Last month, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel attempted to signal a difference in education policy between his administration and the incoming Donald Trump administration in a Washington Post opinion essay. With Betsy DeVos as Trump鈥檚 pick for U.S. secretary of education, Emanuel wanted to demonstrate his opposition to her pro-privatization agenda through his support for both public education and charter schools.
The problem, however, is that there is very little daylight separating Emanuel鈥檚 agenda from that of DeVos, and his model for the Chicago public school system has denied hundreds of thousands of students adequate public education through budget cuts, school closings, and other actions.
In a city with nearly 800 homicides and more than 4,000 shootings last year, Emanuel refuses to fund wraparound services for students living with this trauma. His while we have more than 18,000 homeless students in the city鈥檚 school district, according to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Special education cuts in the public schools have left our most vulnerable students without the services and resources they so desperately need. Seventy-five percent of public schools in Chicago do not have libraries, according to the Chicago Teachers Union (which I serve as president).
Emanuel led the largest mass public school closing ever in one U.S. city鈥攎ostly in African-American and Latino communities鈥攁nd has . He also is known for his Rolodex full of prominent businessmen and wealthy entrepreneurs who have funded charter school privatization, which set the stage for the aforementioned closures.
Not surprisingly, the only schools Emanuel celebrates in his opinion piece are charter schools. One of them is part of the Noble Network of Charter Schools, which named one of its campuses Rauner College Prep after Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner. The multimillionaire governor, who supports Trump鈥檚 nomination of DeVos as secretary of education, is also on record saying that half of Chicago鈥檚 public school teachers are 鈥渧irtually illiterate鈥� and that half of the city鈥檚 principals are 鈥渋ncompetent.鈥�
A recent lawsuit forced Emanuel to release more than 2,000 personal emails, which revealed that Rauner鈥攑rior to being elected governor in 2014鈥攚as included in education discussions, as were billionaires Ken Griffin (the main donor to both Emanuel鈥檚 and Rauner鈥檚 election campaigns) and Penny Pritzker (who was a handpicked member of Emanuel鈥檚 Chicago school board before serving as the U.S. secretary of commerce under President Barack Obama).
The very people driving education policy ... are blocking the most effective education reform available: equitable funding."
Both DeVos and the billionaires backing the mayor鈥檚 education policies apparently believe that because of their wealth, they have the right to impose radical disruption upon low-income students of color and their public school classrooms. Though most of DeVos鈥� charter and voucher school reforms have had mediocre results at best, she has now been nominated for the highest education policymaking position in the land. Similarly, Emanuel extols the virtues of the Noble Network of Charter Schools, which has an atrocious record of expelling African-American students at a rate 7.6 times higher than the Chicago school system鈥檚 average for noncharter public schools, according to the group Voices of Youth in Chicago Education. The network also forced teachers to impose draconian rules demanding students pay exorbitant fines or serve detention for innocuous behavior.
The very people driving education policy鈥擡manuel, DeVos, and the phalanx of wealthy philanthropists subsidizing their ideas through the campaign-finance system鈥攁re blocking the most effective education reform available: equitable funding. A new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that when looking at the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the one test taken by representative samples of all schoolchildren in the country, the states that invested the most money in their lowest-income school districts saw the greatest academic improvement.
The Chicago Teachers Union supports efforts in the Illinois legislature to secure revenue to fund education, and we demand that Mayor Emanuel act immediately to invest in our schools by releasing additional surplus funds from tax-increment financing, reinstituting the corporate head tax on large corporations, closing carried-interest loopholes, supporting a millionaire鈥檚 tax, and other means. Our vision for the schools Chicago鈥檚 students deserve includes high-quality, well-resourced facilities with enforceable class-size limits, funding for special education, libraries, wraparound services, and the arts. And these schools must work in partnership with parents, who are an integral part of their children鈥檚 education and upon whom our members rely.
Sadly, those upon whom Rahm Emanuel relies for his education policy efforts are uber-rich individuals like Betsy DeVos, who never saw a private school they didn鈥檛 prefer over a public one. As Sen. Bernie Sanders suggested in her Senate confirmation hearing, DeVos鈥� nomination as the education secretary is likely connected to her family鈥檚 estimated $200 million in donations to the Republican Party, not a reflection of her commitment to high quality education for all.
When billionaires and educational entrepreneurs can assume the highest office for schools in the land only to dismantle our school systems, the most vulnerable students will suffer the most. Until the time comes when the mayor and the secretary-designate eschew their ties to big money and demand that their wealthy backers pay their fair share in taxes, the school privatization agenda will remain the central pillar in a litany of failed school reform efforts.
