On March 4 the latest round in the war on Chicago public education ended, with the last of the hearings on school closings.
Erica Clark (Parents 4 Teachers) pointed out at a Feb. 13, 2013 press conference: Chicago Public Schools (CPS) wants “. . . to make parents feel they are being engaged while they are being thrown under the bus . . . they [CPS] don’t want to tell the truth . . . that some time down the line they will hand [closed schools] over to charter schools.” CPS threatens to close 129 public schools setting one school against another in the hope of remaining open. Windy Pearson (Herzl School Local School Council) said in the same press conference, the UN Declaration of Human Rights guarantees that education should be free, “not based on venture capitalism whose pockets are being filled by dollars that belong to us.”
Thousands of parents and teachers and students across the city responded with one voice: “Don’t close my school”! When given the opportunity, the communities also said “Don’t close any school.”
In a hearings scenario reminiscent of “The Hunger Games,” CPS told the schools that were ripe for closing in each area to have representatives plead their case. The assumption was that some schools were going to be closed. Please not me and mine. A fight to the death around the entire city in every area, nowhere with more concern than in the city’s south and west sides, where most of the 129 schools still on the list are scattered, and where the vast majority of students are Black and Latino/a. Still, “Zero Schools Closed” emerged as a demand.
CPS must announce how many schools will close, possibly the largest mass school closings in the country thus far, by March 31. Regardless of their decision, a sleeping giant has awakened. Teachers, parents and students are coming together as the Grassroots Education Movement, which convened a city-wide People’s Board on March 8.
No doubt CPS will claim that any reduced number of schools it will close results from the voices they heard at the hearings. However, participants in these hearings are learning that CPS has its own script and does not respond to reason. They use the excuse of necessary budget cuts as a cover for turning public education over to private corporations, while guaranteeing the best selective enrollment education for “elite” students. This conforms to a society built on fewer high tech jobs and a mass of McJobs and Walmart greeters—and a large number of people who will never have a job at all.
March 27 will see a mobilization of Chicagoans—teachers, parents and students alike—to confront the CPS Board of Education’s plan to close schools next year. What steps Chicago workers are prepared to take to maintain our schools open is not yet clear. But anger is smoldering over frustrated demands for world class schools, and CPS knows it is taking a chance no matter what it does.
