Why America Needs An Education Spring
by Jeff Bryant
Well, someone in the mainstream media finally had to ask the question.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, on his “All In” program on May 24, covered the forced closing of 50 public schools in Chicago – the largest incident of mass school closings in the nation’s history.
Joining Hayes were Karen Lewis, head of the Chicago Teachers’ Union, and education professor Pedro Noguera to discuss the rationale for the closures. Lewis said school administrators and Mayor Rahm Emanuel changed the rationale for the closings so many times that the case had become “murky.” Noguera declared the closings were “not a solution” for fixing or “reforming” schools.
Then Hayes dropped this: “Is this a strategy to – I’ll put it on the table: School closings as a strategy to kill public education?”
Good Question!
Neither Lewis nor Noguero answered the question directly. And it’s hard to imagine Emanuel or any of his surrogates on the board of Chicago Public Schools admitting they aim to “kill public education.”
But when political leaders push policies that have no track record of success and are obviously senseless – Noguero mocked the whole notion of school closures as a solution to education failure by asking, “If we had too much crime in a neighborhood would we shut down the police department?” – then skeptical audiences are bound to question the