Contingency centers: A view from the inside

In many ways, our strike in Chicago is about differing view of public education. The Mayor has always pushed two tiered education between open enrollment neighborhood schools, and selective charter and test-to-get-in schools.

One product of the strike has been that the board has had an opportunity to demonstrate their vision of education as they set up “contingency centers” for students while schools were out of session.

Media coverage of the inside of the contingency centers has been quite sparse. I spoke yesterday with one of the people forced by central office to cross the picket line to staff a contingency center who outlined the conditions inside:

There are 15-25 students daily at the school. Some of the students present are children of board employees working at the site. The others are a mixture of elementary and high school students, some from the school and some from surrounding schools. There are dozens of board employees, so many sit in the cafeteria. There really isn’t substantive work to be done. People want to do work, but this is a waste of time and resources. There are way more people than needed. When we found out about the contingency centers, some of us were at least excited to be working with kids, but many were dreading it because they aren’t used to working with students.

We were told to address any student questions about the strike by saying, “The teachers have a right to strike and both sides are working for a solution” and to leave it at that. We saw it as a teachable moment, but we were told that we couldn’t say anything else.

So I would hope for several things moving forward: A more strategic, thoughtful deployment of staff. Also, I want a resolution where teachers get what they need. Most importantly, I hope that it raises questions both within CPS and nationally about the privatization of education and the inequities of the conditions that students are learning under. These questions have always been important to me. I hope through the strike we can address them.

These disparities are highlighted further when look at the contingency centers from the outside as our students’ learning conditions had transitioned from a mayoral afterthought to a mayoral political bargaining chip.

Trying to break the strike, Emanuel and his education team stocked these locations with many of the very resources we were demanding on the picket line.

In our schools, students collapse of heat stroke as they struggle to focus in 96 degree classrooms. Jean Claude-Brizard announced that all contingency centers would have AC.

In our schools, students deal with a lack of supplies and broken clocks in every room and when we complain, nothing happens.  Brizard addressed this in his contingency plans (albeit by asking replacement supervisors to bring their own).

In our schools, students are not guaranteed any class size limits, and if class sizes begin to approach reasonable numbers, the board will quickly cut teachers even as late as 4 weeks into the year, plunging students’ schedules into chaos. At the contingency centers, Brizard promised at worst a 25 to 1 ratio, and many have more adults assigned than students.

In many of our schools, cafeterias sometimes run out of food and students are not allowed to bring in outside food. At the contingency centers, Brizard made a point to promise enough food for all students who attended.

Finally, to get to our schools, many students have to pay their own transportation. Low income students often qualify for reduced fares, but even that process can be complex. Often students will miss a day or two a week as their bus fare has run out or someone in the family has used it for something else. The Mayor granted students free CTA rides all week during the strike.

If we received the supports that the contingency centers receive every day, we never would have had to strike.  Our city leadership is clear—students’ welfare is important when people are watching, but not when they are quietly trying to get their education.

Strike week 2: Democracy takes time, but it's the opposite of what's hurting our kids

Last week, I outlined some of the many reasons why we as Chicago teachers were fed up and ready to go on strike. More than just the strike, I wanted to highlight how students are injured by the daily conditions that our district inflicts upon them.

When students experience horrible conditions in school, it inflicts more than an initial hurt, it undermines their faith in the educational system. Why should students continue to come to school each day and give their best when the institution itself regularly attacks their basic human dignity?

 Beyond raising consciousness of these issues, I had hoped it would also send a message to our district and city leadership that instead of accusing teachers of hurting students by striking, they could simply address the issues most vitally threatening our students’ educations, and we could see a quick resolution to the strike.

Instead, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has laughed off the classroom conditions saying, “It’s 71 degrees outside, we don’t go on strike for air conditioning.” Of course, the Mayor doesn’t have to go on strike for AC, his office has it, and it wasn’t 71 degrees when summer school was getting canceled this year. More than that, it wasn’t his kids who were getting picked up by ambulance after succumbing to heat exhaustion, as happened in a neighboring classroom to mine on Tuesday, September 4.  If it had been one of his kids, I sure wouldn’t have mocked the situation; I would have fought to get it addressed. I’m a teacher, not a mayor, so I see what they view as “other people’s children” as my own.

Yesterday, the Mayor added insult to injury by announcing his intentions to file an injunction on the strike yesterday on two criteria: that the strike is illegal, and that the strike endangers children. So Emanuel has not only failed to address our initial concerns for our students, but has made the claim that we are hurting our students into a court case.

Make no mistake—the Mayor’s own poor policies are what are endangering Chicago students not just during the strike but every single day in our city. I empathize deeply with students and parents who are dealing with the challenge of missing school temporarily until the days are made up. However, the quality of the 180 days they will be in school and their safety commuting to and from school and in their neighborhoods is even more important. I’ve lost 5 students straight from my classrooms to city violence. They were killed commuting to and from school, standing on their porches, or walking home from a friends’ house.  The mayor wouldn’t stand for this for his own children.

I worry some that through this strike, it will take some time to rebuild trust. Our students don’t trust the school system, and the fact that we chose to strike, many of them understand, but some will be upset. I only hope that when they see why we stood up and what we were fighting for, they will understand.

I think it may be harder today as many expected us to return to school this morning. The issue is that it doesn’t ever get this bad in a democratic system. Chicago’s top-down educational system run by people who don’t send their kids to the schools they govern is what helps create these inhumane conditions. While it will take longer for the educators of the city to review the proposed contract we’ve fought for, we cannot simply accept what is being handed to us by our strong, capable leadership.

Democracy takes time. It is messy. But it is just and it creates freedom for those who inhabit it. As epic blogger Fred Klonsky writes here, we don’t live in a democracy and it may confuse and confound those running Chicago when they run into one, but we can at least create one in our union. I am eager to get back to school, but I unceasingly yearn for a democratic, empowering education system for our students, and I’m thankful that we are modeling those principles within our union. 

CNN: My view: From the picket lines

CNN has posted my latest piece this morning.

It deals with the transition from anger at the injustice to shared struggle as the community and national teaching family have come together to support us.

At the start of day one, I felt angry and alone. On day two, I feel like our city and nation have wrapped themselves around educators, and I am ready for the next day of fighting for the schools Chicago and the nation's students deserve.

See you on the picket line.

Gratitude

Sunday night, anxious about the oncoming strike, I spent ten minutes of my time with my small voice to write a short piece about why I was striking. I sent it out via twitter and facebook, and let it go for the night.

The response was overwhelming. First teachers, then parents and students, and finally the mainstream media reached out.

Today, I am filled with hope. I didn't conceive it, but I am proud to be part of this international movement to save public education. Let's maintain these connections, organize in our own communities and take back our education system.

To this end, I'd suggest a couple of actions:
1) Bring together parents, students and educators with equal voice.
2) Develop our own vision of what education should be.
3) Demand community control of policy and implementation of our shared vision.

As a starting point, I'd suggest that we agree on some basic ideas:
1) Public education means every single young person gets the supports they need to take ownership of and advance their education.
2) Parents and students have a right to determine what they want from their schools.
3) Teachers have a right to determine how to best fulfill parent and student vision with our professional expertise.

For too long, we've waited for the rich and powerful to improve our schools. They have no interest or motivation to do so. We are the ones we've been waiting for. Let's build the schools our students deserve.

Wearing red day 2 on the picket line.

Why I'm striking, JCB

CPS CEO Jean-Claude Brizard is on record saying both that CTU leadership is deciding whether or not to strike, and that “everyone knows that a strike would only hurt our kids.”

I just wanted to educate my boss a little on the history of Chicago, as he is relatively new to the area. Chicago is founded on the hard daily struggle of working people. It is the birth of the labor movement—not a movement just for wages and benefits, but a movement that stopped child labor so that each of the kids in CPS schools could attend school instead of working. It was a movement that stopped the practice of working conditions so unsafe that consumers were eating the actual workers who fell into the mix while they were making hot dogs. It was a movement that fought so that workers could have some tiny measure of time with our families rather than spending all waking hours working for the enrichment of their bosses.

But even more importantly, I wanted to educate Mr. Brizard about what it means to “help or hurt our kids”.
When you make me cram 30-50 kids in my classroom with no air conditioning so that temperatures hit 96 degrees, that hurts our kids.

When you lock down our schools with metal detectors and arrest brothers for play fighting in the halls, that hurts our kids.

When you take 18-25 days out of the school year for high stakes testing that is not even scientifically applicable for many of our students, that hurts our kids.

When you spend millions on your pet programs, but there’s no money for school level repairs, so the roof leaks on my students at their desks when it rains, that hurts our kids.

When you unilaterally institute a longer school day, insult us by calling it a “full school day” and then provide no implementation support, throwing our schools into chaos, that hurts our kids.

When you support Mayor Emanuel’s TIF program in diverting hundreds of millions of dollars of school funds into to the pockets of wealthy developers like billionaire member of your school board, Penny Pritzker so she can build more hotels, that not only hurts kids, but somebody should be going to jail.

When you close and turnaround schools disrupting thousands of kids’ lives and educations and often plunging them into violence and have no data to support your practice, that hurts our kids.

When you leave thousands of kids in classrooms with no teacher for weeks and months on end due to central office bureaucracy trumping basic needs of students, that not only hurts our kids, it basically ruins the whole idea of why we have a district at all.

When you, rather than bargain on any of this stuff set up fake school centers staffed by positively motived Central Office staff, many of whom are terribly pissed to be pressed into veritable scabitude when they know you are wrong, and you equip them with a manual that tells them things like, “communicate with words”, that not only hurts our kids, but it suggests you have no idea how to run a system with their welfare in mind.

When you do enough of this, it makes me wonder if you really see our students as “our kids” or “other people’s children”.
And at that moment, I am willing to sacrifice an awful lot to protect the students I serve every day. I am not hurting our kids by striking, I’m striking to restore some semblance of reasonable care for students to this system. I’m doing to tell you, “No, YOU are the one hurting our children, and you need to STOP because what you are doing is wrong, and you are robbing students of their educational opportunities.

I ask anyone who does remotely care about the kids we teach and learn from and triumph and cheer and cry and grow with., to stand with us and fight for a better future for our kids.

See you on the picket line, my friend.

Finding Fact: This report illustrates a simple fact--we must end corporate control of the school system

It’s time for us to draw a line in the sand: Chicago educators won’t be satisfied simply with more money that will contribute to the decline of the district finances. We must demand to be compensated fairly, but also that the district redirect its priorities back to the classroom and away from poorly thoughtful out political shenanigans. The current conflict has illustrated the path to this solution—the CPS current leadership cannot and will not ever place “children first” and so more than a favorable contract, we need a board elected and overseen by the communities whose children actually attend Chicago Public Schools.

Today, a fact-finding panel tasked with reporting on a small portion of the issues involved in the on-going battle between the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Public Schools appointed board and leadership will issue a report on its findings. The report recommended approximately 18.2% more teacher compensation to pay for the mayor’s proposed “Longest School Day”.

The mayor responded by once again trotting out his tired talking points that CPS has the shortest school day and year in the country. It’s not only false, at the high school level, it’s not really close. Furthermore, American teachers devote far more instructional time and students receive similar instructional hours relative to the other countries corporate education reforms often compare us unfavorably towards.

This fact-finding report that the mayor, city and district governance are tearing apart is actually a report that they themselves demanded through millions of dollars of lobbying of the state legislature.

It appears that CPS will continue to emphasize their inability to pay for basic instructional costs in the district and CTU wasn’t really interested in the fact-finding at all in the first place as CTU’s key issues such as class size and length of school day and year were not subject to either the fact finding process or required to be part of the negotiations due to state laws pushed through by CPS.

CPS will ask for either no major pay increase or massive layoffs.

CTU would be wise to redirect the conversation to teachers’ priorities—humane learning conditions for the students we teach each day. We should emphasize that CPS’ interpretation of the budget—that salaries and pensions are bankrupting the system is categorically false—those portions of the budget are at an all-time low. The budget crunch has been triggered by financial mismanagement in a system that is designed to keep educators and community as far away from management as possible.

The more I watch the process, the more I’m sure that we have no choice but to strike. This isn’t a question of money (which we could negotiate to a middle point). It’s a question of difference in philosophy. CPS believes that it should have unilateral control over all teaching and learning issues. It believes that privatization and the increasing diversion of funds from neighborhood schools and classroom level resources to magic bullet programs, turnarounds and charter schools as in its best interests. It’s not interested in providing a teacher for each classroom on the first day of each school year.

The fact finding process reinforces this notion. It demonstrates that even when CPS gets exactly what they want—a high threshold for strike, the ability to unilaterally impose many working conditions, a neutral fact-finding condition, they still cannot even be motivated to come up with a remotely thoughtful budget or proposals that will allow the independent arbiter any path out of the conflict. The solutions put forth that overworked, overstressed people to work more for no compensation or for students to face inhumane class sizes are nothing that anyone with a care for students could possibly endorse.

Since 1995, the district’s operation has revolved around a simple question, “What is in the best interest of the Mayor and his cronies?”

We must return the operating question to be “What is in the best interests of the students?”

Let me make this clear. I don’t want more money. I don’t need to work more hours. I accounted for my school related hours three years ago and found that I worked between 80-100 hours each week. I cannot extended my day and continue to serve my students in the exemplary fashion I demand of myself.

I want the Chicago Public Schools to bargain in good faith not only with the CTU and us, its members, but with students, parents and communities to the benefit of kids.

We will not negotiate for with those who would terrorize our kids, and we will compromise nothing when it comes to the best interests of their children.

In that spirit, we must redouble our efforts to remove the appoint governance structures that have poisoned our schools and our city. We must be prepared to do damage to our own families and risk our livelihoods to fight the board. We must be the barrier between our students and those who would injure them and our entire city.

CPS FY 2013 budget quick look

Understanding the budget:

So you’ve just had the 212 page Chicago Public Schools budget dumped on you and you want to do your civic duty in understanding and commenting on it in the 3 hours before the horribly scheduled public hearings! You can find the budget here:
http://www.cps.edu/About_CPS/Financial_information/Pages/Financialinformation.aspx

Why is this important?

Due to poor management of taxpayer dollars, CPS manufactures its own budget crisis every year. This results in worse educational supports for the vast majority of students while privatizing options continue to be increasingly supported. There is no scientific justification for these priorities; rather it is a strategy for manufactured crisis to force policy rather than the best interests of students driving policy and resource allocation. My hope is that this work will motivate the development of a people’s budget movement in Chicago Public Schools to oppose the current corporate structure.

9 quick things about the current budget and then some explanations:

1.       The district is taking in $5.3 billion in revenue from local (47.6% of the total), state (34.7%), and national (17.6%) support. There is an additional .8 % coming from interest income.

2.       Only $4.7 billion (88.8%) of the $5.3 billion even makes it to the General Operating Fund while 9.3% goes to debt service, much of it going to clouted banks (assigned by a School Board appointed with bankers and business people). An additional 1.9% goes to the capital fund for building and maintaining school facilities.

3.       Both the percentage of the budget devoted to teacher salaries and combined teacher salaries + pensions have declined significantly since FY2004 (Salaries 48.43%-->37.65%, combined 56.3%-->44.30%). This year’s projected decline is the highest on record. The growth has been in charter school tuition (which accounts for a portion, but not the balance of the decline in teacher salaries), and “other fixed charges” (p. 126-127). In accounts, Contracts, Equipment, Transportation, and Contingencies are rising this year (p15)

4.       The pension payments have stayed steady or declined while obligations have ballooned. This is natural with any debt that is not responsibility repaid. The vast majority of the pension “crisis” is caused by CPS and to a lesser degree, the state, diverting pension funding toward failed programs like High School Transformation. Accounting for the simple refusal to pay, they do not make up a major portion of the financial crisis on their own.

5.       Despite the discussion of $120 million in additional funds for school level budgeting, the actual outlay to schools has declined this year (-0.3%). Instead, the Chief Education Officer (15.3%), Chief Administrative Officer (22.8%), Portfolio (1368.0%) , Talent (35.5%), Law (10.1%) and Network (31.6%) offices have grown (p13 of the budget)

6.       Some of the above is explained by the shifting of responsibilities, but that still represents a shifting of funds away from school and LSC based oversight to central office oversight.

7.       The Talent Office is still completely unable to develop a navigatable staffing framework and that results in less competitive hiring by CPS and improper/inadequate staffing that severely damages students. So they received more money to oversee.

8.       The grouping of family and community engagement, LSC relations and governmental affairs suggests a priority on attempting to lobby and attain buy-in from communities rather than truly collaborative efforts that are respectful to parent voice.

9.       The deficit is at least in some part real, but should be viewed in the context of a CPS finance department that has been hundreds of millions of dollars off in their deficit projections every single year.

What is the budget?

The budget is a document that CPS is mandated to release each fiscal year to lay out the expected revenue and planned expenditures for public consumption. It is then voted on by the CPS Board of Education. Since the Board of Education is non-elected, neither the board nor central office is required to actually listen to any of public input. Nevertheless, CPS is legally required release a draft budget in June, hold public hearings and then the board must pass a final version at the following board meeting.  

If they aren’t integrated into the process, why have the hearings at all? Why testify at hearings where people running the system aren’t listening?

CPS is required by law to have the hearings. They also use the opportunity to “sell” their budget to the public. I have presented several years at the hearings. The point is not to move CPS, it’s to build community knowledge and confidence that we can build our own budget. Two years ago, I received my termination notice from my teaching position at Julian High School due to my work supporting student organizing. Even though it was very difficult, I testified through my tears to ensure the story was told.

How is the budget prepared and organized?

The process for preparing the budget, despite public outcry, remains almost completely opaque. In examining what is produced in the draft, it appears that the previous years’ budgets are used as a template with all of their underlying assumptions. Then new budget priorities are integrated and a narrative that decries a huge deficit, praises central office for cutting expenditures, and blames teachers for wanting their promised retirement contract honored is produced regardless of the current status of the budget. This results in a budget with the following portions:

·         Letter from the CEO

·         General overview that puts the current FY budget in comparison with the previous years

·         Rvenue explanation (the money the system is taking in)

·         School based budget breakdown (The money at the school level)

·         Departmental breakdown

·         Pension blaming section

·         Capital budget

·         Debt Management

·         Organizational overview/chart

·         Explanation of the various funds

·         Miscellaneous Appendices