On the ground at Gage Park High School
Substance. The following letter was sent to the Chicago Sun-Times after today's unanimous Board vote. What a travesty. (Deborah Lynch).
Daley/Huberman Class Size Increases: On the Ground at Gage Park High School
The picket signs — one reading "We teach students, not sardines!" — could have been from June 2010 after the Chicago Board of Education voted to raise class size, while retaining an enormous patronage bureaucracy at 125 S. Clark St. and elsewhere. But the protest above took place in August 2006, when Chicago Schools Chief Executive Officer Arne Duncan ordered Gage Park Principal Martin McGreal to take in hundreds of extra students, even though Gage Park was already overcrowded. Duncan fired McGreal from his principal's job for "insubordination," and the overcrowding continued. Above, Deborah Lynch (left) helped lead the pickets at Gage Park on August 31, 2006. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.The Daley/Huberman decision to close their budget gap on the backs of Chicago’s school children is a travesty that Mayor Daley should pay for in his upcoming reelection. CPS staff know, and Huberman himself knows, that there were many other places he could have cut other than making our children suffer, literally suffer, through a year (who knows how many more) of their precious education.
Let’s look at my school, Gage Park High School, a neglected high poverty neighborhood high school which has already been set up for failure by past policies. As a non-magnet, non-selective enrollment, neighborhood high school we are unfortunately a school of last resort. The highest achieving students with good parental support don’t come here, leaving us with very few top students who could be role models. We must take everyone else. And we do. We also must take the expelled students from our neighborhood charter schools, private schools and jail schools.
We are overcrowded, have one social worker for 1700 students, have four Board-funded security guards to control those 1700 students and — no surprise — are on probation. But according to CPS, the media and the business community, we are the problem — and CPS continues to close schools like ours and be lauded for it. (Bradwell Elementary, one of the schools closed this year had an astonishing 74 percent mobility rate and Daley/Huberman combine just replaced all the staff there; their only crime committing themselves to a struggling school in a very tough neighborhood.)
Like most of Chicago's general high schools, Gage Park High School (above) has been sabotaged by the Daley administration for years. Most observers now know that the hostility of the Daley administration and his hand-picked "CEOs" comes from a drive to completely destroy and privatize public education, first in Chicago, and now, with the appointment of Arne Duncan as U.S. Secretary of Education, across the USA using the same dirty tricks that were used by Duncan against schools like Gage Park back in 2006. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.Being on probation is also a disincentive for new teachers as well as students. Who would want to come to a school which could be closed for low test scores, never mind that the students and staff were set up for this failure by the lack resources, support and appreciation? Oh, but our school is forced to participate in an un-researched high school reform program teachers don’t want, and we are forced to pay $350,000 annually to for-profit companies for it — funds that could have gone toward keeping our staff.
In large part because of these tough conditions, about a dozen Gage teachers decided to leave this year and gave notice. That was sad enough, given what they had each accomplished and given to this school community. Now come the class size layoffs which disproportionately affect younger teachers. We are now facing the loss if 12 more of our staff members, teachers who have bought homes, started families, invested in graduate courses to advance themselves, believing they had a job.
Several of them are already award winning and board certified teachers. Others are coaches of championship teams and faculty sponsors of such initiatives as the yearbook and art contests. The difference these professionals have made at Gage Park High school is incredible and literally immeasurable. It doesn’t show up on the Huberman value added, data-driven drivel that passes for analysis and “rationale” for closing yet another struggling, high poverty minority school, but it is a treasure for our students.
It’s like a wake around here these days. It’s hard to comfort colleagues who are leaving through no fault of their own. And it’s hard to comfort the students who are also shell shocked that so many of their favorite teachers are leaving. We have a community here, something the CPS brass don’t understand because they’ve never worked in a school, a community that many of our students depend on even more than more advantaged kids because of their own tough circumstances. Our students are the pawns and the victims of class size increases which are certain to hurt them. They deserved better, so much better.
Deborah Lynch, Teacher, Gage Park High School, Chicago IL, Past President, Chicago Teachers union (2001-2004).
