Mayor's Town Hall... Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel tells his side of the story in an online ‘conversation,’ while elsewhere others fight school closings
One lone media truck was parked outside Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s “Town Hall” on education at Westinghouse High School on Chicago’s West Side on the evening of Monday, January 23, 2012. The event was “broadcast” live online by the Mayor’s office, but the reporter from Substance and some bloggers who came to cover the event in person were denied admission to the room where the mayor was answering pre-screened questions. Substance photo by David R. Stone.Calling it a “Conversation about Education,” Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel held a live “Facebook Town Hall meeting” on the city’s West Side on the evening of Monday, January 23, 2012. At the same time, the Board of Education was holding hearings downtown on its plans to close two neighborhood schoolsm Price and Reed, both on the city's South Side.
It remains to be seen whether the Board was listening and will take community members’ comments and questions into consideration. The mayor’s Town Hall meeting likewise included some tough questions, but the questions did not cause the mayor to vary from his standard script of calling for a longer school day and longer school year, nor to vary from his reliance on standardized test scores to push his version of school reform.
Students in the broadcast journalism program at Westinghouse High School ran the cameras, and one of them served as a moderator to ask some of the questions, along with another moderator, from WVON radio. Most of the questions had been submitted in advance on a special website opened by the mayor’s office 10 days earlier.
The classroom/broadcast studio at Westinghouse was too small to hold all of the students and parents who had been invited, so many of them watched on a large screen in another classroom. Other viewing screens were set up at several other schools around the city for a live broadcast on an online City Hall channel.
Attendance at the Mayor’s live, online “Town Hall” on the future of Chicago Public Schools was strictly limited. While the January 23, 2012 event could be viewed as it happened via video streaming to “viewing locations” at a few schools around the city, security guards and Chicago Police turned people away from the actual event at Westinghouse High School, unless they were Westinghouse students or parents. Even many of them were did not get to see the mayor in person, but viewed a video feed in a separate classroom on another floor of the building. Even a reporter with official Chicago Police Department media credentials was sent to the upstairs viewing room without meeting the mayor. Substance photo by David R. StoneThe mayor praised Westinghouse High School and its broadcast journalism program, but otherwise he is more interested in college prep programs than vocational ones. Chicago Public Schools has cut many of its vocational programs over the past several years, and the trend apparently will continue under Mayor Emanuel. In response to a question about preparing Chicago high school students for careers, he said that rather than focus on such training in high school, he is encouraging various construction trades to create apprenticeship programs for graduates.
In response to other questions, the mayor reiterated his claim that Chicago schools have one of the shortest school days in the nation, so he won’t back down on his move to what he calls a “full school day” next year. For students, this will mean 7½ hours of school per day, about 90 minutes more than most Chicago schools have now. The mayor also plans to lengthen the school year by two weeks in 2012-13.
Asked how he would fund the extended education and adequately compensate teacher for the extra work, he said negotiations were starting with the Chicago Teachers Union. He claimed that “Our teachers are some of the best paid in the country.” He added that “They deserve it,” but gave no specifics about whether teacher pay would be increased to match the increased minutes in the classroom. He also gave no specifics about where any increased funding might come from.
The format of the “Town Hall” did not allow for follow-up questions.
