The Chicago Board of Education anti-public education script has been flipped.
The predators are now the prey.
The charter schools were out in force once again at the December 14 Chicago Board of Ed Meeting pleading to have their charters renewed. But whereas charters were the darlings of yesteryear, they are now at the mercy of CTU organizer and elected Mayor Brandon Johnson and his appointed Board of Trustees.
Least we feel sorry for the hunters who once openly trashed public schools and the Chicago Teachers Union, the CTU Chair Jen Conant spoke in the beginning of public participation about the charter school problems that continue today and the need for all charter teachers to be part of a union. Currently almost 20 percent of charter teachers are under a CTU union contract.
Conant first spoke about recent contract agreements with Aspira and Christopher House Charters that provide equal pay for equal pay and class size contract agreements. However, Instituto del Progreso Latino is still holding out claiming they don’t have the funds to pay their teachers a fair wage. She noted that Instituto doubled the rent it charges for its two schools (collecting more tax money) from about $1 million to $2 million, while the fair market value is about $700k, and increased its management fees from $700k to $1 million. But there is only one social worker for 600 students.
“Think of how many positions that money could be used to fund,” Conant said. “They are taking money for CPS students and siphoning it off to management.”
The other charter holdout during contract negotiations is Namaste, which refuses to provide sanctuary protections for its immigrant students, something every public school provides in our city. They have also refused staffing minimum requirements and rejected union neutrality, which means they want to continue to pressure their staff to not join a union to get better protections.
“In a non-union school a teacher can be fired for speaking up about safety concerns,” Conant said.
The CTU chair also threw cold water on the charters complaining that they need a longer renewal period because of their heavy turnover. She spoke about her own experience when she worked for 11 years at CICS Charter and they had four different CEOs.
“Who knows if these CEOs asking for renewal will be here for the next renewal,” she said. “It’s important that every school have a union to hold management accountable every day.”
Stacia Scott, SEIU Local 73 Executive VP, spoke next about the CPS bus drivers, custodians and teacher assistants known as SECAs, who are negotiating a new contract. She said it is wrong to use the $300 million shortfall as a reason to bargain on the backs of our lowest paid workers, noting 88 percent of these workers are black. She said these low-paid workers have been threatened by privatization over the years and today have tiered wage scales (like CPS teachers with its 2 tiered pension); SECAs make an average $38k per year and are required to live in the city.
“You got to pay people enough to live here,” Scott said.
She said Aramark, the controversial CPS private cleaning and cafeteria vendor, has taken over $1 billion over the past ten years, “yet we still struggle to have clean schools.”
Scott did say that she has noticed a positive trend in CPS and she would like to close loopholes in the contracts to stop abuse of its workers. They collected over 4,000 signatures on a petition for job security, fair pay and cost of living adjustments and equitable pay over the year (CTU asked delegates to survey teachers if they want even paychecks throughout the school year), and asked that SECAs be included in IEP meetings for Special Education kids.
The President of the Principals and Administrators Association, Troy LaRaviere spoke next. ‘Good morning beautiful people,’ he began.
Then the sparks flew.
He made, or rather thundered out, his accusations of racism, of white teachers attacking black principals. Once again the tenacious principal leader, who made his name during the dark days of Mayor Rahm Emanuel by calling out the corrution of charter schools, was there to defend three black principals who were removed from Lindblom, Dunbar and Harriet Tubman Schools.
“We know part of the problem is they’re black,” he said, referring again to former Lindblom Principal Abdul Muhammad. “There were white teachers who were not doing well and (Muhammad) held them accountable for underserving black students.”
Muhammad was removed by CPS at the selective enrollment high school for not reporting sexual abuse and other allegations the law department confirmed. A process that LaRaviere said was unfair because they were not able to refute the allegations. Plus, he said the teachers and staff should have reported the abuse to DCFS and not the principal.
He said former Harriet Tubman Principal Kimberly Gibson was removed based on false claims that she didn’t report a sexual assault, and once again it was because a black principal was holding white teachers accountable who then made allegations with no evidence. He said that CPS Central Office then offered Gibson a separate job if she would give up her principal job.
“For someone who didn’t report sexual assault why would you offer them a job,” LaRaveiere said.
This is a common tactic by those in power. Moving leaders accused of overseeing sexaul abuse to different jobs. The Catholic Church covered up priests raping children by moving them to another parish. A far easier tactic to keep embarrassing information hidden, the children be damned.
Next was the right reactionary attack that was fired in the form of a cute elementary school student named Ariel Hawk who said how much she loved the Keller Gifted Center, but due to the busing crisis was forced to study at her neighborhood school which was the best public school. Whereas before she was learning 8th grade math and reading, she was now only taught 6th grade reading and math. “I wasn’t learning anything at Lincoln,” she said. “I was being taught material I had already learned two years ago.”
This young speaker personified the reaction from the pro-charter and magnet school crowd after CPS announced it wants to move away from school choice that focused on these semi-private schools to reinvigorate neighborhood schools that had been neglected after years of corporate school reform. This started with Mayor Richard Daley’s Ren2010 program to close 100 public schools and replace them with charters and magnets and culminated in President Barack Obama’s Race to the Top administered under former CPS CEO Arne Duncan.
Hawk the gifted student said she returned to Keller, in dire need of busing, to only discover this new injustice for her and her classmates. “And now I hear you want to take away my school, the No. 1 school rated in all of Illinois,” she said. “I think that sounds stupid enough to make a point by itself.”
Interesting choice of word, ‘stupid.’ This word is considered ugly and taboo in today’s world of politically correct language amongst the kids, where my students have even had to correct me or clasp their ears if I read it aloud from an older text. This reminded me of President Trump’s reign when outdated bigoted words were trying to make a comeback in regular lexicon thanks to the right’s assault on less offensive language.
Board of Ed VP Trustee Elizabeth Todd-Breland made it clear after public comments had finished that they had no intention to close any schools.
The last attack on the new and improved Board of Education came from former Board of Ed and CTPF Board Trustee Dwayne Truss (who was appointed by former Mayor Lori Lightfoot). He said it was ‘disengeneous’ for CPS to talk about community partnerships and then leave his Black Community Collaborative out in the cold. He claimed that when they stood up for the rights of black people, which clashed with the rights of migrants, ‘we get kind of punished for that.’ He called out the CTU leadership for supporting the gutting of the ethics portion of the elected school board in order to allow vendors who get paid by CPS to sit on the elected school board. He said there are different community school models to look at, rather than only those partners with the CTU who must also be political allies. He said Michelle Clark High School was one community school model the CTU did not control.
The Catholic Church and its schools have a real opportunity here. Hopefully they will not squander it.