Besides, Renaissance 2010 was a program that came from the bottom up. It originated with Mayor Richard Daley’s office and the Commercial Club of Chicago. Arne Duncan just presided over, and he’s from Chicago. Hyde Park, but still, it’s not his fault that he comes from a privileged background. After all, he went to Harvard, so he knows how to run a school sytem.
The children of Chicago deserve higher test scores, and schools are like eggs, scramble them and you can feed people. And as everyone knows, you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
Please share widely!
I don’t really think that education policy in Chicago should be set along gang boundaries. Of course, this problem was (hopefully) foreseeable. I’m not ready to blame Duncan single-handedly for creating the conditions that led to this murder.
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p>What disturbs me about our nation’s Shootaround Pal/Secretary of Education is the blithe, unfeeling pablum he feeds out after the murder. This is the problem with Obama’s Scrimmage Partner leading education — he’d rather talk in vague generalities and sound bites than show empathy or understanding of public education.
… that DOE and local authorities ought to take into consideration gang affiliation, right alongside grades, schools and geography, when making public school assignments?
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p>It’s unclear to me how “Renaissance 2010” has anything, whatsoever, to do with this nor how, as you infer, having left failing schools in place violence would have been prevented? The perpetrators, sadly, seem like nothing more than garden variety sociopaths, wholly immune from conscience…
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p>Had the schools been left in place somebody else would have died just as violently and just as senselessly… only we’d not have been informed because the media would have considered he/she as an inner city dead-ender: merely a statistic not an honor student worthy of hand-wringing.
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p>23 deaths. 34 deaths. What does it matter? One is too many. Are we only now concerned because the number went from 33 to 34? Are we suddenly alarmed simply because honor students are getting caught in the crossfire? What about the other 33? Who are they? What are their circumstances? Do they matter?
that’s a weird cause effect. r u being serious or just taking the piss?
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p>boston DID NOT shut down high schools during that period. its youth homicide rate ALSO went up.
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p>does that mean in boston, NOT SHUTTING high schools caused the youth murder rate to go up?
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p>also, the stock market went up in 2006 after chicago closed some high schools, and the patriots went on to have a great season in 2007, also due to the closures.
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p>so that is perhaps an upside you haven’t explored.
a discussion started on the relation of communities to school. I confess to demagoguing a bit.
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p>My basic point, however tangential to my post,is that poverty and out-of-school factors impact academic achievement more than “failing schools,” and until we acknowledge that fact and start addressing the relationship between schools and communities, a relationship we take for granted in advantaged communities,we’re destined to keep shuffling the educational deck trying to deal a perfect hand.
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p>Area residents say that problems, not necessarily murder, have arisen due to the scrambling of school districts. Maybe there was no way of knowing that a kid would walk into a gang fight. If Arne & Co. knew, maybe they would have tried to address the issue before moving kids around.
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p>Maybe some information will emerge saying that Arne & Co. considered the potential impact of moving students to different neighborhoods, but I sort of doubt it. My guess is that, like other education reformers, they thought little about anything but reorganizing.
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p>Sabutai asks, should we organize schools along gang lines? Of course not. Should we consider the causes and effects of “reorganization” beyond test scores? Yes, I think so.
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p>Arne is any more responsible for the kid’s death than our gun control laws or our economic policies or the legacy of racism.
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why shouldn’t schools be organized around gang territories?