Chicago Public Schools CEO, Arne Duncan, this week announced his plan to close eight underperforming CPS schools, while dismissing all of these schools' teachers and administrators, as a solution to the schools' "underperformance," based on current NCLB standards.While this may seem like a radically bold and student-focused move, it is nothing more than a political stunt designed to demonstrate District effort at the expense of these latest scapegoated victims.Of course, the schools being closed are each located in some of the most depraved areas of the city and the nation, where crime is rampant and drug use is commonplace.Still, instead of rewarding these dedicated educators with "combat" pay who could have surely found safer and more desirable positions in the suburbs, they are now being cited as the cause of the problem with their students' learning difficulties.What is being further implied is that the students would actually benefit from replacing this large group of experienced educators with others right out of college.

What is most disturbing to me about this proposal is my firsthand knowledge of how this effort is being predicated on one enormous implied LIE!That is, the public's assumption that each of Chicago's 600+ public schools are being afforded equal facilities, materials and resources.Otherwise, dismissing teachers for "insufficient teaching" who were denied equal resources to that of their CPS colleagues at other schools would be illegal, right?I can only hope the leaders of the Chicago Teachers' Union are reading this.

As I have written before, while CPS and other American school systems appear to comply with the School Report Card Act requirements designed to provide parents with specific information regarding their children's schools, in the case of CPS, the data provided is particularly meaningless.As I have previously explained, while school-specific data is reported annually regarding each school's demographics and test scores, ALL information regarding per pupil expenditures, class sizes and teacher-pupil ratios is reported using only the DISTRICT AVERAGE.It is, thereby, implied that the District's resources are being distributed equally throughout all of its schools, which is simply not the case, with CPS resources being distributed, instead, based more on politics than actual need.

I am not merely imagining this inequity.I witnessed it firsthand on countless occasions as an Illinois State Board of Education monitor of Chicago Public Schools.I discovered time and again in Chicago's poorest neighborhoods schools with inadequate lighting, horrible acoustics, dripping ceilings, broken windows, and teachers, with limited quantities of textbooks from the 70's, having to beg for any additional materials or resources.In one school on Chicago's south side I even witnessed students being required to request toilet tissue from their teacher before going to use the washroom, for which they were afforded a meager two sheets each.Meanwhile, sometimes on the same day, I would visit a school on Chicago's north side that could have been mistaken for any well-kept suburban school, with gleaming facilities and closets filled with new textbooks and other teaching materials.

Ironically, at the same time Mr. Duncan is publicly blaming his teachers for having students with limited resources and significant personal setbacks who are unable to progress according to President Bush's expectations, he has made another stunning announcement.He now plans to initiate residential schools for Chicago students residing with parents who are failing to provide them adequate climates for learning and growth.He professes that CPS will never be able to reach some of these children without exclusive management of them 24/7. (A noble, but likely unenforceable premise.)He describes a typical inner-city scenario wherein a child's father is in prison and his mother is addicted to drugs.Mr. Duncan plans to equip these boarding schools with state-of-the-art learning and developmental resources.

So, maybe he does get it.Maybe he does understand that as long as certain negative influences are in place, no teachers, particularly those being forced to teach in equally-disparate conditions, can be expected to achieve optimal results with these students.So then why, with certified teacher shortages at an all time high, is he concurrently punishing some of his own educators for failing to accomplish what he has now acknowledged cannot be accomplished?One principal of a newly doomed school described how this was only her first year in this role, and that gains had been made for the first time. But, to use typical inner-city "street" vernacular:Mr. Duncan "is not trying to hear that."He is more concerned with making it appear that he has taken radical, even if illogical, steps toward school reform.

I have long proposed that School Report Cards be truly school-specific, so that parents can better understand their choices when given the opportunity to select another school for their child.It's not fair for school district officials to withhold information from parents regarding unequal distribution of resources for their own gain.Nor is it fair for State Boards of Education to let them.It's also not fair for all students, teachers and schools to be held to one achievement standard unless sufficient supports are in place to meet the actual needs of all students.The reality is that extreme poverty fuels high crime and drug abuse, and these factors are concentrated in certain neighborhoods and not others, as was eloquently depicted in Jonathon Koziol's "Savage Inequalities" of the schools in East St. Louis.Schools located in these impoverished areas contain abnormally high numbers of students with learning and behavioral deficits, due to poor or absent parenting and inadequate nutrition and health care, as would be expected.Nevertheless, these are often the schools afforded the fewest resources to meet these needs, while States and districts hold these schools to the same expectation percentage of special needs identification.Even schools with fewer needy students, but having inadequate budgets, continue to be compared, via NCLB, with schools whose resources are unlimited and their budgets astronomical.This "apples vs. oranges" scorekeeping of schools' test performance is a purely self-serving exercise in futility that does nothing to benefit students or improve the quality of American education.

Published January 29, 2008