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Marie Sklodowska Curie Metro High School is located in a hardscrabble neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side. A coal-burning power plant lies just to the north and various factories and warehouses stand on surrounding streets.
Gang violence is a serious problem in the area, and the economic crisis has hit many immigrant families hard.
Students and teachers describe the school as a safe haven, a place where, despite a severe lack of resources, teachers offer innovative lessons with real-world context and organize clubs and after-school programs on topics like literature, science, and the environment.
Curie students say they recognize the extra lengths their teachers go to in making sure they get a stimulating, top-flight education even in such trying circumstances. Hence many students and former students have spent the past few days on the picket lines with their teachers and former teachers.
"This is my family," said Nicolas Coronado, 19, a DePaul University political science student on the picket line with his former IB History teacher, Homero Penuelas. "I loved it here."
A student marching band has been helping to keep their teachers' spirits up on the picket line, and one student has even turned up each day in a hot dog costume with a sign saying "Mayor Emanuel Is a Weenie."
On Thursday morning, 2007 Curie graduate Jose Xavier Montenegro gave a younger student pointers on drumming.
"I wasn't the best student but I look up to these teachers," said Montenegro, who now works as a laborer with his own company and competes in power-lifting. "I know what it's like in those classrooms. It's jam-packed; in one class we had 42 students. One time a rat ran through the classroom. Teachers could do a lot more if they had more resources."
Students describe teachers regularly buying supplies out of their own pockets.
"It's like being in a factory and paying your own money for the parts you need to make a phone," said Curie senior Adam Cabanas, 17, standing on the picket line Thursday with senior Cheyenne Watkins. "I love my teachers. They are always there for you."
"They take money out of their own wallets for us," added Watkins, 17. "For teachers to be treated badly after they have put so much of their lives into this is not fair. [The administration] tries to make it look like teachers are hurting students. But students are hurting in the classrooms - there's no air conditioning. You have 38 students in one class."
Jazmin Gonzalez, a seventh-grader at Lindblom Elementary in the nearby Englewood neighborhood, joined her mother and Curie science teacher Maricruz Gonzalez outside the school, wearing a sign around her neck saying "CPS student and daughter of CPS teacher - Double Whammy."
"It's a little scary but this has to happen for teachers to get what they need to teach us effectively, they are some of the hardest working people I've ever met in my life," said Gonzalez about the strike, noting that in her overcrowded classes there are "people sharing desks and sitting at the teacher's desk."
Karina Alcorchas, a 2012 Curie graduate, credits Curie teachers with inspiring her to pursue chemical engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology. "It's important to give back to the teachers who have given so much to us," said Alcorchas, who earlier in the week walked picket lines with her former elementary school teachers.
Curie highlights the main reasons the teachers union opposes standardized testing used to determine merit-based pay, which the school board has backed off on, and merit-based evaluations, which the board is still demanding. (After negotiations Wednesday, both the school board and union president Karen Lewis said progress was being made and students might be back in class on Friday).
"Merit pay works only in neighborhoods where you're not dealing with the kinds of things we're dealing with here," said Penuelas. "I have students who go to work after school and work until 1 in the morning, then we start school at 7:30 am. Many are the breadwinners in their families. We try our best to help our students but these are hard things to overcome."
Rosana Enriquez, Curie's only social worker, elaborated on the challenges facing students.
"Just last week I talked to three kids whose fathers are in jail, and one whose mother had been deported and she was living with relatives, and teen mothers. That's not to mention the foster kids we serve," she said, noting that more social workers in the schools are desperately needed. "Kids are living with depression and anxiety because of the violence in the neighborhood."
Teachers at Curie, as at many public schools, often incorporate the harsh realities that their students live with into their lesson plans, an approach Penuelas noted can also apply to the strike.
"This is as prime an example as any of a civics lesson," he said. "If parents are worried about their kids being at home not getting an education, they should bring them out here. It's a lesson in democracy and power in numbers."
The Chicago Teachers Union lost an important skirmish with Mayor Rahm Emanuel last year when the state legislature passed Emanuel-backed legislation requiring a 75 percent vote to authorize a strike - a high number seen as a blow for teachers unions in Illinois.
But the attack apparently helped energize and mobilize the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), as a whopping 89 percent of teachers voted on June 11 to authorize a strike come fall (actually late summer) as highly contentious contract negotiations stretch on. Chicago teachers last went on strike in 1987.
Emanuel acknowledged the overwhelming vote but tried to minimize its significance by asking the public and media to focus on other numbers - the increased hours he wants kids in school. Teachers have repeatedly said they are not against a longer school day or school year, but demand appropriate pay raises in return. Emanuel rescinded a contractually obligated 4 percent raise for teachers during his first year in office, and now his administration is proposing a contract with a 2 percent raise while lengthening the work day from seven hours to seven hours and 40 minutes.
Many parents have pushed for a compromise, with more time in school but not as much as Emanuel and Chicago Public Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard are demanding. Critics of the longer day cite oppressive heat in many non-air conditioned buildings, other demands on students' time and the inescapable fact that Chicago schools' problems go much deeper than the number of hours in class.
At five hours and 45 minutes, Chicago students have one of the nation's shortest days. But teachers say the actual amount of instruction in Chicago schools is on par with other schools nationwide. There is no easy fix for the systematic economic and social problems that impact Chicago students, but more resources and smaller class sizes would likely do more than extended days to improve student engagement and performance.
The union says the administration's contract proposal will result in larger class sizes. Jackson Potter blogged on the union website:
Like Republican candidate Mitt Romney, they make the argument that class size doesn't matter...The Board has reserved the right to change class size policy at any time and merely notify the union and it has eliminated any funding of positions to lower class size in the district; the previous contract committed $2.25 million to lower class sizes. These changes will concretely increase our class sizes throughout the district, even though many kindergarten and primary grade classrooms throughout the city have class sizes that approach 50 students in a room.
It turns out that Obama strategist David Axelrod's former public relations firm AKPD Media and Messaging is behind ads attacking the teachers unionThe union blasts the administration's proposal for increasing the focus on standardized test-based student performance in evaluating teachers, including an emphasis on "merit pay." Nationwide, teachers have long complained that evaluating their performance based heavily on standardized testing is unfair to dedicated teachers in under-funded, low-income and immigrant-heavy schools and curbs their ability to teach creatively.
Potter summarizes other reasons the union opposes the administration's proposal: eliminating teachers' ability to bank sick days, increasing health insurance costs and requiring teachers to work 10-hour-days during report card pickup.
In the wake of the strike vote Emanuel also touted the fact that 60.6 percent of Chicago Public Schools students who were freshmen four years ago graduated this year - the highest rate since at least 1999. But the insinuation that this improvement is because of measures pushed by his administration comes off as disingenuous when one considers that these measures have only been rolled out in recent months and not in all schools.
Emanuel said the strike vote does not affect ongoing contract negotiations with the teachers union, but the union has noted that taking the vote several months before they might strike was meant to provide leverage in the negotiations and allow 1,500 retiring teachers to vote. With more than 25,000 unionized teachers, CPS is the third-largest school district in the country and the CTU is the largest member of the American Federation of Teachers.
Emanuel has portrayed teachers as putting their interests before students' well-being, and professed his dedication to Chicago students - framing his battle with the teachers as a fight for opportunity and equality for low-income students. But many parents and students have spoken out in support of teachers, who often already put in many unpaid hours and often spent money out of their own pockets to buy supplies.
There has been much intrigue around efforts to generate community support (or the appearance of it) for the Emanuel administration's reform policies, including revelations last year that politically connected ministers had paid church members to show up at community meetings in support of administration proposals to close so-called failing schools. Around the strike vote, many parents received robocalls attacking the teachers' decision to hold an early strike vote. The calls and other efforts against the teachers have been linked to national astroturf "education reform" groups also active in California and other states where public sector unions have squared off with city and state officials.
Meanwhile, it turns out that Obama strategist David Axelrod's former public relations firm AKPD Media and Messaging is behind ads attacking the teachers union. Long-time progressive school reformer and small schools advocate Mike Klonsky noted in a blog post about this revelation that Emanuel "seems hell-bent on destroying the city's public employee unions." Klonsky also questioned the motivations of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten sharing the podium with Emanuel in support of his massive new infrastructure plan - with a heavy focus on privatization - just weeks after she marched with Chicago teachers calling for a strike vote. (The infrastructure plan's marketing is spearheaded by another of Axelrod's former outfits, ASGK Public Strategies.)
Chicago Sun-Times columnist - and former teacher - Carol Marin noted:
Teachers in this town have been demonized, demoralized, and disrespected. No profession is beyond criticism and no public school system is without significant problems. But taking a sledgehammer approach to CPS teachers and their union has backfired on the Emanuel administration and his schools CEO, Jean-Claude Brizard. And all the radio ads and robo calls funded by out of town, union-busting billionaires doesn't alter that fact.
While longer days and closing schools are the prominent issues in Emanuel's battle with union teachers, the conflict has much deeper significance in terms of ongoing battles for the future of public employees unions. And while Emanuel and others who figure into the administration's plans are considered far to the left of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, the battle promises to continue nearly as polarized and hard-fought. Stay tuned.
In my essay, No Controversy Allowed, I shared a story about having an assembly program canceled at a middle school because in my first assembly presentation that morning I agreed with a student that war was a problem and because I mentioned a few apparently "unacceptable" words in my talk (such as healthcare and illegal immigrants). That the students left my presentation with an understanding that it was their responsibility to make connections between their everyday choices and the effects on others; that service to others leads to joy, and that modeling a message of compassion is a good thing, didn't seem to matter. Those dreaded words, and the potential backlash from angry parents (there was none), sealed the deal. I was not permitted to offer my second scheduled middle school assembly program that day. I had hoped this experience was simply a one-off in my 25 year career as a humane educator and not prescient about the future of schooling.
So when I first read about the New York City's Department of Education effort to ban 50 words from city-wide tests, I thought that I'd better corroborate the source. It sounded too much like a satirical piece in The Onion. I thought that this couldn't possibly be true - my home town, New York City, banning words? Alas, it was not satire. Here is the list of words that NYC Department of Education chancellor, Dennis Walcott, believes should be banned:
Abuse (physical, sexual, emotional, or psychological)
Alcohol (beer and liquor), tobacco, or drugs
Birthday celebrations (and birthdays)
Bodily functions
Cancer (and other diseases)
Catastrophes/disasters (tsunamis and hurricanes)
Celebrities
Children dealing with serious issues
Cigarettes (and other smoking paraphernalia)
Computers in the home (acceptable in a school or library setting)
Crime
Death and disease
Divorce
Evolution
Expensive gifts, vacations, and prizes
Gambling involving money
Halloween
Homelessness
Homes with swimming pools
Hunting
Junk food
In-depth discussions of sports that require prior knowledge
Loss of employment
Nuclear weapons
Occult topics (i.e. fortune-telling)
Parapsychology
Politics
Pornography
Poverty
Rap Music
Religion
Religious holidays and festivals (including but not limited to Christmas, Yom Kippur, and Ramadan)
Rock-and-Roll music
Running away
Sex
Slavery
Terrorism
Television and video games (excessive use)
Traumatic material (including material that may be particularly upsetting such as animal shelters)
Vermin (rats and roaches)
Violence
War and bloodshed
Weapons (guns, knives, etc.)
Witchcraft, sorcery, etc.
I'm normally a pretty optimistic person. I believe that it's not only possible, but even probable, that humanity will solve our grave challenges and looming crises. I believe that the destructive and unjust systems which pervade our world, within production, agriculture, energy, campaign finance, transportation, defense, and so on, can be transformed. I believe Stephen Pinker's in-depth anaylsis that reveals that we live in a less violent, less discriminatory, and less cruel world than ever before, and I believe that the unprecedented capacity we now have to collaborate and innovate across every border bodes well for a humane and sustainable future. But the reason I believe all of this is because I also believe that we can transform one primary, underlying system: schooling. I believe that we can embrace a bigger goal for schooling than "competing in the global economy" and commit to graduating a generation of solutionaries who have the knowledge, tools, and motivation to be conscientious choicemakers and engaged changemakers and who are committed to ensuring that the systems within their chosen professions are just, humane, and healthy for all.
But we cannot possibly achieve such an educational goal if we refuse to actually discuss the pressing issues of our time in schools; if we deny our children the opportunity to develop their critical and creative thinking capacities and collaborative skills, and if we dumb down our curricula in such a way that our graduates never learn about the actual issues of our time and are prevented in school from applying their great minds and big hearts toward the challenges we face in today's world.
An attempt to ban words on school-administered standardized tests is a depressing development within an already depressing era of misguided "school reform". Ultimately, the effort in New York was a way of keeping students from thinking about and addressing the most relevant issues in their lives. Most revealing, is that teachers are being pressed to teach to tests in order to maintain school funding and keep their jobs, but the tests are prevented from serving a deeper and more meaningful education when the questions are cleansed of content that impacts students most. As Thoreau once said, "There are thousands hacking at the branches of evil to one that is striking at the root." If we eliminate the root solution to unjust and destructive systems - which I believe is schooling - we will find ourselves endlessly hacking at those branches of evil, and I fear we will fail to solve our challenges and avert potential global catastrophes.