Our children are not parking meters
[Editor's note: The following remarks were delivered to the February 24, 2010 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education by Joe Linehan, a teacher, in response to the CPS school closings. Additional reports on the February 24 Board meeting can be found in our "back issues" by going to Back Issues and then selecting February 2010. The Substance Home Page is monthly, and begins again on the first of every month. George N. Schmidt, Editor].
Above, Chicago teacher Joe Linehan speaking at the February 24, 2010 Board of Education meeting. Substance photo by Garth Liebhaber.The year is 2010 and this doesn’t feel like a renaissance to me. Does this feel like a renaissance to anybody? We’ve witnessed 15 years of disastrous experimentation on our schools and what are the results? Our new magic bullet is data management, but we have plenty of data on turnarounds and it shows that the only thing they’re increasing are the violence and the dropout rate.
Thousands of parents, students, and community members came out this year to the hearings to make their voices heard, and I give the school board credit for making their way to the communities to hear from them, but it should never have come to this. CORE has again made every hearing this year and we fought hard, but nobody made a more compelling and eloquent case for keeping these schools open then the parents and the students of the school community.
These are active communities and they deserve to be given the resources to improve their schools. These are people, they are not statistics. We have privatized a lot in this city in the last couple of years and considering what it’s costing us to park on our own city streets, I’d say it hasn’t all been successful.
But our children are not parking meters…They are our future.
By: xian from CORE
Thank you!
Thank you for your words and especially for emphasizing how the community voiced its opinion against the closings.