Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Cracks in the pavement

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Cracks in the pavement:

Cracks in the pavement

by Mike Klonsky

"This is Little Rock, 1957," Jackson told the board. "This is apartheid."

The mayor had no trouble getting his hand-picked gaggle of billionaires and their toadies on the school board to unanimously vote for more school closings and turnarounds. But it's become clear that mounting protests have begun to create some space for dissent among the minions. Media coverage of the protests seems to have moved somewhat out of the hands of Rahm's army of highly-paid spinners at CPS.

Latest to join the struggle to stop the closings were two important black, religious community leaders, the Rev.

Chicago school board tells parents: We don't need no stinkin' research

by Mike Klonsky

A day after they were handed the latest study showing the poor results of their turnaround reforms, the mayor's hand-picked school board voted to turn 10 more neighborhood public schools over to a private turnaround company. This despite day-long protests outside their offices by hundreds of angry parents, students and community supporters (none of the mayor's paid counter-protesters even bothered to show up).

The board decided to ignore the research and a week of protests (including a march on Monday to the mayor's house) and voted to close five elementary schools, phase out one high school and "turn around" 10 schools by firing all the teachers and making them reapply for jobs.

Even Gates doesn't like shaming teachers in public

by Mike Klonsky

N.Y. Times graphic

Publicly shaming teachers in N.Y. and L.A. is too much even for Bill Gates. In a NYT opinion piece, ("Shame is Not the Solution") he continues to defend the use of inaccurate, misleading, and now widely discredited, value-added formulas, as "one important piece" of ranking individual teachers. But the most powerful of the power philanthropists wants these evaluations kept out of the press. He's at least got that right.

Unfortunately, some education advocates in New York, Los Angeles and other cities are claiming that a good personnel system can be based on ranking teachers according to their “value-added rating” — a

Town says, "frack you" to Anschutz

by Mike Klonsky

Phillip Anschutz, bankrolled the anti-public school propaganda film, Waiting for Superman. Now he's financing another film glorifying the so called, "parent trigger", a law which gives a group of parents the power to fire all their school's teachers and hand it over to a private management company. 20th Century Fox is preparing a September release for “Won’t Back Down” starring Viola Davis and Maggie Gyllenhaal.