After Rahm Emanuel announced a wave of school closures in 2013, Chicagoans took to the streets in protest. But before we can understand whether the closings are racist, we must understand what racism is
Failing schools. Underprivileged schools. Just plain bad schools. The fodder of tsk-tsk, it’s so sad, and that’s why we send our kids to private school and we’re so lucky. They’re the stuff of legend, material for inspirational movies and shocking prime-time news exposés. In Chicago they were once famously called the worst in the nation by William Bennett, secretary of education under then president Ronald Reagan. More recently, Illinois governor Bruce Rauner called them “inadequate”, “woeful”, “just tragic” and “basically almost crumbling prisons”.
Chicago’s public schools have been positioned in the nation’s imagination as, at best, charity cases deserving our sympathy; at worst they are a malignant force to be ignored if you can or snuffed out altogether if you can come up with something better. In this sense Chicago is like many other urban school districts that primarily serve students of color, viewed with pity and contempt.
So in 2013, when Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an unprecedented wave of school closures, perhaps he expected public approval. The city and the school district were facing a $1bn budget deficit, enrollment had dropped in the district overall, and many of the schools on the list had long records of low test scores. Chicago public schools (CPS) first said that as many as 330 schools could be closed, then pared the number down to 129, and finally announced 54 that made the final list. Of those, 49 ultimately were slated to be closed by the end of the 2012-13 school year. Students attending these schools were assigned seats in other schools nearby.
Thousands of Chicagoans took to the streets in three days of marches that proceeded from one closing school to the next. But Emanuel was unmoved. On the day the Chicago board of education formally approved the closures, his office released a statement: “I know this is incredibly difficult, but I firmly believe the most important thing we can do as a city is provide the next generation with a brighter future.”
But if the schools were so terrible, why did people fight for them so adamantly? Why do people care so much about schools that the world has deemed to be “failing”?
What role did race, power and history play in what was happening in my hometown? Behind the numbers and the maps and the graphs, who were the people –the teachers, the children, the neighbors – who would be affected by the decision to close so many schools? I chased the story to boarded-up schools and dusty library archives, to city hall and to Saturday picnics, to the empty lots where public housing projects once stood and to the brown-brick complexes where they remained. When I felt I had answered one question, it inevitably led me to another.
Bronzeville, a community on the city’s majority-black South Side, saw four schools slated for closure in 2013 (including the school where I’d taught), and since 1999 it has had 16 schools either closed or entered into a “turnaround” process (where all faculty and staff lose their jobs and the school is turned over to a third party to hire new teachers). In some ways Bronzeville could be considered typical of African American communities of our era. The fortunes of the community have risen and fallen with the broader tide of social forces affecting black urban centers across the country, including segregation, housing policy, school policy, and economic trends – what sociologist William Julius Wilson calls “cycles of deprivation”.
At the same time, Bronzeville is special. Beginning about 20 blocks south of downtown Chicago, bounded by Lake Michigan and the Dan Ryan expressway, the region occupies a singular place as Chicago’s historic hub of African American culture: the community was the destination of thousands of migrants heading to Chicago from southern states during the Great Migration and home to luminaries such as Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks. Bronzeville is also special to me. As an African American woman writer born and raised in the city, I have long held the cultural legacy of the community as a source of identity and an inspiration – which is why I felt so fortunate to teach in a school there.
Full Article: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/dec/06/chicago-public-schools-closures-racism-ghosts-in-the-schoolyard-extract
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