension system with virtually no state support.'” Although Rahm Emanuel and his school board believed school closures would save money, Littman quotes several researchers demonstrating big costs for closing schools and maintaining empty buildings that still sit unsold along the city’s streets. Transportation costs have increased as students continue to be bused to schools far from their homes. The school district was unable to shed all sorts of fixed costs.

There have been, however, other costs that have nothing to do with money. Littman quotes Roosevelt University sociologist Stephanie Farmer: “The school closings became a touchstone for that generation of kids… They see it as evidence that the city does not care about them… If your mom, your cousins, your aunt, all went to a school there and it was closed, there was a pain there, regardless of what happened with your welcoming school.”

Littman adds: “Some of the Safe Passage programs and support that were supposed to help kids transition weren’t available as long as they (were) needed, in part because it cost money. In general, they typically only lasted one year. Resources that were supposed to move from a shuttered school to a welcoming school—even basics, like books—never arrived.”  And sometimes “kids who had previously been at rival schools were now in the same classroom. Littman interviews Wallace Wilbourne Jr., the Middle Years Programme International Baccalaureate Individuals and Societies teacher at Oscar DePriest Elmentary School in the Austin neighborhood: “There are still long-term impacts… When you destabilize communities, people in the communities are dealing with trauma. That manifests in different ways outside the academic sphere, such as violence in the community.”

Litman explains that Chicago school closures were accelerated by intentional competition from charter schools: “According to a 2017 paper co-authored by Roosevelt University’s (Stephanie) Farmer, 71% of new charter schools—publicly funded, privately run schools—that opened between 2000 and 2012 did so within 1.5 miles of the 49 schools that closed due to low enrollments in 2013.  The authors recommended imposing a moratorium on charter school expansion.”

One factor that is missing in Littman’s excellent piece is the added challenge of student-based budgeting. School decline accelerated in 2014, when Chicago adopted student based budgeting, which pushed many neighborhood schools into a downward enrollment cycle and further reduced services available in the schools in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.  For WBEZ, Sarah Karp and Nader Issa describe how ending student-based budgeting became a winning issue for victorious Brandon Johnson, Chicago’s new mayor and a former CPS teacher and teachers union organizer, as Johnson challenged Paul Vallas, the former Chicago Public Schools CEO and the father of the kind of school reform that eventually led to the 2013 school closures:

“Johnson… says he would… focus on beefing up traditional neighborhood schools in an effort to end the ‘Hunger Games scenario’ where kids ‘apply to access a quality school.’ That includes fully staffed special education departments, librarians, art and music teachers and nurses and social workers, he said.” “Johnson would rather the school district’s central office end per-pupil funding and guarantee a baseline of resources for every school… This would reduce the role enrollment plays in whether a school can afford staff and, he says, help ensure every neighborhood can offer a quality education. He would focus on addressing poverty and trauma.”

Littman does not oversimplify the challenges Johnson will face as mayor.  But she does emphasize a lesson the 2013 Chicago school closures should have taught school policymakers everywhere.  She quotes Rousemary Vega, a West Side mother of five, who has raised her children in the largely Puerto Rican, Humboldt Park neighborhood.  Vega’s children’s school—Lafayette Elementary School—was closed in 2013 and turned into a specialty high school: “Me and my children have to walk past it very day. And now that building is not open to the community. They have great programs in there that the (neighborhood) community cannot benefit from. How unfair is that?”

That question was the subject of Eve Ewing’s powerful Ghosts in the Schoolyard, a book that explores the human consequences of the 2013 school closures for Bronzeville, an African American neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side:  “The people of Bronzeville understand that a school is more than a school.  A school is the site of a history and a pillar of black pride in a racist city.  A school is a safe place to be.  A school is a place where you find family.  A school is a home. So when they come for your schools, they’re coming for you. And after you’re gone they’d prefer you be forgotten.”  Ewing continues: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closure should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions…. These questions, I contend, need to be asked about Chicago’s school closures, about school closures anywhere. In fact, they are worth asking when considering virtually any educational policy decision:  What is the history that has brought us to this moment?  How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard) pp. 155-159)

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Brandon Johnson Beats Paul Vallas to Become Chicago Mayor: What Does This Say about School Reform?

On Tuesday night, Brandon Johnson, a former middle and high school teacher, a Chicago Teachers Union organizer, and a Cooke County Commissioner, was elected to be the next mayor of Chicago.

The public schools have been at the center of mayoral politics in Chicago since 1995, when a state legislative overhaul launched mayoral governance, the possibility of charter schools, and a cascade of test-and-punish reforms—a mix of policies that culminated in June of 2013 in the shutdown of 50 neighborhood public schools on the South Side and West Side after the rapid proliferation of charter schools. Paul Vallas, one of the candidates in Tuesday’s mayoral election, oversaw the launch of those school reforms as the Chicago Public Schools’ Chief Executive Officer from 1995-2001.

In mid-March, Chicago education reporters, Sarah Karp of WBEZ, and Nader Issa and Lauren FitzPatrick of the Chicago Sun-Times, characterized the mayor’s race between, “Paul Vallas, a former Chicago Public Schools CEO, versus Brandon Johnson, a Chicago Teachers Union official. Vallas built a long career on pledges he could give children a better education by reforming low-performing schools in dramatic and controversial ways. Johnson has spent his time organizing around better support for students and targeting the conditions around them in neighborhoods, decrying drastic reforms as disruptive to relationships kids need to succeed.  At the heart of the argument is whether teachers and schools are primarily to blame for low performance or whether a lack of investment in schools and communities is the main driver.”

Since 2011, Brandon Johnson has served as an organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union; he is also in his first term as a Cooke County Commissioner.  Before that, he earned a masters degree in education and taught social studies for several years to middle schoolers at Jenner Elementary beginning in 2007. When the school closed, he moved to a high school.

School decline accelerated in 2014, when Chicago adopted student based budgeting, which pushed many neighborhood schools into a downward enrollment cycle and further reduced services available in the schools in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.  Brandon Johnson has pledged to end that cycle.  For WBEZ, Nader Issa and Sarah Karp explain Johnson’s position on this issue: “Johnson… says he would… focus on beefing up traditional neighborhood schools in an effort to end the ‘Hunger Games scenario’ where kids ‘apply to access a quality school.’ That includes fully staffed special education departments, librarians, art and music teachers and nurses and social workers, he said.” “Johnson would rather the school district’s central office end per-pupil funding and guarantee a baseline of resources for every school… This would reduce the role enrollment plays in whether a school can afford staff and, he says, help ensure every neighborhood can offer a quality education. He would focus on addressing poverty and trauma.”

Vallas campaigned on more police to a quell a years-long rise in gun violence. By choosing Brandon Johnson in this election, the majority of Chicagoans voted for neighborhood repair instead of police crackdown. In his campaign Johnson stressed the need for strengthening essential community institutions including neighborhood schools, trauma intervention services for students and families,  and a collaboration with Cooke County to improve improve mental health services.

What did Chicago voters reject when they elected Brandon Johnson?

Paul Vallas was the efficiency-hawk technocrat brought in as Chief Executive Officer in 1995 to launch Mayor Richard M. Daley’s and the Illinois Legislature’s plan for the Chicago Public Schools—to be operated under the mayor and an appointed school board.  Karp, Issa, and FitzPatrick describe Vallas as “the ultimate technocrat… aiming to solve societal problems with a sort of scientific approach, and who, without degrees in education, asserted that low-performing schools either needed to change or students should be allowed to choose a new one.” “The state legislature had just given Daley control over the city’s schools and Vallas was the first non-educator to hold the school system’s top job. Vallas leaned on standardized testing and fired staff at so-called ‘failing’ schools while holding back underperforming students.  He promoted a system of choice, opening 18 new schools, several of them magnet and selective enrollment high schools seen as a way to keep the middle class in Chicago. And he opened the city’s first charter schools amid a national movement to offer alternatives to traditional public schools.”

Pauline Lipman, an education researcher at the University of Illinois, Chicago, reminds us that, “When test scores flattened in 2001, Vallas left.  But the system he set up of ranking and sorting schools based on an inappropriate use of standardized tests, and disregarding the historical disinvestment and racism schools had suffered, laid the foundation for almost 200 school closings and turn-arounds and the education market that followed. These school closings, 90 percent predominantly Black, devastated Black communities in particular.  Vallas’s (2023) electoral campaign focuses on fighting crime, but the disruptions from the school closings that were a major factor in the destabilization of Black communities can be traced back to Vallas’s reign at CPS.”

Vallas left Chicago in 2001 for a stint in the School District of Philadelphia, where he also opened charter schools, and, in 2007, he was brought in to New Orleans to manage the mass charterization of the public schools that had been launched in 2006 after Hurricane Katrina. Lipman, Camika Royal at Loyola University Maryland, and Adrienne Dixson at the University of Kentucky conclude: “From Chicago, to Philadelphia, to New Orleans—three school districts serving primarily students of color—Paul Vallas left a trail of top-down, punitive, destabliizing and fiscally irresponsible policies. Our research… reveals that rather than ‘restoring broken education systems,’ Vallas has a pattern of leadership that demoralizes teachers and undermines public education.”

In a profound 2018 book,  Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing explores the meaning of neighborhood schools for the communities they serve—something that Paul Vallas has always failed to grasp but Brandon Johnson made the center of his campaign. Ewing describes how the school reforms launched by Paul Vallas over time affected one Chicago South Side neighborhood: “The people of Bronzeville understand that a school is more than a school. A school is the site of a history and a pillar of black pride in a racist city. A school is a safe place to be. A school is a place where you find family. A school is a home. So when they come for your schools, they’re coming for you. And after you’re gone they’d prefer you be forgotten.”

Ewing continues, describing the huge wave of Chicago school closures in the two decades following Vallas’s technocratic makeover: “These questions, I contend, need to be asked about Chicago’s school closures, about school closures anywhere. In fact, they are worth asking when considering virtually any educational policy decision:  What is the history that has brought us to this moment?  How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, pp. 155-159)

These are the very issues that were at stake the 2023 mayoral race in Chicago. The voters chose Brandon Johnson.

Public School Closures in Oakland: Another Example of Failed School Reform and Charter School Expansion

I am grateful that last Sunday the Washington Post’s Scott Wilson recounted the long, sad story of the school closings in California’s Oakland Unified School District. Oakland has universal school choice, and this fall, students in two of Oakland’s now shuttered public schools had to find new schools elsewhere in the school district—with five additional public schools to be closed at the end of the current school year.  As Wilson explains: “The district has… been whiplashed over the years, by education trends and population changes, leaving many schools under annual threat of school closure.”

We have been watching this story develop for years.  Wilson reports: “By 2003, with the district facing a roughly $35 million budget deficit, the state Department of Education took over the operation of Oakland’s public schools, laying off hundreds of teachers and eventually shuttering more than two dozen schools. The state’s day-to-day management ended six years later, but the education department still has what is effectively veto power over fiscal decisions.  At the time of the takeover, the state extended the district a $100 million line of credit, which has yet to be paid off entirely. The district’s uncertain finances and poor performance also opened the door for experimentation from wealthy, mostly White philanthropists with no ties to Oakland. One initiative was the ‘small schools’ movement, financed in large part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.  The idea was to break up big campuses into more intimate places for learning. The money—about $25 million before it ran out—helped open about two dozen schools. But the state administrator at the time closed 14 others over several years.”

Wilson continues: “More lasting was the charter school movement. At the time, billionaires Mike Bloomberg and the late Eli Broad spent tens of millions of dollars promoting charter schools nationally, including large sums in Oakland… But in a state that funds districts by student, every pupil who enrolled in a charter school meant money lost to the broader public education system.”

Gentrification is also implicated.  Today’s school closings—two this year and five before school begins next school year are all located in poorer African American neighborhoods. Wilson explains: “Here in Oakland… the school discussion implicates race…. White gentrification hovers over the East Bay…. The traditional dividing line—Interstate 580—splits wealthy Oakland hills from the struggling ‘flatlands’ where Parker and other affected schools are located.”

All of these problems have been visible for years. Jerry Brown was Mayor of Oakland from 1999 to 2007 and he served as Governor of California from 2011 to 2019. Brown remains an unabashed supporter of charter schools. In fact he started two charter schools himself. Here is EdSource‘s Luis Freedberg: “Brown is unique among California’s governors—and probably governors anywhere—in that he is the founder of two charter schools, the Oakland Military Institute and the Oakland School for the Arts.  He told us he has raised ‘millions and millions of dollars’ to start them and keep them going.” EdSource asked Brown if charter schools don’t pose a funding problem for a school district’s public schools. Freedberg recounts Brown’s answer: “Brown opposes that notion, even in places like Los Angeles and Oakland, which in his words have ‘so many charter schools, and they don’t have enough funds.’ He acknowledged that is a ‘troublesome problem.’ Nonetheless, he said, ‘because I think charter schools are challenging, I’ve resisted more onerous rules that quite frankly are designed to reduce charter schools in the guise of making them more accountable.'”

So how much fiscal pressure do charter schools pose for the public school districts where they are located?  In a huge, 2018, study for In the Public Interest, economist Gordon Lafer documents the annual $57.3 million loss of public school funding to the charter schools in the Oakland Unified School District: “(W)ith a combined district and charter student population of over 52,000 in 2016-17—(Oakland) boasts the highest concentration of charter schools in the state, with 30 percent of pupils attending charter schools.” “To the casual observer, it may not be obvious why charter schools should create any net costs at all for their home districts. To grasp why they do, it is necessary to understand the structural differences between the challenge of operating a single school—or even a local chain of schools—and that of a district-wide system operating tens or hundreds of schools and charged with the legal responsibility to serve all students in the community. When a new charter school opens, it typically fills its classrooms by drawing students away from existing schools in the district…  If, for instance, a given school loses five percent of its student body—and that loss is spread across multiple grade levels, the school may be unable to lay off even a single teacher… Plus, the costs of maintaining school buildings cannot be reduced…. Unless the enrollment falloff is so steep as to force school closures, the expense of heating and cooling schools, running cafeterias, maintaining digital and wireless technologies, and paving parking lots—all of this is unchanged by modest declines in enrollment. In addition, both individual schools and school districts bear significant administrative responsibilities that cannot be cut in response to falling enrollment. These include planning bus routes and operating transportation systems; developing and auditing budgets; managing teacher training and employee benefits; applying for grants and certifying compliance with federal and state regulations; and the everyday work of principals, librarians and guidance counselors.” Lafer describes the consequences of marketplace school choice in the Oakland Unified School District: “You have a system where the neediest and most expensive kids to educate are concentrated in traditional public schools.”

California blogger Tom Ultican has documented the investment and influence of wealthy philanthropists promoting the expansion of charter schools in Oakland: “The map of charter schools in Oakland and proposed school closings shows that both are… in the minority dominated flats (the low lying area between the bay and the hills).  With all of these closings, residents in the flats may no longer have a traditional public school serving their community.  Much of this can be laid at the door step of the six billionaire ‘education reformers’ living across the bay—Reed Hastings (Netflix), Arthur Rock (Intel), Carrie Walton Penner (Walmart), Laurene Powell Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) and Doris Fisher (The Gap).  Reed Hastings established America’s first charter management organization (CMO) in Oakland. There are now six Aspire charter schools serving Oakland families.”  Ultican adds: “Along with these billionaires, New Yorker Michael Bloomberg and Tulsa billionaire Stacey Shusterman have joined in the spending to sway Oakland’s school board elections.”

It is not as though nobody has investigated the impact of widespread public school closings on the neighborhoods where safe and long treasured institutions are shut down.  In Chicago, Rahm Emanuel’s administration closed 50 public schools at the end of the 2013 school year. Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 school reform project had driven a decade-long explosion in the number of charter schools. An important difference, however, is that in Chicago the school district did try to protect the students whose neighborhood public schools were closing by designating specific welcoming schools.  In Oakland, families are left to find their own schools due to universal school choice.

Despite Chicago’s efforts to manage the school closures, however, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research documented extremely negative effects not only for the students whose schools were shuttered but also for students at the so-called “receiving” schools and for the surrounding community across Chicago’s South and West Sides: “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.” “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

In a profound 2018 book,  Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing explores the meaning of school closures across Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood—the meaning for teachers, grandparents, and students.  Ewing contrasts their love for storied community institutions with the technocratic arguments of school district officials: “The people of Bronzeville understand that a school is more than a school.  A school is the site of a history and a pillar of black pride in a racist city.  A school is a safe place to be.  A school is a place where you find family.  A school is a home. So when they come for your schools, they’re coming for you. And after you’re gone they’d prefer you be forgotten.”  Ewing continues: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closure should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions…. These questions, I contend, need to be asked about Chicago’s school closures, about school closures anywhere. In fact, they are worth asking when considering virtually any educational policy decision:  What is the history that has brought us to this moment?  How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, pp. 155-159)

Another School District Closes Public Schools in Response to the Long Damage of Corporate School Reform and Privatization

In its newsletter last week the National Education Policy Center shows how last month’s announcement of upcoming school closures in Oakland, California is merely the latest in a series of public school closures as a consequence of the wave of privatization and experiments with school reform across the states:

“It’s happening again. Another urban school district, this time Oakland Unified in California, has voted to close schools that serve a disproportionate number of students of color from low-income families. Two schools will close this year, and five more next year…. Black students comprise 23 percent of the Oakland school district, but 43 percent of the students in the schools slated for closure. Oakland is the latest in a growing collection of urban school districts that have decided in recent years to close schools that disproportionately enroll students of color and students from low-income families. Other examples include Chicago, which closed or radically reconstituted roughly 200 schools between 2002 and 2018, St. Paul Minnesota, which approved six school closures in December, and Baltimore City, where board members decided in January to shutter three schools. ‘Closures tend to differentially affect low-income communities and communities of color that are politically disempowered, and closures may work against the demand of local actors for more investment in their local institutions,’ according to a NEPC brief authored in 2017 by Gail Sunderman of the University of Maryland along with Erin Coughlan and Rick Mintrop of U.C. Berkeley.”

The Mercury News reported on the Oakland school board’s February 8 decision:; “The Oakland Unified school district will close seven schools, merge two others and cut grades from two more over the next two years, the district board of directors decided in a meeting that stretched for nearly nine hours Tuesday into early Wednesday morning. The vote came after district officials, under pressure from the state and county to create a long-term plan for financial success, presented to the board last week a plan to close, merge, or reduce 16 schools, starting at the end of this school year.”

How has the Oakland Unified School District found itself in such a financial mess that public school closures are being proposed as a solution?  The district was part of an early experiment with small schools, part of a Gates Foundation project that broke up large high schools into small schools. It was an experiment so expensive and unworkable that the Gates Foundation eventually gave it up.  Janelle Scott, a professor at the Graduate School of Education of the University of California at Berkeley identifies “the multiple determinants of the deficit, which include the intentional creation of small schools that are now slated for closure and the cost of charter schools.”

The California blogger Tom Ultican identifies state takeover as another factor: “Twenty years ago, the state took over OUSD claiming a financial crisis…. Then like now, the Bakersfield non-profit FCMAT was brought in to supervise. The state went on to appoint a series of administrators to run the district.”

California’s EdSource provides more details about the state takeover: “In 2003, the district went into state receivership after receiving a $100 million bailout in order to balance its budget amid a massive shortfall…. Though the district still has not fully paid off the loan, control was given back to the district about five years later. The state appointed a trustee with veto authority over the district’s financial decisions…. For years, Oakland city and state representatives have called on the state to forgive the remainder of the loan to no avail.”

What is always mentioned, but rarely detailed in the news reports about today’s school closures in Oakland is the role of the unregulated explosion of charter schools in the district.  Before he became California’s governor and, when he was mayor of Oakland, Jerry Brown himself founded two charter schools in the city.

No account of Oakland’s financial troubles so clearly exposes the fiscal damage wrought by the out-of-control expansion of charter schools in Oakland as Gordon Lafer’s Breaking Point report for In the Public Interest: “In a first-of-its kind analysis, this report reveals that neighborhood public school students in three California school districts are bearing the cost of the unchecked expansion of privately managed charter schools. In 2016-17, charter schools cost the Oakland Unified School district $57.3 million…. The California Charter School Act currently doesn’t allow school boards to consider how a proposed charter school may impact a district’s educational programs or fiscal health when weighing new charter applications. However, when a student leaves a neighborhood school for a charter school, all the funding for that student leaves with them, while the costs do not.”

In Oakland, charter school expansion and other factors have gone so far as to drain the enrollment in several public schools. By now, policymakers very likely imagine that it is easier to close the schools than to figure out a way to build back enrollment in the neighborhood schools in the poorest part of the city.  As in Chicago in 2013, when the school district closed 50 schools in primarily African American neighborhoods, schools being closed are identified as under-enrolled, and school closures are seen the right solution for a mathematical problem.

But in Chicago, when the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research studied what happened after the school closures, here is what the researchers discovered: “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.” “When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning.”

Oakland residents and educators are pushing back against the school district’s decision to close public schools in African American neighborhoods. The Schott Foundation compares what is happening right now in Oakland to what happened in Chicago: “The struggle against school closures in Oakland is part of a nationwide tapestry of community movements that have resisted privatization budget cuts, and built community schools in their place. Oakland’s most compelling analog would likely be the 2015 fight to save Dyett High School in Chicago. Dyett was the last open-enrollment public school in Chicago’s historically Black neighborhood of Bronzeville… In addition to an overwhelming response from the community, parents undertook what would become a 34-day hunger strike, which ended with the announcement of Dyett’s reopening.”

In the conclusion of Ghosts in the Schoolyard, her powerful 2018 book that explores the meaning of Chicago’s 2013 school closures for the neighborhoods those schools had served, University of Chicago sociologist, Eve Ewing suggests that policymakers consider deeper human questions when they set out to right-size a school district in the midst of a long financial crisis: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closures should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions… What is the history that has brought us to this moment? How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p.159)

Illinois Legislature Begins to Repair the Damage of Chicago School Reform

The detour into what we call corporate, test-based public school accountability began in Chicago. It involved an explicit effort to disempower unionized schoolteachers. And underneath it all was a corporate strategy that made assumptions about the wishes and needs of the city’s parents without consulting them.

According to Steven Ashby and Robert Bruno: “In November 1994, the Republicans gained a majority in the Illinois General Assembly… As 1995 opened, the new legislative session created a frenzy of anti-Chicago teacher ideas… After Mayor (Richard M.) Daley’s reelection to a third term in April, Republican leaders urged him to present a plan for school reform… Daley and the Republicans promptly negotiated a broader takeover of the Chicago school system. The plan gave the mayor a large measure of control over the system, which he had long sought… The new law did away with the School Board Nominating Commission, permitting Daley to handpick his own five-person school board. The position of superintendent was also eliminated, and Daley now had the sole power to appoint a school ‘chief executive officer.’ Further weakening the influence of the Chicago Teachers Union and its role in reform, at the mayor’s insistence the law also amended the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act… by banning teachers strikes for eighteen months, prohibiting bargaining over class size, layoffs, staffing and teacher assignments, eliminating seniority as a factor in filling teacher vacancies and limiting teacher rights to file grievances.” (The Fight for the Soul of Public Education: The Story of the Chicago Teachers Strike, Cornell University. Press, 2016, pp. 28-29)

I have been tracking school reform since the mid 1990s, and my clipping file on the Chicago Public Schools is larger than any other. First the new plan disempowered Chicago’s groundbreaking local school councils, which sought to engage parents, teachers and the community in the life of the neighborhood schools.  Then came Renaissance 2010, the massive experiment in the expansion of charter schools and simultaneous closure of the neighborhood schools identified by standardized test scores as “failing.”

Rick Perlstein describes the launch of Renaissance 2010 by the city’s corporate establishment: “Travel back with me, then, to July of 2003, when the Education Committee of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago—comprised of the chairman of the board of McDonald’s, the CEOs of Exelon Energy and the Chicago Board Options Exchange, two top executives of the same Fortune 500 manufacturing firm, two partners at top-international corporate law firms, one founder of an investment bank, one of a mutual fund, and the CEO of a $220.1 billion asset-management fund: twelve men, all but one of them white—published ‘Left Behind: Student Achievement in Chicago’s Public Schools.’ (which declared:) ‘Chicago should have at least 100 charter schools… These would be new schools operating outside the established school system and free of many of the bureaucratic or union-imposed constraints that now limit the flexibility of regular public schools.’ Lo, like pedagogical kudzu, the charters came forth: forty-six of them, with names like ‘Infinity Math, Science, and Technology High School,’ ‘Rickover Naval Academy High School,’ ‘Aspira Charter School,’ and ‘DuSable Leadership Academy of Betty Shabazz International Charter School.'”

Since 1995, Chicago’s mayors and their appointed school boards have experimented in ways that damaged the city’s neighborhood schools, many of them shut down under a “portfolio school reform” plan that operated according to a theory similar to a business portfolio—eliminate the “failing” investments and buy more new, shiny charter schools. The mayor’s appointed board of education launched something called student-based budgeting at the same time the new charters were being launched and marketed with glowing promises. When students left for a charter, the schools which lost enrollment lost funding, class sizes exploded, nurses were laid off, libraries were shuttered, and substitute teachers were even hard to find as the schools declined. A downward spiral began to accelerate, and at the end of 2013, the school district’s mayoral-appointed board closed nearly 50 schools, over 80 percent serving African American students.

The University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research documented extremely negative effects not only for the students whose schools were shuttered but also for students at the so-called “receiving” schools and for the surrounding community across Chicago’s South and West Sides: “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.” “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

But something has begun to change in this spring of 2021. Twenty-six years since an Illinois legislature launched Mayor Richard M. Daley’s 1995 school reform plan, another Illinois Legislature has begun to turn turn away from corporate school reform.

In April it was reported that, “Defying Mayor Lori Lightfoot, Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed a bill… restoring the ability of the Chicago Teachers Union to bargain with the city over a wide range of issues, including class size, layoffs and the duration of the school year… The measure repeals Section 4.5 of the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act, which has restricted the CTU’s bargaining power since 1995, when state lawmakers gave then-Mayor Richard M. Daley control of the school district after several long strikes.”

In May, Mayor Lightfoot’s appointed board of education terminated its long contract with the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) to turnaround the city’s so-called “failing” public schools. School “turnaround” was a central part of the ideology of the 2002 No Child Left Behind Act and Arne Duncan’s 2009 Race to the Top program. School districts were required under federal law to identify the bottom 5 percent of public schools according to their standardized test scores and to turn them around quickly. Chicago turned many of its so-called “failing” schools over to AUSL, a city-wide consultant.  Chalkbeat‘s Cassie Walker Burke explains this history: “Tapped in 2006 to steer improvements at some of the city’s lowest-performing schools, the Academy for Urban School Leadership’s roster currently includes 31 schools on the South and West Sides that predominantly serve students from low-income families. Of the network’s schools, 20 campuses—or 65%—were in good standing last school year and had one of Chicago’s higher school ratings… but the remaining 11 were flagged for remediation or probation under that system.” Walker Burke describes Bogdana Chkoumbova, Chicago’s chief schools officer, explaining why school district leaders have chosen to terminate AUSL management of the schools: “She said that in school-level meetings about the transition plan, parents and educators said they hoped to see district takeover improve school culture and climate and prioritize restorative justice practices. Participants also said they hoped phasing schools back to district oversight would yield better collaboration with other schools and school leaders.”

Then last Wednesday, June 16, the Illinois House voted to approve a bill already passed by the Illinois Senate to begin the process of restoring an elected school board to the Chicago Public Schools. The Sun-Times‘ Rachel Hinton reports: “Chicago will soon have an elected school board thanks to a bill passed by members of the Illinois House Wednesday over objections from Mayor Lori Lightfoot. The House voted 70 to 41 to advance the bill, handing another loss to Lightfoot, who has been vocal in her opposition to the prospect of an elected board. The bill will soon head to Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who has voiced support for an elected board and is expected to sign the legislation… House Bill 2908, as amended, would create a 21-seat board in January 2025, initially split between 11 mayoral appointees—including the board president—and 10 elected members.  Rep. Kam Buckner, D-Chicago, said the bill isn’t perfect but ‘this is a down payment on democracy.’… In a statement, the Chicago Teachers Union said the vote ‘represents the will of the people, and after more than a quarter of a century, moves our district forward in providing democracy and a voice to students and their families'”

Obviously the restoration of the fully elected board of education will be a long process fraught with several years of complicated politics. But there has been real concern in Chicago about the suppression of the voices of parents and teachers and the locus of power in Chicago in the powerful corporate establishment bent on pursuing ideological school reform for over twenty-five years.

In a profound 2018 book exploring the widespread closure of neighborhood schools during the years of mayoral governance, Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side, University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing explores the meaning of school closures across Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood—the meaning for teachers, grandparents, and students. Ewing contrasts their love for storied community institutions with the technocratic arguments of school district officials: “The people of Bronzeville understand that a school is more than a school. A school is the site of a history and a pillar of black pride in a racist city. A school is a safe place to be. A school is a place where you find family. A school is a home. So when they come for your schools, they’re coming for you. And after you’re gone they’d prefer you be forgotten.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, pp. 155-156)

Ewing continues: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closure should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions…. These questions, I contend, need to be asked about Chicago’s school closures, about school closures anywhere. In fact, they are worth asking when considering virtually any educational policy decision:  What is the history that has brought us to this moment?  How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it? Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 159)

In “NY Times” Piece, Eve Ewing Ignores Economic Catastrophe for Public Schools of Charter School Expansion

I am a great fan of Eve Ewing’s book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard.  I have read the book twice, visited in Chicago some of the sites she describes, given the book to friends as a gift and blogged about it.  In that book, Ewing documents the community grief across Chicago’s South Side, where the now three decades old Renaissance 2010 “portfolio school plan” pits neighborhood public schools and charter schools in competition and closes the so-called “failing” neighborhood public schools when too many families opt for a charter school.

In a column published in Monday’s NY Times, Eve Ewing wants to make peace with charter schools.  She writes that we should allow families to choose and ensure that neighborhood schools and charter schools can all be well resourced and thriving. Ewing grasps for a third way—some sort of amicable compromise in a very polarized situation.

Ewing is a University of Chicago sociologist, and, in her column she examines many of the factors by which neighborhood public schools and charter schools have been compared and rated. She points out that academic quality is a mixed bag with neighborhood and charter schools sometimes besting each other in terms of student achievement. Then she wonders, “What would it look like if we built an education policy agenda dedicated to ensuring… resources for all students?

The problem in Ewing’s column this week is that she never identifies or addresses the matter of public funding for education. I assume she wants to equalize school funding across both sectors. But when charter schools compete for students with public schools, there are now two separate education sectors to split what has proven to be a fixed pot of money.  In every single place I know about where charter schools have been allowed to open up, this is a zero sum game.  A sufficient and growing body of research demonstrates that there is no way to split the funding both ways without cutting the funding that most states and local school districts have been budgeting for their public schools.

Bruce Baker, the school finance expert at Rutgers University, explains that one must consider more than the comparative test scores and students’ experiences in neighborhood schools and charters, and instead examine the impact of adding new charter schools into what he calls the entire educational ecosystem of the school district: “If we consider a specific geographic space, like a major urban center, operating under the reality of finite available resources (local, state, and federal revenues), the goal is to provide the best possible system for all children citywide….  Chartering, school choice, or market competition are not policy objectives in-and-of-themselves. They are merely policy alternatives—courses of policy action—toward achieving these broader goals and must be evaluated in this light. To the extent that charter expansion or any policy alternative increases inequity, introduces inefficiencies and redundancies, compromises financial stability, or introduces other objectionable distortions to the system, those costs must be weighed against expected benefits.” “In this report, the focus is on the host district, the loss of enrollments to charter schools, the loss of revenues to charter schools, and the response of districts as seen through patterns of overhead expenditures.”  In his report, Baker calls charter schools “parasites.”

One issue is that charter schools tend to serve fewer English language learners and fewer students with extremely severe disabilities, leaving behind in the neighborhood public schools the children whose needs are most expensive to serve.  Research by Mark Weber and Julia Sass Rubin at Rutgers University demonstrates, for example, that: “New Jersey charter schools continue to enroll proportionally fewer special education and Limited English Proficient students than their sending district public schools. The special education students enrolled in charter schools tend to have less costly disabilities compared to special education students in the district public schools…  (D)ata…  show that many charter schools continue to enroll fewer at-risk students than their sending district public schools.”

In Pennsylvania, the state funds special education in charter schools at a flat rate of $40,000 per student no matter whether the child is autistic, blind, a victim of severe multiple handicaps or impaired by a speech impediment.  Peter Greene reports that in Chester Upland, where a charter school is sucking up a mass of special education funding, in a court decision, Judge Chad Kenney declared: “The Charter Schools serving Chester Upland special education students reported in 2013-14… that they did not have any special education students costing them anything outside the zero to twenty-five thousand dollar range, and yet, this is remarkable considering they receive forty thousand dollars for each one of these special education students under a legislatively mandated formula.”

The biggest financial loss caused by the introduction of a charter sector into a school district is that it is not possible for the school district to recover the stranded costs when children exit to  charter schools.  In a groundbreaking 2018 report, the Oregon political economist, Gordon Lafer demonstrates that California’s Oakland Unified School District loses $57.3 million every year to charter schools.  Here’s how: “To the casual observer, it may not be obvious why charter schools should create any net costs at all for their home districts. To grasp why they do, it is necessary to understand the structural differences between the challenge of operating a single school—or even a local chain of schools—and that of a district-wide system operating tens or hundreds of schools and charged with the legal responsibility to serve all students in the community. When a new charter school opens, it typically fills its classrooms by drawing students away from existing schools in the district…  If, for instance, a given school loses five percent of its student body—and that loss is spread across multiple grade levels, the school may be unable to lay off even a single teacher… Plus, the costs of maintaining school buildings cannot be reduced…. Unless the enrollment falloff is so steep as to force school closures, the expense of heating and cooling schools, running cafeterias, maintaining digital and wireless technologies, and paving parking lots—all of this is unchanged by modest declines in enrollment. In addition, both individual schools and school districts bear significant administrative responsibilities that cannot be cut in response to falling enrollment. These include planning bus routes and operating transportation systems; developing and auditing budgets; managing teacher training and employee benefits; applying for grants and certifying compliance with federal and state regulations; and the everyday work of principals, librarians and guidance counselors.”

Lafer concludes: “If a school district anywhere in the country—in the absence of charter schools—announced that it wanted to create a second system-within-a-system, with a new set of schools whose number, size, specialization, budget, and geographic locations would not be coordinated with the existing school system, we would regard this as the poster child of government inefficiency and a waste of tax dollars. But this is indeed how the charter school system functions.”  In the same report, Lafer adds that in 2016-17, the San Diego Unified School District lost $65.9 million to charter schools.

In a subsequent report, Lafer explains: “Public school students in California’s West Contra Costa Unified School District are paying dearly for privately managed charter schools they don’t attend… Charter schools add $27.9 million a year to WCCUSD’s costs of running its own schools… That’s a net loss, after accounting for all savings realized by no longer educating the charter school students.”

The financial loss for any state’s public schools is not limited to  local school district budgets. There is substantial evidence that state legislatures do not create a separate budget line item funded with additional dollars to pay for school privatization; funding is instead sucked out of what used to be budgeted for the state’s public school districts. In his new book, Schoolhouse Burning, Derek Black traces how funding charter schools depleted public school funding in Ohio during the decade following the Great Recession in 2008: “While states were reducing their financial commitment to public schools, they were pumping enormous new resources into charters and vouchers—and making the policy environment for these alternatives more favorable. Charter schools, unlike traditional public schools, did not struggle during the recession. Their state and federal funding skyrocketed. Too often, financial shortfalls in public school districts were the direct result of pro-charter school policies… Ohio charter schools received substantial funding increases every year between 2008 and 2015. While public schools received increases in a few of those years, they were modest at best—in one instance just one-tenth the size of the charter school increase.” (Schoolhouse Burning, pp. 35-36)

In her brilliant 2018 book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, what Eve Ewing examines is really the social impact in one South Side Chicago community of marketplace school choice in the form of the competition for students between neighborhood public schools and a growing charter school sector. The Renaissance 2010 charter school marketplace expansion was ultimately the economic driver of Chicago’s closure of 50 neighborhood public schools at the end of 2013. The growth of a Chicago charter school sector was a primary cause of the “ghost” neighborhood schoolhouses left abandoned across Chicago’s South Side.

Billionaire Power? Two Decades of Education Policy Are a Cautionary Tale

Anand Giridharadas’s NY Times analysis of the recent Democratic candidates’ debate is the week’s most provocative commentary.  Giridharadas, author of the recent best seller about the role of venture philanthropy, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, devotes his recent column to The Billionaire Election:

“The Democratic debate on Wednesday made it clearer than ever that November’s election has become the billionaire referendum, in which it will be impossible to vote without taking a stand on extreme wealth in a democracy. The word ‘billionaire’ came up more often than ‘China,’ America’s leading geopolitical competitor; ‘immigration,’ among its most contentious issues; and ‘climate,’ its gravest existential threat… With the debate careening between billionaire loathing and billionaire self-love, Mr. Buttigieg warned against making voters ‘choose between a socialist who thinks that capitalism is the root of all evil and a billionaire who thinks that money ought to be the root of all power.'”

As someone who has been watching billionaire-driven, disruptive education reform for over 20 years, I find it fascinating that the role of billionaire power has become a primary issue in presidential politics. If you haven’t been paying such close attention to the education wars, you might not realize that policy around education and the public schools has for two decades been the locus of experimentation with the power and reach of billionaire philanthropists seizing a giant public sector institution from the professionals who have been running the schools for generations.  The billionaires’ idea has been that strategic investment by data wonks and venture philanthropists can turn around school achievement among poor children.

All this fits right in with America’s belief in the enterprising individual, and an attack on public institutions by far-right ideologues.  Disruptive education reform also arose chronologically with the development of big data, which fed into the idea of management efficiency, once tech experts could manipulate the data and help entrepreneurs more efficiently “fix” institutions to raise achievement.

The other part of the story, of course, is that school teaching is not a glam job. You don’t become a celebrity by teaching second grade, or supporting students trying to conceptualize algebra, or helping five sections of fifteen-year-olds every day learn how to read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Teachers work on behalf of children; they are not known for their individualism or for competing to be successful. But the business stars—particularly when they are also tech entrepreneurs—have become marketplace celebrities. And so we have given them a chance.

Mike Bloomberg himself brought the experiment to New York City when he got the state legislature to grant him mayoral governance. He hired a well known attorney, Joel Klein, as his schools chancellor.  Without a a bit of training or experience in education, they took over the schools, opened district-wide school choice in a school district serving over a million students, opened charter schools, colocated charters into buildings with public schools and other charters, tested everyone, rated and ranked schools by test scores, and closed the “failing” schools. It was all about technocratic management and attacks on the teachers’ union.  Many of the charter schools were “no-excuses” experiments with children walking silently in straight lines—schools with high suspension rates to create a rigid culture of obedience.  After Joel Klein left to work with Rupert Murdoch on a tech venture, Bloomberg hired socialite Cathie Black to run the city’s schools.  Black was a magazine publisher at Hearst.  She had no advanced degree and no education experience or training. Unable to show any feeling or empathy for the 1.1 million children enrolled in NYC’s public schools or their parents, Black lasted in the position from January until the first week of April in 2011.

Bloomberg was one of the billionaire, ed tech leaders, but there were lots of others:

• Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation brought us a bunch of experiments that eventually petered out: small high schools, the Common Core, incentive pay for teachers based on their students’ test scores. And Gates money seeded the vast charter school experiment in New Orleans after the 2005 hurricane.
• The Walton Family Foundation has spent more on charter school expansion than any of the other billionaires.
• The Edith and Eli Broad Foundation just bought a place in the Yale School of Management for the Broad Superintendents’ Academy that has for years been training school leaders with business management principles.
• Mark Zuckerberg (the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative) has promoted so-called “personalized” learning in which the software is programmed to tailor online instruction “personally” according each child’s needs and rate of learning.

Arne Duncan filled the U.S. Department of Education with staff from the Gates Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund and formalized all the competitive, business-tech theory into a Race to the Top, which was going to reward success and punish so-called “failing schools” with mandated quick turnarounds—firing principals and teachers, charterizing or privatizing schools, and finally closing schools.

It is time to remember several things about the reforms brought to us by the tech billionaires, for these same lessons may apply to the way, if elected, billionaires would “reform” the country just as they “reformed” the schools.  In the first place, No Child Left Behind, the federal program that encapsulated all this ed-reform theory, didn’t raise test scores.  Neither did it close test score gaps between wealthy children raised in pockets of privilege and poor children.

And the turnaround strategy created a mess in the cities where it was tried.  Year after year, New York City qualifies as the nation’s most segregated school district, because marketplace school choice promotes racial and economic segregation.  In Chicago, where Gates money enabled Arne Duncan to launch Renaissance 2010 before he took the same ideas to the U.S. Department of Education in Race to the Top, University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing describes the human collateral damage when technocrats forgot about the role of human institutions in real communities. In the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago’s South Side, Ewing documents community grieving for the destruction of neighborhoods when schools were closed:  “The people of Bronzeville understand that a school is more than a school.  A school is the site of a history and a pillar of black pride in a racist city.  A school is a safe place to be.  A school is a place where you find family.  A school is a home. So when they come for your schools, they’re coming for you. And after you’re gone they’d prefer you be forgotten.”  Ewing continues: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closure should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions…. These questions, I contend, need to be asked about Chicago’s school closures, about school closures anywhere. In fact, they are worth asking when considering virtually any educational policy decision:  What is the history that has brought us to this moment?  How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, pp. 155-159)

Mike Rose, the education writer and professor who has educated future teachers during an entire career writes about the kind of education policies the billionaire technocrats have never understood. After a trip across the United States observing excellent teachers, Rose writes about what classrooms look like when teachers know how to nurture and respect human connections with and among our children:  “The classrooms were safe. They provided physical safety, which in some neighborhoods is a real consideration. But there was also safety from insult and diminishment….  Intimately related to safety is respect, a word I heard frequently during my travels.  It meant many things: politeness, fair treatment, and beyond individual civility, a respect for the language and culture of the local population… Talking about safety and respect leads to a consideration of authority. I witnessed a range of classroom management styles, and though some teachers involved students in determining the rules of conduct and gave them significant responsibility to provide the class with direction, others came with a curriculum and codes of conduct fairly well in place.  But two things were always evident.  A teacher’s authority came not just with age or with the role, but from multiple sources—knowing the subject, appreciating students’ backgrounds, and providing a safe and respectful space. And even in traditionally run classrooms, authority was distributed. Students contributed to the flow of events, shaped the direction of discussion, became authorities on the work they were doing. These classrooms, then, were places of expectation and responsibility.”

Do we really want the billionaires to be able to direct their philanthropy, however well-intentioned, privately to shape public institutions with the money they are not paying in taxes?  Giradharadas concludes his recent column with that very question: “Do we wish to be a society in which wealth purchases fealty?  Are we cool with plutocrats taking advantage of a cash-starved state to run their own private policy machinery, thus cultivating the networks required to take over the state from time to time, and run it in ways that further entrench wealth? Just this week, Mr. Bezos, the founder and chief executive of Amazon, announced his creation of a $10 billion fund to fight climate change.  Once, such a gift might have been greeted with unmitigated gratitude. But now, rightly, people are asking about all the taxes Amazon doesn’t pay, about its own carbon footprint, and about whether any mortal should have that much power over a shared crisis.”

Rahm’s and Arne’s Legacies Continue to Damage Chicago Public Schools, Especially in Black Neighborhoods

Corporate school reform was launched in Chicago back in 2004 in the form of a glittery new promise named Renaissance 2010.  By 2010, the school district said, it would close so-called “failing” public schools and replace them with one hundred new schools. Many of the new schools would be charter schools. There was a corporate flavor to every detail beginning with the formal announcement of the new scheme—at the Commercial Club of Chicago.

In Chicago, however, corporate school reform did not end in 2010. It continues to this day.

In Ghosts in the Schoolyard, her profound (2018) history of Chicago school reform, University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing contrasts the widespread community grief that has followed school closures—as parents, children, and teachers understood and loved their schools as community and even family institutions, while schools CEO, Barbara Byrd Bennett and her staff brought a technocratic corporate mentality.  Ewing quotes the Chicago Public Schools portfolio planner, Brittany Meadows, justifying (at a formal 2013 hearing) the reason for closing Mayo Elementary School: “(T)he enrollment efficiency range of the Mayo facility is between 552 and 828 students. As I stated, the enrollment of Mayo as of the 20th day of attendance for the 2012-2013 school year is 408. The number is below the enrollment efficiency range, and thus the school is underutilized.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 100)

Ewing dissects the technocratic logic of the school reform imposed on Chicago by Arne Duncan, who ran the district before he became U.S. Secretary of Education and later Rahm Emanuel and a succession of mayoral-appointed school district CEOs: “Meadows closes with the language of logic: ‘This number is below the enrollment efficiency range, and thus the school is underutilized.’ Meadows presents this data using an ‘if… then’ statement, explaining the calculation of the metrics without explaining the validity of the constructs involved. In this manner the school closure proposal appears natural and inevitable. Well, of course, since this number is below the enrollment efficiency range, this is what happens next… The logic implied in Meadows’s statement reflects a certain view of reality: the idea that the most important aspects of the educational enterprise can easily be captured in no-nonsense, non-debatable numeric facts. These numbers are taken to be unbiased and a truer representation of what happens in a school building than more qualitative measures… which are seen as overly subjective or unreliable.” (Emphasis is in the original.) (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 101)

Corporate school reform in Chicago, while claiming to be neutral and based on data, has always operated with racist implications. Ewing provides the numbers: “Of the students who would be affected by the closures, 88 percent were black; 90 percent of the schools were majority black, and 71 percent had mostly black teachers—a big deal in a country where 84 percent of public school teachers are white.”(Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 5)

Besides Chicago’s school closures, which culminated in 2013, when 50 neighborhood schools were shut down, corporate school reform in Chicago has featured something called “student based budgeting.”  A new report from Roosevelt University sociologist, Stephanie Farmer now documents that Student Based Budgeting Concentrates Low Budget Schools in Chicago’s Black Neighborhoods.

Farmer explains: “In 2014, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) adopted a system-wide Student Based Budgeting model for determining individual school budgets… Our findings show that CPS’ putatively color-blind Student Based Budgeting reproduces racial inequality by concentrating low-budget public schools almost exclusively in Chicago’s Black neighborhoods…  Since the 1990s, the Chicago Board of Education (CBOE) has adopted various reforms to make Chicago Public Schools work more like a business than a public good.  CBOE’s school choice reform of the early 2000s created a marketplace of schools by closing neighborhood public schools to make way for new types of schools, many of which were privatized charter schools.”

Farmer contrasts the way Chicago Public Schools allocated funding across its schools in the past with what happened after Student Based Budgeting was introduced in 2014: “CPS central office provided each school an automatic allocation of teachers, school professionals, and staff positions. The cost of these professionals was covered by the central office, and not individual school budgets. This guaranteed that every school would have a baseline of education professionals needed to operate the school.  Under the new Student Based Budgeting model, CBOE ended the automatic allocation. Instead, schools would receive a stipend based on per student headcounts. Central office would continue to cover the cost of the principal, one clerk and one counselor, but automatic funding for eight school positions was eliminated. Principals had to use individual school stipends to pay for teacher salaries, educational professionals, and staff positions.”

Farmer explains: “Critics of Student Based Budgeting are concerned that it treats every kid the same, regardless of income level… Critics are also concerned that Student Based Budgeting forces low enrolled schools to cut their programs, enriching classes, teachers and support staff… to compensate for the loss of monetary support.  The diminished learning environment pushes parents to seek out other school options.”

In other words, School Based Budgeting causes a downward spiral.

External, non-school related factors also affect Chicago’s school choice marketplace, and Student Based Budgeting exacerbates these other very complex dynamics. Farmer explains: “Our research shows that Student Based Budgeting ignores the unevenness of neighborhood distress, which contributes to declining enrollments. Declining school enrollments are not just a result of student-consumers choosing the best school-product… Many lower-income and predominantly Black neighborhoods are experiencing distress caused by: a low wage labor market and poverty; cuts to the public sector (i.e. public housing and school closures); displacement caused by gentrification and growing housing unaffordability; and crime coupled with racially motivated policing.  These factors form the context in which approximately 250,000 Black people have moved out of Chicago between 2000 and 2016, according to the U.S.Census.”

Farmer concludes: “Instead of giving schools the ‘freedom to flourish,’ Student Based Budgeting sets up schools for the ‘freedom to fail.’…Classrooms are overcrowded, where there are over 40 students in elementary classrooms, because there is not enough money in the budget to reduce class size by hiring additional teachers. Small schools are also forced to pare down their curriculum to the bare bones and cut enriching programs like in the arts, foreign languages, and training in professional trades. Many low budget schools are concentrated in the neighborhoods that also have the highest level of student mobility rates, where students move from one school to another due to factors like evictions or homelessness. Schools with starved budgets are unable to provide institutional supports for these students.”

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is currently negotiating a contract, and the teachers voted last week to authorize a strike in mid-October if the negotiations break down. But the issue is not salaries. Chicago education reporter for WBEZ (NPR) Sarah Karp reports that CTU President Jesse Sharkey “and other union leaders have emphasized that the compensation package will still leave office clerks and teacher aides… who are CTU members—making such low wages their children will qualify for free and reduced lunch… Sharkey repeated Thursday night that the contract fight is about more than pay. Two of the big unresolved issues have to do with staffing and class size limits. The union had started out by insisting that the board of education agree to lower staff-to-student ratios for nurses, social workers and special education case managers. They also wanted a promise in the contract that more librarians would be hired.”

It is impossible to know from outside the district how many of the issues in the contract negotiations can be traced back to Student Based Budgeting and the rest of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s corporate school reform legacy.  What is clear is that Chicago’s new mayor, Lori Lightfoot, who is, by law, responsible for Chicago’s public schools, has a huge challenge to undo years of corporate school reform policies that have undermined the operation of the nation’s third largest public school district. It is a legacy fraught with racial overtones.

Considering School Closures as Philadelphia’s Empty Germantown High School Faces Sheriff’s Sale

In her profound and provocative book about the community impact of Chicago’s closure of 50 so-called “underutilized” public schools at the end of the 2013 school year, Eve Ewing considers the effect of school closures on the neighborhoods they once anchored.  Ewing’s book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, is about Chicago’s Bronzeville neighborhood and a set of school closures in Chicago in which 88 percent of the affected students were African American, and 71 percent of the closed schools had majority-African American teachers. (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 5)

Ewing writes: “Understanding these tropes of death and mourning as they pertain not to the people we love, but to the places where we loved them, has a particular gravity during a time when the deaths of black people at the hands of the state—through such mechanisms as police violence and mass incarceration—are receiving renewed attention. As the people of Bronzeville understand, the death of a school and the death of a person at the barrel of a gun are not the same thing, but they also are the same thing. The people of Bronzeville understand that a school is more than a school. A school is the site of a history and a pillar of black pride in a racist city. A school is a safe place to be. A school is a place where you find family. A school is a home. So when they come for your schools, they’re coming for you. And after you’re gone, they’d prefer you be forgotten.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, pp. 155-156)

Public school closures were one of three “school turnarounds” prescribed for so-called “failing schools” in the No Child Left Behind Act; they were also as part of Arne Duncan’s priorities in Race to the Top and School Improvement Grants. (The other two turnaround strategies were firing the principal and half the staff or privatizing school by charterizing it or turning it over to a private Educational Management Organization.)  At the end of the school year in 2013, Chicago closed 50 schools. Other big city school districts also imposed school closure as a “turnaround” strategy. Philadelphia closed 23 schools that same year.

Chicago and Philadelphia were also both rapidly expanding marketplace school competition by imposing a management theory called portfolio school reform. It is a strategy that models business school thinking.  The district manages traditional public and charter schools as though they are  investments in a stock portfolio. The idea is to launch new schools and close low scoring schools and schools that become under-enrolled. It is imagined that the competition will drive school improvement, but that has not been the result anyplace where this scheme has been launched. School districts in Chicago and Philadelphia launched a growing number of charter schools at the same time the overall student population in the school district was declining. As families experimented with school choice, both districts shut down neighborhood schools described as becoming “underutilized.”  School closure was a top down policy, and when it was imposed, the justification was presented with reams of technical data. In Philadelphia, the school closures were imposed by a state-appointed School Reform Commission. By popular demand, the Philadelphia school district has now been returned to democratic governance under a locally elected school board, a development which may reflect partly on the community’s response to the massive school closures.

I thought about the wave of 2013 school closures this morning as I read an article from Tuesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer about Philadelphia’s storied Germantown High School—now covered by the newspaper as a mere eyesore, an abandoned hulk of a building. The Inquirer’s Hannah Chinn reports: “When the Philadelphia School District closed Germantown High School in 2013 just shy of its 100th anniversary and announced plans to sell it, some residents felt blindsided and confused.  Others were hopeful. How could their community continue without a central education facility? Who would take on the responsibility of the building?… Could the building be redeveloped to offer affordable housing…?  Vocational training? A resource center? Six years later, all those questions remain unanswered… In September 2013, the Maryland-based Concordia Group began negotiations to purchase Germantown High.”  The sale was opposed in court, but, “In 2017, after an appeal from the School District, the court approved the sale of … five schools.  But the Concordia Group no longer seemed so sure… The two Germantown schools are not listed on Concordia’s site—or seemingly anywhere else, except with the sheriff… This spring (2019), unpaid balances have caught up to the property. On May 15, the high school is scheduled for tax sale. According to the Sheriff’s Office, if a property owner fails to pay utility bills, schools taxes, or city taxes, the property may be auctioned at a tax delinquency sale so the city can collect what it’s owed. The opening bid on Germantown High next month is listed as $1,500.”

In a 2016 report on the wave of school closings across America’s cities, Rachel M. Cohen describes the 2013 Philadelphia school closures that included Germantown High School: “In 2012, citing a $1.4 billion deficit, Philadelphia’s state-run school commission voted to close 23 schools—nearly 10 percent of the city’s stock… Amid the fiscal pressure for state budget cuts, declining student enrollment, charter-school growth, and federal incentives to shut down low-performing schools, the district assured the public that closures would help put the city back on track toward financial stability… While black students were 40 percent of Chicago’s school district population in 2013, they made up 88 percent of those affected by the closures. In Philadelphia, black students made up 58 percent of the district, but 81 percent of those affected by closures.”

You might wonder whether any academic research has been conducted on the effects of Philadelphia’s school closures and on the use of school closure as a strategy for supporting higher academic achievement among the affected students.  The University of Pennsylvania’s Matthew P. Steinberg and John M. MacDonald just published such a study of the impact of the 2013 public school closures in Philadelphia. The study (published in the Economics of Education Review, Volume 69, April 2019) is paywalled, but the conclusions are reported in the abstract: “We estimate the impact of public school closings in Philadelphia on student achievement and behavioral outcomes. While school closures had no effect on the average achievement of displaced students, achievement increased among displaced students attending higher-performing schools following closure. The achievement of students (already) attending receiving-schools, however, was negatively affected by the receipt of displaced students. School absences increased significantly for displaced students following closure. We also find that the achievement of displaced and receiving-school students declined as the fraction of displaced students attending a receiving-school increased, and displaced students missed more days of school and received more suspension days the farther they traveled to their new school following closure.”  It is clear that the educational experiment has not been an astounding success for the students involved.

The new study on Philadelphia pretty much replicates the findings in a research brief summarized in January by the National Education Policy Center: “In School Closure as a Strategy to Remedy Low Performance, Gail Sunderman of the University of Maryland, and Erin Coghlan and Rick Mintrop of the University of California, Berkeley, conclude that closures are ‘a high-risk/low-gain strategy that fails to hold promise with respect to either student achievement or non-cognitive well-being.’ Sunderman, Coghlan and Mintrop found that closures don’t necessarily result in students transferring to higher performing schools. In addition, the transfer itself can set students back as they adapt to new environments. School closures also often fail to deliver promised cost savings, the brief’s author’s note. That’s because closures come with hidden costs such as mothballing buildings, transporting students to schools that are farther from their homes, and renovating receiving schools to accommodate additional enrollment.”

After Rahm Emanuel’s administration closed 50 public schools at the end of the 2013 school year, the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research documented extremely negative effects not only for the students whose schools were shuttered but also for students at the so-called “receiving” schools and for the surrounding community across Chicago’s South and West Sides: “When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools.” “Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community.”

The Chicago Consortium on School Research continues: “When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning… The intensity of the feelings of loss were amplified in cases where schools had been open for decades, with generations of families attending the same neighborhood school.  Losing their closed schools was not easy and the majority of interviewees spoke about the difficulty they had integrating and socializing into the welcoming schools.”  “Even though welcoming school staff and students did not lose their schools per se, many also expressed feelings of loss because incorporating a large number of new students required adjustments… Creating strong relationships and building trust in welcoming schools after schools closed was difficult.. Displaced staff and students, who had just lost their schools, had to go into unfamiliar school environments and start anew. Welcoming school communities also did not want to lose or change the way their schools were previously.”

We have lived through two decades of top-down school reform—including prescriptions for turning around our society’s lowest performing schools—the schools situated in our nation’s poorest neighborhoods. In her new book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve Ewing suggests that we reframe our thinking about school closure as a turnaround strategy. “When Barbara Byrd-Bennett (then Chicago’s school CEO) made her statement to the board (who were considering the proposed school closures), she encouraged them—and anyone else who might be listening, including journalists and average citizens—to see Chicago’s empty school buildings as a ‘utilization crisis,’ a matter of dire urgency demanding immediate attention… Within this frame, the frame of the utilization crisis, school closure indeed appears to be the only option for anyone who cares about children… But if we consider not only the painting but the frame, we might come to other conclusions because we have seen that, when considering a school’s value, there is more to the assessment than meets they eye. There is the symbolic weight of a school as a bastion of community pride, and also the fear that losing the school means conceding a battle in a much larger ideological war over the future of a city and who gets to claim it. There is the need to consider that losing the school represents another assault in a long line of racist attacks against a people… There is our intensely segregated society to account for, in which those who attend the school experience a fundamentally different reality than those who have the power to steer its future. And finally, there is the intense emotional aftermath that follows school closure….” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, pp. 158-159)

Ewing continues: “It’s worth stating explicitly: my purpose in this book is not to say that school closures should never happen. Rather, in expanding the frame within which we see school closure as a policy decision, we find ourselves with a new series of questions… What is the history that has brought us to this moment? How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p.159)

More Education News from Chicago: WBEZ Publishes the Troubling History of Chicago’s Public School Closures

It is quite a week for education news from Chicago.  Yesterday this blog covered the first teachers’ strike at a charter school network, UNO-Acero Charter Schools in Chicago.

Today’s post considers nearly two decades of closures of traditional neighborhood schools in Chicago.  Chicago’s closure of so-called “failing” schools began in 2002. Two years later, Chicago’s technocratic model of test-based, punitive, turnaround-based school reform was formalized into Renaissance 2010, the program led by Arne Duncan. The “turnaround” idea—later brought by Duncan into federal programs— was to punish schools posting low test scores by firing teachers and principals, closing schools, and replacing them with privately operated charter schools.  It was an early example of an ideology the inventor of this kind of school policy calls “portfolio school reform“—the idea that a district manage its schools, public and charter alike, as though they are a stock portfolio. Keep and invest in the schools that raise scores, and shed the failures.

The “portfolio” model features disruption as a virtue and condemns stability as the product of bureaucracy and tradition.  It is a business-school idea whose proponents have forgotten to consider that real children, parents and communities are involved, and that there might be human damage from this kind of disruption. The theory involves test scores, moving kids around, and formulas to determine which buildings are being optimally utilized. The ideology dreams up a spiral of continuous growth in the number of high-scoring schools.

On Monday, Chicago’s WBEZ published a history of the Chicago school closures which have been the centerpiece of this plan: “In the time it has taken for a child to grow up in Chicago, city leaders have either closed or radically shaken up some 200 public schools—nearly a third of the entire district…. These decisions, defended as the best and only way to improve chronically low-performing schools or deal with serious under-enrollment, have meant 70,160 children—the vast majority of them black—have seen their schools closed or all staff in them fired… 61,420 black children affected. The number of children who have lived through a Chicago school closing since 2002 is jaw dropping, and the impact on the black community in particular has been profound. A total of 70,160 Chicago students have experienced either a school closing or a total re-staffing of their school firsthand; of those, 88 percent are black. That’s a wildly disproportionate number… Some 7,368 Latino children have lived through a school shakeup.  Meanwhile, white students have been nearly untouched.  In almost 17 years, just 533 white students have experienced a closing.”

WBEZ reporters attempt to remain agnostic about whether this sort of school reform has been a good or bad thing in Chicago. They report that school achievement as measured by tests has improved, but they also add details that make it hard to know what caused higher scores. One place scores have risen is in the growing number of highly selective schools in Chicago. The reporters add, however, that the rest is only speculative: “And to the core question of whether school shakeups made a difference for the students they were meant to help at chronically low-performing schools, there is no easy answer.  The city still considers 10 percent of district-run schools so low performing they need ‘intensive support,’ though it considers nearly 80 percent to be in ‘good standing.’  That’s a much rosier picture than in 2002, but both the tests used to evaluate students and the accountability systems used to evaluate schools have  changed dramatically, making comparisons fraught.  And even if it were possible to compare to 2002, it’s impossible to say what’s behind any improvement.”  “After nearly two decades, the school system is still confronting the same two problems that prompted it to begin shuttering schools in the first place. It still struggles with chronically low-performing schools.  And despite the pain and protests that accompanied so many school closings, the system has a more dramatic under-enrollment problem today than it did when it started shutting down schools in 2002.”

WBEZ‘s reporters also interview students, parents and teachers who have been forced to change schools, many of them dislocated more than once—separated from friends, beloved teachers, family traditions and neighborhoods. The reporters reference the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research’s report on the mourning process that has affected students and families not only in the schools that were shut down but in the schools that received masses of new students, where significant readjustment followed.

And WBEZ reporters also talk with Eve Ewing, the University of Chicago sociologist whose profound new book portrays widespread grieving across Black Chicago for the loss of community institutions woven into the lives of generations of families and their neighborhoods: “‘It’s heartbreaking,’ said Eve Ewing, a University of Chicago sociology professor whose recent book examined the 2013 school closings in Bronzeville and their impact on the African-American community.  Ewing said the ‘astronomical’ numbers show school closings have ‘actually become part of the fabric of blackness in Chicago for many people.’  She said school closings play into social instability, ‘and the fact that so many black Chicagoans feel like this city is not a stable or a safe place to stay—and are leaving.'”  The reporters add that Chicago Public Schools have lost 42,000 students since 2013. The assumption is that school closures have been part of the motivation for families to move to Chicago’s suburbs or to Northwest Indiana.

Ironically on Monday, the same day WBEZ published its history of Chicago’s school closures, a Cook County judge blocked the Chicago Public Schools’ plan (see here, here, and here) to close another predominantly African American school, the National Teachers Academy, this one located in the South Loop. Chicago Public Schools had planned to convert the building into a high school to serve the area just south of downtown, an area lacking a high school. The District immediately announced it would accept the judge’s ruling.  It will keep the National Teachers Academy open as an elementary school to prevent further disruption among students, their families, and the community.

Parents have been protesting the planned closure of the highly rated, majority black, traditional public National Teachers Academy for several years. The school district had announced it would move National Teachers’ Academy students to join South Loop Elementary, where the students are mostly white. Chicago Public Schools has always promised, however, that students from closed schools would not be moved to a lower-scoring school.  In October, test scores at National Teachers Academy topped scores at South Loop. The judge’s decision, however, was decided on what the judge accepted as a civil rights violation.  The Sun-Times Lauren Fitzpatrick explains: “NTA families had organized nearly two years ago to loudly fight CPS’ plans to take over their building…. Their lawsuit alleged that CPS violated the rights of NTA students, who are mostly African-American, under the Illinois Civil Rights Act….”

In Chicago, as the school district has closed public schools, it has also allowed the number of charter schools rapidly to expand.  In another action on Monday of this week, the school district recommended closure of two charter schools deemed under-performing.  For the Sun-Times, Lauren Fitzpatrick adds: “Officials also denied applications for three new privately managed, publicly funded schools seeking to open, though all five operators can appeal to a state board that has overturned CPS’s decisions in the past… And the same school board was set Wednesday to consider applications for three new charter schools, amid plummeting enrollment and finances that have improved but are no means plentiful.”

What is clear is that Chicago’s experiment with “portfolio school reform” continues.  The new WBEZ history concludes: “In the 2019 mayoral race, candidates are already weighing in on school closings—and it’s obvious the city’s next mayor faces an under-enrollment crisis. Chicago has more under-enrolled schools today than it did in 2013, before it closed 50 underutilized schools. It’s been losing 10,000 children annually for the last several years.”

How would Chicago be different today if policy makers had thought about the people who would be effected by school closures and examined what have turned out to be the inevitable fiscal implications of continually opening charter schools to expand the portfolio of choices? I believe hindsight is clearer than the WBEZ reporters want to admit. Researchers at Roosevelt University have documented, for example, that the competition created by the rapid expansion of charter schools resulted in the closure of traditional public schools and also contributed to a financial crisis in the Chicago Public Schools.

In her new book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard, Eve Ewing suggests additional considerations: “What do school closures, and their disproportionate clustering in communities like Bronzeville, tell us about a fundamental devaluation of African American children, their families, and black life in general?… What is the history that has brought us to this moment  How can we learn more about that history from those who have lived it?  What does this institution represent for the community closest to it?  Who gets to make the decisions here, and how do power, race, and identity inform the answer to that question?” (pp. 158-159)