There are so many reasons to celebrate this week’s election results. First, there are the returns from our former home states. In New Hampshire, Chris Pappas becomes the first openly gay member of the US Senate, and both houses of the state legislature turn blue after too many years of destructive right-wing control. In Mississippi, we’re witnessing a potential miracle, if Scott Colom’s slim lead holds. After the gutting of the historic Voting Rights Act by the Supreme Court, to have a Black senator representing the state with the most notorious history of racism is a cosmic joke.
And then there’s Texas, where we’ve been awaiting a Democratic breakthrough after so many disappointing election cycles; it finally happened in a big way. The Democrats swept every single state-wide office from Governor and Senator on down. But what especially warmed my educator’s heart was that Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa ran on a platform supporting public education. Governor Greg Abbot was a leading advocate of vouchers. He raised millions to defeat Republicans from small town and rural Texas who opposed voucher bills to protect their local public schools. In addition, Senator-elect James Talarico taught low-income students in San Antonio. He also supports public schools although the issue was not as central to his campaign as to Hinojosa’s.
In recent years, education and schools have not received much attention in most campaigns with national implications. They were relegated to the local level, although at the state level vouchers almost disappeared from ballots because they were consistently rejected by the public. Abbott had to resort to extreme measures to make the votes go his way, using vast amounts of billionaire money to oust rural Republican legislators opposed to vouchers . The only other education issue that captured the public attention has been Trump’s efforts to hollow out and close the Department of Education. That’s why Hinojosa’s platform was such an important refocusing of voters’ attention on public education, an issue that’s central to such a large segment of the population.
“All politics is local,” said legendary Speaker of the House Tip O’Neil. So, after that quick sprint through our former homes, what’s happening in our present home of 31 years as a result of Tuesday’s voting? Of course, the biggest issue on the ballot was the birth of the first fully elected school board. I’ve written several times about my reservations about this historic change. As I feared, the election became a contest between deep-pocketed special interests – the Chicago Teachers Union on one side and a combination of charter school advocates, anti-union groups and a union at odds with the CTU. The race for the first elected school board president followed those lines. It turned out to be a contest among three flawed candidates, won by the non-CTU candidate.
Although the issue of school closings was not specifically on the ballot, it was one of the defining issues that divided the candidates. I want to take a few moments to talk about this issue, which casts a shadow on so many areas of school politics here. In 2012, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel ordered the closing of 50 neighborhood elementary schools. Although the primary rationale offered for a school’s appearance on the list was underutilization, the explanations drifted to academic underperformance in some cases. Some schools on the original list were removed because they were able to exercise political muscle. What united all these schools was the suddenness of their death notices. There was little to no prior consultation with parent and community groups, not even with the administration of the affected schools until the 11th hour, clearly to minimize the resistance to the decision from above. If you’d like to know more about the impact on communities of the closings, I highly recommend reading Ghosts in the Schoolyard by Dr. Eve Ewing.
The unpopularity of the closings played a significant role in the mayor’s failed re-election bid and led to CPS agreeing to a moratorium on school closings. Now the moratorium is about to expire. In the meantime, the school population in the city has continued to decline, resulting in more underutilized schools, particularly at the high school level, at the same time that CPS budget crisis has deepened. The CTU candidates ran on a no-closings platform, while the new school board president and others maintained an openness to lifting the moratorium.
I’d like to make a modest proposal about future closings, based on my own experience. I was deeply involved in the creation of a union-backed charter high school in CPS. For complicated reasons, the location of the school changed several times, each time having to establish itself in a different community. With every new move, the school population declined to the point where we no longer felt we could offer our students a robust high school experience – no extracurricular activities, limited course selections, inadequate support services – and we unilaterally decided to close.
Currently, a number of high schools are serving very small populations in buildings designed for much larger student bodies. If there are to be new closings, I think they should be concentrated in the high school sector. Wherever it’s possible, consolidations should be explored. The impact on communities is going to be less severe than what Ewing described for elementary schools because a large percentage of CPS high school students are already attending schools other than their designated neighborhood schools. Whatever elementary school closings may be considered should require more consultation and collaboration with the affected schools and communities. No more top-down 2,000 pound bombs dropped suddenly, as was the case in 2012.
Good luck to the newly elected school board. I wish them well, while maintaining a healthy skepticism about their ability to overcome the enormous obstacles the system faces during their tenure.
