The Chicago Sun-Times reported last week that many independent hearing officers, hired by the Chicago Public Schools, actually oppose a handful of school closings and have serious reservations about several others.
According to schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett, the school board may consider the reports from independent hearing officers before making a final decision about each school closing on May 22. The district currently plans to close 54 schools.
The issue hearing officers have with six of the 10 closings being opposed is the safety of students. Students might have to cross gang turf lines to attend “welcoming” schools in other neighborhoods after their own neighborhood school closes, a situation that many people find unacceptable.
In opposing the closing of Jackson Elementary School in Chicago’s Auburn-Gresham community, for example, retired federal Judge David H Coar wrote in his report, the Sun-Times said, that student safety was key: “There is no question that Jackson is underutilized. However, the safety of the youngest and most vulnerable children in the school system is a very serious thing, not to be addressed with generalities and vague promises.”
“We have a lot of kids that are saying if they have to cross the tracks to go school, they’re not going to go,” the paper quoted one parent of three kids at the school as saying.
In some cases, the issue independent hearing officers have with the school closing is more procedural in nature. For example, one hearing officer said the district had failed to consider the fact that additional housing units would be built near one of the elementary schools on the closure list. Although the issue was discussed, the alderman who brought it up told the Sun-Times he wasn’t optimistic about getting the school off the closure list.
And it will come to this
Although hearing officers think closing many of the schools on the list of 54 is a dangerous thing to do, although students are protesting this and other privatization plots in Washington, in cities around the country, and at Chicago’s Lincoln Park High School, which is not on the closure list, and although the policies of No Child Left Behind, launched more than a decade ago, continue to dump damaging effects on schools in low-income neighborhoods today amid protest from educators, parents, and even students, the powers that be in Chicago don’t seem to be listening to this wisdom from the system’s stakeholders.
It’s clear that all the hearings we can conduct, all the editorials we can write, and all the speeches we can make don’t actually persuade anybody to change their opinion or to change the train wreck that is the closure of a massive number of schools in Chicago for the reason of “underutilization,” a downstream effect of many situations the closures are supposed to remedy.
This is the sort of realization that makes me wonder why we even bother teaching students how to support an argument or write a “persuasive” essay. Writing doesn’t actually persuade anybody anymore. And although I admit students will have to support scientific arguments if they ever publish the results of their research, making the Next Generation Science Standards worthwhile, a full one-third of the Common Core writing standards seem to be a complete waste of time, bearing no resemblance to how writing works in the real world. Money trumps quality every time test writers produce mediocre tests. We make our lives and those of our children cheap every time barriers to entry into the education field go down. We sell our communities short with uninspired leadership every time schools fail to meet some arbitrary measure of quality and we take the easy way out by shutting their doors.
However many schools come off the list in Chicago, May 22 will be a sad day, I’m afraid. There appears to be no indication the people pushing the Common Core’s English/Language Arts standards on our children have any idea what they say. There could not possibly be a more cogent argument, made by so many well-meaning and well-educated people, that has fallen so flat on our elected officials.
