BY HANK REICHMAN
For some time now, despite the rash of school shootings and the growing number of accidental shootings associated with the unfettered dissemination of firearms, violent crime in most urban areas in the U.S. has been declining for decades. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, after peaking in 1991, “crime has dropped precipitously in the last quarter-century.” From 1991 to 2016, the murder rate fell by roughly half, from 9.8 killings per 100,000 to 5.3, GOP blathering about MS-13 notwithstanding. The most noteworthy recent exception, however, has been Chicago, which in 2016 accounted for 43.7 percent of a national increase over the previous year in urban murders. Just last weekend in Chicago, 71 people were shot, 12 of them fatally.
The causes of such violence in the city are surely complex and multifold, but one factor that is finally getting attention has been the impact of the privatization of Chicago’s public schools and the closures of city elementary and high schools in poor and minority communities. Here’s how Lance Williams, professor of education at Northeastern Illinois University, put it on a recent PBS News Hour broadcast:
Well, you’re seeing the violence on the West Side and the South Sides of Chicago because, about 20 years ago, in the early 2000s, the city of Chicago implemented some very, very bad public policy.
The most damaging of those policies was the policy of Renaissance 2010, when Chicago basically privatized, through charter schools, neighborhood public elementary and high schools. It became a serious problem, because many of the high schools and communities that had long traditions of street organizations caused young African-American males to be afraid to leave out of their communities, going to new schools throughout the city of Chicago.
So, basically, from the early 2000s, too many young African-American males haven’t been going to school, meaning that they don’t have life prospects. They can’t get jobs. They’re self-medicated to deal with the stress in their community. And it’s driving a lot of the violence.
Tamar Manasseh, a community activist with Mothers and Men Against Senseless Killings, added this about the Englewood neighborhood on the same broadcast: “Englewood will not have any public schools in the fall. And these kids that Professor Williams spoke of, they will have no options of a public high school in Englewood. But yet the police have all the resources.”
Here’s the background: In 1995, Mayor Richard M. Daley introduced marketplace school choice by adding privatized charter schools. The “theory” was that In a climate of competition, the school district would encourage families to choose a school. Then the district would phase out “weak” schools and schools that would become under-enrolled due to competition. The school district would keep on authorizing new charter schools to keep marketplace competition alive. Renaissance 2010, an extension of the program, was managed by none other than Arne Duncan, who, with respect to charters and privatization, would soon become a sort of “Betsy DeVos lite” as President Obama’s Secretary of Education.
Many poor neighborhoods on the South and West Sides of Chicago were already losing population, however, and the expansion of competitive school choice accelerated under-enrollment in neighborhood schools. In May, 2013, over the strong opposition of many community activists and the Chicago Teachers Union, Chicago Public Schools closed 50 “under-enrolled” schools in these neighborhoods. where this year three more high schools are being shuttered and then consolidated in 2019 into one new high school.
The most thorough study of the impact of the school closures was conducted by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research.
When the closures took place at the end of the 2012-13 school year, nearly 12,000 students were attending the 47 elementary schools that closed that year, close to 17,000 students were attending the 48 designated welcoming schools, and around 1,100 staff were employed in the closed schools. . . . Our findings show that the reality of school closures was much more complex than policymakers anticipated…. Interviews with affected students and staff revealed major challenges with logistics, relationships and school culture… Closed school staff and students came into welcoming schools grieving and, in some cases, resentful that their schools closed while other schools stayed open. Welcoming school staff said they were not adequately supported to serve the new population and to address resulting divisions. Furthermore, leaders did not know what it took to be a successful welcoming school… Staff and students said that it took a long period of time to build new school cultures and feel like a cohesive community. . . .
When schools closed, it severed the longstanding social connections that families and staff had with their schools and with one another, resulting in a period of mourning… The intensity of the feelings of loss were amplified in cases where schools had been open for decades, with generations of families attending the same neighborhood school. Losing their closed schools was not easy and the majority of interviewees spoke about the difficulty they had integrating and socializing into the welcoming schools. Even though welcoming school staff and students did not lose their schools per se, many also expressed feelings of loss because incorporating a large number of new students required adjustments… Creating strong relationships and building trust in welcoming schools after schools closed was difficult.. Displaced staff and students, who had just lost their schools, had to go into unfamiliar school environments and start anew. Welcoming school communities also did not want to lose or change the way their schools were previously.
The study found that students affected by school closures experienced negative learning effects, especially students from closed schools. The largest negative impact of school closures was on the test scores of students from closed
schools; their scores were lower than expected the year of the announcement.
“For every school you close, for every teacher that loses a job, that’s one more of these thugs or gangbangers that are created,” said Tamar Manasseh. “When you remove resources, what do you expect? This is what you will get.”
There is much talk among educational “reformers” like Duncan about ending “the school to prison pipeline.” But it would seem that by closing public schools these same reformers may be “solving” the problem simply by emptying classrooms, creating a new “streets to prison pipeline” in the process — except for the fact that no one has yet been arrested for any of the 71 shootings in Chicago last weekend.
