Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm's Monday Massacre at Clemente

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm's Monday Massacre at Clemente:

Rahm's Monday Massacre at Clemente

by Mike Klonsky

When the board announced that Roberto Clemente High School was to be the city's third public high school, (along with Senn and the new Back of the Yards H.S.) converted into a wall-to-wall International Baccalaureate (IB) school, many Clemente teachers were thrilled by the news. Teacher teams began preparing to implement the new plan and think about how they could make a contribution to the new Clemente.

Unlike most early CPS school restructuring efforts, the new IB school at Clemente was being planned to accept all interested neighborhood students and "not look to filter students out,” schools chief Jean-Claude Brizard told reporters earlier this year.

In March, the mayor signed a deal with IB to double the size of the city’s international baccalaureate program and devote five neighborhood schools exclusively to that program to supposedly prepare 3,500 more students for