Karen Lewis and the New, Shrewd Unionism
Great minds, thinking alike.
This was a very bad week for Chicago's children.
On Wednesday evening, the unelected Chicago Board of Education approved the largest school closing plan in history. 50 schools will be shuttered in a pattern that is clearly racially biased: black students account for 40% of the CPS population, but 88% of the students who are being displaced are black. It obviously makes the elites who run CPS uncomfortable to point out such things, but it is the sad, ugly truth.
I'm not going to pretend that there is any upside to this. Many children - a good number of whom are homeless - are going to have their lives further upended in this senseless purge. The savings will be modest, if they materialize at all; CPS has already admitted its initial estimate of cost savings was a crock, calling into question the integrity of their projections. And the notion that schools were "under-utilized" is offensive in a district where the CPS administration thinks class size targets of 40 are acceptable.
If anything positive comes out of this, it's certainly not worth the pain Chicago's most vulnerable children will feel
