How Other Districts Do It; How CPS Is Portrayed

In Newark, they're doing a Fresh Start/Sherman-type thing to try and help one school:  Raising the Scores: For a School, Hope and a Fresh Start (NYT).  With the support of the teachers union, Newton replaced 6 of its 44 teachers — some against their will — with teachers who demonstrated a higher commitment to change or who had expertise needed in a particular subject.

Meanwhile, Chicago's principal influx is making news nationally: Rookie Chicago Principal Faces Early Challenges (NPR).  Like Chicago, many other school systems across the country are facing the same turnover, as baby boomer principals near retirement age. And for the rookie principals, challenges come early and often.

Comments

[George Schmidt]

Alexander, Newton is not doing a "fresh start Sherman type thing..."

If you read the article from the Times carefully, the following quote (which you include) tells the whole story:

"The partnership [between the district, the teachers' union, and Seton Hall University] has allowed Newton to make some significant changes and difficult decisions. For instance, with the support of the teachers union, Newton replaced 6 of its 44 teachers — some against their will — with teachers who demonstrated a higher commitment to change or who had expertise needed in a particular subject..."

This is closer to Chicago's "Fresh Start" schools than to the silly "turnaround" schools handed over to AUSL by Daley and Duncan.

Chicago's models have always involved maximum teacher bashing from the administrations, going all the way back to the "Reconstitutions" of the high schools (check out Englewood's record after that happened ten years ago) through today.

The original "Renaissance" schools (before "Renaissance 2010") were also replete with public school teacher bashing. The staffs (and families) of Wiliams, Dodge and Terrell were all bashed, both by Duncan and in the media, for their "failures" before the makeover takeover of 2003. And, of course, like any other prescription based on a faulty diagnosis, they failed. And because we have monopoly corporate media here, those failures are just swept under all rugs while the latest miracle is touted.

Any decent researcher will tell you that fewer than five years for a "turnaround" isn't giving you any data worth mentioning, let alone touting. Yet the "Sherman Miracle" (our latest) was promoted both by CPS and by the Tribune with less than a year under its belt (and with the heroic superteachers heading for the hills before the second year could even begin).

Just about the only "turnaround" that's taken a school for the "bottom" (as measured by test scores) to the "top" (tier, as measured by test scores) has been King High School. And that particular "miracle" was done by dumping all of the old King kids and importing a selective group, while rehabbing the building (at a cost of more than $30 million) and joining forces with the gentrification that evicted virtually all of the poor families from the area east of Cottage Grove Ave.

So let's take a closer look at the latest iteration of this decade-old Chicago silliness:

Sherman, Harvard, and the AUSL marketing of "Schools of Excellence" (aided and abetted by the Chicago Tribune Corporation and others).

After all, Mayor Richard M. Daley opened Harvard Elementary "School of Excellence" the day after Labor Day this year, after the Chicago Tribune spent the Labor Day weekend in its "news" columns melodramatically touting the Sherman "School of Excellence."

Both Sherman ("School of Excellence") and Harvard ("School of Excellence") -- Chicago's two AUSL propaganda centers -- dumped virtually all of their incumbent staff. That's old fashioned teacher bashing. The kangaroo court for Sherman (Harvard wasn't even given notice they could defend themselves, and then the hearing was scheduled at a time when the school was still in session) was vicious. Sherman teachers and families made a decent defense, but like other Show Trials, the verdict was in before the trial began.

The implication on both the latest Chicago "turnaround" schools was that the teachers (and principals) were the primary source of the "problems" (such as they were able to be identified by Arne's corrupt statistical juggling of data when the indictments were drawn up against Sherman and Harvard).

Not appalling poverty in the community.

Not drug gangs right outside the door (and sometimes in the halls).

Not decades of segregation and neglect.

Not biased tests.

No -- it was the teachers who caused Sherman's low test scores and other "data" to drive out data driven system to drive out the old Sherman teachers, sort of like a lynch mob, and bring in the new. (Note: This same stuff has been going on for a decade, as anyone who remembers the original "reconstitution" and Show Trials of Englewood High School can attest).

Another implication was that addled "superstar" teachers orchestrated by AUSL type marketing could "save" the school through 24/7 missionary style work.

This Newark program is not a "Chicago-type thing."

In fact, as the "Chicago model" began imploding at various places around the USA (and Chicago's "experts" proved greedy, dumb, and worse when they arrived at different places to export the model from Philadelphia and Detroit to Oakland and elsewhere on the West Coast), even those who originally touted the "Chicago model" trimmed it back.

As you know, in New York City, Bloomklein (Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein) don't cite Chicago as the basis for their corporate "reforms." If anything, since the Clinton administration discovered that many of Chicago's data claims were shakey or simply fraudulent (e.g., changing tests and then making illicit comparisons from year-to-year), Chicago suddenly dropped from the State of the Union radar as a vanguard examplar of corporate "school reform."

All that's left here now (to the detriment of New Orleans and its children) is the phony claim pushed by Margaret Spellings a couple of days after President Bush's State of the Union that Chicago charters are now the "miracle."

Evan the laziest reporters who comes to town and simply rehashes what's given him in a clip file has to spend a little time taking a second look. And when a second look is given to these Chicago's touts, over time, it's like checking out the "I love yous" from a whore. The closer you look, the uglier it gets.