Black Chicago Teachers Win Discrimination Lawsuit Against Arne Duncan's Mass Firings

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.blackagendareport.com/?q=content/black-chicago-teachers-win-lawsuit-against-arne-duncans-mass-firing-black-teachers

Wed, 10/06/2010 - 18:48 — Bruce A. Dixon



Back in June of 2009, BAR told the story of activist teachers who sued the Chicago Public Schools to reverse the firings of hundreds of committed, experienced, mostly black and female teachers in dozens of schools and their replacement with less experienced, younger, whiter teachers at lower salaries. This pattern of discriminatory firings and school closings has since been replicated across the country, and is a core element the Obama administration’s education policy. Since then, some of those same teachers have won the leadership of Chicago's 30,000 strong teachers union. Earlier this week, a US District Court judge ruled in their favor.

Black Chicago Teachers Win Lawsuit Against Arne Duncan's Mass Firing of Black Teachers

By BAR managing editor Bruce A. Dixon

As Pauline Lippman explains at length elsewhere in this issue of BAR, the bipartisan quest to first undermine, and then to privatize public education has made educational policy a crucial battleground in the struggle for democracy in the U.S. As one of the laboratories for neoliberal school reform, my home town of Chicago owes the nation a profound apology. There, City Hall assumed mayoral control over public schools in the mid 1990s, replacing the professional educators at its helm with a “CEO” and flunkies from the mayor's staff.

A decade earlier under reform mayor Harold Washington, Chicagoans won locally elected parent councils with teacher representation, democratic bodies with veto over principals' contracts and the expenditures of some Title 1 funds. The most economical way around these local democratic institutions, City Hall decided, was to dissolve entire public schools, firing their staffs wholesale and replacing them with charters and other schools not subject to the law, or accountable to parents.

Paul Vallas, who went on to wreck public education in Philadelphia and New Orleans was the first Chicago school “CEO.” Arne Duncan, now the Obama administration’s Secretary of Education, was the second. Duncan closed dozens of schools and summarily fired hundreds of teachers in a “turnaround” strategy that has become national policy under the Obama Administration.

FULL story at link.

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. "schools not subject to the law, or accountable to parents"

Why does any thinking person believe this is a good idea??

[Dragonfli]

2. They think in terms of profit and new markets, not "good".

If it opens new markets and creats profit for the privateers then it doesn't matter to them if the ideas are good or bad, in their eyes money is beyond good or bad.

Chidren are becoming commodities - it's the neo-liberal way.