Meeting the needs of Chicago 's 'throwaway' children... Commentary on the 2010 school closing hearings in Chicago
[Editor's note: The following opinion piece by Deborah Lynch, CTU Past President, teacher, Gage Park High School, was published January 29, 2010 Chicago Tribune on line. Published here with permission of Ms. Lynch. Deborah Lynch is the only announced candidate for the presidency of the Chicago Teachers Union who has attended all six of the school closing (etc.) hearings at CPS headquarters at 125 S. Clark St. since the 2010 Hit List was announced on January 19, 2010 and the hearings began on January 28, 2010.]
Above, a Guggenheim Elementary School students (identified only as a number on the insistence of hearing officer Fred Bates) testifies on behalf of her school's teachers and "family" at the January 28 hearing on the proposed closing of Guggenheim for "failure." Arrayed beyond the student are (left to right, visible) Chicago Board of Education member Peggy Davis, CPS "Chief Administrative Officer" Robert Runcie (partly obscured by the podium), CPS "Director of Performance" Ryan Crosby, and CPS attorney Miguel Rodriguez. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt. One big eighth grade boy wiped tears away as he begged his audience not to have his be the last graduating class of his school — ever. Another seven year old girl cried and she said "the kids and the teachers at my school promise that we will try harder if you keep us open." And another girl, so tiny she could not be seen over the podium, told the audience that "if you close my school you will break my heart real hard bad."
Such was the tragic scene at Thursday's hearings on school closures at the Chicago Board of Education offices. One parent, teacher, staff member, student, grandparent and alumni after another followed in the footsteps of the 80 schools closed before them in the last five years as part of the Mayor's Renaissance 2010 Plan. Never mind that there is no research supporting this plan, that there has been irreparable harm done and at least one fatality as a consequence of the plan. City and School officials are continuing to move forward on the unprecedented destruction of our system of neighborhood public schools.
Closing the recalcitrant achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students is a stubborn challenge that every city is facing and no city has achieved. One thing is for certain, however. Closing schools is not the answer. Many of the schools that have been or are being closed have an astounding 50 percent mobility rate, making year by year comparisons a cruel joke. These schools serve the neediest of the needy: homeless children and families in insecure, unstable, impoverished and often violent circumstances. "The throwaway children," one parent described them. "The children," another parent said, referring to the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law, "that have been left so far behind that they were never in the race in the first place."
There were dozens and dozens of beautiful, well behaved children from the Curtis and Guggenheim Schools at the meeting who heard their school and themselves being castigated as one of the poorest performing schools and student bodies in the city. And one after another of the children went to the microphones crying and promised "to be good, to be better, to try harder" if only they "would leave our school alone."
School officials were present who described how much help these schools had been given,. One official bragged that he had spent a whopping 23 hours in one of the schools. Yet staff member after staff member, parent after parent, said they'd never ever seen those people in the school buildings. The Board's Safety and Security Department officials made incredible statements about how "confident we are that these children (who would be walking 6-8 blocks further from home across gang territory) will arrive at their new schools safely."
Not only are students from closed schools stigmatized and marginalized, they are in very real physical danger I was able to speak and castigated the Board for disrupting these very fragile lives based on "metrics" and "regression analysis" and "value added points" and "trend points", when they themselves wouldn't walk down the streets they are now asking these children to navigate. I proposed a new standard: no school closures unless and until Board and CPS officials themselves feel safe enough to walk down the streets they are asking very young students to.
Many speakers described the vitally important role their neighborhood school played in their community, the sense of family in a community with a very fragile social fabric. The Board is asking these beautiful, innocent children to give up a part of themselves, children who have so little to give to begin with. The Board is asking these innocent children pay the price for its failure, for our failure, to explode the code and find better ways of reaching and teaching poor children. It's easy for the Board to issue an edict closing a school, to turn its back on it, to give up on it. But that's the wrong way. The hard way, the right way, the real challenge, has to be staying and fighting to find the answers to meet the needs of these, our most vulnerable children.
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