Bob Simpson's Open Salon Blog

Why is Corporate  America inciting violence in Chicago?

Wed, 8 May 2013 10:05:43 -0400

“At times like this when CPS [Chicago Public Schools] is making an attempt to close the most schools at one time in the nation, I don’t think you need another Columbine or Connecticut or another suicide because of bullying.” Sherise McDaniel, Chicago Public School parent

Corporate America has declared war on public education by closing schools, privatizing schools, gaining control over curriculum, imposing a barrage of hi-stakes testing, limiting citizen involvement and attacking teachers unions. The worst attacks are against working class education.

Corporate America sees no reason to educate working class students beyond the most basic level. They are seen as nothing more than future low paid drones in a brutal dog-eat-dog-cat-eat-mouse economy. The war against public education is a class war being waged by the wealthy against a growing working class resistance.

It is a New Civil War.

Chicago has become a major front in this New Civil War. Every war has its battlefields, but in Chicago the New Civil War battlefields don’t have names like Bull Run, Antietam, Gettsyburg or Fort Pillow. Instead they have names like Henson, Chalmers, Paderewski, Bethune, Pope, Manierre and Stewart. These are just a few of the Chicago public schools slated for closings and school actions.

The term “New Civil War” is not intended to be a metaphor.

The Chicago Public Schools (CPS) school closings, consolidations and turnarounds have already cost human casualties with actual deaths and injuries. Chicago is a deeply divided city where gang and turf battles are grim realities in many of its working class communities. In this war on public education, CPS is taking full advantage of these tragic schisms, making the defense of public schools even more difficult.

Across the city with the help of organizations like the Chicago Teachers Union and the Grassroots Education Movement, thousands of Chicagoans have declared their opposition to the assault on their childrens’ education.

127 arrested in protest against school closings. I was among them.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel is in full control of the public schools and enthusiastically represents corporate interests. CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett of the Chicago Public Schools(CPS), answers directly to Rahm.

CPS currently is proposing 61 school actions involving a total of 133 schools. Students from schools that are closed must go to what CPS calls “welcoming schools”, whence the figure of 133 affected schools. Most of these proposed school actions would take place in working class neighborhoods of color, many of them predominantly African-American. Some of these school actions could have deadly consequences.

Does Rahm Emanuel want bloodshed along Division Street?

“We live in a city of Capulets and Montagues. We can either tell the truth about that or not, and in this case, GDs and Vice Lords. That’s our Capulets and Montagues.”— Karen Lewis, President Chicago Teachers Union Local 1

Probably the most egregious example of possible deadly consequences is the proposed closing of George Manierre Elementary School on the Near North Side. CPS is proposing to send Manierre students to Jenner Elementary Academy of the Arts across the (aptly named) Division Street.

George Manierre School on the Near North Side of Chicago

Surrounded by mostly white affluent homeowners, the last remaining low income black residents have long been divided by a tragic feud growing out of Chicago's traditional racialized poverty. The conflict dates back to the days of the Cabrini-Green housing project and attempts by the Gangster Disciples and the Vice Lords to gain control over the now demolished hi-rise section.

There are people on both sides of the Division Street boundary who want to bring peace to the fractured community, but warn that will take time and resources, two things that the City is unwilling to provide. It’s not even really about being a gang member, because just living on opposite sides of Division Street is enough to become an “enemy”.

Alderman Walter Burnett, who grew up in Cabrini-Green represents the ward:

“We’re dealing with a generational curse. Some of these kid’s parents were killed by other kid's parents. That’s the real stuff in that neighborhood…Kids don’t get along. The ones from Manierre can’t even cross the street. Every time they go over to Seward Park on the Jenner side they get beat up. You’ve got grandparents and parents who’ve got all this revenge stuff simmering, and it lives on with the kids. I’m concerned about the kids' safety, too. If I lived there I wouldn’t let my kid go to that other school.”

Ten year old Dominique Brooks was one of the victims. She was beaten bloody by 8 girls for being on the wrong side of Division Street. According to Karolyn Harris who intervened in the attack, Dominique could have been killed. At a school closing hearing Dominique Brooks said in tears,”Please don’t send us to Jenner. I beg you, please.”

I attended the final CPS hearing about closing Manierre. I heard reports of Facebook threats and of a hit list being circulated. Residents do not view these as childish pranks. Sherise McDaniel said quite seriously that if Manierre and Jenner are merged:

“The classrooms will be disrupted because of the different gangs and family feuds. And I can guarantee you that if children fight, the parents will too. I would also like to let you know that these parents do use guns. At times like this when CPS is making an attempt to close the most school at one time in the nation, I don’t think you need another Columbine or Connecticut or another suicide because of bullying.”

In February of 2009 the Chicago City Council passed a resolution in support of the UN Rights of the Child. This means that is the responsibility of the city government and the people of Chicago to protect children from all forms of violence. Chicago has failed to live up to this responsibility because its policies of racial segregation, disinvestment in communities and its destructive school actions.

At the final hearing William Fleming testified how he went to the UN to file complaints about the human rights abuses associated with school closings saying:

“These are child soldiers we are creating. They are not joining gangs. We are forcing them into gangs. We are forcing them to choose a side of violence because of bad decisions that WE have made.”

Several parents at the final hearing said that if Manierre must be closed for financial reasons, why can’t students go to some of the predominantly white high-performing schools in the neighborhood like Newberry Math and Science Academy or LaSalle Language Academy? Wouldn’t advancing desegregation be a better alternative than more violence against children?

Just today I read that the independent hearing officer who heard this and other testimony opposes Manierre’s closing. The Board of Education will make the final decision later this month.

The human cost of this New Civil War against public education

Chicago has seen what can happen with ill-advised school actions. Derrion Albert was beaten to death in 2009 near Fenger High School as a result of a consolidation. What one observer called an “an explosion of violence and disruption” occurred at Clemente High School when CPS closed Austin High School and many of its students ended up at Clemente. Three students were shot and killed amidst the social chaos.

According to one prominent South Side school activist, Hadiya Pendleton was killed last January because of a rivalry between two gangs that grew out of school consolidations in the Bronzeville community. Pendleton, an honors student who had no gang affiliations, had just returned from performing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Counselors, social workers and psychologists report seeing students with symptoms of PTSD, something I also observed during my years teaching in a South Side Catholic high school. Extreme stress is a dagger into the heart of a person’s immune system because of the emotional damage it does and it can result in early death. It’s life during wartime and CPS is fanning the flames.

Old-timers may remember the FBI’s COINTELPRO plan back in 1969 to trigger an all-out war between the Chicago Black Panthers and the powerful Black P. Stone street gang through planting false rumors. The whole charade was not designed to end the criminal activities of the Stones, but to sabotage the black liberation movement in Chicago and further disrupt efforts by black Chicago to end white supremacy in the city.

This was at a time when the Panthers were building a revolutionary multi-racial alliance with working class latino and white organizations. This could easily have become a war that spilled outside of the segregated boundaries of black Chicago. Fortunately leaders of the Panthers and the Stones figured out what was going on and the plot failed.

Frankly, I don’t see much difference between what the FBI did then and what CPS is doing now. CPS is willing to watch people die to fulfill its agenda. A large part of that agenda has little to do with education. It’s about land grabs on behalf of real estate interests and investment bankers as well as ethnic cleansing of working class communities of color to create a whiter more affluent Chicago.

But it’s more than just young people in the cross-hairs & the cross-fires.

In distressed communities that have endured disinvestment, unemployment and high levels of personal violence neighborhood schools are often islands of stability. Whole generations have put their heart and soul into these schools to obtain the resources denied to them by the CPS policy of educational apartheid. What CPS calls “underutilization”, education activists see as an opportunity for smaller classes, spaces for wraparound social and psychological services for students as well as places for after-school activities for both adults and children.

What CPS claims is a “data driven” educational agenda is an endless parade of hi-stakes testing and lifeless scripted curriculum coming from profit-hungry corporations. Not to mention that the CPS “data” is often based on sloppy research and outright lies.

On behalf of the wealthy and powerful, CPS is waging war on young people’s right to critical thinking, to conduct exploratory research, to experience in-depth learning and to participate in science and the arts.It is waging war on the love and joy associated with the student-teacher relationship. It is making war on the ability of working class youth to remake the wounded world they live in.

H.G. Wells once wrote that, “Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” This New Civil War is a war on civilization itself. It must be stopped.

If a bullet can kill a body, bad educational practices can murder a mind. It isn’t enough to stop the violence born of poverty, racism or extreme social alienation. It isn’t enough to save the Chicago schools as they exist now. Those are only necessary first steps toward a true education for liberation.

The young people of Chicago and our nation deserve nothing less.

Lincoln Park High School students in Chicago walk out
to protest the firing of 8 veteran teachers in May of 2013

Bob "BobboSphere" Simpson is a retired high school history teacher who taught on both the South and West Sides of the city. He is a member of the Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign.

Sources consulted

School's Closing, Gang Feud Fuel New Fears In Old Town By Mark Konkol and Paul Biasco

CPS School Closings: Manierre Supporters Try Again to Save Their School
By Paul Biasco

Manierre Elementary Parents Make Last Pleas To Save School By Paul Biasco

The Black and White of Education in Chicago’s Public Schools: Class, Charters and Chaos by the Chicago Teachers Union

Chicago City Council Passes Resolution Supporting the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child by Northwestern University News

Every Chicago Public School is My School

Keep Pope alive: A small school fights for survival

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:04:15 -0400

A cacophony of young voices competed with the low whistle of a cold wind on a gray Chicago spring day as children skipped down the sidewalk in front of Pope Elementary. The school is located across from Douglas Park on Chicago’s West Side in the North Lawndale community. It is also one of the 54 Chicago schools slated for closing. Pope, like most of the schools on the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) death list, is located in a predominantly African American working class neighborhood.

I was at Pope School for a press conference on April 19 organized by the indefatigable Valerie Leonard of the Lawndale Alliance.The assembled young people were eager to save their school and eager to talk:

“What I want to say on behalf of my fellow classmates is that Pope is a wonderful school.”

“I am part of a soccer team and the girls on the team don’t want the school to close.”

“I think it’s unfair to close the school. The school has been here for many years and is walking distance from my house which actually around the corner. This school has taught me a lot and my ISAT scores are like 99% and 98% and I think thats really good for my age.”

“I am a former student at Pope School and I still have two young sisters who go here and I have younger brother in the 8th grade and another brother in second grade...The school is outstanding. They have great teachers there. And we’re actually not saying we’re the best school, but we also have the academics to prove that this school should be open and not only do the teachers work with the students but they work with the parents as well.”

Lisa Pugh who heads up the Local School Council (LSC) had this to say:

”I’m here to keep Pope alive. We are just two points down from AYP and you want to close our school down. You are not giving us a chance...Our test scores show improvement.”

AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress) is a measurement defined by the No Child Left Behind Act that determines how schools are doing academically according to results on standardized tests. The Local School Counsel is an elected board that helps support the school and determine some of its policies.

Lisa Pugh: President of the Pope Elementary Local School Council

CPS has been closing schools for several years, often providing conflicting reasons as to why. This year’s flavor of the month is “underutilization” of school buildings. But Pope’s enrollment has been growing, up from 142 in 2009 to 184 in 2013. Pope’s class size is an optimum of 20 students per teacher which may explain its huge jump in reading and math test scores. West Side residents see “underutilization” as an opportunity for small classes after enduring decades of overcrowded schools in African American neighborhoods.

According to Valerie Leonard who studied how Pope uses its space, the school is well within the official CPS guidelines. CPS claims that the school does not have a science lab when it fact it does. It also has a computer lab, a special ed room, a nurse’s office, a game room, two rooms for America Scores which is a unique after-school program combining soccer and reading plus 3 rooms devoted to counseling from the Juvenile Protective Association (JPA).

Valerie Leonard of the North Lawndale Alliance

According to Alderman Michael Chandler who also spoke, CPS is spreading “negative propaganda” about Pope by claiming that is is not handicapped accessible when it is. CPS also claimed that Pope has no Pre-K program while Alderman Chandler said,”...the fact of the matter is we still have families on the waiting list.”

The Chicago Teachers Union has repeatedly emphasized the importance of “wraparound” programs which provide social and psychological services for students. JPA counseling is just such a program. Such programs are especially important in African American working class communities that have been subjected to racially motivated disinvestment and deliberate withholding of resources. The resulting social problems can be overwhelming to those struggling to hold these neighborhoods together.

24th Ward Alderman Michael Chandler

So why on God’s green earth would CPS want to close a school which is doing so much for the community and is showing such steady improvement. Part of the answer lies with AUSL, the politically well-connected Academy of Urban School Leadership. AUSL has been contracted by CPS to do school “turnarounds”. These turnarounds involve firing the entire staff of “failing” schools, regardless of the staff member’s performance, and replacing them with staff contracted by AUSL. But even according to standardized test scores, AUSL schools are often outperformed by neighborhood schools.

In what she calls with a twinkle in her eye, her “conspiracy theory”, Leonard believes that AUSL is trying to gain control of all of the school real estate around Douglas Park, pointing to the other schools that being closed in that area in favor of AUSL. Board of Education President David Vitale is a former chair of AUSL. Tim Cawley, the chief administrative officer of CPS was also once an AUSL higher-up. Vitale is especially close to Mayor Emanuel and is essentially his “made man” at CPS.

According to Valerie Leonard, AUSL schools do not collaborate well with other North Lawndale schools, which despite the many social problems in the area, is a West Side tradition. When I mentioned to her that I thought AUSL was predatory, she made it clear that was an understatement.

I’ve personally talked to two AUSL teachers who told me they were recruited to the program under false pretenses, not knowing about the damage that AUSL was doing by destabilizing already distressed communities. AUSL funders include The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the New Schools Venture Fund, both of whom are leading advocates of school privatization.

Lisa Pugh took a few of us on short tour of the neighborhood after the press conference. The street west of Pope has a strong block club, very important in African American neighborhoods. City services are still doled out according to Chicago’s traditional racial apartheid and block clubs must take up the slack. North of Pope are new townhouses and to the east is the expansive Douglas Park.

Closing Pope will most likely turn it into an abandoned building, a magnet for gangbangers, drug abusers, graffiti taggers and the commonplace urban vandal. Surrounding residents have worked hard maintaining their property and fear for the value of their homes and the stability of the neighborhood. Black homeowners were hit hard by the 2008 housing crash and can’t afford further losses. In addition, who would even want to move into a neighborhood with a huge abandoned building?

It is widely believed on the West Side that these destabilizing school closings are directly related to gentrification and an overall plan to remove the current black working class residents in favor of a whiter more affluent population. I do not think this is paranoia, but a shrewd observation of a conspiracy being conducted in plain sight.

North Lawndale and the other Chicago communities have made their opposition to further school closings known in multiple protest meetings and marches. I predict that this currently cold spring is about to heat up because of the growing resistance movement, not only to save public education, but to end Chicago's traditional racial apartheid.

Mr. Vitale, please note: the Pope School mascot is the black panther...

Some faces of the Pope school resistance movement

Photos by Bob Simpson

Sources consulted:

Study disputes turnaround stats for failing Chicago schools by Rosalind Rossi

School reform organization gets average grades by Joel Hood and Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah

Public Comments to CPS Regarding the Proposed Closure of Pope School: April 19, 2013 by Valery Leonard

Academy of Urban School Leadership

Nathaniel Pope Elementary School: Writing and Fine Arts Magnet Cluster School

The Lost Woods of Rachel Carson

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 07:04:58 -0400

“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature -- the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.” Rachel Carson

Rachel Carson had a life-long love affair with nature that was accompanied by a deep and terrible sense of loss because of the human destruction wreaked upon the biosphere. Although Carson’s literary fame is based on only 5 books, she also wrote numerous short pieces during her employment at the US Fish and Wildlife Service, as well as newspaper stories, magazine articles, speeches and personal letters. She was among the finest writers of the 20th century USA.

Her biographer Linda Lear has done a great service by sharing a sample of these virtually unknown Carson writings in the anthology Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson. These give us a glimpse of the living breathing woman behind the environmental icon.

A woman destined to be a writer

Carson’s first nature writing was published at the age of 15 in St Nicholas Magazine, a children’s literary magazine that helped launch the careers of William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, e.e. cummings, Edna St.Vincent Millay and E.B White.

A selection follows:

“The call of the trail on that dewy May morning was too strong to withstand. The sun was barely an hour high when Pal and I set off for a day of our favorite sport with a lunchbox, a canteen, a notebook, and a camera….

...Soon our trail turned aside into deeper woodland. It wound up a gently sloping hill, carpeted with fragrant pine needles. It was our own discovery, Pal's and mine, and the fact gave us a thrill of exultation. It was a sort of place that awes you by its majestic silence, interrupted only by the rustling breeze and the distant tinkle of water.”--- from “My Favorite Recreation” by Rachel Carson

As a lyrical prose stylist with a love of poetry, she paid meticulous attention to the craft of writing as well as to the exacting details of science. Having grown up as a voracious reader and knowing that she wanted to be a writer from a young age, she had an abiding faith in the power of the printed word.

Rachel Carson compulsively wrote and rewrote. She read her drafts aloud and then had others read them to her. Each word had to be in its proper niche in that complex interrelationship among words, sentences, paragraphs, sections and chapters that make up a fine work of literature. Her approach to writing mirrored the ecologically complex web of life that continued to astonish and inspire her throughout her life.

She believed that written and spoken words (she became an accomplished public speaker) could help generate a love of nature based on the human capacity for imagination. She was concerned about the increasing alienation of humans from the natural world.

Understanding that increasing urbanization and suburbanization were part of this alienation, she wrote about science from a storytelling point of view. She hoped that her readers could enter the world of biological science through vivid language, even if their lives were surrounded by concrete, asphalt and petrochemical fumes. She had an abiding faith that ordinary people could come to understand the precepts of science and develop an appreciation of nature.

The beginnings of her professional writing career

Her first book, Under the Sea Wind, may be termed “science fiction”, in the sense that it used the science of marine biology as she told the life stories of an Atlantic eel, an Atlantic mackerel and a sanderling (a shore bird).

I was 8 years old when I first read this book, curled up on the floor of our Wheaton, Maryland bungalow, hundreds of miles from the dark North Atlantic home of Scomber the mackerel, my favorite of the 3 characters. Scomber’s many adventures seemed as real to me as the reading lamp that illuminated them for me.

Carson wrote a detailed description for the publisher’s marketing department about her writing process. She explained that most books about the sea were written from a human vantage point. That is what she tried to avoid:

“I very soon realized that the central character of the book was the ocean itself. The smell of the sea’s edge, the feeling of vast movements of water, the sound of waves, crept into every page, and overall was the ocean as the force dominating all its creatures.”

Ironically Carson never saw the ocean until she graduated from college. She came from a somewhat impoverished Pennsylvania family and had never traveled far. She originally relied on the poetry of John Masefield and the novels of Joseph Conrad to help her imagine the sea and its wonders. Perhaps this early experience is what gave her such a faith in the ability of words to create worlds.

Throughout her writing career she tried to pass on the historical memory of the natural world as she perceived it and as others before her had done. While researching a series of radio scripts she wrote while at her job at US Fisheries Commission (later the US Fish and Wildlife Service), she also developed newspaper articles on natural history which she sold to supplement her income in the harsh Depression years.

Typical of these was one entitled “The Fight for Wildlife Pushes Ahead” which was published in the Richmond Times-Dispatch Sunday Magazine in March of 1938. In it she reviewed the genocidal slaughter of American wildlife that caused the extinction of such creatures as the passenger pigeon, relentlessly shot into extinction even though at the time of European colonization, its flocks once darkened the skies of the East.

“A scant hundred years ago, more than half of America was unspoiled wilderness…But what of wildlife today? The last heath hen perished on the island of Martha's Vineyard in 1933, and the passenger pigeon is now a creature of legend. Salmon are virtually gone from the rivers of New England, and the Atlantic Coast shad fisheries have declined some 80% within half a century...The ranks of elk were so thin by 1904 that domestication was urged as the only means of preventing their extinction.”

Carson loved wildlife for its own sake, but she was acutely aware that many of her readers did not. She explained that wildlife supported a multi-million dollar hunting, fishing and wildlife observation industry, a powerful argument for conservation during the Great Depression. She called for more land to be put aside for wildlife, not simply for the sake endangered species, but to stop the spread of soil loss that had created the terrifying Dust Bowl and to prevent flooding caused by denuded hillsides.

But Carson’s writing career did not really begin to take off until she received a rejection from her boss at the US Fisheries Commission. The piece that she submitted,”Undersea”, was just too beautifully written for a government manual. With a smile he suggested sending it to the Atlantic Magazine where editor Edward Weeks eventually published it. It became the basis of her first book, Under the Sea Wind.

Rachel Carson: The woman who melded biology and literature

Carson was a woman in the male dominated field of science. Although there were a few women scientists in the field of U.S. biology, they often met with cruel discrimination. That was the fate of Mary Skinker, Carson’s beloved college science professor. Carson stood by Skinker throughout her struggles to remain a scientist in a hostile work environment.

Carson was a skilled laboratory and fieldwork scientist, but was hired at the Fisheries Commission for her writing talent. She rose quickly in the government ranks to become head of the US Fish and Wildlife Service publications department. Colleagues remembered her as an exacting, but patient editor who demanded from others no more than she expected of herself.

Carson was only the second woman even hired by that department and her government science career flourished mostly because she worked in publishing. She encountered sexism on the job, but resisted it with her formidable wit and intelligence, along with some help from her male allies.

An example was her desire to board the government research ship Albatross with its 50 man crew to visit the Georges Bank in the North Atlantic. This caused “consternation” among her male superiors because no woman had ever set foot on the Albatross before. She explained that she could manage publications about the North Atlantic better if she had direct experience at sea.

It was finally decided that two women would be ok so she invited her literary agent Marie Rodell. Rodell jokingly called herself Carson’s “chaperone”. The physical rigors and dangers aboard a fishing vessel in the frigid North Atlantic proved no obstacle to either woman and they were quickly accepted by the crew once the voyage was underway.

Feeling constricted by the confines of government, she retired from the US Fish and Wildlife Service with the publication of The Sea Around Us in 1951. The book had risen to the top of the best seller list and brought her a long sought economic security. Earnings from her writing allowed her to have a home in Silver Spring, MD near Washington DC as well as a cottage on the Maine coast.

This was followed by another bestseller, The Edge of the Sea, with its passionate descriptions of life along the shore. Under the Sea Wind, which was virtually ignored when it appeared only a month before the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, was reissued to acclaim and brisk sales.

Carson’s sea trilogy achieved great popularity in the 1950s, when rising US affluence did not assuage a sense of social isolation and emotional emptiness. Nor did it quell the fears generated by the Cold War and its frightening possibilities of nuclear destruction. As one of her readers wrote to her:

“We have been troubled about the world, and had almost lost faith in man; it helps to think about the long history of the earth, and how life came to be. When we think in terms of millions of years, we are not so impatient that our problems can be solved tomorrow. “

From reading the many letters she received from readers, she drew certain conclusions about why people responded to her books so strongly. After winning the 1952 National Book Award for The Sea Around Us she shared these words:

“If there is poetry in my book about the sea, it is not because I deliberately put it there, but because no one could write truthfully about the sea and leave out the poetry...we have looked outward at the earth [man] has inhabited so briefly and at the universe in which our earth is so minute a part. Yet these are the great realities, and against them we see our human problems in a different perspective. Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas, we should find less time to plan our own destruction.”

Some people were mystified by why a woman would take so much interest in the sea. Carson addressed this at an author luncheon in New York:

“People often seem to be surprised that a woman should've written a book about the sea. This is especially true, I find, of men. Perhaps they been accustomed to thinking of the more exciting fields of scientific knowledge is exclusively masculine domains. In fact, one of my correspondents not long ago addressed me as “Dear Sir" - --explaining that although he knew perfectly well that I was a woman, he simply could not bring himself to acknowledge the fact.”

Carson went on to explain that her interest was at first “sensory and emotional” and that the “intellectual” came later. Carson had received many letters from readers of all social classes telling of their own deep feelings about the sea. She spoke of exploring tide pools and seeing people just staring out at the ocean, lost in their own thoughts and emotions. To her this sense of wonder was a human trait, an almost spiritual longing, and one to be encouraged, especially among the young:

“If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.”

Carson believed that women had a deeper appreciation of both beauty and wonder than men did. She was quite candid about this in a speech she gave to the Theta Sigma Phi Society of Women Journalism in 1954. She told them that she was not afraid of being labeled a “sentimentalist” and that natural beauty was necessary to the “...spiritual development of any individual or society...”:

“...I believe it is important for women to realize that the world of today threatens to destroy much of that beauty that has immense power to bring us a healing release from tension. Women have a greater intuitive understanding of such things. They want for their children not only physical health but mental and spiritual health as well. I bring these things to your attention tonight because I think of your awareness of them will help, whether you're a practicing journalists, or teachers, or librarians, or house wives and mothers.”

She wrote popular articles in magazines with large female readerships and became one of the most respected women of the 1950s, a time when women were supposed to stay home with the children and stay out of public affairs. Although she had many male colleagues, some of whom became close friends like New Yorker editor William Shawn and wildlife illustrator Bob Hines, her closest attachments were with women. Among these were her mother, Marie Rodell, Marjorie Spock, Lois Crisler, Beverly Knecht and especially Dorothy Freeman.

Carson and Freeman had an intense love relationship that lasted for many years and Freeman became Carson’s greatest source of emotional strength. Carson never married and Freeman’s husband Stan gave his full approval to their close relationship. Carson often shared her observations of nature with Dorothy Freeman through her many letters, several of which are included in Lost Woods. Carson also shared with Dorothy Freeman the intense difficulties she endured because of her complicated ofttimes distressing family life.

Although technically a single woman, Carson assumed the role of breadwinner for her mother and at various times provided financial support for others in her family. When her sister died, she adopted her son Roger, then a small child who displayed symptoms of severe ADHD. Carson had become a single mom. She also became caregiver to her own mother when her health began to fail. Although she desperately wanted to do more research and writing, she felt a deep sense of obligation to her family responsibilities.

These financial and emotional burdens took a toll on Carson’s physical and psychological well being. She sometimes fell into periods of deep depression which kept her from writing at all. Living in a society where such matters were confined to the private sphere meant that Carson’s output as a writer was severely limited. A male science writer would most likely not have had the same experience.

From the wonders of nature to the terrors of industrial society

After the success of her sea trilogy Carson made plans for other projects that would inspire love of the natural world. These included books about evolution and ecology. Those plans were never realized. Instead Rachel Carson found herself a leading figure in a resurgent environmental movement.

Carson had reservations about mass pesticide spraying going back to her days at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. She had even unsuccessfully tried to interest Readers Digest in an article about DDT, the poison developed during World War II to kill malarial mosquitoes, but which went into widespread civilian use after that war ended. She was also very concerned about the dumping of nuclear waste into the sea.

Atomic bombs and DDT had been conceived as weapons of war. Carson came to realize that these and other profitable weapons of mass destruction now threatened the biosphere upon which all life on earth depends.

A liberal Democrat and an admirer of John Kenneth Galbraith’s critique of American capitalism, she had generally avoided making direct political statements in public, couching her criticisms of government, academia and the corporate world in more general humanistic terms. But in 1958, as reports came in of widespread wildlife deaths coming from pesticides to eradicate fire ants and mosquitoes, she made a critical decision.

She set aside her other plans and decided to write a major article on the abuse of pesticides. This idea evolved into Silent Spring. Silent Spring was more than a “fire bell in the night” warning us about why robins were dying agonizing deaths in city parks. Silent Spring also called into question the entire direction of American society with its emphasis on consumerism at all costs and profit without regard for either present or future.

Silent Spring: The writer as political organizer

One of Rachel Carson’s contemporaries was Rosa Parks. A myth was planted that Parks was just an everyday woman who sat in the “white only” section of a segregated bus because she was “tired”. This canard ignores the fact that Parks was a committed activist who had undergone civil rights training at the famed Highlander Folk School. She was also not the first person to sit down in a segregated bus and get arrested, but her individual case helped further a social movement that eventually overthrew Jim Crow.

To a large degree, Rachel Carson was subjected to a similar mythologizing, portrayed as a lone woman who stood against the chemical industry on the strength of her book Silent Spring and her own individual courage. She was not the first person to call attention to the horrors of indiscriminate pesticide spraying. She also developed a large network of scientists, environmental activists and inspired readers to rely upon. She would need that network to write Silent Spring and defend the book from attacks.

Both Parks and Carson were courageous and visionary individuals. Without such individuals social movements would be impossible. But a successful social movement also requires the participation of many other people, whose contributions, great and small, carry inspired visions into reality. Yet myths of the lone individual persist, as if being part of a social movement is a heresy in the USA.

Carson hired research assistants to collect the numerous scientific papers and documents about pesticides she needed to analyze. Both she and her assistants visited the Department of Interior, the Department of Agriculture, the FDA, the Public Health Service, and the National Institutes of Health. In the era before computers, Carson and her assistants worked from notebooks and index cards. Carson reached out to scientists like Bob Rudd, M. S. Biskind, Frank Egler, Edmund O. Wilson, Clarence Cottam and many others to get deeper insights and to help fact check her writing.

Her years at the Fish and Wildlife Service had given her a personal network of government scientists and researchers to rely upon. Many of these people had long worried about pesticides and now thanks to Rachel Carson, their research might reach the public instead of being buried in obscure journals or government documents. Her inquiries eventually came to the notice of powerful government bureaucrats who tried (unsuccessfully) to limit her access to public records.

As Carson struggled with writing Silent Spring, she also had her close friends to support her both emotionally and intellectually. To test the waters about how the public would react to her findings about pesticides she published a letter in the April 10, 1959 Washington Postentitled “Vanishing Americans”. A portion is excerpted below:

“During the last 15 years, use of highly poisonous hydrocarbons and of other organic phosphates allied to the nerve gases of chemical warfare has built up from small beginnings to what a noted British ecologist recently called, 'an amazing rain of death upon the surface of the earth. ‘…Too many of us, the sudden silencing of the song of birds, this obliteration of the colored beauty and interest of birdlife, is sufficient cause for sharp regret. Those who have never known such rewarding enjoyment of nature, there should yet remain a nagging and insistent question: if this rain of death has produced so disastrous effect on birds, what of other lives, including our own?”

Response to her letter was overwhelmingly positive. Carson knew that she could count on her legions of readers to mobilize on her behalf once the book was published. Like it or not, humans are part of the natural world and whatever humans do to nature, humans do to themselves. A key part of her book was the chapter on how pesticides were carcinogens linked to human cancers.

Carson spent time in 1960 working for the John F. Kennedy campaign and joined a Democratic Party natural resources committee, broadening her influence into the mainstream political process. She was also invited to join a small group of powerful Democratic Party women which included Frances Perkins, Eleanor Roosevelt and Jackie Kennedy.

Rachel Carson had already assembled an army of citizen activists, scientists, and political figures. Her book editor Paul Brooks warned her that they would need to work up a “crusade” on the local level and he began recruiting more supporters. Carson consulted with Ruth Scott, an activist in the National Federation of Garden Clubs and the Audubon Society. Her contacts and organizational ability proved invaluable. Marie Rodell made sure that key individuals would get advance copies so that important women’s organizations like the League of Women Voters and the National Association of Women’s Clubs could include the book in their activities.

When the first chapters of Silent Spring were published in the New Yorker and a flood of mostly positive letters poured in, Carson braced herself for a grueling round of public appearances. Well funded attacks from powerful chemical corporations were already underway and needed to be countered. Velsicol Chemical, the maker of chlordane, was threatening a a lawsuit. Dupont’s PR department labored for many hours to produce a media analysis accurately predicting the book’s enormous impact.

But as she edited the final draft of Silent Spring, she was also carrying a secret known to only her closest friends. She was battling an aggressive form of breast cancer that sapped both her emotional and physical stamina.

She had earlier undergone a radical mastectomy after discovering two suspicious growths. According to the pathology report one was benign, but the other showed a “condition bordering on malignancy”. However her surgeon, a Dr. Sanderson, did not suggest any further treatment. A few months after her surgery Carson discovered that her doctor had lied. The growth was malignant and had shown signs of metastasizing. According to her biographer Linda Lear:

“Medical protocols between a single, female patient and her physician in the 1950s and 1960s might help explain why Sanderson had not told Carson the truth. Typically, in the case of a married woman, the patient herself would not have been told she had a malignancy, but her husband, had he asked directly, would have been given the full account.”

At that time, cancer was hushed up and the word was banned from “polite” conversation. Carson was determined to keep her secret. Once Silent Spring hit the bookstores, she was sure that the chemical companies would use her medical condition against her. She was often in great pain as she endured her increasingly ineffective radiation and drug treatments.

When Silent Spring made the best seller list and she openly called for citizen activism, the industry attacks against her intensified.

She was labeled a “crank”, an “alarmist”, a “high priestess of nature”, and even a “communist”. She was criticized for only have a MA in biology, for not writing peer reviewed scientific papers and for taking her case to the public instead of keeping it confined to the scientific community. Some of the attacks took a blatantly sexist tone as critics raised questions about her marital status as a “spinster”, accused her of loving cats and birds, decried her supposed emotionalism and sentimentality, while dismissing her findings as products of “hysteria”.

The chemical industry unleashed a torrent of money to finance a massive PR campaign directed by top marketing firms. Some of the criticism of Silent Spring displayed a more subtle strategy, acknowledging her literary powers and applauding her concern, while denouncing the book as exaggerated. Some attempted to be clever, such as Monsanto’s widely distributed parody of Silent Spring called The Desolate Year.

In her public appearances Rachel Carson unleashed criticism of her own, describing a cabal within industry, government and academia which betrayed the cause of scientific truth,“...to serve the gods of production and profit.”

In a speech to the National Women’s Press Club in the fall of 1962, she lashed out at the chemical industry’s twisting of scientific research, even comparing it to the censorship of science in Stalin’s Russia:

“Is industry becoming a screen through which facts must be filtered, so the hard, uncomfortable truths are kept back and only the harmless morsels allowed to filter through? I know that many thoughtful scientists are deeply disturbed that their organizations are becoming fronts for industry. More than one scientist has raised disturbing questions whether a spirit of Lysenkoism may be developing in America today--- the philosophy that perverted and destroyed the science of genetics in Russia and even infiltrated all of that nation's agricultural sciences.”

A single mom with a masters degree had revealed the ugly secrets of the temple.

The chemical industry had seriously underestimated both Rachel Carson and her network of supporters. The sexist attacks largely backfired. The support she received from courageous scientists increased her credibility. Her readers sent a flood of letters to newspapers, politicians and companies. They also spoke out against pesticide spraying in their local communities. Carson herself began discussions aimed at starting a citizens action organization. Washington politicians including the Kennedy administration were developing new legislation and regulations.

Industry PR flacks had tried to define Carson as an unhinged fanatic. But Carson proved to be very skillful at using the relatively new PR medium of TV. Her moment of media triumph came in April of 1963 with her appearance on a CBS news documentary seen by millions.

The American people saw a calm well spoken woman reading from Silent Spring, not the harridan that her critics described. It was Carson relying on the power of words and her faith that ordinary people could understand science and use it to change society for the better. In her closing statement she said this:

“We still talk in terms of conquest. We still haven't become mature enough to think of ourselves as only a very tiny part of a vast and incredible universe. Now I truly believe that we in this generation must come to terms with nature, I think we’re challenged, as mankind has never been challenged before, to prove our maturity and our mastery, not of nature, but of ourselves.”

Rachel Carson with children near her Silver Spring home (Photo by Life Magazine)

One of the great social movements of the 1960’s was being born.

Rachel Carson 1907 – 1964

The eloquent voice of Rachel Carson finally went silent in the spring of 1964. I learned of her death the following day when a student named Paula walked into my Springbrook High School English class, distraught and in tears. Her friend and neighbor Rachel Carson had just died. Carson’s nearby Silver Spring, Maryland home was not only close to my school, but near Northwest Branch creek where I had spent many happy teenage hours. Rachel Carson had been a part of my life since the day I first opened the pages of Under the Sea Wind.

By then her illness was no longer a secret, but I had hoped for a medical miracle that never came. A world without Rachel Carson? I didn’t want to believe it and I sat enveloped by a terrible sadness. It didn’t seem possible. Even as I was writing article I found myself grieving anew.

A view of the Northwest Branch stream valley where Rachel Carson often walked

Today I think about the books she would have written and how her living presence would have influenced the social revolts that were already underway. I imagine her collaborating with radical union leader Tony Mazzocchi, who went into the factories and refineries to see how direct exposure to toxic chemicals was affecting the workers there. He took to heart Carson’s warning that humans as well as birds were affected.

What speech would she have given at the first Earth Day demonstration in Washington DC in the spring of 1970? How would her socio-economic vision have evolved as the gray shadow of McCarthyism was lifting? What more might she have said about the “gods of production and profit”?

Rachel Carson envisioned a world where humans lived in harmony with nature and by implication, learned to live more harmoniously with one another. She believed this was possible through the liberal reform of capitalism as explained by award-winning economist John Kenneth Galbraith.

It is here where I must part ways with Rachel Carson. I believe this harmony can only come about in a society where cooperation is the rule ----rather than the relentless drive for profit. As a wounded biosphere lurches toward disastrous climate change, a transformation into some form of democratic cooperative socialism is becoming a survival imperative. Such a society has never existed before.The challenges are daunting and the clock is ticking.

As for the Lost Woods of Rachel Carson, they really exist. They are a stunning portion of the Maine shore that Rachel Carson hoped to buy and turn into a wilderness sanctuary. She called it "The Lost Woods”. However she could never save enough money for the purchase.

Years later, local residents cooperated with one another and shared resources so that today the Boothbay Region Land Trust now protects most of her beloved Lost Woods.

Building a better planetary society will not be that simple, but sometimes---- life finds a way.

?Near Rachel Carson’s Maine cottage (Photo by the NYT)

A somewhat different version of this article first appeared in the Red Wedge online magazine.

Sources Consulted

Lost Woods: The Discovered Writing of Rachel Carson edited by Linda Lear

Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature by Linda Lear

Rachel Carson: Breaking the Silence by Carolyn Gage

In Defense of Rachel Carson by Sarah Grey

Rachel Carson - And the birth of modern environmentalism by Rex Weyler

Rachel Carson’s ‘Rugged Shore’ in Maine by Frank Meola

The Chicago school closings: Finding truth amidst the lies

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 20:03:33 -0400

“Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscience will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design."--- Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union

It was a grim Thursday afternoon on March 21st as the news trickled out that 61 Chicago school buildings would be closed and that 54 school programs will be axed. The closings are heavily clustered in the poorest mostly African American and Latino neighborhoods, where decades of disinvestment and economic apartheid have taken a heavy toll on the residents.

Many people have moved away from these communities, driven out by the lack of jobs, the meager resources given to the schools, the inadequate city services and the resulting crime and violence. Many believe that the forced exodus is part of a land grab for real estate interests who will move in to gentrify these areas.

On the South and West Sides of the city, where the closings are hitting hardest, poverty is a policy, not an accident. The Chicago financial elite, which could provide jobs and rational investment, has chosen displacement over renewal, ethnic cleansing over neighborhood stabilization. As the Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel (photo above) is the public face of this prairie plutocracy.

Barbara Byrd-Bennett: CEO of public school destruction in Chicago

To further injure already badly wounded neighborhoods, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett (photo on the left) is administering further neighborhood destabilization through massive school closings.

This is despite the impassioned opposition of thousands of people who crowded into churches and gymnasiums across the city to oppose this systematic dismantling of public education.

Thirty thousand children will be directly affected by the closings. In the days leading up to the Thursday school massacre, a deluge of lies and royal decrees poured out of the CPS office at 125 S. Clark.

According to Byrd-Bennett:

”How can we leave children in under performing, underutilized buildings, when we know that we have a process by which we can absolutely get more resources to those children?”

If so, then why is the “underutilization” formula based on overcrowding an average 30 students into each classroom instead of lowering class size? Why has CPS opened up private charter schools in these “underpopulated” communities while also claiming a “budget crisis”? Why hasn’t CPS been providing the necessary “resources” all along? Why are public schools whose performance is improving also on the hit list?

CTU vice-president Jesse Sharkey pointed out that in the past,”The vast majority of students wind up going to a school that performs worse, or equally, at the same level.”

Byrd-Bennett, knowing that safety is an issue if students have to cross busy streets and dangerous gang boundaries assured parents that:

“The safety and security of every student is essential, and we will not close any school where I believe we cannot guarantee the safety of our children as part of their transition to a new welcoming school. I will not compromise the safety of a single child.”

CPS has some $10 an hour workers for the “CPS Community Watch” from previous school closings, but the “watchers” only stand at major intersections and are often blocks apart. They do not personally escort students to and from school.

Alderman Walter Burnett questioned the entire program in a city with a sky-high murder rate, “Anything short of more police is not going to provide safe passage, and even with police now we don't have safe passage."

Clarice Berry, president of Chicago Principals and Administrators Association said:

“I’m angry. I’m upset. I’m shaking to the core. I didn’t think they’d actually go through with this, the largest number of closings ever...There’s been no planning. Just slash and burn.”

Byrd-Bennett also claimed that at community meetings, “...everybody got it that we really needed to close schools.” That was the howler of the week.

Clearly no one was expected to take any of Bennett-Byrd’s statements seriously.

After days of disinformation that even the most trusting Pollyanna would doubt, I needed a break

I knew exactly where to find refuge from this Windy City blizzard of lies: in the heart of North Lawndale, one of the communities most affected by Chicago’s racial apartheid and all of its myriad social problems related to extreme poverty.

The Committee to Save North Lawndale Schools was holding a press conference on the morning of March 21st to present a community-based alternative plan to the closings.The Committee outlined the possible consequences of the school closings in their written report saying that their community would “...be more adversely impacted than any community in Chicago.”

North Lawndale across the street from the press conference

A Local School Council representative from Penn School who is also a substitute teacher told how he has been “in the trenches of these schools”. He described the lack libraries, gyms and computer labs. Contrasting the schools in North Lawndale with the nearby suburbs, he asked why empty school rooms were not being used to provide services that would benefit the community.

North Lawndale has been the target of venture capitalists and the school privatization efforts they favor. These include charter schools that shut out parent participation and are generally non-union. Charter school faculties are mostly white at a time when CPS has severely reduced the number of black teachers. Windy Pearson (photo on the right) of Action Now and a CPS graduate declared her organization’s support for public neighborhood schools saying,” Our children and their education is not a rubber stamp for the banks.”

Darren Tillis, who works to liaison between CPS and the Lawndale community denied that schools in the neighborhood are “underutilized” calling traditional schools the “most stable thing” in the community and that 50% of North Lawndale schools were trending upward in performance. He challenged CPS to study the alternative plan being offered by the North Lawndale Community Advisory Council (CAC), saying, ”We think this plan will serve as a great model, not only for the schools in North Lawndale, but for schools throughout the City of Chicago.”

As explained by Valerie Leonard from the Lawndale Alliance, the plan included the goals of high quality education for all students, plus social, emotional and health services to North Lawndale students that will ensure they are ready to learn. The plan recommended specialities for different schools including STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics), green technology, entrepreneurship, leadership development and fine arts. All families would have access to pre-school programs. Community members would be able to access necessary social services from the school building.

This idea of using spaces within schools to turn them into true community centers is being implemented nationally. The Coalition for Community Schools has a detailed report on how the type of schools being advocated for North Lawndale can work. The Chicago Teachers Union has also provided research supporting the idea. Lawndale's "underutilized" spaces could be used exactly for that purpose.

Leonard explained that a Community School Collaborative will be established that would work on providing needed social services to the community from within the school while the Community Advisory Council worked on the academic and extra curricular needs. According to Leonard:

“We will organize the 240 different organizations in North Lawndale that provide social services, that provide youth services, that provide counseling and health and fitness.”

The written report went into more detail:

Programming that will reduce truancy and delinquency and cut the pipeline from school to prison.
Programs for health fitness and nutrition, the eradication of the food desert and opportunities for healthy eating and positive lifestyle changes.
Workforce development training that will provide students with exposure to career choices in manufacturing, technology, health, and the trades beginning at the elementary school level.
Basic skills and workforce training and development opportunities for parents.
Outlets for sports and recreation, arts and culture.

Make no little plans...

Daniel Burnham, who created the first master plan for Chicago, was quoted as saying:

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood and probably will themselves not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will not die.”

Clearly the plan being put forward in North Lawndale is firmly in the Burnham tradition and will require significant seed money for implementation. The written report estimates that funding the new Collaborative will require at least $322,000 for the first year. Valerie Leonard(photo on the right) said this money would be raised by going to foundations.

This would give the Collaborative more leeway than if it were funded solely by CPS.

It was the failures of the CPS leadership that led to the current educational disaster. The Collaborative is in effect, a declaration of independence for North Lawndale, a community coming together to shape its own destiny in the face of relentless attacks from the wealthy and powerful.

North Lawndale was originally threatened with 13 school closings which CAC said would be devastating;

Closing 13 buildings and leaving them empty would cause a host of problems, including exacerbated blight conditions; reduce property values; increase student mobility rates; increased dropout rates; increased vandalism and violence and interrupted student learning. The most upwardly mobile residents may decide to leave while real estate developers will continue to take a pass on new development. This single act could be just as detrimental if not more detrimental than losing major employers like international Harvester, Sears and Western Electric. It could take 10 years or more for the community to recover---- if we recover. Ten years represents an entire generation of elementary school students.

One North Lawndale activist told me privately that she didn’t think the community could survive a blow like that one.

When the hit list came out that afternoon there were 4 North Lawndale schools among schools slated to be closed. A smiling Barbara Byrd-Bennett was all over the TV news promising air conditioning, libraries, science labs and iPads at the receiving schools for displaced students. My prediction is that we’ll be seeing those resources arrive around the time the Loch Ness monster surfaces in Burnham Harbor.

What is certain is that opposition to the school closings runs high. The Chicago Teachers Union(CTU) and the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM) are planning a mass rally on March 27 with civil disobedience while neighborhood leaders around the city are planning their next move.

The resistance continues...

North Lawndale mural showing the
community's long history of resistance

Sources Consulted

Save North Lawndale Schools: A community-based alternative plan

Principals on school closings: 'There's been no planning. Just slash and burn' by Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah, John Byrne and John Chase

CPS Transition Plan Underway by Elizabeth Brackett

Community members rally against school closings by Mario Lekovic

Chicago proposes closing 53 elementary schools, firing staff at another 6 By Linda Lutton and Becky Vevea

Parents, community leaders question whether Safe Passage program will get their kids to school and back unharmed by John Chase, Jeff Coen and John Byrne

President Lewis’ Statement on School Closings

Instead of closing schools, how about this? By Valerie Strauss

Chicago’s deadly border crossings: Lives in the balance

Sun, 3 Mar 2013 00:03:09 -0500

There are no barbed wire adorned border walls. You won’t see unsmiling heavily armed solders toting automatic weapons as you wait nervously in a long line for clearance to cross over. You won’t have to show a passport or have your car torn apart during a search for weapons or drugs. In fact unless you are an expert at modern urban wall art, you may not even realize you have crossed one of these Chicago borders.

They are the ever shifting boundaries in Chicago’s gang and turf wars. What the Associated Press has called, “a Sandy Hook Elementary School attack unfolding in slow motion”, caught the attention of the national media with the killing of 15 year old South Sider Hadiya Pendleton.

Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy called it a gang shooting, and that Pendleton, who had no gang affiliation, was a victim of “Mistaken identity -- wrong place at the wrong time.” Leaving aside the issue of where is the right “place” and when is right “time” to get shot, this statement tells us nothing.

But I heard another explanation at a South Side meeting about the education crisis.

According to a community leader familiar with the neighborhood where the tragedy took place, the gang shoot-out which resulted in Pendleton’s death came about because of a poorly planned and poorly executed school boundary change. Two groups of kids with longstanding issues had been thrown together into a single school and the situation “exploded”.

Hadiyah Pendleton

Local community activists and other adult leaders had pleaded with the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) not to go ahead with the change, but it was part of a long term plan to help gentrify the South Side Bronzeville community through school closings, consolidations and boundary changes. Profit was the priority.

Hadiya Pendleton was caught in the crossfire of two gangs that did not even exist before this ill-conceived CPS strategy.

School closings can kill

Living on the West Side of Chicago, Dwayne Truss is very familiar with a 15th Police District map of gang boundaries, carefully color-coded for easy understanding. Within the map are the locations of neighborhood schools in the West Side Austin area.

Referring to the map at a February West Side meeting, Truss, who co-chairs the Austin Community Action Council said,”This is what our babies, our kids have to go through.” Referring to the children of those who sit on the Board of Education Truss continued by saying,”Their kids don’t have to go through this.” ----from Austin Talks

Dwayne Truss (with Valerie Leonard) at a February 27th press conference at CPS headquarters

In January 2013 CPS took high schools off of the list of potential school closings because even the normally oblivious CPS leadership decided that the danger of crossing gang borders was just too great. As of March 2013, that still leaves 129 grade schools on what many Chicagoans call “Rahm’s hit list”, a grim wordplay in a city where gang affiliations can reach down as far as middle school and grade school.

CPS has been sponsoring a series of community meetings across the city where thousands of students, teachers and parents have come to plead for the survival of their neighborhood schools. The meetings have also become scenes of massive vocal protest against school closings. The issue of student safety when crossing gang boundaries comes up repeatedly in passionate, sometimes tearful testimony. There is suspicion that the meetings are just a charade in front of the stony-faced CPS representatives; that life and death decisions about which schools to close have already been made.

The Walton Foundation funds these meetings. The Waltons own Walmart. Their concern for the sanctity of human life can be seen among the charred bodies of South Asian textile workers who died making Walmart products in appalling sweatshop conditions.

Gang borders are the most lethal in the areas of the city hit hardest by racism and its accompanying poverty. These include South Shore, Englewood, West Englewood, North Lawndale, Humboldt Park and Austin. These are communities suffering from disinvestment, unemployment, foreclosures, withholding of city services, schools deprived of the most basic needs and what author Michelle Alexander calls the The New Jim Crow, mass incarceration as a form of social control.

Not surprisingly, these areas of the city have suffered population loss. Using questionable numbers one analyst called “wildly inappropriate”, CPS now says the schools are “underutilized” and may need to be closed. This is after decades of CPS malign neglect, what the Chicago Teachers Union calls educational apartheid. One of the factors that caused the exit of neighborhood residents was the deliberate CPS policy of withholding resources needed by schools in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.

The “underutilization” argument is chutzpah in the first degree, especially since students from shuttered schools will likely have to cross gang boundaries to get to their receiving schools. That will only encourage more families to pack up and leave. Now combine this with the number of private charter schools that are opening up and competing for students. Do the math and the whole CPS “underutilization” rationale reads like a piece of satire from The Onion.

No wonder some veteran community activists feel that City Hall’s school closing blitzkrieg is really about emptying out areas of the city for redevelopment. New office buildings and condos will net banks and real estate moguls millions in profit. It will also make a whiter and more politically obedient city. Go ahead and label these battle scarred community activists paranoid and delusional if you want. I think their assessment is on the money...literally.

Pardon my bitter sarcasm, but City Hall probably views all of this as a “kinder, gentler” ethnic cleansing, as opposed to the variety which swept across the former Yugoslavia during the 1990’s.

Rahm sends in the Top Cop

Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy appeared on WLS-Radio in mid February and announced that his department would guarantee the safety of Chicago grade school students who might have to cross gang borders resulting from school closings. Yes, he really said that---after one of the most violent years in recent Chicago history, with 506 murders and an average of 21 reported shootings a day.

At a press conference held at the Chicago Board of Education in late February, West Sider Angela Bowman talked about some of the dangers faced by young children:

“My concern with these school closings is the safety of our children. The CPS Board is not walking through these neighborhoods while they are making up these things about underutilization and why they want to close these schools… A lot of people live in drug infested, gang infested and pedophile infested neighborhoods. Students will have to get up extra early and walk in the dark, especially in winter time. Walk in the dark to these schools and then walk back in the dark.” ---

Angela Bowman

There are 129 public grade schools still on the closing list. And what about the high school students who are already crossing gang borders? And the charter school students? Don’t they deserve some protection also? How will City Hall pay for this and hire all the extra cops? I hate to ask you to do the math once again, but think about it.

McCarthy admitted that there was “a lot of work to do.” He referred to a plan to set up “safe passages” to be staffed by Chicago cops. Parents will be told of safe corridors from home to school that their children may travel. There was such a plan for school year 2011-2012 but McCarthy admitted that the scheme “had some problems”.

Police Chief Garry McCarthy

It’s hard to take McCarthy’s vague assurances seriously. He appeared on radio at 7 am on a Sunday morning, not in front of the TV klieg lights with a stern and concerned looking Rahm at his side nodding at strategic moments.

McCarthy’s low profile announcement suggests Rahm has his scapegoat in place if everything goes to hell and back at the start of the 2013 school year. He’ll be shown the same exit door that Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard was pushed through when the negotiations with the Chicago Teachers Union turned into a political embarrassment for the Mayor.

Rahm wants Chicago companies to pony up $50 million

Unlike the nearly clandestine revelation about 2013 “Safe Passages” from Superintendent McCarthy, Rahm’s declaration that he would seek $50 million from Chicago CEO’s for anti-violence programs was greeted with intense, respectful & uncritical media attention.

Emanuel is putting his formidable fund-raising skills to work to raise money for early intervention programs for younger kids and provide jobs, mentoring, recreation and conflict-resolution programs to give troubled teens an alternative to the gang violence that claimed the life of 15-year-old Hadiya Pendleton. -----Chicago Sun-Times

He named Allstate CEO Tom Wilson and Jim Reynolds, CEO of Loop Capital Markets to co-chair the fundraising committee. The idea is raise $50 million over the next five years. Wilson grew up in Englewood, one of the areas plagued by gang violence:

“As I looked at the needs of the community, we needed to get involved, get back in there and make this city as great as it should be. But we can’t be a great city unless we really bring along all sectors, [including] the young people on the South and West Sides.”

Wilson is right about the South and West Sides, but the devil is in the details. There is supposed to be an “advisory committee of criminal justice experts and community leaders” to oversee the finances. Who decides who sits on the committee?

Rahm’s normal pattern would be to stuff it with his political cronies and cronies-to-be (those present community “leaders” whose souls are up for auction). After contracts are carefully padded and then awarded, some money will actually get to anti-violence programs, some of which will help. Summer jobs and recreation programs can get some kids out of harm’s way at least some of the time.

But Wilson knows that $5 million a year is a drop in the bucket. In 2010 Wilson personally made over $8.5 million in annual compensation. His total worth is estimated at $23 million. But by Chicago CEO comparison, Wilson is only modestly wealthy. Sanjay Jha, CEO of Motorola Mobility, took in over $47 million in personal annual compensation.

Rahm’s $50 million over 5 years is a pittance and an insult to the working class people of the city.

Chicago’s working class has a better idea

“We cannot fix what’s wrong with our schools until we are prepared to have honest conversations about poverty and race. Until we do, we will be mired in the no-excuses mentality [that] poverty doesn’t matter. Poverty matters a lot when you are teaching children who are distracted by their lives. Poverty matters a lot when you are teaching children who have seen trauma like none of us in this room can imagine.”-- Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis

“Our analysis demonstrates clearly that high levels of poverty and income inequality are strongly correlated with elevated levels of violence, and that raising wages for Chicago’s low-wage workers, along with other targeted anti-poverty and employment programs, is the most effective means of achieving safer streets and stronger communities across the city.”-------- Stand Up! Chicago

All across the poorest working class areas of the city you can hear the same refrain. To get serious about defusing gang violence, people need good paying jobs and rational economic development to drastically reduce poverty. In areas of the city where poverty is minimal, there are no serious gang problems. There has not been a murder in the mostly white prosperous Northwest Side neighborhood of Edison Park since 2007. There were 128 murders in mostly black low income South Side Englewood since 2007.

This disparity is the direct consequence of Chicago’s traditional racial apartheid as well as the steep increase in income inequality in the USA as a whole. The map below makes this point.

Chicago has the 3rd highest US urban poverty rate and the worst African American poverty rate in the nation. One third of Chicago’s children are in poverty. Chicago’s income inequality is similar to that of El Salvador, a nation whose appalling income inequality fuels a shockingly high homicide rate.

An appalling income inequality? A shockingly high homicide rate? Sound familiar?

The link between income inequality and violence has been shown by numerous studies around the world, which simply confirms what many Chicagoans already know from direct observation. The loss of Chicago’s once plentiful unionized manufacturing jobs and the current attack on wages from the city’s elite have made the economics of working class life more uncertain and more dangerous.

During the summer of 2012, the Austin neighborhood on the far West Side suffered the highest number of homicides of any neighborhood in the city. Unemployment in Austin stands at 22%. Disinvestment there is symbolized by the sprawling urban ruins of the once bustling unionized Brach’s Candy factory. The presence of a low wage Walmart on North Ave does little for the 27,000 Austin residents in poverty. Many Austin workers commute to downtown retail stores and restaurants and Austin is #1 among Chicago neighborhoods in providing workers to downtown department stores. These downtown workplaces are mostly non-union and often pay poverty wages.

Throughout 2012, there were numerous public protests by low wage workers who make the connection between the pain of poverty and the agony of neighborhood violence. They want a pay raise for Chicago's poverty level workers---a very substantial pay raise that will narrow the income inequality gap. They are also calling for more jobs at decent wages to help the unemployed, not more minimum wage work that cannot support families. They are determined to reduce the appeal of gangs and eventually dissolve those dangerous borders that many Chicago students must navigate.

Workers demand an increase in the minimum wage

The Workers Organizing Committee of Chicago (WOCC) is one of the many groups addressing the central issues of poverty and racism that are at the root of gang violence. They have been leading the Fight for 15 campaign to raise wages in the downtown retail and food service industry to $15 an hour.

Lorgio Velez is a 19 year old aspiring musician from the South Side Bridgeport-Canaryville community. In the past two years there have been 114 murders within two miles of Lorgio’s home. A former worker at McDonalds, Lorgio has been active in the WOCC Fight for 15 campaign:

“I’m from the city and gets a little rough out there. In the past month of November I lost two friends. One of whom was my best friend and the other was a good friend. You know, there is a lot of gang violence and a lot of times...I kinda fear for my life when I be walking around here.

I just want to be able to pursue my dream and see my projects come to life ...because everything is a struggle out here when you are making $8.25 an hour. I’m in these streets [at Fight for 15 demonstrations] rallying and marching and letting these voices be heard. It’s about time people see what’s going on.”

Lorgio Velez

For me, this is personal-- very personal

I once lived along one of those gang borders in the Logan Square neighborhood on the city’s near Northwest Side.

I kept a can of white paint handy to cover over the graffiti that regularly appeared on our garage. Sometimes it was to mark the territory of one the last remaining white gangs, the Gaylords, fighting a losing turf war against one of the newer latino gangs intent on expanding their territory. Sometimes it was two latino gangs contending with one another. I lost a modest amount of time and money painting over this wartime propaganda. The young people in these local battles were paying with their lives.

As a teacher on the city’s South Side in the last quarter of the 20th century I had students from neighborhoods like K-Town, Little Village, Gage Park and Pilsen. I learned about “Folks” and “People”, which were the two loose alliances that most Chicago street gangs belonged to.

I went to faculty orientations on the gang symbols of such organizations as the Latin Kings and the Two-Sixers, two of the more prominent gangs active in neighborhoods where our student originated. I was instructed to watch for gang graffiti on student notebooks and lockers. I learned some of the complex hand signals gangs used to communicate and the various “colors” which were their street attire.

It was an open enrollment Catholic women’s high school and yes we did have gang affiliated students there. But we also had a close-knit faculty and school community. For the most part, the school building itself was neutral territory. Some of the kids that I was reasonably sure had gang affiliations were good students and could contribute intelligent commentary in class discussions. But the war going on outside the schoolhouse door was never far away.

Students told me of painful personal losses in their extended families and in their neighborhoods. They spoke of community festivals where they were afraid to cross the street because a rival gang was patrolling the other side. A freshman student burst into tears one day when I passed out a Chicago Tribune article about gangs for a current events discussion. She knew one of the young men profiled in the article. He had been shot to death. Another student suddenly stood up in my 7th period world history class and started yelling incoherently. Two hours later she was a participant in a gang fight near the school. She knew she was going into combat and I think she was cracking under the strain. Some students displayed symptoms of PTSD.

As for me, I struggled against a tendency to develop a hard cynical self-protective exterior. A few teachers had succumbed to that and I didn’t like what I saw.

Sometimes I would walk up to the end of the 3rd floor corridor and look at the skyline of the Chicago Loop where the wealthy were moving vast fortunes around while young people tried to survive a war they did not start and did not know how to stop.

The skyscrapers seem to meld together into a single Dark Tower of Mordor where greed and lust for power were keeping multitudes of people struggling for economic survival while as the poet Mathew Arnold once wrote, “...ignorant armies clash by night.”

That was more than a decade ago, but how much has changed?

This is not the time to close a single school in the City of Chicago. There are lives in the balance.

Sources Consulted

Chicago Takes Leading Role In National Gun Debate by the Associated Press

Teen girl's killing ignites widespread outrage: 'Why did it have to be her'

Chicago shooting: A case of 'mistaken identity'? by Mary Wisniewski

Student safety No. 1 concern if Emmet Elementary closes, community members say by Ellyn Fortino

McCarthy: Police can safeguard students ‘crossing gang boundaries’ by Fran Spielman and Lauren Fitzpatrick

Chicago's $10 million CEOs

School-closings panel has conflicts of interest, group charges by Lauren Fitzpatrick

Questions for the commission: enrollment, finances by Curtis Black

The High Inequality of U.S. Metro Areas Compared to Countries by Richard Florida