[Statement written by George Milkowski, 50th Ward Green Party Committeeman and approved by the CCGP]
The Cook County Green Party is opposed to the Chicago Board of Education’s policy of classifying some schools as “turnaround” schools in which teachers and administrators are replaced en masse, and unilaterally closing others. Therefore, the CCGP calls for a moratorium on any future implementation of these policies.
For 17 years the Chicago Public Schools have been under the control of the City’s mayors, and for all of those years, mayoral proposals, whether called Renaissance, reconstruction, reconstitution, turnaround or other nomenclature, have been almost total failures when one examines the facts. Designs for Change, an independent organization founded in 1977 in Chicago to develop and advocate effective school reforms through world-class research and policy analysis, disputed the alleged successes of turnaround schools. Their February 21, 2012 report ranked 210 Chicago elementary schools with at least 95% low income students, based on the percentage of students who passed their 2011 state reading exams. The report found that only three turnaround schools operated by the Academy for Urban School Leadership ranked in the top 100. The AUSL is the major entity favored by the City and by the Mayor under the turnaround policy and was once run by current School Board member David Vitale. Two other turnaround schools run by the CPS ranked 150th and 206th in the study. These poor results are even more surprising as most “turnaround” schools usually have additional funds allocated to their operation compared to local neighborhood schools. (1)
These findings are not unusual. Turnaround schools are usually turned into charter schools, and charter schools are rarely effective. More often than not they are worse than the already existing schools. In 2009 Stanford University released a report that concluded that when comparing charter schools to equivalent traditional neighborhood schools. Only 17% of the charter schools had better tests results. In 37% of the schools the results were worse and in the remaining 46% of schools there was no discernable difference in the test results. (2)
What is at the root of the problem in the public schools? In 1966 the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare commissioned a report titled the Equality of Educational Opportunity Study to examine and identify factors that affect one’s expected success in School. Usually called the Coleman report after the lead investigator, James S. Coleman, it concluded that although teachers are the most important in-school factor affecting a child’s learning, class size and the quality of the principal are also important. However, two-thirds of a child’s learning is affected by out-of-school factors, and most crucially among these are family characteristics such as income level, parents’ education, whether there are two parents in the household, neighborhood environment, housing stock, healthcare, and so on. In 2011 Richard Rothstein, a noted education scholar, stated that “No analyst has been able to attribute less than two-thirds of the variation in achievement among schools to the family characteristics of their students.” (3)
If charter schools are effective in only about one sixth of the time, why do the powers-that-be continue to push for them? The CCGP can only conclude that an underlying reason for pushing charter schools is a less-than-obvious attempt to weaken unionized teachers.
The CCGP calls for a moratorium on establishing any more “turnaround” schools and on closing any more schools in the name of educational reform. We support the proposal in the Illinois General Assembly to impose such a moratorium through HB4487. After seventeen years, too many children’s lives have been hurt by this misguided CPS policy.
1. Chicago Sun-Times, February 22, 2012, “Study Disputes turnaround stats”. Rosalind
Rossi.
2 Center for Research on Education Outcomes, Stanford University, 2009.
3. Substance, September, 2011, “Firing Line: The Grand Coalition Against Teachers”,
Joanne Barkan.