Dear AustinTalks readers,
Before its May 22 vote, the Chicago Board of Education would do well to address the elephant in the room regarding school closings – CPS school reform’s academic betrayal of African-American children.
After a decade of closing schools, the students who have been the most uprooted, the most subjected to multiple school actions and the most socially destabilized by these school closings have also been the most academically harmed students in the system.
According to a study by the Consortium on Chicago School Research, Chicago’s achievement gap has widened during the past 20 years of reform, “with African-American students falling further behind students from other racial/ethnic groups.”
The study speculates that school closings may be a contributor to this widening gap. Yet CPS is attempting to launch the greatest expansion of school closings ever, without responding to requests for board members to address the speculative role of school closings in African-American students being “left behind.”
This makes one ask: What is the hidden agenda? Who benefits when African-American students fall further and further behind their non-African-American counterparts?
Who is profiting from the repeated shuffling around of children of color and the dollars that follow them? Knowing that the children have not only not profited, but instead have actually been harmed under CPS reform, why has the board not put a halt to this failed reform movement?
What is it that has motivated board members to continue to vote their approval of what amounts to a modern-day Tuskegee experiment? Have current board members even discussed their reform movement’s betrayal of African-American students over the past two decades?
Will these current board members be bold enough to put a stop to this betrayal? Will they be able to look at themselves in the mirror after their May 22nd votes are cast?
As one who proudly taught during the pre-reform era that generated a dramatic national narrowing of the achievement gap, I echo Stanford researcher Linda Darling-Hammond (noted for her in-depth study of the policies and practices that led to that impressive narrowing of the achievement gap from 1971 to 1988), when I say to CPS, “It’s not as though we don’t know what works. Let’s just do it.”
Stop school closings. Return to neighborhood schools the funding that this reform movement has diverted to the unproven, unsustainable charter school experiment. Return to the closing of the gap.
I join esteemed Chicago educator, Timuel Black, in saying to board members Carlos Azcoitia, Henry Bienen, Mahalia Hines, Jesse Ruiz, David Vitale and Andrea Zopp, “it’s not too late to do right by our children.”
Remember that when you cast your vote.
And I say to all CPS stakeholders, too many of our ancestors paid the ultimate price for the right to equity in public schooling for us to now submit to the inequitable delivery of education to our children.
Do not give up that right. Demand an end to the betrayal.
Sincerely,
Bonita Robinson
Bonita Robinson, a recently retired reading specialist and a member of the CTU Black Caucus, was awarded the Illinois Governor’s Master Teacher Award while teaching at the Austin community’s Duke Ellington School during the era of the narrowing of the achievement gap.