When did Collins High School get off probation thanks to that AUSL miracle? Or did it?
Taking It to the Next Level With CPS and AUSL... Did I miss a recent press conference at Chicago's Collins Academy? You know, the shindig where Mayor Rahm Emanuel and CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard announced that Collins, as of November 2011, was no longer on academic probation.
By the time the Collins community gathered to speak out against the slanders against Collins by then CEO Arne Duncan and then Chicago Board of Education President Michael Scott on February 2, 2006, someone had already expressed their anger North Lawndale style on the Collins sign. The above photograph was taken by Substance the night of the massive Save Collins meeting at the school, a meeting which opposed the Duncan/Scott destruction of the school and the AUSL "turnaround." Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.Did I sleep through their slickly produced slideshow highlighting the spike in test scores that got Collins removed from the CPS probation watchlist?
I didn't think so.
But I do remember back in 2006, when Arne Duncan announced that he was closing Collins because of bad test scores and declining enrollment. I also remember that Duncan then handed Collins over to his well-connected pals at the Academy for Urban School Leadership and asked them to reopen the school in 2007 as a "turnaround."
That's when the money started to roll in. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation quickly ponied up $1 million to the heavy-hitters at AUSL for the Collins turnaround effort. That same foundation kicked in an additional $10.3 million for AUSL in 2008, and a chunk of that cash was used for teacher training at Collins.
Let's fast forward to June 2011.
That's when Emanuel was asked to give a commencement address to AUSL's first graduating class of Collins seniors. It was no surprise that he signed on, because if there's one education group in town that's long been wired directly into City Hall, it's AUSL. In fact, Emanuel made it a point to increase AUSL's clout on the Fifth Floor during his first weeks on the job.
One of the reasons why the majority of people who know the history of CPS attacks on public schools do not stand when someone mindlessly links the death of Chicago Board of Education president Michael Scott with others who died honorable deaths is that Scott, more than any other African American in Chicago, was responsible for the massive expansion of charter and "turnaround" schools in Chicago during his two terms as President of the Chicago Board of Education. Above, Scott utilized his pre-reheasrsed doubletalk against Collins High School in February, March and April 2006 when the school was being subjected to humiliating media attacks and put into "turnaround" under AUSL. The irony of the role that Scott played, noted by community leaders at the time, was that Scott's own mother had been one of the community leaders whose protests in the 1960s and 1970s had resulted in the construction of Collins as a real public school, what was called "The School in the Park." Scott's betrayal of his community and his roots was noted across the city. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.He did that by tapping AUSL's former chairman, David Vitale, to become president of the Chicago Board of Education. The new mayor also recruited Vitale's AUSL colleague Tim Cawley (who commutes daily from Winnetka) to serve as CPS's Chief Administrative Officer. Before joining CPS, Cawley spent three years as a managing director of AUSL.
So Emanuel was happy to speak to the newly minted Collins graduates, and the local media dutifully told the story of what Emanuel described as a successful turnaround school.
Some in the press focused on the claim that every Collins senior had graduated and all were heading to college. And then there was the ABC-7 anchorman who went so far as to call Collins one of Chicago's "exceptional public schools." With just that statement, he forever flagged himself as a suburbanite.
Of course, no one in the press corps or the mayor's office ever mentioned that CPS — as of the date of the mayor's speech — still classified Collins as an under-performing "Level 3" school that was on "academic probation."
Nor did anyone mention that a higher percentage of Collins students was meeting state reading standards back in 2006, when Duncan shuttered the place, than in June 2011, when Emanuel posed for pictures at the school.
The Collins High School auditorium was nearly filled on the night of February 2, 2006 when the school organized a protest against the proposed phase out of the real public high schools and the proposed "turnaround" under AUSL. Two people who were not present at the event, although invited, were Chicago Board of Education President Michael Scott and CPS CEO Arne Duncan. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.Instead, the reporters played ball and stuck to prefabricated talking points: 100% of the senior class was graduating, and all (or nearly all) of the kids were headed to college.
Nobody mentioned that the 88 graduating Collins seniors represented only two-thirds of the kids who had started together as freshmen back in the fall of 2007. Nobody asked what had happened to the rest of those kids.
No one with press credentials thought to say: "Mr. Mayor, if one-third of that September 2007 freshman class failed to walk across the Collins stage with a diploma in June 2011, can you really say Collins is a successful turnaround?"
But the flurry of feel-good stories that day couldn't change one critical fact: AUSL's Collins Academy was still on probation as a "Level 3" school.
And if you're a Chicago teacher working in one of the many non-AUSL public schools that CPS has classified as "Level 3," you know enough to keep your resume current.
Despite their lack of knowledge of Chicago's real public schools and complete lack of teaching experience or credentials in Chicago's real public schools, CPS Chief Executive Officer Jean-Claude Brizard, Chief Administrative Officer Tim Cawley, Chief Portfolio Officer Oliver Sicat, and Board President David Vitale (under the seal of the Board background) have the power of life and death over the city's public schools, teachers and children. Above, Brizard and Cawley are protected by security at the beginning of the "Mic Check" at the December 14, 2011, meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. A growing number of people are demanding that Mayor Rahm Emanuel stop the conflicts of interest regarding AUSL (Cawley and Vitale were both with AUSL before being appointed to the CPS jobs by Emanuel). Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.You do that because you know that your head may soon be on the chopping block. As Brizard explained in CPS's recently released Guidelines for School Actions: "When a school receives the lowest performance level (Level 3) on the Performance Policy for two consecutive years, the school may be subject to a school action."
By "school action," Brizard means one of those annual rites of winter that typically involves firing every employee at a school, moving kids to a different school, or handing off management of a school (which also results in mass firings) to connected cronies, like the favored sons at AUSL.
Of course, it might get politically tricky to continue handing off schools to AUSL if AUSL's own schools are on probation and are themselves subject to "school actions" — particularly if the new mayor just declared one of those schools to be a successful turnaround.
And that's why the whole AUSL/City Hall gang must have breathed a big sigh of relief last month, when CPS removed Collins from the probation list. CPS awarded Collins "Level 2" status, deeming it to be a school in "good standing" — no longer part of the city's "123,000 under-performing seats."
I bet you're wondering how Collins pulled off this feat. Just what kind of bump in the school's test scores was needed to get this AUSL "success story" back in "good standing"? The answer might surprise you.
So buckle up and join me as we enter the upside-down world of big-money school reform.
When Emanuel spoke to the Collins kids at the end of the 2010-11 school year, just 15.0% of them were meeting state standards in reading. Only 14.8% of them were meeting state standards in math.
Five months later, when the school was taken off probation, those numbers had actually slipped. Only 14.9% of the kids were meeting state standards in reading. Even worse, only 6.8% of the kids were hitting the target in math.
In other words, CPS took Collins off probation and classified it as a school in "good standing," even though its reading and math numbers had dropped over the course of that probationary school year.
Six years ago, on February 6, 2006, former Collins High School principal Grady Jordan told the crowd protesting the proposed phase out of Collins and the turning over of the Collins building to AUSL that the proposal was a crime against the school and its community. As AUSL moved against the school, Dr. Jordan removed his photograph from a display in the hall of the school depicting the schools' principals, despite the fact that he had been founding principal of Collins when the school opened in September 1976. Behind Dr. Jordan in the above photograph are seats labeled "Arne Duncan" and "Michael Scott," both of whom refused to attend the community meeting. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.How much had they dropped? Well, when Duncan closed the school in 2006, 17.9% of the Collins kids were meeting state standards in reading, and 7.6% of the kids were doing the same in math — both better numbers than those that just got the connected school taken off probation.
How's that for a successful turnaround?
[Editor's note: The following article originally appeared at Huffington Post and gets eternal life here thanks to permission from the reporter to add it to www.substancenews.net. Matt Farmer, a Chicago attorney, reports regular at Huffington Post and also plays guitar. Matt Farmer covered Rahm Emanuel's speech at the June 2011 Collins HS graduation for Huffington Post and Substance, and the URL is: http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2328§ion=Article].
