I'm amazed that nobody has diaried this yet. I've hesitated myself, figuring that someone else could do a better job. But I guess it falls to me.
Two successive Chicago city administrations, and their loyal appointed school board members, have been waging a war on open-enrollment neighborhood public schools, in a massive effort to replace them with charter schools. (I specify "open-enrollment" and "neighborhood" because, in order to pay lip service to desegegration mandates, Chicago has resorted to a massive scheme of academic tracking by school. In other words, you don't go to your nearest school and take honors classes if you're an honor student or regular classes if you're a regular student -- instead, the system is divided into honors schools and regular schools. The former are called "selective enrollment," while the latter are "open enrollment." There's a tier of magnet schools in between that offer specialized academic programs. None of this has done anything to reduce segregation at the open-enrollment level, BTW.)
The latest target is Dyett High School -- the last neighborhood public high school in all of Bronzeville, Chicago's oldest African-American neighborhood.
Black Schools Matter: Chicago Protesters Go on Hunger Strike to Save Their Last Neighborhood School
If the Emanuel administration has its way, this mostly black community will have to choose between sending their children to a failing charter school or a failing public school run by a private company – all while the neighborhood’s historic Walter H. Dyett High School is closed.Nat King Cole, Dinah Washington, Red Fox and Bo Diddley are all alumni of Dyett.
Why close such a vibrant connection to the community’s proud past?
The unelected Board of Education voted in 2012 to phase out the school because of low standardized test scores and dropping graduation rates.
It’s the same excuse lawmakers used in 1988 to take away local control from Chicago residents throughout the city. Most Americans have the right to vote for the people who run their local public schools. But not in Chicago, Philadelphia, New Orleans or many other places dark complected people live. The poorer the people and the darker their skin, the more likely the state will swipe away their right to self government on the excuse that their neglected and underfunded schools are “failing.”
Chicago, the third largest district in the country, is a prime example of this kind of disaster capitalism.
While schools in wealthier neighborhoods had all the amenities, Dyett students had no honors or AP classes and no art or music. Even physical education classes had to be taken on-line.
Hunger Strike: The Fight for Dyett High School in Chicago In 2012 Chicago’s appointed school board voted to “phase out” Dyett High School, but the path of intentional destruction was over a decade in the making.Rhoda Rae Gutierrez and Pauline Lipman consider Dyett High School a victim of the 3Ds of education reform – destabilization, disinvestment, and disenfranchisement. Dyett experienced destabilizing upheaval in its student population when the Chicago Public Schools decided to “turn around,” convert to charter, or create selective enrollment in the 20 area schools near Dyett. Students were sent from school to school with very little cohesion to community, teachers, or curriculum. There was also considerable disinvestment in Dyett. The school was initially a middle school. When Dyett converted to a high school, no resources were set aside to convert the school – there were no science labs and the school library only had seven books. The Dyett community also experienced disenfranchisement. Decisions about the school were made by a school board appointed by the mayor with no consideration for the outpouring of commitment from the community to keep an open enrollment high school in the neighborhood.
For those of us who have witnessed the privatization of our school systems, we know all too well what is at stake if Dyett High School no longer is in the hands of the community. Once we have one neighborhood without an open enrollment high school it will be all too easy for subsequent parts of our city to fall like dominoes, creating a system of privatized schools.
Coverage of this incident has been fragmented and day-by-day -- there's background on the closure, but unfortunately, it's not all in one convenient place. Focus has shifted away from the circumstances surrounding the closure itself to the hunger strikers' struggles to be acknowledged by the Emanuel administration.Now, I have to confess to extreme cynicism about the efficacy of this hunger strike. It's not that I think that the strikers are misguided -- not in the least. It's that I honestly think Rahm Emanuel's most likely reply is simply to ignore them, to wait them out until they either give up or starve to death. Moral suasion only works on people with morals. Public shaming only works on people who feel shame.
Emanuel only acknowledged the strikers at all on the 11th day of their strike. Here's what he had to say:
“And I would remind everybody, within a three-mile radius there 10 high schools,” Emanuel said. “Within about a mile of the school, there’s King College Prep. So there’s a lot of high schools in that area and how do you talk about another one or others that are not at capacity.” Three miles.Who here lives in a major metropolitan area? Does your child travel three miles to go to school?
Three miles is an hour's walk for a healthy grown-up.
Three miles is five or six major streets to cross, and who knows how many other invisible boundaries.
Three miles is 24 stops on a CTA bus.
Three miles is from City Hall past Fullerton Avenue, past Western Avenue, almost down to 31st Street.
Three miles of radius is six miles in diameter. That's a circle reaching from 26th Street to 75th Street.
Three miles is the distance from Clemente High School to Lincoln Park High School, or from Lincoln Park High School to Lake View High School, or from Lake View to Senn -- with Amundsen in between them.
Three miles is what Rahm Emanuel apparently believes is an acceptable distance from nothing to something.
Emanuel didn't meet with the protesters when they came to City Hall on the 12th day of their hunger strike. City Hall staff didn't even bring them chairs. They sat on the floor.
Today, if I'm not mistaken, is day 13.
I invite anyone with better information to link to it in the comments.