Rahm Emanuel: Don’t Be Afraid of School Choice
Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel published an opinion article in the Washington Post saying something about how choice is a good thing when it is a good thing, so don’t get your knickers twisted against school choice just because Trump is for it. At least I think that is what he is saying. Read it and tell me why you think he (or someone wrote) wrote this article to get people to think well of school choice.
I think he is saying that when Democrats promote privatization by charter school, that is a good thing, and we must keep doing it even though Betsy DeVos wants to turn every school into a charter school and/or give every student a voucher to attend a religious school.
Sorry, but I have a hard time reading anything allegedly penned by Rahm about schools without thinking of the day of infamy when he closed 50 public schools at one fell swoop. He will be remembered for the brutal, disruptive, heedless closing of 50 community public schools. That, and the awful youth violence that continues to plague Chicago, promoted to some extent by the deliberate destruction of communities.
At the same time that Rahm and his hand-picked board of the city’s elite were closing public schools, they continued opening charter schools. Chicago is not an example of the success of school reform. To the extent that we use the federal NAEP scores as a measure, Chicago is still one of the lowest performing urban districts in the nation. It has some very good public schools, but it also has many very poorly resourced schools. Rahm will not be remembered as an education reformer.
In this article, he boasts again of Urban Prep Academy. This is the all-black, all-male school where 100% of the students who reach 12th grade graduate and go to college. This is a school that Gary Rubinstein researched and discovered its high attrition rate and its low test scores, lower than those of students in Chicago public schools. When I googled Urban Prep to find the links, I noticed that newspapers around the country still report the news of its “100% graduation rate” and “100% college acceptance rate.”
Knowing what Rahm has done to the Chicago public schools, I find it hard to understand why he thinks he is in a position to offer advice to the nation about school reform. The reality is that he is comfortable with Trump and DeVos and the privatization movement and has no qualms about continuing to implement it in Chicago.Rahm Emanuel: Don’t Be Afraid of School Choice | Diane Ravitch's blog:
