PHOTO/BOB SIMPSON
CHICAGO, IL — Gale, Gresham and Dyett are three Chicago Public Schools. All were saved from the “to be closed list” last year. Dyett and Gresham are on Chicago’s South side, an area devastated by destruction of industry and the jobs they once provided. Public school assets have been turned over to charter schools, further reducing the number of school children. In the Spring, CPS voted to turn Gresham over to the private Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL) to run the school. More recently CPS rejected a community-researched proposal to keep Dyett open. CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett and Alderman Will Burns both discounted community outrage, vowing to go through with their plans.
Gale, in far north in Rogers Park, is also situated in an economically devastated zone. Charter schools have affected enrollment in Gale: one charter school, under investigation by the FBI, has a campus in the neighborhood. It drains 8th and 9th graders from Gale. This spring, the Chicago Light Brigade brought public attention to lead paint in classrooms, a faulty fire alarm, a heating system so bad that children could not stay in cold classrooms last winter, and security cameras that do not work – to mention a few items that need to be addressed. Publicly embarrassing for the alderman, these dangerous conditions led to media attention that further forced CPS to make plans to address these problems. Plans are not actions; we await the results.
The CPS budget has just been announced. Gale will lose another $300,000 added to the $300,000 it lost last year. All city schools are losing an average of 2.3% of last year’s budgets. Schools that were promised extra resources (last year they “welcomed” students from closed schools) are losing an average of 5%.
This attack is not new. When it started, many thought that we could reason with CPS. If we showed them the error of their ways, they would reform.
We’ve learned some lessons. First, as one parent at Gale put it, “They just don’t care about us.” They listen to our protests and then they do what they had planned to do anyway.
Second, this is not a failed plan. CPS is accomplishing exactly what it has intended, starving public schools, privatizing education, and shifting resources to selective enrollment schools for the elite. Traditional public schools are losing money, yet the city finds $60 million for the new selective enrollment Barack Obama College Preparatory High School.
Third, CPS actions follow an economic convulsion: in the past, education always held promise for future economic security. Now, in the automated robotics era, schooling leads to crushing student debt, not jobs.
Today we live under conditions of the complete merger of corporations and the state. We cannot expect our “leaders” to return us to democracy and prosperity any more than they will bargain with us for better schools.
Any opportunity, like the gains we have made at Gale, must be pressed throughout Chicago, recognizing that only parents, students and teachers—the working class—have the interests of the children at heart. These are steps that can be taken for us to begin acting in our own class interests for a national solution for full funding.
