BOARDWATCH: Board's claims about 'turnaround' success are challenged by parents and community leaders while complaints about conflicts of interest are ignored... Parents, union and community leaders denounce AUSL 'network' in Black Chicago, West Side schools as new AUSL turnarounds are proposed
In a series of dramatic moments, parents, teachers, union and community leaders from Chicago's West Side repeatedly took the floor at the March 26, 2014 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education to denounce the latest proposal to "turn around" three more of the city's elementary schools based on test scores and other invalid measures of school performance. The speakers also noted that the Board of Education has several conflicts of interest in placing the schools in the hands of the clout-heavy AUSL group. They also charged that the AUSL "turnarounds" in the past have failed despite all of the extra resources that the Board gives to "turnaround" schools during the first years of the corporate-style process.
Surrounded by emotional parents and other community activists, Valerie Leonard presented the Board with research showing that the so-called "turnaround" process that had become the monopoly of AISL had failed in virtually every school that it had been used at. Leonard was gone from the meeting when, at the end of the meeting, Board President David Vitale and Board member Andrea Zopp (of the Chicago Urban League) talked about how some members of the public didn't understand the "facts," even though the Board members were silent or busily on their cell phones while Leonard and others spoke against the AUSL proposal on the Board's March 26, 2014 agenda. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.AUSL (the "Academy for Urban School Leadership") has been given the lucrative turnaround contracts since the Board began using the corporate nomenclature for the "reconstitution" of schools more than ten years ago.The proposed "turnarounds" were announced in a CPS press release on March 21, but will not appear on the Board meeting agenda until the April Board meeting. The Board will next meet on April 23 at 125 S. Clark St. Sign in for public participation at the Board meeting will begin at 8:00 a.m. on April 14, 2014. The public agenda for that Board meeting will become available to the public according to the Open Meetings Act by 10:00 a.m. on April 21, 2014.
The proposed "turnaround" of the three schools was announced by CPS officials but did not appear on the public agenda for the Board's March 26 meeting. The seven members of the Board of Education and Board "Chief Executive Officer" Barbara Byrd Bennett sat stolidly or looked away as more than half dozen speakers denounced their latest corporate-style version of reality prior to the Board's vote to impose the turnarounds. The latest attack was on the Dvorak, McNair and Gresham elementary schools, all of which s