The Battle for Public Education in Chicago

School closings protest in Chicago. Photo by Kari Lydersen.

Even before he was elected Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel worked to pass Illinois state legislation that many thought would make it impossible for the Chicago Teachers Union to go on strike. The national “education reform” movement, which promotes private charter schools and generally opposes public teachers unions, worked hard behind the scenes to get Illinois legislators to pass a bill that mandated 75 percent of teachers union members would have to vote for a strike. Experts saw such support as unlikely in any union vote, and figured that the education reform movement had dealt a serious blow to the Chicago Teachers Union.

That law was seen as a significant victory for the reform movement that wants to funnel public funds to charter schools run by private corporations or non-profit organizations, while often at the same time closing or shrinking traditional neighborhood public schools with unionized teachers.

Emanuel is known as an ardent backer of privatization in general, and immediately upon taking office in May 2011 he set out to dramatically restructure the city’s troubled public school system. Emanuel and his appointed school board have overseen the opening of many new charter schools, while they have slashed the traditional public school system by closing almost 50 public schools, turning others over to private entities to run as “turnaround schools” and instituting massive budget cuts.

It is a radical rethinking of the very nature of public education: the idea that private entities unfettered by union contracts or bureaucracy and “competing” on an “open market” can do a better job providing services like education than publicly-run and unionized systems.

There are numerous success stories among Chicago’s charter schools, like the Academy for Global Citizenship in the Back of the Yards neighborhood, where students tend an organic farm, get power from solar panels, speak different languages and learn about cultures across the world.

But critics of school reform say that at its heart it is a way to break the social contract and redefine the public sector’s responsibility to provide equal quality services to all communities, while employing public workers in good jobs with collective bargaining power.

Most charter schools enroll students from around the city based on a lottery system or selective criteria like test scores. That’s different from the traditional idea of neighborhood schools, where students would simply attend the school in their community. Chicago has for years had a complicated patchwork of different types of public schools including neighborhood schools, magnet schools drawing students from around the city and others.

Emanuel and other proponents of charter schools say it is all about “choice” — the idea that parents will choose the best school for their child and private operators will compete for that business.

But when Emanuel and his school board announced their plans to close scores of public schools including many neighborhood schools last year, parents and students made their choice abundantly clear.

By law the city had to hold a total of several hundred hearings on the school closing proposals. At those hearings, parents, students, teachers and other community members let loose with rage, tears and pleas underscoring the importance of their local public schools. They talked about relationships students formed with teachers, janitors and lunch ladies over years — even over multiple generations. They talked about how the schools are anchors of stability and caring in often violent and tumultuous neighborhoods. They talked about how despite that violence, a severe lack of resources and countless other problems beyond their control, caring teachers and staff managed to provide a quality education and atmosphere for students.

But neither Emanuel nor any of the board members attended a single neighborhood hearing. And the board ultimately voted to close almost 50 elementary schools, creating waves of dismay, sadness and fear.

For example, retired postal worker Frances Newman’s daughter Amira had been attending Daniel Hale Williams Preparatory Academy on Chicago’s south side, named after the African American doctor who pioneered open heart surgery. At that school, the 14-year-old was able to take orchestra and Mandarin language classes. The Newmans were devastated to learn that Williams was closing; Amira remembers students crying on the playground after depressed teachers told them the news.

Parents filed two class action lawsuits alleging the closings violated the Americans with Disabilities Act and raised civil rights violations because of disproportionate impact on special needs kids, especially Black and Latino special needs students. The lawsuits also argued that schools with higher numbers of special education students were unfairly targeted for closure, since the smaller classes for kids with serious special needs made a school more likely to be labeled “under-utilized” by the administration.

A federal judge denied the lawsuits class status, dashing parents’ hopes of an injunction to prevent or delay the school closings.

The administration argued that the school closings were essential given the budget crisis in the system and the idea that many of the schools were under-enrolled and inefficient or were performing badly on tests. But parents groups and the union presented much evidence to counter these claims, and also argued that teachers and students shouldn’t be blamed for poor test scores when they faced a raft of challenges including high numbers of kids who don’t speak English or struggle with disabilities, homelessness and other factors.

School closings protest in downtown Chicago. Photo by Kari Lydersen.

Many saw the school closings in part as retribution against the Chicago Teachers Union, which made international headlines in September 2012 for a seven-day strike that the union was ultimately seen as “winning.” About 90 percent of the union membership voted to go on strike, easily surpassing the 75 percent enshrined in the law Emanuel helped pass.

After taking office Emanuel had tried to push through major changes in the school system including a longer school day, without negotiating with the teachers union or offering teachers compensation for the added work of the longer day.

More than the issue of pay and workload, teachers argued, a longer day was pointless if they were starved of resources like books and air conditioning, and had students stuffed into hot overcrowded classrooms. Ultimately a longer day was instituted and the administration promised it would be augmented with more funding for art, music and the like. Similar promises were made during the round of school closings — the idea was that at their “new” schools, students would have access to more resources and a better education.

But those promises went widely unfulfilled. The school closings were followed by a round of drastic budget cuts to individual schools, that meant many layoffs of art, music and language teachers and the termination of those programs. Meanwhile parents even in the city’s poorest neighborhoods were forced to do fundraising and chip in to buy basic supplies like toilet paper.

At the same time, the city was approving new charter schools and privately-run “turnaround schools” with proportionally higher budgets. And even as schools in the poorest, mostly Black neighborhoods were being closed or decimated, millions of extra taxpayer dollars were devoted to a few public schools serving wealthier and disproportionately white students. Walter Payton College Prep and Lincoln Elementary, in some of the city’s wealthiest areas, undertook multi-million dollars expansions. Adding insult to injury, Emanuel’s administration announced that a new high school named after President Barack Obama will be located on the largely white and prosperous North Side, far from the South Side neighborhoods where Obama was a community organizer. Walter Payton and the planned Obama high school would get up to $17 million and $60 million, respectively, in taxpayer dollars under a controversial program called Tax Increment Financing, or TIF.

Across the city, parents voiced their anger.

In September 2013, for example, Pilsen parents marched into the office of Alderman Danny Solis during “ward night” hours on a warm Tuesday evening. Students dressed in their crisp school uniforms joined parents in work clothes, nurses scrubs and their Sunday best, a few carrying infants in their arms. But Solis was nowhere to be seen as the crowd chanted in English and Spanish “Give our kids the TIF!”

The schools administration reported that its proposed FY2014 budget included $68 million in cuts to school operating costs for the past academic year. The parent group Raise Your Hand surveyed individual principals and pegged the amount at more than $160 million. Each Chicago public school has a Local School Council (LSC) made up of parents, community members and the principal. When the councils were inaugurated in 1989, they were heralded nationally as an innovative exercise in local democracy and community empowerment. Each LSC votes to approve the budget that the administration hands down for an individual school. Normally it is largely a rubber stamp exercise. But during the summer of 2013, LSCs particularly in higher-income, north-side neighborhoods voted to reject the bare-bones budgets the district had given them. While the vast majority of Chicago public schools students are low-income, Black and Latino, the coalition was made up of significant numbers of white and higher-income parents — the very ones the district could not afford to lose, as many described it.

School closings protest. Photo by Kari Lydersen.

Emanuel “has made it more difficult to convince parents to send their kids to public schools,” said Jeff Karova, a North Side parent who fought against massive budget cuts at schools.

Even in the face of massive outcry about his education policies, Emanuel has continued to tout his overhaul of the city’s public education system as one of his signature goals and achievements. He and his backers often describe themselves as fighting for the rights of students and parents against a greedy and self-interested Chicago Teachers Union.

But the 2012 strike — when many thousands of teachers, parents and other residents filled the streets wearing red T-shirts _ and many events since have shown the deep connection that parents and students have with their public schools, teachers and staff . . . and how their choice is to preserve rather than uproot and destroy that system.

Three years ago Emanuel thought he could push through major school reform policies by steamrolling over the teachers union, including union president Karen Lewis.

Today, Emanuel is facing a tough re-election campaign, with his toughest opponent likely being Lewis herself. An August poll by the Chicago Tribune found that a full 10 percent more voters would choose Lewis over Emanuel. A previous Chicago Sun-Times poll had also shown Emanuel’s approval ratings low and an opening for Lewis.

It is remarkable that an unapologetically fiery, African American female union leader is leading the race against a star of the national Democratic Party and a darling of high finance companies who has more than $8 million in his campaign war chest.

This shows just how much Emanuel has alienated Chicagoans with his approach to public education and what that symbolizes about his larger debates over the future of the public sector.

While proponents of privatization applaud the merits of charter schools, in Chicago charter schools have had a rough road lately.

During the 2011 election campaign, one of Emanuel’s key aides was Juan Rangel, head of the largely Latino community group UNO. UNO has long been a powerful and politically connected entity. They run 16 charter schools in Chicago and receive many millions in state and city funds. But a dark cloud was cast over UNO and Rangel stepped down this year after investigations showed the system had given sweetheart contracts to political supporters and relatives. Meanwhile another of Emanuel’s favored charter operators, Concept Schools, is being investigated by the FBI and a planned new Concept school has been tabled. The high-profile network of Noble Street charter schools has drawn fire for levying fines against low-income students and parents for a host of minor infractions, forcing many out of the schools altogether. And studies have consistently shown mixed academic results for charter schools; overall they appear to perform no better than traditional public schools even though charter schools have more power to reject difficult students.

One of Emanuel’s loudest backers in promoting charter schools is his close friend Republican Bruce Rauner, a former investment banker and outspoken free market capitalist. Rauner is running for governor and appears to have the edge over incumbent Pat Quinn.

Hence the governor’s race in November and the Mayoral race in February 2015 both promise to be major battlefields over the shape of public education and the true meaning of “school choice.”

A student marching band joined the protest. Photo by Kari Lydersen.

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Kari Lydersen. Chicago-based reporter specializing in energy, the environment, labor, public health and immigration issues. Her most recent book is Mayor 1%: Rahhm Emanuel and the Rise of Chicagos 99%. 

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