Rahm’s and Arne’s Legacies Continue to Damage Chicago Public Schools, Especially in Black Neighborhoods
Corporate school reform was launched in Chicago back in 2004 in the form of a glittery new promise named Renaissance 2010. By 2010, the school district said, it would close so-called “failing” public schools and replace them with one hundred new schools. Many of the new schools would be charter schools. There was a corporate flavor to every detail beginning with the formal announcement of the new scheme—at the Commercial Club of Chicago.
In Chicago, however, corporate school reform did not end in 2010. It continues to this day.
In Ghosts in the Schoolyard, her profound (2018) history of Chicago school reform, University of Chicago sociologist Eve Ewing contrasts the widespread community grief that has followed school closures—as parents, children, and teachers understood and loved their schools as community and even family institutions, while schools CEO, Barbara Byrd Bennett and her staff brought a technocratic corporate mentality. Ewing quotes the Chicago Public Schools portfolio planner, Brittany Meadows, justifying (at a formal 2013 hearing) the reason for closing Mayo Elementary School: “(T)he enrollment efficiency range of the Mayo facility is between 552 and 828 students. As I stated, the enrollment of Mayo as of the 20th day of attendance for the 2012-2013 school year is 408. The number is below the enrollment efficiency range, and thus the school is underutilized.” (Ghosts in the Schoolyard, p. 100)
Ewing dissects the technocratic logic of the school reform imposed on Chicago by Arne Duncan, who ran the district before he became U.S. Secretary of Education and later Rahm Emanuel and a succession of mayoral-appointed school district CEOs: “Meadows closes with the language of logic: ‘This number is below the enrollment efficiency range, and thus the school is underutilized.’ Meadows presents this data using an ‘if… then’ statement, explaining the calculation of the metrics without explaining the validity of the constructs involved. In this manner the school closure proposal appears natural and inevitable. Well, of course, since this CONTINUE READING: Rahm’s and Arne’s Legacies Continue to Damage Chicago Public Schools, Especially in Black Neighborhoods | janresseger
