Safe

 Driving my daughter to school is safe. Driving back home is unsafe. Sitting at a stop light listening to loud Japanese prog house is safe. Sitting at a stop light with my thoughts is unsafe. Left turns are unsafe. 

When I was working with high school students at a large, underfunded Chicago high school in a neighborhood inundated with "White on everybody else violence", a number of my students in our social justice club had learned from their sister organization a technique (it was either VOYCE or Mikva) which sought to push the conversation about student safety beyond sterile surveys. 

They unfurled a large piece of butcher paper to reveal a detailed map of our school. They talked a bit about the feelings of being unwelcome and unsafe in the very building they were being asked to be vulnerable enough to learn in. 

They asked the other students present to take Red, Green and Yellow pencils and mark the places in the building they felt unsafe, safe or sometimes unsafe. They said they were interested in teachers' perceptions as well, but asked us to step aside so this particular map could be exclusive to students' voices and experiences. 

Parking in the garage is unsafe. Listening to my partner and our shared students talk about empathy on the phone while driving is safe. Pedestrians are safe. Semi-trucks barreling along belching pollutants into our community are unsafe. 

When all of the students had finished, the students leading the activity appended the map to the wall. We silently contemplated as the map they co-created screamed a furious red. "Ms. C"'s room: green. The school cops' station red. Bathrooms bright red. The first floor hallway yellow. The second floor hallway yellow speckled red. 

Playing with my kid is safe. Sitting up alone at night is unsafe. 

I knew that my students felt unsafe in the building. I saw the fights, the students being attacked and arrested by police outside or on the way to school, the police looking in to find a student in a classroom before being met and stopped at the classroom door. 

I didn't know it was this bad. I tried to imagine how one was expected to learn--to be tested and punished for lack of performance in this context. I searched for any explanation for the behavior of the people who contracted those tests and failed to provide safety to the students. 

This wasn't the end of the conversation by a long shot. They joined with other students to fight to destroy the school-to-prison-pipeline. And they won a lot--pay for behavior and zero tolerance policies at a nearby charter network, restorative justice policies within the school piloted with the 9th grade class, a change in district-wide policy around discipline, and the beginning of mass student involvement in police and prison abolition movements. Our schools are still not as safe as they must be for students to have equitable chances to learn. Our streets are still occupied by a violent, armed force that has antipathy toward many students. Our communities are still massively unsafe due to corporate pollution and racist pandemic policy. 

Trying to live when 100% of your self-worth is based on your utility to other is deadly unsafe. Teaching students is safe. Talking about trees with the Sprout is safe. Following students into just action is safe. 
 
Stay safe. Please.

Which side are you on?

Today, I returned to my classroom after a week at the bargaining table with Chicago Public Schools representatives and their lawyers. On Tuesday, the board had returned with none of the language they promised to deliver and essentially ended any concrete negotiations. We were on the verge of a strike--the third strike since my group, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators took over the Chicago Teachers Union leadership in 2010. I was happy to see my students and they had lots of questions about how the bargaining went and what came next. I wrote two sentences on the board:

A) All people have a human right to an equitable education.

B) It is too expensive to ensure that everyone has access to an equitable education.

After reminding my students the nature of "equitable" rather than "equal", they discussed the two statements in their table groups. After five minutes every group preferred the first statement, and most groups had already jumped to discussing examples of inequity in their own school lives.

I asked them whether the need for equity in this case was similar to everyone wanting an expensive car or extra spending money and they protested emphasizing that "education is not a thing you want, it's something you need to have a good life. We should all have it."

So, I asked them, what do you say to someone who says, "There's just not enough money to do that"? They said, "This is what's most important so that's where we should spend our money as a city." From there, we looked up and wrote on the board the Chicago Public Schools total budget:

$7,700,000,000 

(I miswrote one of the numbers, but this is the accurate number)

They were pissed. The money is there. Why isn't it used on what it should be? 

We talked about the four options that the students had:

1) Ignore the strike. Rest, play and come back once it's concluded. 

2) Support the board. Speak loudly about the need to end the strike and defer to the city leadership. 

3) Support the union. Come to the picket line and voice and demonstrate solidarity with the educators in the hopes that we will win. 

4) Support yourselves. Decide together what issues you see in your schools and use this opportunity to fight for them. They may overlap or not with the union's issues. In some cases, they may oppose the educators issues. 

Some students began listing issues they cared about and I took notes on the board. "Sports", "Health and Safety at school", "Materials", "Access to a gym and other facilities" (We are in a shared building where the other school's principal limits access to the two gyms in the building meaning many of our students have to take two of three Physical Education classes in a classroom space.),  and "less crowded classrooms" (their class has 34 sixth graders in it).

We compared the students' priorities to the educators' priorities and found a lot of overlap. I told them they we had written ours based on the principle of equity that they had chosen at the beginning of class. 

We talked about equity as something that in our neighborhood, we have always had to fight for. (I reminded some of them that the major high school campus in our neighborhood was only built after a long hunger strike by mothers and grandmothers in the neighborhood and survived due to student protests)

They wrote up their plans for the coming strike and shared with their groups. Some students planned to catch up on sleep and game; some made plans to join picket lines and downtown marches and others planned to head to the library to learn more. We dismissed and walking into the unknown, wondering when we would see each other again.

These struggles may see very familiar to many; but also utterly foreign to others. A simple read of the comments on local education articles (NEVER READ THE COMMENTS ;)) shows a deep divide between CPS students, their families, CPS educators and the more conservative readers whose own experiences are quite different. 

In these cases, sometimes it's useful to envision (we often use these exercises to prepare for writing in our classrooms):

Imagine for a moment a far away land in a far away time where children of color and of the impoverished are educated under an entirely separate school code than everyone else in the principality. Youth fear the onset of beautiful summer weather because it brings more shootings and more police violence. They sip from lead contaminated water while government officials deny the contamination risk. A beautiful child with disabilities lies lifeless at the bottom of a school pool after the school officials ignore his and thousands of other students’ federal rights to services under their Individualized Education Plan. Neighborhood schools are closed and defunded and they learn in squalid conditions where the leaders sign rich contracts with private firms who let rat and pest populations breed and spread rather than spending their ill-gotten gains on students’ safety. The leaders constantly cut positions and refuse to put together an effective substitute system, meaning that many students lack a consistent educator and others learn in overcrowded classrooms. When a student is injured or has an urgent medical need, they have to hope that it is that one day at the one time per week that a certified nurse is in the building. The previous mayor led a “war on literacy” that removed libraries from nearly every black school and most Latinx schools in the city while truncating public library hours and staffing. Through struggle, the people have secured an extra billion dollars in resources for the schools--an investment that is a tiny, fleeting flame of hope that flickers and dies in the face of a city and school leadership that is already directing those riches elsewhere.

This place you are imagining is our beloved Chicago. You are visualizing the beautiful schools where I have taught thousands of students and will send my own daughter the moment she reaches the age she can enroll (she missed by 2 weeks this year). Chicago’s new Mayor Lori Lightfoot was elected to lead our city with a billion new dollars from the State of Illinois and promises to end the machine’s oppressive, inequitable education system. She entered office with the platform and resources to accomplish this change. And yet, five months later, we are living on the verge of a huge municipal strike led not only by Chicago Teachers Union educators, but also SEIU special education assistants and security guards, and Park District employees. It is a battle not just for fair salaries and access to affordable benefits, but it is a fight against the deep inequities that plague our system.

Returning from teacher training in Japan to start a new teaching career in Chicago, I learned a great deal from my students and the veteran black teachers in the buildings. As they emphasized that merely surviving an unequal system was not enough; only equity would suffice, it echoed my own upbringing in some ways.

When I was about to turn seven, I remember listening to some of my father’s Irish Rebel Songs. I loved them so much that I would sit with my ear to the speaker and sing along at the top of my lungs. He asked me what I thought about them, and I asked, “It doesn’t say, but don’t they all die at the end?” “Yes, they definitely do.” “Why would they fight if they knew that they were almost certainly going to lose and die?” He told me that “Our ancestors dreamed of a day where a child of a child of a child of theirs would be born into a free Ireland. That dream kept us fighting and it’s not just an Irish dream, it’s a dream that belongs to all of us.”

Later my mother would say something similar about why our ancestors endured constant abuse, deportation, Chinese exclusion and prejudice to keep returning to the U.S. over generations until we could forge documents to stay.

As we come together tomorrow and every day forward until Chicago's political leadership meets our demands for equity, I would ask people consider two questions: 1) Do our children and students deserve what other students mere miles away receive automatically? Are our children as worthy of respect, love and support? 2) Which side are you on?

Our story is not unique; it is part of a struggle raging in every city, every community. As our battle in Chicago takes center stage, we ask that you lift us up and join us. As you kindle the same battles in your own cities and communities, we ask that you reach out and we will join you in solidarity.

When Teacher Evaluation is Driven by Bigoted Testing

So today, on the last possible day to administer my End of Year REACH performance task (the test used to check how much I taught students and used to assign me a portion of my rating), I pushed aside our incredible sexual education curriculum to give one of my seventh grade classes the test.

Of course, I was already pretty skeptical of this assessment after last year's fiasco where the 7th grade library test had an extremely racist question in which the test designers made up fictional anti-immigration African American and Latina and forced students to choose one to support.
http://www.wbez.org/news/critics-blast-cps-immigration-test-question-offensive-inaccurate-110232

This was today's test:
https://dochub.com/xianfranzingerbarrett/aXyzER/social-science_grade-7_student_eoy14-15?pg=6

It featured the exact transgender rights principle that I had taught earlier in the week: "People have the right to express their own gender identity and choose how they are addressed". Only the test modeled the bigoted approach:

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. 

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. 

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of

interviews w

ith her. 

We do not know why Charley Parkhurst chose to live her life as a man, because we have no records of interviews with her.

In fact, the title of the piece was printed on the top of every page:

I was pretty pissed. We've had discussions all week about identity, sexuality and gender, and it took considerable work to create a safe space where students were respectful of the concepts and each other's identification. Now I was administering a test--with my own job rating on the line--which directly violated those concepts.

One of my students raised their hand. "Why does it keep calling 'he' as 'she'"? I said, "Why do you ask?" "It seems like this test doesn't respect Charley's choice."

I said, "That's a great point. You can write that into your answer if you'd like."

The outcomes were incredible. The seventh graders were confused by the conflict of a test enforcing a transphobic narrative and what they knew was fair and right, and this what they came up with in response to the transphobic essay prompt, "Based on teh documents above (A-D), what are the reasons Charley Parker lived her life as a man? Be sure to explain your thinking and use evidence from 304 sources to support your answer."

DC (first crossed out all of the female pronouns and wrote in male ones to respect Charley's choices)
No one can be for sure about this since he hasn't been interviewed. I would say it was by choice and under his circumstances, it would seem relevant. It states in document A that "Another Charley Parkhurst story is that he was the first 'woman' to vote in Colifornia". This might be a reason why he made the transition by his choice. 

MG: The reason Charley Parker changed his gender was because he was a runaway and found his identity in being a male. Both documents A and C have information stating that Charley had family problems and decided to leave home. It also states that Charley loved his life as a male because he had a very important job and was very good at it without being judged by his gender. 

EA:
Charlie Parker (copying the wrong name from the question title) lived his life as a man for a couple of reasons. One of them was because he ran away from the orphanage. Another one was because he enjoyed driving and learning about horses.

JV: Charley Parker lived her life as a man because in Document A, it says that she voted so she was a guy. Also in Document C, Holiday said, "You are just the man I want". So Charley wanted to be a man and also because it was a good choice for her. 

Some of the other students just referred to the subject by his chosen name Charley Parkhurst over and over again to avoid using the incorrect pronouns proscribed by the test. 

Others got confused and thought that since the test was using female pronouns, that must have been Charley's choice, and so deduced that Charley must have been born a man but chose to be a woman because they couldn't believe that the testmakers could be that prejudiced. Others just wrote he/she in every sentence. 

Additionally, I had to help them understand how to connect the documents to the questions as due to the identification of the documents and questions with different alphabet letters, it was hard for them to follow. They knew what primary and secondary sources were, but they couldn't navigate the poor design of the test. My recollection was that the Beginning of Year REACH Performance Task was far shorter and easier than this round--which would destroy the integrity of the growth measurement--but it's no longer available online, so I can't remember for sure. 

In the end, they completed the test, we had a good chat and then they went off to the next class leaving me to input the scores for my rating.

But then the power and water went out at my school and we have no engineering position staffed by the district, so I couldn't put them in anyway. 

Yes, I Was Fired and Still We Will Win

At 9:11am Friday morning, on a quiet, scripted phone call from my principal, my teaching career ended. Again. 

Many of you have already read the exact details here:

http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/21411000-418/cps-calls-teachers-mom-to-tell-him-hes-getting-laid-off.html

And I hesitate to blog on it, as I could never match the beautiful words of friends and accomplished bloggers Stephanie Rivera and Fred Klonsky.

In many ways, I feel out of generous love, people have focused too much on my story and I don’t want to perpetuate that dynamic—there are some 3,000 other educators who are going through the same.

But I always teach my students that our voices may not be the strongest; our writing might not be the most polished; we may be nervous and stumble; but our experiences are precious and must be heard and we are the only ones who can make that happen.

I am deeply thankful to all of you who have reached out in this time. I am sure it is jarring and sad to watch someone’s life passion torn away, and it has been immeasurably helpful to have each and every one of you supporting me.  

Beyond that, I feel so blessed by my community. I feel fortunate to work with amazing students who communicate directly and frequently the difference my work makes, a supportive professional group of colleagues and the warmest community organizers and allies anyone could ask for.

I say all this because I don’t want anyone to feel bad for me.  I want them to start by acknowledging the beauty that my students and I conspired to build and understanding that it cannot ever be destroyed; even by an action as cruel as this.

I would ask each of you to pause to capture in your mind that one teacher or several that altered the course of your life. Now tear them from the fabric of your experience. What would it look like? How would you be changed?

Our city inflicts that sadistic exercise on our impoverished students of color as a regular occurrence.

I don’t pretend to have been that life changing teacher for every one or even most of my students, but like my 3,000 colleagues, each of us was the difference maker for some students.

And as it happens again and again, the message that the district sends to our students is clear, “You are uncared for. Even those you thought loved you dearly have abandoned you, and it’s your own fault.”  Again, this is not just a happenstance; it is a regular matter of practice. When I was let go in 2010, my principal first told students that I simply left, (He didn’t care about you) and later told them that “There wasn’t enough interest in Japanese” (You didn’t care enough). Both were lies—lies that made students feel worse about themselves.

So this time, I need my students to understand—we did nothing wrong. We did everything right, and through our honest collaboration we created many treasures. We spoke for justice when others were silent and we took consequences to fight for what we knew to be right. Now, as one of those consequences, I must go on a journey, but it is not out of lack of love.

This was my best teaching year by far. Better than the year that I raised the scores the most; better than the year I won that national teaching award. This year I listened most deeply to the largest portion of my students and learned to support them in all the right battles: for student voice, against sexism, homophobia, ableism, and racism, for student/teacher unity and against the school-to-prison pipeline. The classroom was open and the youth shared amazing personal stories that I will share-with their consent-in this space over the next few months.  I would not trade this year away for 100 years as the football star I dreamt I would become when I was a tiny little 10 year old who didn’t really understand the physics of Professional Football.

I know that in the reactions, many people were shocked that with what I do each day, I could be treated in this fashion. Thank you for your outrage. But I want to be very clear about your dismay:

This was not those who run the Chicago Public Schools System failing in their mission; it was them succeeding.  While it took me by surprise when I was laid off in 2010, I had planned for it this time. I was relatively sure I would be one of the thousands of people who devote their lives to the children of Chicago who would be mechanically thanked for our service and tossed aside as if our students didn’t need us anymore, so I made plans in case of this situation.  A former student understood:

Janai Cooks ‏@Kitty_luvs_Unot19m (Japanese/Social Justice at Julian 2008-2010)
Why is the CPS board so scared of @xianb8 ? Because that man has got more heart and drive to actually educate teens & watch us grow !!!!

If I had taught what I taught in Mayor Emanuel’s hometown, I would still be employed. If the children I taught had been rich enough and white enough, I would have continued to collect my paycheck and accolades and they would have been affirmed in all of their accomplishments.  I am unemployed and my students are without their teacher today because I chose to teach students of highest need. I chose to actually address the opportunity gaps in our society, and not in theory but in reality supporting impoverished young people of color to fight to improve their own lives and demand to be treated as equals.



But it was more than worth it. While to many these constant horrible disparities can cause resignation and hopelessness, what students have taught me is that while consistent injustice can numb some, they have reached a stage of consistent righteous struggle beyond where others despair.They have shown me that it's not enough to urge those in power to treat us humanely; if they will not, they must be removed.

This is exactly what we need at this time. Rather than be models for the students who are the victims of this injustice, let them be your models. The deep, consistent social inequities that transport our students from their crib to the jailhouse door will not be vanquished with a phone call or momentary righteous indignation. Unlike the white abolitionist that John Brown spoke of derisively who can be outraged and then quit whenever he wants, this struggle is our students’ and communities’ daily struggle. And they must and will lead it.

So I thank you for your anger at my unjust firing, but I would ask you to reserve the same rage for the educations ruined by arrests on school grounds, over testing and under resourcing.  Get furious at the total indignity of a system that calls a dedicated worker’s momma to inform him of his termination, but get more livid about the teen mothers who get shamed into giving up the education they so desperately want for themselves and their children. Get angry that I didn't get due process, but get madder about the millions of young people who had to plea bargain out to a crime they didn't commit or go another day without employment opportunities or access to health care. 

The depth of the injustice in our society is so deep that it’s a miracle that many of our young people can see any light at all, and yet they pursue it with all they have.

And so we must too. This fight must continue, and it must not end until Rahm Emanuel and those he serves are vanquished from any position of power that they could use to further hurt the children of the City of Chicago..

For me, I've decided to that this might be the right time to step away from the classroom for a moment. I realize looking back that I've neglected self-care for quite a long time, and do not have the energy to work with a new group of amazing youth people to build to a new vista.  This isn't a permanent state, but with each heartbreak, we must heal.

While I won’t be in the classroom, I will be teaching next year. In our broken city, in this jacked up state of Illinois, in this great country of ours that seems to have forgotten that education and such things are basic rights, there are a few people in need of instruction more than my students. I will take my expertise to teach those failing to run our society. Are they prepared for their lessons?

We all continue this beautiful struggle and we will win because we must.

And one day I will return to my classroom, and another adventure will begin.

What will you do to save the lives of the children of the city of Chicago?

Today, the Chicago Board of Education announced their plans to proceed with major school actions against 71 schools. These are not the least utilized schools, nor the lowest performing by CPS’ own flawed metrics.

This is the ultimate insult to nearly twenty thousand parents, students, educators and community members who came to community hearings to protest the closings nearly unanimously. They came to demand that CPS not compromise their children’s potential and now they have been utterly ignored. Anyone who came to any of the hearings knows that the parents both know far more about the district than the board employees responsible for the decisions and deeply oppose these actions. CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett neither attended the hearings nor listened to the community voices responding with the proclamation that “everyone understands that we need to close some schools.”

The board has made a political decision to help their deep pocketed allies that will hurt tens of thousands of Chicago students.

And what of that hurt? Let’s put it directly—real talk—if we, the people of Chicago; the ones who the schools belong to; the ones who attend, work at and send our own kids to CPS neighborhood schools allow the board to follow through on this decision, we will lose children; victims of an absurd system in which an unelected school board plays Hunger Games (much respect to Joel Rodriguez who coined the comparison and whose children’s school is slated for closure) with the lives of poor children of color even as they and many of the decision makers at central office give their own children and grandchildren highly resourced, stable educations.

Can you imagine parents from Winnetka having to come to Chicago and beg poor people of color to “allow” New Trier to stay open? Can you imagine the Lab School being labeled “underutilized” and closed?

Close your eyes for a moment and envision your own child, or grandchild. Now add their classmates and other students who go to a school. Now imagine someone sitting next to you had expressed their intention to press a button that would hurt a percentage of the children you see, cause another portion to dropout, and put another portion six feet underground. What would you be willing to do to stop them from pressing that button? Would you reason with them? Would you beg? Would you march around? Or would you do more?

Now, in Chicago, if the kids you are envisioning are rich or white, the likelihood that you would have to treat this as more than a thought exercise is very low. After all, this is a nationwide experiment on poor children of color—“other people’s children”.

Our corporate overlords have taken historically under resourced schools and placed them under constant siege in a barrage of overtesting, charterization, constant chaos and now is the moment they expect our neighborhood schools to fall.

This is unjust. It is disgusting. It is a slow genocide. It is Tuskegee and Jim Crow, and “Kill the Indian, save the man.” It is the death knell of Brown v. Board aborted before it could even sniff its potential.

And it must not stand.

What are you willing to do to stop it?

There are specific actions we must take to save these young people’s lives. They may risk your job or your freedom; are our kids’ lives worth it to you? I must admit, while my heart never wavers on these matters (as I have shown in action in the past), my mind sometimes questions.

But when it does, I think of a brave young woman. I think of Vicki Soto, who faced with a mass murderer armed with an automatic weapon, walked out to almost certain death in order to increase the likelihood of her students surviving. And I remember what it means to be a teacher. I think of my own students like Araceli Medrano who snuck into the principal’s conference room to scrawl on the data board a powerful message, “Reading scores aren’t everything. Reevaluate the rules you have imposed for next year because students and teachers agree the atmosphere is ‘suppressive’. ; we have all lost our spirits. Do not take offense; take action. Listen to those you work for” and then signed it in her own name with her graduation year.

And I am ready to protest.

And resist.

And speak truth.

And suffer punishment.

And risk livelihood, profession, personal safety,

And even life.

Rahm Emanuel and his minions—our bosses—are on the verge of becoming mass murderers. Let’s save their victims—Chicago’s children—but also let’s save them from themselves and ourselves from being accomplices.

Let’s fight to build a bridge from this dark day to the day when our schools belong to the only group who could ever actually develop the school system Chicago’s children deserve—our communities themselves. Whatever harm and danger that we may encounter together on that journey, let us dance the desperate dance of justice together.

Where policy comes from

If we race and leave childrans behind only then will will know is our childrans learning.

Obama's impending victory

First of all, I want to congratulate many of you on your hard work. 

I still hold hope and as critical as I've been, I'm relieved that the election results for this one day seem about as good as they can get for a single election's results. But we need far more--long, life-shaking civic engagement that can really change the landscape of a society.

I hold serious hope that everyone who has assured me that we just needed to come together and ensure Obama's re-election so that we could subsequently switch into accountability mode was not just saying what needed to be said, but really honestly believes that's the next step.

Because with all that hope, I also know one harsh reality: starting tomorrow, all of the corporate influences that sidetracked Hope and Change throughout the first-term will have already had their first second-term conversations with the administration and we will have not.

The other thing that worried me about this cycle was the constant refrain of how bad Romney would make it and that there'd be nothing we could do about it. This assumes that we are at the mercy of people in power and their agenda. If this is the case, we might as well just give up now. We cannot vote our way to the free society we deserve, and there are going to be moments where we have to get mad and active and use civil disobedience to push those in power to act justly. If we do that effectively, we can win over the unjust rule of law.

We will likely need to do that under this administration as well. We must stand for what just and we should expect this administration to oppose us in many areas:

1. We need to bring people together now and resolve that we will not vote for any candidate that enters the current debate pact to exclude third-party voices. We need to act quickly and decisively to throw corporate money out of politics and grab grassroots control of policymaking in as many areas as possible. Those with power should offer resources to execute our plans, not demand that we accept the plans they impose on us.

2. We need to draw a line on due process. No President from any party should have license to employ killer robot planes to execute 16 year-old American citizens who have neither committed, nor been accused of any crime. Gibbs' comments on this case--blaming the victim for essentially having a bad dad are crazy and he should have been fired on the spot. 

3. We need serious immigration reform and it should fully acknowledge the vast contributions of immigrants--both documented and undocumented--to the country. It should seek to decriminalize immigrant populations and provide expedient pathways to citizenship rather than the fragmenting of families.

4. The final margin in the Superintendent race in Indiana and several other Congressional races suggests that Corporate Education Reform dollars only go so far in certainly contexts. They are often beating us soundly in the policy arena, but the general public is neither asking for these policies nor particularly resolute in following this corporate narrative. We need to call out the current administration's disastrous direction on privatizing education and testing the crap out of our kids for what it is: junk science that will pour over a hundred billion dollars into making our students' educations worse.

5. We need to look at making public education all the way through college free, accessible and equitably outstanding for all young people. Education should be a right, not a privilege, and we should be able to pursue it regardless of our background without being criminalized or put into veritable debt slavery for large portions of our lives.

That's just a start, but we need to nail down these commitments today and stay engaged. It is impossible for us to build the free and fair country we envision through a single election day, but we can achieve that lofty goal by applying increased organizing energy to the struggle between these elections.

Much love.

x

Open Letter to Newark Teachers

The Newark Teachers Union is facing a critical contract vote that was supposed to be Monday, October 28th although the hurricane is pushing back the date. It's a particularly interesting vote in light of the emergence of the NEW  (Newark Education Workers) Caucus as a group within the union opposing the contract and the current NTU leadership, along with Randi Weingarten, AFT President and Republican Celebrity Governor Chris Christie supporting it. Hear more about it here: http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/14087/newark_teachers_union_new_caucus_contract_vote_del_grosso_ratification_owen/

Unlike the AFT leadership and the annoying head of state of New Jersey, I don't think it's right for me to presume to know what's best for the educators of Newark--they certain can and must figure that out in vibrant, democratic and grassroots fashion.

On the other hand, it's vital to show support for fellow educators and to remind them that they are not alone in the fight to defend public education, so:

October 28, 2012

Dear Newark Teachers:

You stand at the crossroads of an immense and democratic decision. Many may try to make you feel like you are making a horrible mistake if you don’t vote a certain way, but I want to ensure you that it is far more important to engage in your profession, union and the policy that governs the daily learning of your students than to vote one way or another.

As a recently returned striking Chicago Teacher, I can tell you that there are plenty of things worth striking over. It’s worth standing up and saying what needs to be improved in your working conditions even if a single strike or contract negotiation cannot address all of them. I cannot think of a time in my teaching career when I was prouder than standing on the picket line to fight for smaller class sizes and humane classroom conditions with my fellow educators, students and parents.

Like in Chicago, I’m sure there are many challenges in Newark Public Schools, and some of them are unique to your situation. However, I’m quite sure that we share many similarities. We work extremely hard. We are under-appreciated  We often put our students and their families ahead of the needs of our own families. Most of all, we are under attack by the same corporate forces that seek to blame us for the problems they've created in our public school system and use that as an opportunity to divide us. They intend to take full control of the resources of our schools.

They are spending billions of dollars to sell us policies that studies tell us will hurt our students:

1. Districts controlled by the richest of the rich who do not send their own kids to the schools we teach in
2. Evaluations dictated by the employer and predicated on inaccurate high stakes tests not intended for this purpose
3. Charter and turnaround schools that contextually underperform their counterparts
4. Multi-tiered employment that will cast us as unequal based on when we were hired
5. Merit pay
6.  A continued erosion of our voice into the conditions of our own profession.
7. Extended work hours without the necessary resources or adding more employees so that we are stretched more thinly
8. Destruction of our retirement plans, so once we’ve given our all to students, we get nothing in return

You’ll recognize many of these corporate goals in the contract you are being asked to vote on. You’ll also recognize them as policies that serve a corporate purpose but in no way help your instruction. Now you are faced with a decision to make: “Would voting for this contract help or hinder my teaching and the quality of life for my students and my own family?”

It is a shame it has come to this—I, like many of you, wish I lived in a time where I could just close my classroom door and be an awesome teacher to my students—but it’s also an opportunity. Heroic battles are not waged and won by superhuman heroes, but by every day people inspired to do what they never thought themselves capable of.

So go forth and vote what you feel to be best for students, but look beyond that too. The fight for our profession, the public school system and our very American democracy is at hand. The bigger question is not whether or not Newark teachers should accept this contract. It is whether we as educators will continue to allow the super-rich to fund and push separate and unequal education or we will force them to step aside so with our parents and students voices combine we can shape our schools and classrooms in the ways we know to be best.

Be courageous, and stand up for what you know to be right. This is a glorious teaching moment, and you are just the educator to shine in it!

Xian Barrett, Law and Chicago History Teacher, Gage Park High School, Chicago Public Schools
2009-2010 U.S. Department of Education Classroom Teaching Ambassador Fellow
VIVA Teacher Leader

"Real parents"

The director of Education Reform Now which is a differently named part of Democrats for Education Reform, Ms. Nieves Huffman recently wrote an article on Catalyst: "Real Parents Have Been Standing Up" to respond to a thoughtful piece from Wendy Katten, director of Raise Your Hand for Public Education.

I'll try to avoid snark until the last paragraph as I respect that we can have reasonable discussions within our differences about educational policy. We can be polite. We can be respectful. That is, until the last paragraph, then we get to treat each other and all bets are off.

I think Ms. Nieves Huffman's story illustrates exactly why CPS should be expected to adhere to state law and common decency into major facilities decisions. I would include attendance boundary changes.

What she describes is exactly why hedge fund managers should not dictate policy in Chicago; parents and students should and educators should be supported to implement that policy.  It sounds like Ms. Huffman-Nieves agrees in her emphasis on the need for parents and key stakeholders (like students and educators) to be involved in the process.

I expect that she will stand by that conviction and testify with us at future Board meetings, run expensive television ads and use her thoughtful, Broad reaching voice to contest CPS' atrociously bad school facilities process which has been excoriated by a honorable state panel of educators, community organizations and educators.

Furthermore, I hope that she will reconsider using an illegally obtained list of parents' private contact information to spam parents to watch a non-veiled piece of corporate funded propaganda that is rapidly emerging as one of the worst movies of all time. (#1 Worst Box Office Showing of the Last 30 years.)

I would not to presume to know better for her and her funders' organization than she does, but given her stated goals, I would advise the convening of some non-hedge fund connected parents who don't have the means to choose selective schools (charter or otherwise) and ask them where the ample dollars they have ought to be spent.

After all, that would be democratic parent voice, which would deliver better decision-making and may have helped avert the strike in the first place.

Finally, in reference to the titles of the pieces, I'd say that Huffman doesn't really address the key issue here at all: There's a difference between an independently formed advocacy group that builds itself from the ground up and a well financed organization that obtained its money and chose its positions before it spoke to its first grassroots parent voice. "Selected voice" is not the same as "grassroots voice" and is infinitely less useful for creating good policy. If I can find 200 parents to take $1000 to make their kids smoke cigarettes, that doesn't count as a grassroots parent advocacy group for child smoking, it's just me being a terrible person.

Xian Barrett
Prime Minister, Chicago Barretts for Billionaires Not Getting to Run Rabbit Proof Fence Experiments on Other People's Children

Postscript: What I hope is not lost in the playful sniping is that we do have an obligation to fight for true democratic voice. I know that may sound presumptuous, but I'm not saying that I have the right to define what is "true" voice. I think that everyone has a pretty good understanding that the law that lets billionaires buy elections and run constant and misleading ads through groups like DFER does not promote a fair marketplace of ideas. On the other hand, Raise Your Hand's labor of love has brought together people across communities and led to the development of new ideas that with advocacy and implementation will lead to a better education for Chicago students.

Why should we care? Because I believe that when we push aside these money groups and really get the voices of those who experience the daily indignities of our school system, that's when we'll finally have the opportunity to reform our schools for the betterment of kids, not moneyed folks.

Coming Home

In a few minutes, like 3.8 million other educators nationwide, I will enter my classroom to teach a handful of the 55 million students in our country's education system. Our motives and focus will be the same--to deliver the best future for the students we teach.

For the last week and a half, that mission hasn't changed, but for 25,000 Chicago educators, we chose a more unconventional route to fight for that mission--we went on strike. We decide that the Chicago Public Schools Board of Education had treated our students and ourselves so poorly, that the most prudent way to earn the best future for the students we teach was to leave our classrooms.

Looking at the final outcomes, and how far the Board moved, I'm proud to say we accomplished what we sacrificed and set out to do. Make no mistake--our students, their families and we sacrificed a great deal for this. After all, the only people still getting money to put food on the table through this were the CPS higher-ups and the Mayor; even as they stonewalled our student centered asks.

I also feel some disappointment. My classroom still won't have air conditioning. Our class sizes situation is incrementally improved, but it will still be a major issue. We may have a slightly less test centered culture, but we are still facing a tsunami of corporate profits and test-based child abuse.

But that disappointment doesn't lead to discouragement. We stood proudly, we fought, and we won for our students.  It is not a final victory or a resolution. We must continue to fight tomorrow and every day after that. We will just be doing so from our classrooms instead of from a picket line.

I hope we've shown that to our millions of colleagues who followed the strike closely and sent their support. I hope we've taught the country that billionaires not only don't have all the answers to the challenges of public education, but lack the basic knowledge and stake in the game to do much more than pad their pockets at our children's expense.

We must teach well in our classrooms, but as the leaders of the educational arena, we have a far greater calling. We must work with our communities, hear their needs, desires and grievances and develop a better education system by and of the communities we serve. We must lock out corporate voice and control--to be sure, if businesses want to help with best of motives and ample resources, they are welcome--but they must not set the agenda.

We are the leaders we have been waiting for. Let's create a vision for a better school system, and let's fight like hell to make it reality.

Thank you and much love to all of you. I can't wait to see where our paths cross.

A student addresses Rahm's dismissal of air conditioning as a real issue

The following student comment on Facebook has 16,304 likes:

Hi, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I am a student at Lincoln Park High School, and my father is an employee of the Cook County Jail. You stated yesterday in your news conference that air conditioning in schools is not an important factor in negotiations, but at my fathers job when a temperature reaches a certain degree for the detainees they must get relief or it is inhumane. Are you saying that detainees should have better conditions then CPS students and faculty? I know this cannot be a deciding factor in the contract so lets bring out the real issues at hand and take control of a situation and lead by example and by the mayor you were elected to be!

P.S. You should really be in on all meetings pertaining to the negotiations!

If the billionaires and millionaires running our city can't listen to the teachers, please let them listen to the students. 

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