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Paul Vallas’s trail of school privatization • The TRiiBE [1]
['Jim Daley']
Date: 2023-03-26 12:42:59+00:00
On April 4, Chicago voters will decide between two candidates with starkly different visions for the city and its 340,000 public school students. One is Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a former public school teacher and seasoned organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The other is Paul Vallas, the CEO of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) from 1995 to 2002 and a longtime proponent of charter schools in districts he’s managed around the country.
The election is a flashpoint not just in the struggle for the direction CPS will take, but also in the battle for the future of public schools nationwide: whether it will be one of school choice—which broadly includes expanding open enrollment programs, vouchers and charter schools—or reinvestment in traditional neighborhood schools staffed by unionized teachers. The battle is one that Vallas has often found himself at the center of in the cities where he has been a school district administrator.
Between stints as an administrator, Vallas occasionally sought higher office: he ran for Illinois governor in 2002, flirted with running again in 2010, ran for lieutenant governor in 2014 and first ran for mayor of Chicago in 2019. Now, running on a law-and-order campaign that capitalized on white voters’ fears of violent crime, Vallas is poised to take charge not just of a school district but America’s third-largest city.
Mercedes Schneider is a longtime educator who has written extensively about the privatization of education and published three books on the topic. “He was always, I think, trying to get back to Chicago,” she told The TRiiBE.
After departing Chicago in 2002, Vallas ran Philadelphia’s school district for five years, then took over the New Orleans Recovery School District from 2007 to 2011, and ran the Bridgeport, CT school district from December 2011 to November 2013. In each city, he opened charter schools, promoted military schools, and expanded standardized testing and zero-tolerance disciplinary policies. He also ran school districts in Haiti and Chile between 2010 and 2012.
“He liked not answering to anyone,” said Schneider, who has taught in St. Tammany Parish, just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans proper, since 2007. “Wherever he goes, he leaves and there’s questions, and a mess, and promises didn’t pan out.”
Vallas first began championing charter schools and standardized testing in Chicago in 1995. The Republican-controlled state legislature had just given total control of CPS to then-Mayor Richard M. Daley, who appointed Vallas, his budget director, as the school district’s first CEO. It was an unusual pick: previously, the district had been led by superintendents, not chief executive officers, and they had backgrounds in education, not finance. Vallas was also the first white CPS administrator since the district was desegregated in 1981.
His approach to managing the school district reflected his fiscal background: he balanced the budget, partly by redirecting tax revenues that had previously been exclusively dedicated to the teachers pension fund to its general education fund instead. He also took out $666 million in capital bonds that will cost the city $1.5 billion with interest, according to a newly released report.
Vallas greatly expanded standardized testing and non-neighborhood schools like charters and selective enrollment high schools, and he started 13 International Baccalaureate programs in public high schools. His tenure also coincided with the institution of zero-tolerance discipline policies and the opening of some of the district’s first public military schools, the Carver Military Academy in Altgeld Gardens and the Chicago Military Academy in Bronzeville on the city’s South Side.
On the 2023 campaign trail in Chicago, Vallas has said he’d use militarized charter schools and ROTC programs as incubators for future law enforcement officers. At the Women Take Action Alliance Mayoral Forum on March 11 at the Chicago Temple in the heart of the Loop, Vallas and Johnson were asked how they would recruit more women to the Chicago Police Department (CPD). Johnson answered first; the solution was to “create a working environment that’s favorable to women,” he said. “That’s in every sector. Unfortunately, we have relied so heavily on law enforcement to do and handle every single dynamic, much like we do with teachers. And that’s why we’re having a tough time recruiting and retaining educators as well. We have to improve the conditions in which individuals are being asked to serve. As mayor of the city of Chicago, I’m going to tell you the truth. We’re going to create better environments so that law enforcement can do their job and not someone else’s.”
Vallas took a different approach. “The way you recruit in a diversified way is real simple,” he said. “We have 10,000 young people in ROTC programs. I opened seven military and first responder high schools in Chicago. And there are, I think, 40 ROTC high schools, and 46 percent of those 10,000 students are women. We can provide a direct pipeline from the ROTC programs” to CPD.
A 2021 Chalkbeat Chicago investigation found CPS students at nine predominantly Black and Latiné schools were being automatically enrolled in JROTC without their knowledge or consent. The report noted that at the time 94 percent of CPS’s nearly 8,000 JROTC cadets were Black or Latiné, despite making up only 83 percent of the district-wide student body.
Militarized public and charter schools are “ways to take urban, impoverished kids and get them in the military,” Maria Pereira, a former member of the elected Bridgeport school board who clashed with Vallas during his time there, told The TRiiBE. “You’ll never see something like that in a white, affluent neighborhood.”
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[1] Url:
https://thetriibe.com/2023/03/paul-vallas-trail-of-school-privatization-chicago/
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