Progress Illinois

With less than a week to go before the Chicago Board of Education votes on whether or not to authorize six new charter schools, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) held a round of public hearings last night. School reform advocates have long complained that CPS handpicks which charters will get the green light long before the hearings begin. And the opaque nature of the process generated a lot of criticism last year.  As a result, officials are treading more lightly as they move forward this year.

Unlike in the previous years of Mayor Daley's Renaissance 2010 program, only a handful of new charters are being considered this time around. Still, CPS chief Ron Huberman is recommending that an additional 8,130 charters seats be made available next fall, according to an analysis by the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE). Alexander Russo reports that the established private school operators appear to have a leg-up:

Just six new schools are being recommended for approval -- most of them add-on campuses of existing networks.  Fourteen did a full application only to get rejected.  Meanwhile, a slew of existing contract schools are vying for charterization thanks to the newly lifted charter cap.

Contract schools -- which are also privately-managed but allow teachers to join collective bargaining under the Chicago Teacher's Union -- began to spring up when CPS nears the cap on the charter schools (originally set at 30). Regular readers may recall that the General Assembly agreed to lift that cap last spring, effectively allowing the number of Chicago charters to double. Under that same legislation, lawmakers also agreed to allow these schools to hire non-certified teachers to fill 25 percent of their classrooms. Tim King, founder of the all-boys Urban Prep on the city's West Side, tells Catalyst that he's among those hoping to transition from contract to charter status this year so he will have the "same freedoms as charter schools" (i.e., the ability to hire non-traditional, uncertified staff). That has members of CORE -- a grassroots, pro-labor coalition -- justifiably upset. "These so-called reform efforts have nothing to do with reform," high school teacher and CORE spokesman Kenzo Shibata tells us.  "They're just a way of busting our union."

Indeed, am influential report recently revealed that there is no evidence that Mayor Daley’s school “reform” program is actually improving district performance. Not only is academic achievement flat, but the Consortium for Chicago School Research reports that a vast majority of the elementary students uprooted between 2001 and 2006 were merely shuffled into other failing schools. No wonder CPS has been so secretive about the closing process.

Shibata describes the school board's vote on the latest charters as the first of a 12-round fight. The second round will come in January as more school closure recommendations are announced. That's when Chicago Democratic State Rep. Cynthia Soto's hard-fought battle to bring transparency and create clear criteria over the closure process will likely come to a head.

In the meantime, CORE is setting its sights on overturning a 1995 state law that gave Mayor Daley control of Chicago's schools in the first place. "Labor law doesn’t allow a company to close down a union plant and open up a non-union one across the street," teacher and CORE member Jackson Potter writes in a release, "but that’s exactly what Chicago Public Schools has done for the last six years without pause."

Stay tuned ...