A Critique of Affirmative Action
by Benjamin Studebaker
Yesterday, the supreme court announced a non-decision decision on the issue of affirmative action by universities. The ruling itself makes no significant difference to the status quo, but it got me thinking about the issue. As regular readers know, I think economic and social mobility is very important. For this reason, I am opposed to affirmative action.
This may seem counter-intuitive. Isn’t the usual rationale for affirmative action the belief that it leads to greater social mobility for historically disfavored racial groups? That is indeed how affirmative action is often justified, but I do not think the argument holds. We assume that by giving preference to less qualified applicants from racial minorities we rectify inequities of opportunity, but what we really do is hide them.
I offer three separate but related reasons for opposing affirmative action:
- Racial Focus–Affirmative action as structured focuses on race, when class is the principle impediment to inter-generational economic advancement. By focusing on race rather than on the poverty that happens to be associated with race, affirmative action perpetuates racism.
- Too Little, Too Late–Affirmative action comes too late in the educational process to have any ameliorative effect on equality, while simultaneously reducing economic efficiency.
- Prevents Real Action–As a result of #2, affirmative action hides inequality of opportunity earlier in the education system without doing anything about it, creating the illusion that it is being addressed when no useful action has been taken. As a result, it perpetuates inequality.
I’d like to address each in turn.
Racial Focus:
It is undoubtedly the case that African-Americans have worse outcomes than other Americans:
The question is, why? Is it because employers and universities are racist, and refuse to take African-Americans, or is it because African-Americans tend to come from poor areas with weak schools? As we established the other day, all poor Americans have reduced opportunity for upward mobility. Someone born to a poor white family in a poor area with poor schools is quite disadvantaged, and someone born to a well-off black family in an affluent area with good schools is not really very disadvantaged at all. Why should we be trying to improve the opportunity of affluent African-Americans? It doesn’t make sense for the president’s children to have an advantage when applying to universities over poor white kids from substandard schools–Barack Obama agrees with that:
I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged.
Many employers and universities are at this point so afraid of appearing racist that they will risk breaking the law in order to maintain diversity. Take UCLA–in 1996, the state of California outlawed affirmative action in its universities. Over the following 10 years, UCLA’s black population as a percentage of the total fell continuously:
UCLA attracted unfavorable attention in 2006 for its low number of black students, and as a result, it changed its admission policy so as to take into account an array of factors. They took into account whether or not a student was from a poor background, a bad school, or had parents who had not gone to college. The result was that African-American admission figures rose. This would suggest that the disadvantages many African-Americans suffer through are the result not of the color of their skin, but of the income of their parents. None of this is to say that racism no longer exists, or that blacks at the same income level as whites have perfectly equal opportunity, but class is far more powerful than race in determining economic outcomes. This jives with the polling data, which has shown a steady decline in openly racist attitudes, the kind of attitudes likely to see blacks denied opportunity purely on racial grounds:
By focusing so intently on race rather than income, we perpetuate the idea that the color of one’s skin matters. Making race matter, even in seemingly positive or impartial contexts, such as promoting diversity, only serves to reinforce the central premise of racism–that your skin color, your physical appearance as indicated by your genetics, says something about who you are as a person. An America that tries to get a certain portion of its university population to have darker skin than the rest is not an America in which people are not judged “by the color of their skin but by the content of their character”. Schools should be entirely indifferent to racial percentages in and of themselves.
This would seem to suggest that affirmative action might still be justifiable if it were class-based rather than race-based, and indeed, that’s an argument I’ve read in several places around the internet lately. Nonetheless, I must disagree even with class-based affirmative action at the university level.
Too Little, Too Late:
The second problem with affirmative action, even when targeted against the universally disadvantaged poor of all racial descriptions, is that it comes too late in the game. By the time young people are applying for college, those whose potentials are going to be harmed by poverty have already been harmed, usually irrevocably. The teen pregnancies have happened or are happening, the gang affiliations have already started, the drug use and drug-dealing is well underway. If put a kid through 12 grades of poor schools, bad neighborhoods, and domestic disturbances, letting him get into college with poorer scores will hardly help. Most students who might have received the advantage will already be off the rails, and the remainder will go into college behind the other students academically.
We can see that by high school, there is already a large difference in performance on college-entrance exams:
Letting someone with an SAT score a couple hundred points lower than the norm into one’s university does not close this gap. Here we can see how even after being allotted places, the disadvantaged African-American students still disproportionately fail to graduate from college:
And long before they get this far, a disproportionate number of these disadvantaged students drops out of high school altogether:
Effectively, affirmative action is pushing students who have already fallen far behind to go to schools they are not prepared for. It sets students up to fail, and those students who do fail take places that otherwise might have gone to successful students, depressing the rate at which our universities produce capable, economically useful graduates.
We need to fix opportunity disparities not in the universities, but in the grade schools. It’s the high school drop out gap and the SAT gap that should be our concern, not the college entry gap. We’ve got to lay a level foundation for students of all economic backgrounds before we worry about what the ceiling looks like.
Prevents Real Action:
Affirmative action removes a symptom of the equality of opportunity problem (lack of diversity in the universities), but it does not cure that problem. When UCLA stopped advantaging racial minorities and its African-American demographic collapsed, that was not, as it was popularly thought of at the time, a negative reflection of poor selection methods. It was instead a reflection of the failure of California’s public schools to prepare poor, disadvantaged students for college. By appealing to affirmative action, we give ourselves a cheap out. We can say we are doing something for opportunity, when in reality what we are doing is ephemeral and too often ineffective. Too many disadvantaged people never make it far enough to benefit from affirmative action, and the remainder are often unprepared or face lifelong discrimination on the assumption that they could not have possibly earned their positions and qualifications on merit.
As a result, affirmative action at the university level perpetuates both inequality and racism. A much better approach would be to reorganize the way we operate our grade schools and high schools. We need to get poor kids from disadvantaged backgrounds into good schools.
How do we do this? We need to stop sending kids to schools based on geography. A school in a poor neighborhood should not have more poor students than a school in an affluent neighborhood has. Elementary, middle, and high schools should have quotas. Merit-based university admissions should be exclusively merit-based. There should be no difference in economic class between the students at a school located in the middle of an inner-city and a school located out in an affluent suburb. Bus the kids the extra distance as needed. The one thing we cannot do is precisely what we are presently doing–allow poor students to congregate in schools where no one really believes in their potential, only to offer them places at universities they’re not qualified to go to later on.
Benjamin Studebaker 
I will concede that merely admitting students from previously underrepresented racial and ethnic groups is not the solution to the problem of economic and social mobility for those groups and to think that is naive. But there is research cited in a previous Supreme Court decision, Grutter vs. Bollinger 2003, that links the benefit of diversity in the university to programs of study which facilitate productive and long-term relationships across social and cultural differences. Furthermore there is a large body of research which cites specific conditions that must be met if intergroup contact is to be educationally beneficial. It can’t just be putting kids of different race, class, ethnicity in the same classroom and expecting something magical to happen. Furthering the cause of economic and social mobility is also about changing attitudes between groups and this depends upon exploration of class, race, and gender issues in the society, and the higher education system in addition to the grade school system is the premier medium for this to take place. Schooling can either ignore and reproduce unequal relationships that persist in the society at large or it can recognize, interrupt, and transform those relationships. The choice of which path to take is not only represented in access to schools but also in content and pedagogy.
And furthermore the SAT gap troubles me and most critical educators not, because all standardized tests are biased against minorities and students who are economically disadvantaged. The problem is that standardized tests are such a big part of our educational system, not that minorities perform poorly on them. You don’t need to be intelligent to do even moderately well on the SAT or any standardized test. All you need to have is a family which can afford to buy the test prep materials. If you study the book, you learn how to take the test. It’s as simple as that. And of course now teachers are forced to do non-stop test prep in the classroom, even with students in elementary school, and as a result sacrifice more meaningful learning opportunities. Asian Americans tend to do very well on these standardized tests, but then look at how much they get stressed out and how much pressure their parents put on them. It’s similar to your post about homework. It’s not worth it, and it’s not a product of any meaningful kind of intelligence that would ultimately benefit the society that student will eventually enter. Also there are many aspects of a child’s intelligence which can not be measured by the SAT, or even academic performance within the traditional lecture-style pedagogy that still dominates our educational system. Plus studies have show that SATS are not a reliable predictor of success in college.
And I’m confused by your solution to the problem. I assume it’s just one potential solution you just thought up and not your panacea for the problem. Nonetheless, the solution lies in making all schools better and that includes ones in poor neighborhoods. And there are many factors involved in making an entire educational system better. One thing they really need to do is end the standardized testing entry requirements for specialized high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx High School of Science where the level of teaching and learning is at a significantly higher level but the population is overwhelmingly whites and Asians whose families have the money to prepare them for the single admissions test you need to get in, the SHSAT. Pedagogy is different in these schools than in the test prep factories that poorer schools have become. That’s one of the real problems. Unfortunately right now our politicians and leaders in the faux reform movement have been on this testing and accountability, privatize and charterize our school system binge for the last 12 years or so as a result of NCLB and Race to the Top and these policies have actually been enormously detrimental to making sure that minorities and students of a lower class status receive a quality education. There aren’t enough good schools in America for every poor kid to be able go to an already existing good school. Class sizes would be enormous and that is indeed what is happening, and studies have proven how detrimental that is to student learning. And dealing with the education problem means simultaneously dealing with the poverty problem. Just read about the affects that mass school closing have had on entire communities. Look at the results of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s decision to close 50 or so “poor performing” schools in Chicago. The reason these schools were poor performing is that they were underresourced, because of Emanuel’s messed up priorities in terms of the budget, and they were only measuring teacher’s performance by their student’s score on a single standardized test. You can’t deal with one affectively without dealing with the other.
“The one thing we cannot do is precisely what we are presently doing–allow poor students to congregate in schools where no one really believes in their potential, only to offer them places at universities they’re not qualified to go to later on.”
I’m especially confused by this. You’re saying it’s somehow justified that in an educational system which is supposed to provide equal opportunity for every student, a teacher or administrator or politician should see a classroom of poor kids and automatically assume the worse. That’s the whole mentality behind testing and accountability, charterize and privatize, which has been disadvantaging poor and minority students for the last decade. I could provide you with all the evidence, if need be. I would think that would be the root of the problem that you need to fix. That’s a problem with attitude, and if we’re graduating teachers and adminstrators who take that type of attitude towards their classrooms and schools and entire minority or disadvantaged student populations than we have a big problem, cause that’s a racist, classist attitude. Pedagogy is complex, because intelligence is complex and it’s more than can be measured by any statistic. There’s not a one-size fits all way to teach every student or every classroom, and that has been proven time and time again. Every student is unique. Every classroom is unique, and yes when it comes to pedagogy in the classroom and being able to connect with and reach your students, race and class become very important factors in whether the learning experience will be affective or not especially in a social studies class or English class where the opportunities abound to examine these issues in historical context and literary context. Even if they are not made transparent and explicit evidence shows that gender, class, and race differences affect teacher-student interaction and also student-student interaction, Now the teacher could either ignore the ways in which these factors affect her learning environment and choose to not explore them for the potential learning opportunities they hold, or she could do so and her classroom and society, if all teachers started doing this within the framework of a social justice curriculum and pedagogy, would be better off for it. The experience of the students, the knowledge students bring to the classroom is integral to creating an affective learning environment. This has also been demonstrated time and time again. It is the teacher’s job to devise ways to connect subject content to student’s lived experience, and this is just one of the reasons that America has failed it’s minorities and disadvantaged students and even its more well-off students who may get good grades, like you and me, but what meaning does that hold in the end except the meaning that society and a deeply flawed system attaches to it. The problem is much more complex that what you present in this post. Even good schools are not doing their jobs in terms of preparing students to be critical thinkers, civically engaged people, to ccare about learning for more than just the grade. You testified to the lack of engagement you had with school in your homework post and subsequent comments, how your high school experience didn’t cater to your needs and I could testify to it as well regarding my high school experience albeit in an affluent school district.
And don’t take this is an insult but only as a testament to your belief in the primacy of expertise. You are a political and ethical philosopher. I gather you don’t know enough about educational theory and philosophy, different forms of pedagogy, educational psychology, race and class and gender and how they affect the relationships between teacher and student in the classroom, the history of education in America, the affects of excessive grading testing, the affects of privatization and charterization of American schools to be able to be fully informed on the myriad ways in which our educational system is biased against minorities and lower class citizens.
There’s a lot here, I’ll do my best.
We shouldn’t be trying to correct racist attitudes as the university level, we should be preventing those attitudes from arising in the first place by normalizing it in the grade schools. The universities undermine their claims to meritocracy through AA, spreading resentment and fueling racism. At many universities, students group together socially on the basis of race. It’s too late in the game to make any ameliorative difference.
Standardized tests are a blunt instrument and far from perfect. I’m not defending them, merely using them as an example of a metric that illustrates a pre-college inequality of educational opportunity. Unless you’re denying that there is inequality of opportunity in the grade/middle/high schools, we have nothing to disagree about there.
There’s a lot that could be done to improve both poor performing and high performing schools. I’m not arguing about that, I’m arguing about how we can ensure that poor students have access to the same quality of education that our affluent students presently enjoy (limited and flawed though even that standard may be). There are big improvements we could make to the system for everyone, but all I’m trying to do in this piece is equalize opportunity in the context of the current education system in the US.
Emanuel’s school closings are a great idea, because they take poor students out of schools in which most of the students are poor and redistribute them more evenly throughout the rest of the system. Schools are bad not just due to lack of resources, but due to their homogeneity of class. A school dominated by poor students, even a school given lots of money, will underperform a school dominated by affluent students with high-participation parents. We need a mix of the classes in the schools themselves. It would of course be nice if the Chicago public schools budget could increase as well, but barring that, redistributing students is good policy.
I’m not saying teachers and administrators should assume the worst about poor students, I’m saying that they do. And we cannot change that just by saying “they shouldn’t do that”. We have to work with the resources we have, both financially and in terms of teaching/administration quality. This can be ameliorated by ensuring that teachers teach a more balanced portion of the population. At present, we have some teachers in gilded schools where the job is reasonably satisfying, and we have other teachers trapped in dystopian schools where every day is a struggle just to survive and maintain discipline. This is the result of an inequity in student distribution–raging at the teachers doesn’t help, and the money isn’t there for increasing their pay so as to improve their quality.
I’m not writing a treatise on pedagogy here, but I do think affirmative action isn’t helping and that redistribution of students earlier in their academic careers would make a difference. That’s not a panacea for everything wrong with our education system, but can it close the opportunity gap? I think it can certainly make a difference, and at low financial cost.
“I’m not saying teachers and administrators should assume the worst about poor students, I’m saying that they do. And we cannot change that just by saying “they shouldn’t do that”.
Of course you cannot the attitudes of teachers and administrators just by telliing people “they shouldn’t do that.” This is a vast oversimplification of what I was saying and ignores the complexity of a pedagogy that goes beyond just lecturing on the topic of social justice. Teaching and telling are not the same thing. If something can be learned, it can also be unlearned.
Its not about teaching a more balanced classroom. Its about using culturally relevant pedagogy and being sensitive to the pedagogical needs of poor and minority students. That was my point every classroom is unique. You can not teach every classroom the same way or using the same content and strategies and expect students to be able to perceive it as relevant or important to their lives and circumstances. And teacher education programs need to be revamped to reflect these findings. I never said you were trying to write a treatise on pedagogy. But pedagogy is relevant to everything you’re saying here and it is clear that you do not enough about it to have an well-informed opinion on how institutionalized racism and racist attitudes and the subordination and domination of minority culture by majority culture affect our schools in so many different ways. The standards by which we measure underperformance of schools are deeply flawed and then these school closings are a product of that. Mass school closings across the country have had a documented awful affect on the quality and equity of America’s educational system and to suggest otherwise is just plainly ignorant. It’s foolish to think that just by putting poor students with rich and upper middle class students that suddenly outcomes for poor students will change. It’s far more likely that they will feel incredibly isolated and uncomfortable in new surroundings and with forms of pedagogy which are still not culturally relevant to their circumstances and this will affect their academic performance. I concur we should have more homogenous classrooms but to think that this will solve anything by itself is similar to the naive thinking that just by instituting affirmative action ands setting a quota for minority students in universities that you would significantly change their circumstances and adequately attend to their needs.
And your assumption that it’s too late to affect attitudes towards culturally different groups by the time students start entering teacher education programs in university is also not based in practice and its clear that you need to do more research on this also before you can be well-informed. In fact if you are gonna be teaching culturally different groups then you need to be well-versed in different learning style models, cognitive development models, and social identity models. This is an integral part of learning to be a teacher and it is about bringing previously held attitudes out into the open for exploration;and critique. Again I will say and you clearly ignored this, the body of empirical research and curricular writing that builds on the benefits of diversity, multiculturalism, and social justice in higher education provides valuable resources for faculty and administrators who are working towards social and cultural equity and inclusivity at the level of interactions whether between individual students or within classrooms, disciplinary curricula, and entire postsecondary institutions. A social justice perspective and framework taken in teacher education programs enables prospective educators to recognize the patterns of domination and subordination that characterize the larger society and are reproduced in teacher-student student-student relationships. This perspective explores the reproductions of race, class, gender and other identity based power inequities and analyzes those in the context of other power relations in the classroom. A social justice framework in teacher education programs teaches prospective educators to explore their own socialization process and their unexamined assumptions about the “other” and once they get into the classroom explore the socialization of their students and how it relates to their teaching practice. Knowing one’s self and knowing one’s students is the key to developing a culturally relevant pedagogy that will allow a teacher to affectively to teach that classroom full of poor and minority students and also to foster better interaction between culturally different groups in a heterogenous classroom.
“In faculty seminars in which ‘‘knowing one’s students’’ remains the primary or exclusive focus for discussion and analysis, we introduce various organizers to engage faculty with considerations such as learning style and/ or cognitive and social identity development (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007 , chapter 17 ; Anderson & Adams, 1992 ). Learning style models help faculty to design a range of learning environments that match some preferred cultural or individual student learning styles while at the same time stretching others. Cognitive development models help faculty to understand the different levels of complexity with which students take in and process knowledge and to anticipate the tendency of some students to dichotomize complex questions, reducing multiple perspectives to simple either/or, right/wrong choices, although other students (often in the same classroom) work with the inherent messiness of real-world social issues and appreciate the multiple, differing perspectives held by their peers (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 2007 , chapter 17 ; King & Shuford, 1996 ; for application, see Adams & Marchesani, 1997 ). Social identity models enable faculty to understand and account for the possibility that students connected by seemingly same social identities may express very different responses (e.g., denial, anger, pain) to social issues in the classroom (Adams & Marchesani, 1997 ; Hardiman & Jackson, 1992 ; Wijeyesinghe & Jackson, 2001 ). Information about social identities is not important only to the instructor. It is also important for students to know about each other’s social identities, as well as about their own, as a context for understanding their different perspectives on social justice issues.”
You are an advocate for society finding better ways to model itself and produce better outcomes for all its citizens. How does society progress? It progresses when the attitudes and practices of its dominant social and cultural institutions change and that change has to come from within. Education is one those institutions where attitudes are changing but need to change on a greater scale. Education plays the dual role of reflecting stratified relationships in the society as well as reproducing them through access curriculum as well as course content and pedagogy. All levels of education also offers a unique opportunity for interrupting the unequal relationships by helping people understand social inequality and by modeling equitable relationships in the classroom.
You keep broadening my argument–all I’m saying is that AA does not work and actually prevents us from doing policies that are more helpful. I’m not even saying that college students are incapable of changing their racial attitudes–I’m only saying that it’s easier to get the right attitude when you’re younger than it is to change it later.
I do think that a more even distribution of poor students is itself helpful, because poor students require more human and financial resources to make up for a lack of said resources at home. It’s difficult for a teacher to provide those extra resources when the entire school is composed of people who need them. Disadvantaged students are more manageable if every teacher has some, instead of some teachers having none and others having them exclusively. I’m not saying that this is everything, there is of course lots of other things you can do in the schools, but this is an important first step. No matter how you talk about race/class/gender/diversity if affluent kids and poor kids never meet each other, there are going to be limitations on what you can do.
I’m sure pedagogy has lots of great ideas about how we should talk about race/class/gender and so on, but my principle concern here is correcting the opportunity gap, which is primarily a gap in teaching and financial resources, not the product of active racism.
And when we’re talking about the school system being racist, we’re not talking about overt and extreme racist attitudes that exist We’re talking about a whole institution being racist in the paternalistic attitude it takes towards the education of minority and poor students, for example with the belief that while these student’s schools should be made into test prep factories, meanwhile more well-off students at specialized high schools such as the University of Chicago Laboratory School and Bronx High School Science get a much richer education. There are forces within the educational system who fight this attitude and the negative outcomes that stem from it, teachers and students and parents and administrators and their numbers are large but unfortunately their power is not commensurate with their numbers since the neoliberal agenda in education of the last decade or so has largely been a product of politicians and private business imposing their will on our system of public education and turning it into a for-profit venture.
Which is why we shouldn’t have “minority schools” and “affluent schools”. Mixing the classes together is the first step to eliminating the divide–AA doesn’t address this problem.
Ok I agree with you then in general. And I agree with you that if they never meet each other than that contributes greatly to the problem. I was just trying to present multiple facets of the problem.
Glad to hear we’re on the same page.
the main point I was trying to make was that just as affirmative action masks underlying racism and classism so could your solution of busing poor kids to more “affluent” schools just the same. my point was it can’t be thought of as an adequate solution in and of itself.
And also just to affirm I don’t agree with you that that affirmative action is bad policy. It is only bad policy if it is used by itself, which it has been, just like your policy of busing poor students to affluent schools is a very similar idea to affirmative action, in terms of the idea of relocation, but not good enough and probably I would foresee it being detrimental if it was used just by itself to try to increase the opportunities of minorities. I believe your idea would also really just serve to mask the underlying institutional racism that exists in our educational system. As iterated in the decision of the Supreme Court in Grutter vs. Bollinger back in 2003. Affirmative action is only affective policy if it is paired with promoting cross-racial understanding and breaking down racial stereotypes in the classroom. Or else kids of different races and classes just tend to go to their own separate corners as you said whether they are in higher education or in grade school.
I don’t think there is institutional racism in the education system, I think there is institutional classism. This is where we differ. I’m trying to reduce inequalities of opportunity among varying class groups, you’re trying to end racism altogether. I also would like to end racism altogether, but that’s not what I’m talking about. The reason blacks and Hispanics disproportionately fail is cycles of poverty, not overt racism.
Also, you really have to read much more about the Chicago school closings to understand what is going on there. You can’t just assume that just because you see the phrase “closing underperforming schools and re-locating kids” that it’s automatically good policy what is happening. It’s certainly doesn’t match up with your idea of relocating kids to well-performing public schools that aren’t segregated. Dig a little deeper.
I’s not true that there’s not enough money in the budget to fund these schools. Budgets are being mis-managed and politician’s priorities don’t have the best interests of the people in mind especially in the case of Chicago and Rahm Emanuel. And the reason they are withholding public funds from education is because these politicians are in the pockets of private business people who convince the politicians to allow them to put their own funds into transforming the entire schools system into a for-profit venture. Rahm Emanuel takes heavy campaign contributions from people who heavily invested in privately run charter schools. Believe it or not, these schools are run like companies and actually have shareholders And the problem with using a business model to run education is obvious….profit and cutting costs become more important who suffers as a result? That would be the children and the teachers and the parents. Public funds are being allocated to schools that have been turned into charters and for-profit schools which have been proven not to perform any better and most often worse than the public schools they are intended to replace. These schools tend to be highly segregated. The teachers are often not unionized. That is where these children are being re-located. That is where these children will be subject to more harsh disciplinary measures that fuel the school to prison pipeline. That is where these students will continue to suffer the effects of excessive standardized testing and the test-prep factory atmosphere. In Chicago, these children will be forced to cross dangerous gang lines in order to get to their new schools. This is where teachers are hired that usually aren’t well-qualified or often not even certified just so the people who run the school can save money on their salaries. These are schools where children are given no time for recess and physical activity. Now it would be nice if these children were being located to schools that would actually serve their interests, but that’s not happening and that has never been a result of mass school closings anywhere around the country. They close public schools and they enlist private or philanthropic money to build more charter schools which eventually become publicly funded but privately controlled. This doesn’t reduce inequality. It increases it. Of course there are some good charter schools around, but the reason they may be good is not because they are charters. If you look at why their better performing it’s usually because they tend to contain a lower percentage of minority students along with a richer curriculum and they tend to be in a more affluent area. The dumbed down curriculum tends to follow the minority students wherever their schools may be closing. This is the neoliberal agenda for education to eliminate education as a public good and make it completely privatized and the project has been progressing steadily for years now even though it has show no proof of positive results and often actually negative results. Its that same paternalistic attitude that I referenced earlier that we rich people, we private business people who are no experts in education and the needs of children know better how run an effective school system than all the teachers and administrators and Karen Lewis, Head of the Chicago Teacher’s Union, who vehemently oppose these school closings.
“Unlike the teachers in Moore, Chicago teachers’ schools are not gone because of some capricious act of nature. They are gone because of decades of very deliberate decisions by public officials, corporate interests and ordinary citizens that have eviscerated the neighborhoods of Chicago, displacing people with the demolition of public housing, gutting communities with foreclosures and the elimination of jobs. The schools are gone because they have been replaced by charter schools, the darlings of politically well-connected school reformers making a profit on tax money while public officials eliminate the inconvenience of teachers unions. The schools are gone because poor African Americans and Hispanics in Chicago are disenfranchised by school governance that is appointed by the mayor with limited accountability to the communities. The schools are gone because public funding in this country remains tied to real estate taxes that benefit wealthy suburbs at the expense of the urban core. The schools are gone because years of school reforms imposed from the latest outside savior have left front line teachers abused and demoralized and their students underachieving. And the schools are gone because white flight that began decades ago has left the cities brown and black and poor.” Reverend John Thomas
Public money is being used by Rahm Emanuel to finance unnecessary corporate projects such as the $100 million investment in the DePaul University Sports Stadium and basketball arena and Chicago Mercantile Exchange Relocation and yet he claims he doesn’t have enough money to put more resources into these schools.
Penny Pritzker is one of the members of the unelected and appointed by Rahm Emanuel Chicago school board which voted to close down these schools. Her family is extremely wealthy and and she voted to increase the growth of charter schools, one of which bear her name, the Pritzker Academy. Those same funds that could be going to keep these schools resourced she voted to relocate to the charter school which bears her name, where students are forced to be conformists, wear uniforms, subject to harsh disciplinary members and basically assimilate into a culture of “do as you are told and follow directions” That’s what being a good student means in these schools. That’s the extent of pedagogy. No creativity or critical thinking. Just sit down shut up do the test prep, do three hours of homework every night and follow directions.
Read this: http://www.epi.org/files/2013/bba-rhetoric-trumps-reality-executive-summary.pdf
Read this:http://www.wbez.org/news/fact-check-chicago-school-closings-107216
Read this: http://dianeravitch.net/2013/05/17/chicago-schools-2013-still-separate-still-unequal/
And there’s so much more material out there I won’t take the time to point you to.
I live in the suburbs of Chicago and read regularly about the policy.
Many of the schools in question are in gang-affilliated neighborhoods. By breaking up those schools, the city breaks up the gangs, and by breaking up the gangs, the city breaks poverty cycles. Many of these gangs are now multi-generational institutions. They use the geographically-assigned schools as feeders to recruit additional members. Have a look at the connections between the gangs and the schools in question:
http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130521/old-town/cps-school-closings-interactive-map-with-closing-schools-gang-lines
Most of these gangs are themselves race-affiliated. Even though the new schools will not necessarily be better academically, by increasing their geographical diversity, they can hopefully undermine the neighborhood and ethnic loyalties that otherwise tend to prevail.
As your own links show, CPS is short $1 billion–the economic investments the city is making would not adequately address that financial gap. Not that closing schools will save money either, but it will mix students together who otherwise would be separated based on geography.
I agree with your criticisms of charter schools, but I’d rather have students mixed together in charter schools than segregated under the current system. The union is of course opposed to the closings because it will cost teachers jobs, as it should be–it exists for the benefit of teachers, not students. Often those interests align, but I don’t think they do in this case. Karen Lewis’ counterarguments against the program are extremely feeble. Have you heard her egregious sports metaphors? This one’s the worst:
“When the Cubs lose a game they don’t call for Wrigley Field to close down. They don’t want the entire team dismantled. Despite empty seats, the stadium isn’t accused of being underutilized. The owners don’t kill the franchise. They don’t bastardize the team. They don’t demoralize the coach who then demoralizes the players. The owners don’t blame the fans for every missed ball or strike. They honor the players’ contracts. No one questions their salaries or tries to steal their pensions and rarely does the public attack their union. They invest in the stadium—they want to make it better, and better and even outstanding.”
Emanuel’s plan is very, very far from perfect, but it is better than the status quo.
It’s absolutely not worth it, for all the reasons I mentioned earlier. Again just like with affirmative action, relocation with school closings means nothing without a pedagogical and curriculum policy to meet the needs of these students in the classroom and foster interaction and cooperation across class and race lines. I already said that these schools will be highly segregated which I know you don’t agree with so the benefits that you desire don’t come there. It is a very big deal that the schools that they will be moving to are not better academically, but the bigger deal is what I just mentioned.
And regarding the gangs, these students will still have to cross gang lines and go back home. They’ll still be roaming the streets of their neighborhoods where they live. The gangs could just as easily recruit them there. A school is not a feeder institution for a gang. Poverty and hopelessness are feeder institutions for gangs. A school is just a physical structure. And one thing this policy will not do and will actually exacerbate and mass school closings have already been proven to exacerbate is fueling the school to prison pipeline. Your analysis is just plain wrong and its based on what you expect to happen, instead of looking back at what has already happened.
Have you read about the effects of school closings all across the country? This is the same policy except on a much more massive scale. I don’t get it. Your all about outcomes right? If the desired outcomes have proven not to materialize in the past, why do you think they will materialize now?
And how is it a good thing that this will cost teacher’s jobs. So these charter schools can higher less qualified and uncertified non-unionized people to teach these kids just to save money on labor costs?
And furthermore your map just proves that a lot of kids will be moving from a school in one gang’s territory to a school in rival gang territory. And some of the new school neighborhoods have just the same gangs. And then there are a few that have “none identified” by both schools. What good does that do? It actually places these kids in great harm when forced to cross gang lines. And your logic goes past me of how moving kids from gang’s territory to another gang’s territory somehow undermines the gangs in terms of recruitment. If need be, why can’t gangs adjust. These kids aren’t moving to these new neighborhoods. They’re just going to schools in new neighborhoods and they will still go back and hang around in the neighborhoods from which they are originally from. And sometimes rival gangs even band together to conduct their drug businesses. They’re not as ethnically loyal as you think they are. If they need new members and there’s a new group of kids to recruit then they’ll try to recruit them and they will be successful because these kids will still be living in poverty.
Read this: http://www.suntimes.com/news/crime/7259451-418/street-gangs-forge-new-business-model.html
This isn’t just way way far from perfect policy. It’s bad policy, and that’s the reason nearly everyone in Chicago who is affected by it, opposes it.
Relocation in and of itself causes students to see and potentially interact with, on a daily basis, students from different places and backgrounds. It also redistributes the most challenging students and thereby decreases the load on individual schools and teachers. Even without any further policy, this is useful. Ideal? No. Useful? Yes.
Students will still join gangs, sure, but if some number of them make friends with other people, or even just learn not to hate them through exposure, it will have been marginally beneficial.
If a black kid moves from a school in a black gang’s territory to a school in a Hispanic gang’s territory, so that black kids and Hispanic kids mingle who otherwise wouldn’t have, that’s good for race relations and it’s good for the economic opportunity of both groups. Even if the gangs just become more racially diverse, that is itself better than the status quo.
Lots of people hating a change is to be expected. People always defend the way things are, no matter how tragic that system may be for them personally. Remember the poor and uninsured republicans who opposed Obamacare?
Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.
well then you really have no argument against affirmative action then, cause one of the points of affirmative action was to allow the races to mingle in higher education and that has certainly happened… ideal?no…useful yes….even without the pedagogy and attention that would adequately educate these students? well I would say no but clearly you would say yes….and look at your map again…there’s about one or two schools where the kids are moving to a territory with different gangs…otherwise it’s just moving to somewhere with no gangs from another school with no gangs….or its moving from one school area with the same gangs to another school area with the same gangs and a few additional gangs…or moving from one school area with the same gangs to another school area with exactly the same gangs..or, and this is the stupidest part of this policy. moving kids from a neighborhood school with no gangs to a neighborhood school with a lot of gangs….your argument of gangs mixing races doesn’t hold water if you look at your map more closely which obviously you didnt..they’ll still recruit from the same race. and kids joining gangs is not beneficial for society…I don’t care how different the races of one individual gang may be….so they’re united in selling drugs and making hits on rival gangs…wonderful.
and really you’re trying to look at every variable separately when in truth doing that makes you see the policy as beneficial…all these variables intertwine and affect one another and looking at them as separate entities is short-sighted. i don’t care if it decreases the load on individual teachers if most of them are going to be unqualified, non-certified, and non-unionized and I already told you about the dumbed-down pedagogy and obsession with standardized test-prep and social control that these charter schools most often employ…there aren’t gonna be any rich white kids in these schools? people from your old high school aren’t being transplanted to these schools. they will still be highly segregated schools with poor Black and hispanic kids in poor gang infested neighborhoods and therefore that viewpoint of seeing them as failures you pointed out will still hold as much as it did in their old schools. and charter schools especially in poor neighborhoods tend to have higher class sizes since the managers of these schools wanna save money on labor costs. I mean you’re ignoring so many variables that affect the validity of your arguments. I keep imploring you to look at the results of school closings in other parts of the country but apparently you’re not listening to me. You will see that they have actually raised inequality rather than reduced it. School closings have become the status quo across the country. They are not anti- status quo, and for you to say they are is clear that you do not have all the facts.
again this is not making the perfect the enemy of the good. this is looking at the policy as a whole and recognizing it as what it is….bad policy that will exacerbate inequality, not reduce it.
I don’t object to affirmative action on the grounds that it fails to mix the races–it certainly does that. I object to it on the grounds that it fails to improve opportunity for disadvantaged groups, and I believe the negative externalities of taking students who are unprepared are more harmful than any benefits from the artificial creation of diversity.
They don’t have to go to an area with different gangs–as long as it’s an area that their neighborhood gang doesn’t control, it’s a plus.
If the same gangs are in both areas, I agree that’s ineffectual, but that isn’t the case for most of the schools in question.
I think the world is absolutely a better place if gangs are based on shared economic interests rather than racial/cultural identity. It’s not a perfect place–ideally there would be no gangs at all–but less racism in gangs? That’s good.
The teachers currently in place are not succeeding, so even if the new teachers are just as bad, decreasing their workload by diversifying their student populations is still an improvement. Replacing overworked bad teachers with ordinary bad teachers is an upgrade, albeit a small one.
Yes, in many cases the new schools are not more affluent, but it is at least geographically different in population, which by itself is still positive.
Schools are closing due to lack of funds, which is a product of the recession and many state and local governments’ commitments to balanced budgets. It’s unfortunate, but unless those governments stop committing to balanced budgets, it becomes unavoidable. Voters have decided they would rather cut budgets and cut taxes than fund schools. The CPS situation is somewhat different from the norm here.
In some places, school closings lead to overcrowding in the remaining schools. The CPS program is eliminating excess capacity, both current and future, due to falling student numbers. Pointing to examples of how school closings have harmed some localities does not comment on the CPS scheme. The CPS closings also affect the distribution of students of different backgrounds in a city with unusually high student inequity. It’s not equivalent to other closings that are made for purely budgetary reasons–this program is not expected to improve substantively CPS’ fiscal position, and while other closings keep student populations more or less uniform, the CPS scheme will bring about ethnic and class mixing.
All changes are, by definition, anti-status quo.
To say the teachers are not succeeding and are just plainly bad is a drastic oversimplification of why these students aren’t doing well in school, and its irresponsible to say that. There are many variables associated with a student not doing well in school, as I’m sure you know, and I could point you to all the literature on that. When taken into account other factors, teachers tend to be very low on the totem pole. Under resourced schools and poverty are way bigger determinants of academic success than teachers.And what causes underresourced schools in poor mostly low-income household areas of Chicago. Illinois’ inequitable and utterly stupid way of funding schools through mostly local property taxes.
http://thinkprogress.org/education/2012/09/12/835111/how-illinois-shortchanges-chicago/?mobile=nc
Schools in affluent districts with higher property values get vastly more money and more resources. The solution would be to change the funding scheme and strike the root of the problem. But do you see Rahm Emanuel lobbying for that? If there not gonna change the funding scheme, they could at least take some of the property tax funds from the affluent schools and transfer it to the schools in the poorer neighborhoods to make it more equitable.
The teachers not succeeding is only one small part of why the students aren’t doing well–predominately, the reasons are poverty, poor home environments, lack of resources, and bad neighborhoods. Schools that take children further away from those environments are a plus.
I agree that a redistribution of resources from affluent districts to poor ones is a great idea, but I still think relocating students is better than nothing.
I still can’t comprehend how you think these students are being relocated to suddenly better environments than they were in before. Again they’re not moving homes, and they still gonna be hanging around in their home neighborhoods. They’re changing schools, and the entire region, the region that encompasses there current location and future relocation is mired in poverty and destitution. You act like the poverty is concentrated in a few blocks and moving their schools a few blocks means lessening the burden of their environment? They’re home life will still be characterized by poverty and destitution and they’re school life will be characterized by pedagogy that won’t meet their needs. Where is the benefit that your pointing to? You clearly don’t understand the process here. The only reason that Rahm Emanuel and his people and Republicans in state legislatures and others at the state level don’t undertake more meaningful reforms is because that would mean making the public schools better and more resourced. They don’t want that. Thats the idea behind closing public schools and relocating kids to privately managed charter schools They want privately managed charter schools to replace the public schools, so they starve them of resources and do not enact the reforms that would actually would make a difference in the performance of neighborhood public schools. Its the cozy relationship between charter operators and politicians that fuels this policy, and for you to think anything else is foolish and makes clear you don’t have a firm understanding of the situation. This is why people who are affected, protest. If you would notice they not only protest against these school closings. They also protest for the policies that I’m talking about because they recognize the agenda that is served by mass closing of public schools, and that would be the agenda of the super rich charter operators and the politicians who grease their wheels. The money that should be going to resource public schools is going to charters. This policy is just their way of enacting an agenda to privatize the school system. And guess what…..it’s worked before and it’s gonna work again and students are gonna be hurt because of it.
The continued poverty and lack of pedagogy that meets these kid’s needs is going to overwhelm any perceived benefit from ethnic mixing. I already told you the reason that we haven’t seen the academic benefits from affirmative action. This is the same thing. There’s nothing that forces people to cooperate with each other just because they see each other everyday. They’ll go to their separate corners. They’ll be violence and they’ll always be violence without a pedagogy that encourages them to cooperate and reach across class, ethnic, and racial lines. And this most certainly will not be provided by charter schools, and that’s why your perceived benefit of cooperation after violence won’t happen. This is not about gangs, and your emphasis on them as a target of this policy is so absurd, cause the bigger issue here is the charter schools and the privatization of the school system. This is about the kind of pedagogy and zero tolerance hyperdisciplinary attitude that these kids will be suffering under because they are all poor Black and Hispanic kids and that is how the white, generally younger, and underqualified, underexperienced, and teachers that charter schools generally employ will be seeing them in the classroom. I keep repeating and repeating that these schools will still be highly segregated and I’m talking about highly segregated in the eyes of the teachers that will be teaching them and the administrative people who will be running the dumbed-down content and design of their education. You think they care to see the difference between Puerto Rican and Mexican or whatever ethnic rivalries exist between kids, as much as a gang may see it?
“Third, Chicago Public Schools currently has plans to expand their charter system. In 2012, CPS signed the Gates Compact with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (a non-profit that financially supports the expansion of charter schools). As part of the Gates Compact, CPS pledged to open an additional 60 charter schools in the near future. Already CPS has plans to open 13 new charters in 2013, despite their claim that the system is underutilized. If the future location of charter schools mirrors the existing trends, then the new charter schools will be located in the neighborhoods facing traditional public school closures” (see below
Same poverty-stricken neighborhoods…same kids…..just public to charter.
And you’re undervaluing the relationships that these kids form with their current teachers. It’s not that these teachers are bad. They do everything possible with the meager resources they have. Why do you think students are out there protesting too? And please don’t tell me it’s because they’ve been indoctrinated. They’re protesting for their teachers, for stability in at least one aspect of their lives, as incomplete and as not perfect as that stability may be, they realize its not the fault of their teachers. As you said these schools aren’t mainly being closed because there low performing. And even if they were defined as low- performing that would not be a good reason to close them because the criteria is defined by standardized test scores. They’re being closed because they’re being defined as underutilized, and the reason they’re underutilized is because of that stupid threshold of 30 per classroom conveniently set by the same people who are closing the schools based on that threshold and who are connected to the wealthy people who arranged the opening of charters and the starving of resources from the public neighborhood schools. So in an agenda designed like this, a mass school closing is the logical end to the agenda, and that’s what everyone protesting realizes and they realize that this agenda does not serve their interests. They’ve connected the dots. You haven’t.
That’s why it’s the status quo. It’s the status quo for the American educational system. Because it’s an agenda that’s been going on for years now. It’s not change. It’s more of the same.
“Fourth, charter schools have created the conditions under which traditional neighborhood schools are considered underutilized. CPS has allowed charter schools to proliferate and absorb nearly 53,000 children into their system as of 2013, up from just 5,525 students
who attended charter schools in 2000.24 Furthermore, the district added more charter schools to the system at precisely the time it was experiencing declining enrollment. For example, in 2000, CPS had 432,000 students and 597 schools. In the current school year, CPS has 403,000 students and 681 schools. In this way, the proliferation of charter schools is a significant contributor to the underutilization that those CPS schools in danger of closure may be experiencing.”25
Why are the public schools underutilized? because of the opening of charters. It’s amazing to me that you don’t see the obvious connections here, the agenda of privatization that is advanced by mass school closings. This stuff doesn’t happen by accident. It’s all deliberative and planned out. And for you to think this is primarily about gangs and ethnic mixing boggles my mind.
There are also several cases in which the welcoming school is higher rated, though admittedly that is not the norm.
Are you gonna look at the criteria for how these very few schools are higher rated cause it’s most likely to be standardized test scores, or are you just gonna assume higher rated means something wonderful and academically rich? And if you’re gonna relocate more poor Black and Hispanic kids to these schools, those scores are inevitably gonna go down and what has happened in a lot of cases across the country is that they start closing the schools that they relocated these kids to from another low-performing school, so the cycle just goes on and on and on. So sometimes kids will even go through two rounds of school closings based solely on standardized test scores that don’t have any hope of improving. It becomes a continuous policy of mass displacement with no end in sight.
“In many cases the new school is geographically quite close to the old one, but in some cases, more than you claim (I counted 5 rather easily) the new school is in a different gang’s area.”
OK, so you counted 5. I counted 5 too. Where’s the more than 5? If this was really the intention of the policy why didn’t Rahm Emanuel make sure to make it more than 5? Why are most of the kids moving to a school two blocks away with the same gang?
The intention of this policy is to privatize education in Chicago which will reduce the quality of the education these kids will be receiving and will perpetuate and exacerbate inequality Any ethnic mixing that you perceive happening because of 5 new schools being in a different gang area is not gonna make up for that. And your shortsightedness in not seeing the broader agenda here with these school closings makes the gang thing even more irrelevant.
The schools they’re in are terrible. Changing schools can’t hurt, it can only help. When the public schools are terrible and the state won’t or can’t improve them, replacing them, even with private schools, can still be an improvement.
We’re not talking about a proposal to reform the pedagogy or change the funding structure. We’re talking about a proposal to close some failing schools and relocate some students elsewhere. I agree with you that all of those things would be nice, but they’re not on the table, and pointing out that it would be nice if they were is not an argument against closing failing schools and relocating students to new ones. The students in these schools have no chance as it stands. New environments are better than nothing.
again you simply ignore everything I said…these environments are not better than nothing….they are worse….and I’ve said everything to prove that they will be much worse.and you keep conveniently ignoring or saying “We’re not talking about this” regarding everything I said…these new schools will either produce the same outcomes for these kids are produce worse outcomes at the service of an agenda that aims to privatize which is an agenda that doesn’t serve the best interest of these kids or American society in general and has proven, proven not to work. “closing failings schools” is a moniker faux reformers have adopted all across the country to make it seem like they are doing something good for these kids.look beyond that phrase and you’ll see that they haven’t and the results bear it out…I don’t put any stock into a definition of “failing” that only includes standardized test scores….you may…but then that just proves your ignorance on the topic of validity and reliability of standardized tests……..you wanna keep ignoring results, be my guest…but then don’t claim to be the outcomes guy cause you’re not being the outcomes guy in this case…..
your so ignorant to say that replacing public schools with privatized schools is better….all you need to look at this evidence to prove this statement wrong..and I don’t know how many times I’ve repeated this with you conveniently ignoring it…again what has happened rather than what you expect to happen.
And this policy has been going on for basically the last decade….after a while you come to realize that the people in power aren’t doing this anymore because they think it works..cause it clearly doesn’t…and doing it in other city for perhaps slightly different reasons isn’t gonna change that fact…they’re doing it because it lines their pockets..it’s just another business venture…..its another form of special interest influence, a source of campaign money….privatizing schools and closing public schools is a big business…its huge profit margins for a very few who benefit like the CEOs and hedge fund managers and other people ….at the expense of the kids and learning and teachers and the public school system…you keep saying you agree with me on charter schools and privatized schools….well then why in the world then don’t you recognize the overarching agenda of this policy for what it is?
“We’re not talking about a proposal to reform the pedagogy or change the funding structure.We’re talking about a proposal to close some failing schools and relocate some students elsewhere. ”
You may not be talking about a lot of things, because you don’t see how all these things affect the question of whether this policy is good or not. I’m talking about these things, because they’re actually important in making that decision. “We are not talking about this” is not an argument. Find a better one.
I’ve already told you about the dumbed-down pedagogy in charter schools and the affect that has on these kids. This has a lot, a lot, of bearing,, clearly more than you realize, on the question of whether these kids are actually moving to a better environment. And as far as the funding structure, I already said, and you clearly ignored this too, the reason they won’t change the funding structure to better serve these schools which they’re closing and conveniently labeling “failing”, as a result of their policies which starve the schools, is because they are in the business of starving and subsequently closing public schools and opening charters and private managed schools….the reason they won’t change the funding structure is key to the agenda here, and seems to be something you like to ignore. well you can’t ignore it, because if you looked at it properly it would affect your opinion of whether this policy is a good policy or not. .
It would really help our discussion if you would address my points rather than saying they don’t matter because I’ve clearly layed out how they do matter. Or if you think they don’t matter lay out a better argument for why you think they don’t matter, cause so far you haven’t laid one out. Your only point has been gangs and ethnic mixing, which I find to be suspect at best.
your stubbornness in not seeing the interconnectedness of everything I’m talking about blinds you from seeing the harm in this policy……it’s obvious we’ve reached an impasse. we’ll see the results a few years down the road.
I agree that we overemphasize standardized test scores, but on what basis then do you believe the current CPS schools to be superior learning environments to the alternative the mayor is proposing? In what specific ways will the new schools do a worse job than the current CPS schools? It may very well be the case that charter schools are worse than the average school nationwide or statewide, but are they worse than the average school the CPS intends to close?
And take a look at this study which found that the majority of TIF Tax Increment Financing dollars, spent on CPS went to selective enrollment schools which have a richer education, which keep out the poor Black and Hispanic kids through entrance requirements that most of them would never be able to meet. That would be 52% of TIF dollars went to fund selective enrollment schools which comprise a whopping 1% of CPS. By contrast, neighborhood schools are 69% of the school system and have received 48% of funding. 78% of the funding goes to the affluent schools on the north side, which I’m sure is where you live.
Oh and look at this awful little tidbit right here: *Farmer notes in the report that selective enrollment schools can be financed “on the backs of those excluded”. That is, parents who live in a TIF district that bankrolled the construction of a nearby selective enrollment school might not see their property taxes benefit their child’s education because the school doesn’t have to admit local kids, like a neighborhood school does.
“Do the laws governing the use of TIF dollars make it a flawed system? That is, a poorer community with less property tax revenue is not going to garner as much money as a wealthier one, which, arguably, doesn’t need the public money as much as the poorer community.
It seems counter-intuitive, right? You have underdeveloped areas reliant on their own underdevelopment, as opposed to having some general pool. You should have a development pool at the state or even national level. The more you fragment a development fund, the more uneven it’s going to be.”
There are many many way which the politicians and higher-ups could be making the system more equitable and less segregated as opposed to this stupid scheme which all it does is relocate kids from underresourced public schools to privately managed charter schools. But they don’t do that. Why? Because its part of the neoliberal project, and this has been written about extensively, to see public schools fail and privately managed schools take over even though these privately managed schools are highly segregated and don’t produce any better outcomes for the kids they are taking. School closings based on standardized test scores are an easy way to make this agenda a reality, because poor kids don’t do well on standardized tests and will never do well on standardized tests.
And that’s not gonna change with this scheme. And one thing that will not change for these kids is the fact they will still be living in poverty and that will still hurt their academic outcomes immensely and the idea that this stupid policy will do anything to alleviate that is foolish. The measures they are using to gauge the affectiveness of these schools are standardized test scores, which are so flawed as to be rendered essentially useless and consistently counterproductive to creating an affective learning environment for these kids and I could point you to all the literature on that. The affectiveness of affluent schools like the University of Chicago Labaratory School for example are not determined solely by standardized test scores. They don’t even take standardized tests.
And take a look at this brief, a conglomeration of the findings of multiple stuides, which proves ever more of your points wrong and suspect about underutilization and funding and violence. Again it seems you just read the headlines and make all your assumptions from that.
http://www.createchicago.org/2013/03/create-releases-research-brief-on.html
“In the current round of school closures, Chicago Public Schools leaders have changed tack and instead are focused on saving the district money by closing underutilized schools. CPS claims they are facing a $1 billion deficit in their budget for the school year 2013-2014. However, CPS’s past history of budgeting should give caution. Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports from the school years 2011-2012 and 2010-2011 show that CPS has a recent history of overstating their budget troubles. In the 2011-2012 school year, the Chicago Board of Education (BOE) approved a budget with a $214 million deficit. However, CPS ended the school year with a $328 million surplus. And again, the BOE approved a budget anticipating a $245 million deficit for the 2010-2011 school year, but the district ended that school year with a $328 million surplus. In both cases CPS’s budgeting was off by $500 million dollars.”
I agree with much of what you say, and I would prefer policy that directly addresses those inequities, but relocations are still better than nothing.
As I understand it, CPS will attempt to close its deficit through tax increases:
http://www.chicagobusiness.com/article/20130607/BLOGS02/130609845/cps-close-to-eliminating-1-billion-budget-hole
I agree that if CPS does end up with a surplus, that schools are a great place in which to invest it, but that still doesn’t make relocating students a bad idea.
“Another 2011 Pew report summarizing the research on school closings in six cities showed that school closures did not save the school districts as much money as was hoped. In addition to the inability of these districts to sell or lease their properties, closure-related costs cut further into savings, as districts found themselves paying for closed school site maintenance or demolition, moving services, and support for both displaced students and the schools that received them.12 Closures have many upfront and, in some cases, hidden costs, as a recent audit of the 2008 Washington D.C. school closures conducted by the Office of the D.C. Auditor underscores. The audit determined that instead of saving the district $30 million, as claimed by former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee, the closures actually cost the city $40 million after factoring in the expense of demolishing buildings, removing furnishings, and transporting students. Further, the district lost another. $5 million in federal and state grants as students left the system, many to the charter schools being built in tandem with the closings.”13
Utilization is based on the physical size of a school and the number of students occupying a classroom. The Chicago Board of Education has determined that 30 children in a classroom is the ideal or most efficient class size for Kindergarten through eighth-grade classes. Classrooms under 30 students are deemed underutilized. By these standards, CPS estimates that 50% of its neighborhood schools are underutilized, and nearly 140 are half empty.
“It is questionable whether 30 students per class should be the standard for the ideal utilization of a classroom. The Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) program initiated in Tennessee in the late 1980s has yielded the most comprehensive and credible studies on the impact of class sizes. In the STAR program, students and teachers were randomly assigned to two types of classes: a small class with an average of 15 students or a regular class with an average of 22 students. After four years, researchers determined that the difference of seven students had significant impacts on student achievement. Students from the smaller classes outperformed students from larger classes by the equivalent of three additional months of schooling in the first year.15 Studies of STAR also determined that African American students, lower- income students, and students from urban areas benefitted the most from smaller class sizes.”16
“Advocates of charter schools claim that the lack of union and public involvement allows the schools to innovate and elevate academic performance. This claim does not hold under scrutiny. According to CPS’s own data, an average charter school performs 10 percentile points below comparable (in terms of racial composition and number of students qualifying for Free or Reduced Lunches) traditional schools on reading test scores.19 Charters also consistently underperform by 12 percentile points on reading and 2 percentile points on math test scores relative to comparable public magnet schools.20
There are many reasons to believe that school closures are directly related to the expansion of the charter school system. First, the budget deficit, in part, can be attributed to the costs of expanding the charter school system. In FY 2012, $350 million was budgeted for the Office of New Schools, the office devoted to developing new charter and contract schools. For the upcoming fiscal year, CPS allocated an additional $23 million to fund new charter schools, nearly half of what they estimate they will save if they close 80 neighborhood schools. In addition, the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) was successful in lobbying the Illinois General Assembly for an additional $35 million to expand their charter school network in 2012, at a time when the state cut over $200 million from the public school budget.
“Second, there is a strong local and national trend of converting closed public schools into privately operated charter schools. Forty-two percent of all closed public schools across the U.S. have been turned into charter schools. Chicago parallels that trend, with 40% of its closed public schools converted into privately operated charter schools. 21 Moreover, the reopened charter schools did not necessarily benefit neighborhood children. A study of closed neighborhood schools that were reopened as charter schools in Chicago showed a transformation in the student body attending these reopened schools. The new students tended to be more affluent, with higher prior achievement, and fewer of them had special needs. The schools also served fewer students from the neighborhoods in which the schools were situated.” 22
“Additionally, charters do not save the district money. CPS compensates organizations for approximately 75% of charter schools’ operational expenses. Charters also receive funds from a combination of state and federal grants, non-profit grants and fund raising. In addition, many of the charter replacement schools lease their school building from the district. When examining the lease agreements between CPS and various charter schools, the Chicago Teachers Union found that CPS leased a significant number of the public buildings to privately operated charter schools for just $1.23”
Third, Chicago Public Schools currently has plans to expand their charter system. In 2012, CPS signed the Gates Compact with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (a non-profit that financially supports the expansion of charter schools). As part of the Gates Compact, CPS pledged to open an additional 60 charter schools in the near future. Already CPS has plans to open 13 new charters in 2013, despite their claim that the system is underutilized. If the future location of charter schools mirrors the existing trends, then the new charter schools will be located in the neighborhoods facing traditional public school closures (see below).
“Fourth, charter schools have created the conditions under which traditional neighborhood schools are considered underutilized. CPS has allowed charter schools to proliferate and absorb nearly 53,000 children into their system as of 2013, up from just 5,525 students
who attended charter schools in 2000.24 Furthermore, the district added more charter schools to the system at precisely the time it was experiencing declining enrollment. For example, in 2000, CPS had 432,000 students and 597 schools. In the current school year, CPS has 403,000 students and 681 schools. In this way, the proliferation of charter schools is a significant contributor to the underutilization that those CPS schools in danger of closure may be experiencing.”25
The closings aren’t going to save money. I don’t expect them to. But relocating students at break-even cost is still beneficial.
Fewer students per class is definitely always beneficial, but given financial constraints, districts often set 30 as the goal. I don’t think CPS has the money to indulge smaller sizes.
I agree with your criticisms of private schools, but I don’t think the system as it is is accomplishing anything for Chicago’s disadvantaged. Relocating students will help somewhat, though I wish they were doing much more and had the tax resources to do so.
The right has steadily starved state and local governments of the tax revenue necessary to make resource improvements to the schools, and the affluent parents are extremely protective of their funding and will vote out any who attempt to redistribute it. It’s a systemic problem, with no easy solution, at least under the present democratic system.
“It is questionable whether 30 students per class should be the standard for the ideal utilization of a classroom. The Student Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) program initiated in Tennessee in the late 1980s has yielded the most comprehensive and credible studies on the impact of class sizes. In the STAR program, students and teachers were randomly assigned to two types of classes: a small class with an average of 15 students or a regular class with an average of 22 students. After four years, researchers determined that the difference of seven students had significant impacts on student achievement. Students from the smaller classes outperformed students from larger classes by the equivalent of three additional months of schooling in the first year.15 Studies of STAR also determined that African American students, lower- income students, and students from urban areas benefitted the most from smaller class sizes.”16
“Advocates of charter schools claim that the lack of union and public involvement allows the schools to innovate and elevate academic performance. This claim does not hold under scrutiny. According to CPS’s own data, an average charter school performs 10 percentile points below comparable (in terms of racial composition and number of students qualifying for Free or Reduced Lunches) traditional schools on reading test scores.19 Charters also consistently underperform by 12 percentile points on reading and 2 percentile points on math test scores relative to comparable public magnet schools.20
There are many reasons to believe that school closures are directly related to the expansion of the charter school system. First, the budget deficit, in part, can be attributed to the costs of expanding the charter school system. In FY 2012, $350 million was budgeted for the Office of New Schools, the office devoted to developing new charter and contract schools. For the upcoming fiscal year, CPS allocated an additional $23 million to fund new charter schools, nearly half of what they estimate they will save if they close 80 neighborhood schools. In addition, the United Neighborhood Organization (UNO) was successful in lobbying the Illinois General Assembly for an additional $35 million to expand their charter school network in 2012, at a time when the state cut over $200 million from the public school budget.
“Second, there is a strong local and national trend of converting closed public schools into privately operated charter schools. Forty-two percent of all closed public schools across the U.S. have been turned into charter schools. Chicago parallels that trend, with 40% of its closed public schools converted into privately operated charter schools. 21 Moreover, the reopened charter schools did not necessarily benefit neighborhood children. A study of closed neighborhood schools that were reopened as charter schools in Chicago showed a transformation in the student body attending these reopened schools. The new students tended to be more affluent, with higher prior achievement, and fewer of them had special needs. The schools also served fewer students from the neighborhoods in which the schools were situated.” 22
“Additionally, charters do not save the district money. CPS compensates organizations for approximately 75% of charter schools’ operational expenses. Charters also receive funds from a combination of state and federal grants, non-profit grants and fund raising. In addition, many of the charter replacement schools lease their school building from the district. When examining the lease agreements between CPS and various charter schools, the Chicago Teachers Union found that CPS leased a significant number of the public buildings to privately operated charter schools for just $1.23”
Third, Chicago Public Schools currently has plans to expand their charter system. In 2012, CPS signed the Gates Compact with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (a non-profit that financially supports the expansion of charter schools). As part of the Gates Compact, CPS pledged to open an additional 60 charter schools in the near future. Already CPS has plans to open 13 new charters in 2013, despite their claim that the system is underutilized. If the future location of charter schools mirrors the existing trends, then the new charter schools will be located in the neighborhoods facing traditional public school closures (see below).
“Fourth, charter schools have created the conditions under which traditional neighborhood schools are considered underutilized. CPS has allowed charter schools to proliferate and absorb nearly 53,000 children into their system as of 2013, up from just 5,525 students
who attended charter schools in 2000.24 Furthermore, the district added more charter schools to the system at precisely the time it was experiencing declining enrollment. For example, in 2000, CPS had 432,000 students and 597 schools. In the current school year, CPS has 403,000 students and 681 schools. In this way, the proliferation of charter schools is a significant contributor to the underutilization that those CPS schools in danger of closure may be experiencing.”25
“Finally, the people in charge of the closure process and Chicago Public Schools leadership are supporters of charter school expansion. The current CPS CEO, Barbara Byrd- Bennett, is a Broad Foundation executive coach, training superintendents in the principles of business model
school reform. The Broad Foundation invests millions in transforming schools into more privately controlled entities and seeks to train the next generation of leaders to realize the charter school takeover of the public schools.”
“Disinvestment in public schools and empty buildings will deepen the hardship confronting neighborhoods already suffering from community disinvestment and may contribute to even further population loss of African Americans in Chicago. For example, WBEZ aggregated data on abandoned properties, city-owned vacant lots, and community area census figures from the city’s data portal site, and mapped them on top of the locations of the schools targeted for potential closure.32 They found that school closures directly correspond to the locations of troubled mortgages, foreclosures, and population loss. Closing neighborhood schools will discourage people from moving back into these disinvested communities. Furthermore, closures may exacerbate tensions between communities and lead to violence. Since 2004, school closures that transfer students to schools outside their immediate neighborhoods have resulted in spikes of violence in and around elementary and high schools.33 We strongly caution policy makers to consider the added stressors that closures bring to these communities.”
“School closures also disproportionately impact African American teachers. The Chicago Teachers Union reports that African Americans made up nearly 40% of all CPS teachers in the 1990s. By 2012, that proportion was reduced to under 20%.34 In previous rounds of Chicago school closings, 65% of the teachers displaced were African American women.35 A 2012 report by the Consortium
on Chicago School Research on school closings and turnarounds determined that, “The teacher workforce after intervention across all models was more likely to be white, younger, and less experienced, and was more likely to have provisional certification than the teachers who were at those schools before the intervention.”36
Conclusion
“At present, the data reviewed in this research brief does not support Chicago Public Schools’ claim that closures are a viable solution to the current issues in the district. Instead, their greatest potential is to inflict deeper harm on African American and Latino/a communities. In addition to the current issues of privatization (via charter school
expansion) and displacement, massive school closings
are poised to continue the legacy of mass displacement, marginalization and isolation of low-income communities of color in Chicago.
See just as I told you…making claims on what you expect to happen rather than what actually does happen.
And clearly we must not be looking at the same map, because you keep making the same untrue claims about it in a vain attempt to bolster your point that these kids are being moved to drastically different neighborhoods in terms of the gangs. Let’s take a closer look here
I counted 4 instances where kids are being moved from a school neighborhood without gangs to one with which will place them at greater risk for violence and recruitment.
I counted 21 instances where kids are being moved from a school neighborhood with no gangs to another one with no gangs.
I counted 19 instances where kids are being moved from a school neighborhood with the same gangs to another one with the same exact gangs
And I counted all of 5 instances where kids are being moved from a school neighborhood with one set of gangs to one with a few different gangs but also the same ones that were in their old neighborhood.
Count yourself….This is the basic ratio. I might have miscounted a tad…but this is the basic ratio.
how is it a plus if its the same exact gang with the same exact ethnicity? your not making one iota of sense. Latin kings on this side of the neighborhood to latin kings on the other side. or sometimes just one or two blocks away from each other…which I’m sure implies the same exact people. yes that’s a big change. its not like the schools to which they are moving are amazingly far from their original schools either in most cases
And how exactly are these students of different backgrounds. They are all poor Black and Hispanic kids living in the poorest neighborhoods of Chicago? Are they not? The people in power don’t view them as ethnically diverse and I am certain that didn’t factor into their plans when coming up with this scheme. They see them as one big monolith, just like most Americans who are relatively affluent see poor Black and Hispanic people as one big monolith and that’s the mentality they take when making these decisions. and as far as I know getting kids into more ethnically diverse and different gangs, which this plan doesn’t do anyway, was never listed by Rahm Emanuel as one his motivations when he and his school board devised this plan.
And what proof do you have, cause its certainly not that map, to say the neighborhoods, where these kids are moving are so geographically diverse from the ones they’re leaving. In almost all of the cases they’re not that far away from each other. Your idea that this plan will affect gangs or ethnic diversity among students in any significant way does not at all stand up to scrutiny of your map.so if you feel your points are still valid, show me some evidence that actually backs up your points.
I think you have some reverse causation in here–the neighborhoods become unpleasant places in which to live before the schools close, not the other way around.
I don’t want schools to have any geographical connection to their student populations, because I want different neighborhoods to mix. Violence happens when people who are hostile to each other are forced to mix together. It’s a necessary evil en route to understanding.
In many cases the new school is geographically quite close to the old one, but in some cases, more than you claim (I counted 5 rather easily) the new school is in a different gang’s area. There are also several cases in which the welcoming school is higher rated, though admittedly that is not the norm. In those cases, some good is undeniably being done.
If the teachers who slip through the cracks are disproportionately black, it is probably because the schools being shuttered are in disproportionately poor areas, predominately populated by blacks. It is not due to systemic racism.
I see many examples of policies you’d like CPS to undertake that it’s not undertaking, and for the most part, I agree with you that those would be good policies if the city was willing and able to undertake them, but too often it is not willing, or not able, or both. What precisely do you think is wrong with the specific policy of student relocation? How is the way things are better?
[…] his quest to lower carbon emissions. I also think his support for affirmative action is misplaced (I think it doesn’t effectively address the causes of inequality and perpetuates racial tension). But […]
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I really enjoyed reading this; it described what I’d been thinking but couldn’t articulate. I agree with your arguments and I agree that your proposed solution would have the desired effect, but I don’t see how any politician could successfully implement it. Do you have any thoughts on this?
Mixing the classes in schools at an early age would no doubt be welcomed by the poorer classes, but it would surely infuriate the more affluent (but not affluent enough to pay for private education) classes? Even though many might agree with your ideas, they would see this mixing as having a detrimental effect on the lives of THEIR children. NIMBYism at its worst, but this is how many people react when the situation affects them. Any politician who tried to carry out this policy would be alienating all of these voters, and this could spell the end of their career.
So… from a pragmatic standpoint, how would you propose getting these changes implemented?
You’re absolutely right, democratic states are extremely unlikely to enact these policies. In this respect, democracies are simply defective, and I see no alternative policies that would accomplish the same goal that are any more likely to be supported by voters. Nonetheless, I think it’s worthwhile to point out what should happen even if it almost certainly won’t happen. It helps us recognize just how off-kilter things are.
Very useful – it gives us all some food for thought and hopefully helps us to highlight some long-denied truths.
So… if you’d care to entertain the thought, what do you think politicians SHOULD do? Given they can never reach this ideal, what do you think is the next best, and most realistic, alternative that could improve the current situation?
I don’t think there are any realistic alternatives. They all require some level of additional redistribution of opportunities and/or income, and affluent voters deeply oppose this. Politicians are much more likely to further cut extant redistribution than they are to pass anything additional.