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Chicago Public Schools Sell Out

By Jackson Potter

This educational system of ours is a twisted mess. A teacher at Englewood High School once told me, "The farther away you get from kids, the greater the rewards." He was speaking about area instructional officers, administrators and union officials, but could just as easily have been talking about the Chicago Board of Education's 2010 strategy. As an educator, it has become increasingly obvious to me that the board's attempt to shutter long-standing schools (under a myriad of excuses) and replace them with nonunion substitutes is against the best interests of students.

Jackson Potter on Memorial Day, Chicago, 20054

Englewood is a good example of all this. Chicago Public Schools CEO Arne Duncan labeled us "a culture of failure," but did he provide any comprehensive assessments of where we failed? No, he presented test data and graduation-rate figures. Did people at the board offer a scientific approach to repairing our atrocious dropout percentage? No, their answer was to shut us down and ship our incoming freshman into other probation schools. So now already-discouraged students of color in schools like mine, who are getting labeled as failures by the very adults who have failed them, are sent into other chaotic environments. Where they will miraculously succeed?

Here's where the feds come in to make this picture prettier. We've got a No Child Left Behind law that requires schools to report the names and contact information of all our students to the military, starting junior year. We have a systemwide dropout rate of 50% for African-American youth and Mayor Daley wants a naval academy at Senn, and there are proposals to house an Air Force academy at Englewood.

What's really going on? Just like with public housing, Social Security, pensions, or veterans' health care, we have a nationwide effort to dismantle the welfare state. It's not a great leap from making poor children homeless or semi-transient to depriving them of an education—after all, housing, health care, and education aren't explicitly mentioned in the Constitution as rights of man. All fantasies about a meritocracy aside, if you are a poor and marginalized person, the mainstream mantra is that you aren't owed anything. But there is salvation outside of starvation: pull yourself up and join the military, pay for college, get a bed to sleep in...hopefully not a body bag.

From the top officials in the land to the vassals like Michael Scott and Arne Duncan, we are hearing the same message: that the lives of our most neglected children are only worth something if they make an unusual sacrifice on behalf of their nation—life itself. Even as Daley and company sell off our school system piecemeal to the likes of Microsoft, we would do well to remember that "philanthropists are those who give publicly and steal privately." The corrupt are selling our kids to the highest bidder, and we all know the military is top dog on the public dole. I have one student, a senior, who is harassed on a daily basis by military recruiters to enlist. How come the government can't send vigorous and dedicated college recruiters or unionized employers instead? Because they don't care; they are servicing inhumane interests. The war on Iraq has been an unmitigated disaster—how can we challenge our youth to persevere and pull themselves up out of poverty and despair, when we send them on ethically bankrupt suicide missions? The simple answer is: we can't.