Gentrification driving phoney school reform

Schooling in the Ownership Society -  Greg Hinz at Crain's unintentionally gives us some clues about the real reasons for Rahm's mass closures of neighborhood schools and their replacement with privately-run charters and selective-enrollment schools. It has much more to do with reshaping the city's demography, pushing out the poor and people of color from the inner city and replacing them with a new class of young, tech and finance professionals.

Writes Hinz:

 Take, for instance, the paradox that the city has grown wealthier even as it has lost hundreds of thousands of working-class residents, most of them minorities. 

As Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economist Bill Testa put it, it's good that minorities finally can make it anywhere, including the 'burbs. Everyone should have choices. At the same time, it's undeniable that one reason working-class people are fleeing the city is that the influx of wealthier newcomers is driving up prices.

To some extent, that's classic gentrification because, when those with money fight for space against those without, the money folks almost always win. Forcing lower-income folks out to inner-ring suburbs via pricing pressures can be a real disservice, if only because the suburbs are much less equipped than the city with public transit to get people to work.

Of course, Chicago's gentrification didn't begin with Rahm. It goes as far back as the 1950s and old man Daley's regime. The demolition of Chicago's public housing in the 80's and 90's and the forced migration of thousands of black families out of the west and south sides, out to inner-ring suburbs, began under Richie Daley...

Daley together with the Civic Committee and then schools CEO Arne Duncan, also cooked up the Renaissance 2010 school debacle and the unbridled expansion of privately-run charters and new selective enrollment high schools at the expense of neighborhood schools.

Renaissance 2010 was a dismal failure in terms of improving Chicago's public schools if that was ever its real intent. It was quietly junked and replaced with the current strategy of mass school closings in mainly black and Latino communities under the banner of under-utilization.

The Sun-Times confirmed today that 90% of the students impacted by CPS school closings are African-American.

Of those 129 schools located mostly on the South and West sides, 117 are majority black. And 119 of them have a percentage of black students higher than thedistrict average. At the 129 schools on CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s list of schools that could be closed this year, 88 percent of the students are black. Schools with at least 90 percent black students account for 103 of the 129. Just nine are majority Hispanic.

Chicago Teachers Union - More than 30,000 children will be directly or indirectly affected by the public school closures - either because they have to go to a new school, or because their school is absorbing students from a shuttered building. The school system will also be coping with 1,581 fewer teachers.

Chicago Public Schools officials have said the cuts to staff and the largest mass school closings in the nation were necessary to help stem a mounting deficit forecast at a record $1 billion in 2014.

The closings have affected mainly Hispanic and African-American neighborhoods. Parents and union leaders have protested, saying more children will have to cross gang territorial lines, leaving them potentially exposed to violence in a city that recorded 506 homicides in 2012.

Chicago Public Schools have hired 1,200 "safe passage" workers to staff school routes to make sure children arrive safely. This summer, there have been two homicides along those safe-school routes.

Union leaders contend the "safe passage" program is soaking up money that could be spent on social workers, counselors and nurses at schools.