Progress Illinois

Last week, Catalyst Chicago publisher Linda Lenz took note of an emerging dialogue among school reformers that contains “distant echoes of the mass brain-storming session that the late Mayor Harold Washington called in the wake of the record-long 1987 teacher strike, which lit the fuse for the school system’s overhaul in 1988.”

Watching hundreds of teachers, students, and neighborhood activists pour out of buses and spill off the sidewalks around the Chicago Public Schools headquarters yesterday to protest the proposed closure or reorganization of 22 schools under Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 initiative, it became clear that Lenz is on to something.

The school reform activists no longer appear to a fractured bunch fighting battles along neighborhood lines. They want a seat at the boardroom table where they can really weigh in on how the district is run. To make that happen, they're pushing for school board elections and working to help Local School Councils hold onto power. The Chi-Town Daily News has been keeping tabs on the emergence of a unified front:

Don Moore, the executive director of Designs for Change, says the protest is the coalition’s kick-off event, and will be followed by other demonstrations [...]

“This coalition is trying to build a political movement collectively among the affected schools and their supporters,” Moore says.

The demonstrators still bring a myriad of agendas -- from retired teachers sticking up for the union to the anti-militarization crowd to frustrated educators and students who just wanted to be heard. But this time the interests don’t seem to be colliding. Brian Roa, a science teacher at Senn High School in Edgewater, told us that they’re bound by a common concern that city officials are “trying to take the public out of education.”

The first battle on that front, the Sun-Times reports, is putting their foot down on Renaissance 2010:

Protesters called for a halt to Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plan to close 70 troubled or half-empty schools and create 100 new ones by 2010, saying there’s no proof the effort is working. They demanded an outside audit.

While we’ve highlighted some promising approaches within the Renaissance 2010 program, the organizers are right that there is so far scant evidence that the new schools are any better than the under-performing institutions they’re supposedly replacing. Meanwhile, the mayor is furiously signing off on charter schools and, at this pace, 50 percent of the school system could be privatized by 2020, according to the Caucus of Rank and File Teachers (CORE), a coalition of teachers union members and community activists. One demonstrator told the Tribune:

“It’s becoming increasingly clear that this is not an education plan, it is a business plan. It is a real estate developer plan that has nothing to do with education,” said Karen Lewis, a teacher at King College Prep.

To get a better sense of the frustration surrounding the initiative, head over to Gaper’s Block and check out the video they’ve posted of an anti-Renaissance 2010 meeting held earlier this month (shot by Labor Beat).

The board will vote on the latest round of school closures next month.