It's always School Reform Groundhog Day at Chicago's Orr School

[Hannah Bell]

Only in a city that has a municipal and media version of dementia could the latest Orr High School story be a form of "news" with most of the context left out. During Spring Cleaning week, WBEZ listeners were treated to the most recent sage of Orr, which in its latest iteration is a "Turnaround" run by President Barack Obama's favorite corporate turnaround specialists, the Academy for Urban School Leadership (AUSL). Again.

Following the traditional corporate school reform narrative for Chicago (one that dates back to the original school reform fraud exposed by Substance in 1984, the Marva Collins Hoax, which made it as far as CBS "60 Minutes" before the facts came out), the young white reporter wanders around the all-black school on a tour hosted by the energetic black reformer. The reporter then narratives the story from the point of view of the dog-and-pony show prepared carefully for him prior to his arrival, and the story becomes "news" for the benefit of the latest corporate version of fixing things in the schools...

The story of the 16 years since Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley got complete control of Chicago's public schools can't be told by corporate media, not in Chicago and not from anywhere else...So Chicago is going to remain in a kind of school reform Ground Hog Day. That's because corporate school reform is a failure in everything except cheap marketing tricks...

And so, thanks to public radio Chicago, we get the latest iteration of the lies that have been coming out of Chicago since the day in 1996 when Paul Vallas (Chicago's first Great White Hope Chief Executive Officer) declared Orr on "probation". Or from the next year, when it got "reconstituted." Until a couple of years later, when it was ready to be "reengineered." Before the dawn of the 21st Century, when Orr was going to be subjected to "Intervention." In November 2006, Orr was being saved by the then flavor-of-the-month corporate reform formula called "small schools..." Until one of the smalls was moved out (to save it; it was the military small school, Phoenix, which was released from Orr and moved to the Grant School building so that Orr could be destroyed — and its teachers and administrators humiliated and fired — by another twist of corporate reform...). So that's left out, too. Phoenix was once a part of the small schools "Orr Campus." Until Mayor Daley and his corporate reform guys decided to destroy that version of reform and put in AUSL, the current flavor of the month.

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2217§ion=Article


There is an interesting mention of Chicago's "Clout List" for admission into its selective entry schools, too. I.e. the rich & important get special preference, kind of like Bush's legacy admission to Yale.

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=2217§ion=Article

[madrchsod]

1. reccomend...here`s another chicago based site...

http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/

i subscribe to his emails.