The 'rebirth' of Englewood or a bureaucratic shell game? Was Englewood closing necessary?
For the fall of 2007, two new schools are scheduled to open at Englewood High School, Urban Prep and TEAM Englewood Community Academy.
Those of us who are still working at Englewood proper, which started being phased out in 2005, our last school year of graduating seniors will begin in the fall of 07. At the end of the last school year the rumor mill had us all convinced that Urban Prep would join in the fall of 2006. However Tim King and his cohort from the Hales Franciscan decided they wanted to stay at Lindblom College Prep because Englewood had not been properly rehabbed to welcome their freshman class. An anonymous source within the Board of Education claims they are trying to stay at Lindblom, after all it’s a beautiful building and they won’t have to “contaminate” their school culture by exposing students to neighborhood kids attending our phasing out.
Urban Prep is a perfect example of how Renaissance 2010 works to marginalize young people in poor communities of color so as to boost test scores and recruit students with higher stanines. Tim King and company have the ability to recruit district wide, and while he promises that he will draw upon community based applicants, their actual application process ensures that only the most motivated parents and disciplined students will get the acceptance letter. The school that was recently approved to join Urban Prep, TEAM Englewood, looks to use a different approach.
Unlike Urban Prep (a charter school), TEAM Englewood is a performance school and thereby will maintain a unionized teaching staff. Additionally principal Peggy Korellis, who used to teach in the Englewood area, claims her school will do “all of our recruitment in Englewood because we truly want to serve the community.” She emphasizes that they will draw almost exclusively on the eight feeder schools that have traditionally served Englewood high, even though “we don’t have enrollment boundaries from the office of new schools.”
Their recruitment process also appears to be more democratic. Korellis and company are not requiring nearly as much as Urban Prep in their school registration requirements. At Urban Prep students had to attend mandatory summer classes and orientations, while TEAM Englewood will only ask for a writing sample that will not count against applicants, then their names will be chosen by lottery.
Associate Professor of Education David Stovall of the University of Illinois at Chicago claims that the lottery system is another way Renaissance 2010 excludes members of the community from attending their neighborhood schools. In a recent interview he put forth the following rhetorical questions and commentary: “When you have this lottery system, how is it set up, who gets in? What will that school look like in terms of its students? How many students don’t get selected by the lottery and get left out because parents feel like the lottery is only for families who are more stable, even if that’s not the case. Some parents won’t even put their names in a lottery because they think its already geared toward a particular type of student/family.”
In our brief conversation, Korellis extolled the virtues of a unionized workforce and emphasized the importance of having experience within the field of education in order to properly manage a school. She has taught at Richards Career Academy and was an assistant principal at Corliss High School, both in Chicago; all of her administrative team also have literacy endorsements.
At the end of the day Korellis appears to be a good fit for the school and community, but it’s difficult to figure out why the school needed to be closed to bring in new management following “best practices.” In our conversation, she mentioned that the school will have “career and college prep, double period math, four years of math and science for all of our students, advanced placement courses, differentiated instruction and use a small school philosophy.” While of these ideas are useful, they are familiar buzzwords that the educational mantra deacons have been preaching since I began working in the system. Professor Stoval cautioned: “What’s gonna be critical in an institution like that is its relationships with family and community members of what that school is gonna be.”
It is becoming more and more obvious that the haphazard process of school closings and openings is a shell game, where bureaucrats with little educational experience and even less concern for the well being of marginalized children, can receive accolades from the Mayor while he works on displacing these “problem” families out of the city. As educators with power in our union and within our schools we should do as much as we can to ensure that we don’t allow these same decision makers to control educational policy in Chicago for the next six mayoral terms.
