'The Onion' Reports the Truth on the Chicago Public School System

Chicago Public School system: Nothing more than a low-level detention facility

This post went up over at VDare (on the highly informative VDare Blog) which points out a recent headline from The Onion cuts to the heart of the teachers strike in the Chicago Public School system in ways no other news outlet is capable of doing. [The Onion Understands Chicago Public School Students Better Than The MSM Or The Department Of Education, Paul Kersey, VDare, 9-13-2012]:

You knew the good folks over at The Onion would comment on the teachers strike from the Chicago Public School system

Chicago Public Schools Celebrate Third Straight Day Without Any Student Violence, Sept. 12, 2012

CHICAGO—Jubilant Chicago Public Schools officials announced Wednesday that, for three straight days now, there has not been a single act of student violence in any of the city’s 675 public schools. “Our classrooms and hallways are safer now than they’ve ever been,” said CPS chief executive Jean-Claude Brizard, happily noting that there have been no reported instances of beatings, stabbings, sexual assaults, or shootings in any of the city’s public schools this week.[ More]

Because there are no students!

Recall that of the 400,000+ students attending CPS schools, lessthan 9 percent of them are white (44 percent are Hispanic and 40 percent are Black). Like most of the articles in The Onion, this satirical piece on Chicago Public Schools isn’t far off the mark.

Consider this article from The Huffington Post

Chicago Public School Students Face Racial Discipline Gap: Education Department, March 6, 2012:

In Chicago public schools, black students receive harsher punishments for in-school infractions than white students, a fact that mirrors a nationwide trend, according to data released by the U.S. Department of Education Tuesday. The report paints a startling picture of racial disparities in how students are disciplined in schools across the country.

In Chicago, white students comprised three percent of suspensions — and 10 percent of the total student population — but black students, who had a larger overall representation at 42 percent, comprised 76 percent of the city's school suspensions. The data show that in 2009 to 2010, Chicago suspended the third largest percentage of black students among the country's 20 biggest school districts. [More]

Of course, the black students misbehaving is never, ever their fault—we just have to find new, advanced methods of convincing the dwindling percentage of white kids in the CPS system to disrupt the flow of learning at rates that are comparable to the black kids.

Violence at schools in Chicago is nothing new, and with the teachers strike comes a reprieve in the state-sponsored (and tax-payer funded) day-care system that is provided to the primarily fatherless households of the Second City.

That’s basically what the K-12 Education system in Chicago: glorified babysitters (and hey, with an average salary of $76,000 for a teacher, it beats the starting salary for a correctional officer at the Cook County Jail, which starts at only $45,000/k a year) in a low-level detention facility.

Read the rest there. If you have Twitter, consider sending this article to both the Chicago Public School account (@ChiPubSchools) and the Chicago Teachers Union account (@CTULocal1 ).

Basically, the Chicago Public School system (remember, of 400,000+ students, roughly nine percent are white) operates as a low-level detention facility. The teachers average compensation dwarfs the starting salary for a Cook County correctional officer, meaning that the environment inside the classroom is far more treacherous than the one inside the jails of Chicago.

Why else would Chicago Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy give a press conference on Monday where he said "We're emptying out our offices"; with the teachers on strike, the momentary detention facilities public schools of Chicago aren't performing their duty of providing state-sponsored baby-sitting. 

All of this reminds me of a scene from the John Hughes movie The Breakfast Club. Set in an all-white suburb of Chicago in the 1980s, the film is about five students of varying backgrounds (but all-white) sent to Saturday detention. The overbearing Assistant Principal Richard Vernon (a character who has been lampooned in countless forms of media since) acts as a domineering administrator over the detainees. In a pivotal scene, Vernon has a conversation with the white janitor:

                            VERNON
               What did you want to be when you
               were young?

                             CARL
               When I was a kid, I wanted to be
               John Lennon...

                            VERNON
               Carl don't be a goof!  I'm trying
               to make a serious point here...I've
               been teaching, for twenty two years,
               and each year...these kids get more
               and more arrogant.

                             CARL
               Aw bull shit, man.  Come on Vern,
               the kids haven't changed, you have!
               You took a teaching position, 'cause
               you thought it'd be fun, right?
               Thought you could have summer
               vacations off...and then you found
               out it was actually work...and that
               really bummed you out.

                            VERNON
               These kids turned on me...they think
               I'm a big fuckin' joke...

                             CARL
               Come on...listen Vern, if you were
               sixteen, what would you think of
               you, huh?

                            VERNON
               Hey...Carl, you think I give one
               rat's ass what these kids think of
               me?

                             CARL
               Yes I do...

                            VERNON
               You think about this...when you get
               old, these kids; when I get old,
               they're gonna be runnin' the country.

                             CARL
               Yeah?

                            VERNON
               Now this is the thought that wakes
               me up in the middle of the night...
               That when I get older, these kids
               are gonna take care of me...

                             CARL
               I wouldn't count on it!

Does anyone ever stop and think how the 92 percent non-white students, who are enrolled in the Chicago Public Schools system, will run Chicago in the near-future?

No, of course not.

These are questions we aren't supposed to ask in Black-Run America (BRA).

Because Life is So Brief and Time is a Thief When You're Undecided: The Racial History of Gary, Indiana and the Need for Restrictive Covenants

Gary, Indiana demise correlates to the 1967 election of its first Black Mayor

It's a city time forgot; it's a history lesson that we purposefully skip over; it's yet another reminder that "Manifest Destruction" (the Great Migration of Blacks from South) was the most devastating event in American history.

Gary, Indiana.

In S. Paul O'Hara's Gary, the Most American of All American Cities we are introduced to a city whose collapse mirrors that of Detroit (described in vivid detail in Escape from Detroit:The Collapse of America's Black Metropolis): with a population that nearly 100 percent white in 1920, Gary saw a migration of 15,000 Black migrants between 1920 and 1930. At 18 percent of the population of Gary in 1930, another 20,000 Black people would join them by 1940 -- lured by work in the steel mills.

Through high fecundity rates (maintaining close racial solidarity), the percentage of Blacks would slowly began to overwhelm the white population; by 1967, Black people would be able to elect Richard Gordon Hatcher as one of the first Black mayors of a major city in the nation.

Time magazine would report the election of Hatcher was a victory, not because of race, but due to a desire to reform the political process. Nevertheless, the magazine would report:

"Shouting, dancing Negroes weaved wildly through the six downtown blocks of Gary, Indiana."

Today, Gary, Indiana is 84 percent Black. USA Today called it a "ghost-town" in a 2011 article [Gary, Ind., struggles with population loss, by Judy Keen, 5-19-2011]:

The 2010 Census crystallized Gary's decline: The population, which peaked at 178,320 in 1960, is now 80,294. From 2000 through last year's count, Gary lost 22% of its residents. The city's unemployment rate in February was 9.8%.

Gary — like Detroit, which lost 25% of its people in the past decade — faces tough questions: What is the best way to shrink a city? How can city government provide adequate services as its tax base contracts? How can new employers and residents be wooed to a place known more for blight than for opportunity?

The city has cut many services and decided last month to close its main library, which opened in 1964. A state board raised property tax caps this month and set Gary's tax levy at $40.8 million. If the caps had not been increased, Gary would have been allowed to collect only $30 million. It was the third and final time the city can seek such relief.

A plague of vacancies

Gary was founded in 1906 by U.S. Steel, which still employs 4,727 here. Last year, the company announced a $220 million modernization of the Gary plant.

The city's decline began in the 1960s as overseas steel production squeezed U.S. makers and accelerated in the 1970s as "white flight" prompted the rapid growth of surrounding cities. More than 80% of Gary's residents are black.

 Wait a second: why can't the 84 percent Black population sustain the wealth that white people left behind?; why can't they keep alive the businesses?; why can't they keep alive the high property valuations; how come the migration of Black people to Gary brought high levels of crime and violence that caused white people to flee the city?; why can't the majority Black population ignite that entrepreneurial spirit, innovate, attract outside investments, and diversity the economy (as happened in Pittsburgh -- another city built on steel)?

The answer is self-explanatory: because the population is less than 10 percent white and 84 percent Black.

Because Black people (outside of state and federal welfare, handouts, subsidies, and grants) have no purchasing power, the city needed an emergency infusion of cash in 2009 from the Obama stimulus fund. In all, Gary received $266 million in stimulus funds [Gary, Indiana: Unbroken spirit amid the ruins of the 20th Century, BBC, by Paul Mason, 10-12-2010]:

I'd been to Gary, Indiana before. In April 2009, when the Obama fiscal stimulus had just begun, the city's mayor had told me that all the city needed was $400m of stimulus money in order to "fly like an eagle and make our country proud".

To put this in context you have to know that Gary, home to what is still US Steel Corp's biggest plant, is suffering from one of the most advanced cases of urban blight in the developed world. Its city centre is near-deserted by day. The texture of the urban landscape is cracked stone, grass, crumbled brick and buddleia.

Gary is one third poor, 84% African American, and has seen its population halve over the past three decades. If crime, as the official figures suggest, has recently dropped off then - say the critics - that is because population flight from the city is bigger than the census figures show.

Gary in the end got $266m of stimulus money and has, according to the federal "recipient reported data" created a grand total of 327 jobs. That's $800,000 per job.
I went back determined to find out how the stimulus dollars had been spent; to get beyond the ideology and recriminations and see why President Barack Obama's stimulus has failed to turn the country around.

Brink of bankruptcy?

So what's the story with Gary and the stimulus? The mayor believes the city is "last in line" when it comes to federal money - because the money is dispensed via the state of Indiana, which is Republican controlled. Mayor Rudy Clay tells me:
"I guess they thought, well, Gary voted in large numbers for the president, enabling him to take the state of Indiana, so he will look after them."

But it is more complex - Gary's public finances are a mess. It owes tens of millions of dollars to other entities. Its great get-out-of-jail card - tax revenue from casinos - turned out to be a busted flush. Its convention centre is dark most of the time. The one-time Sheraton Hotel, right next to the City Hall, is derelict.

With no ability to raise a local income tax it is reliant on property tax. But the State of Indiana passed laws capping tax raising powers, so by 2012 Gary's tax income from property will halve.

At that point, according to the fiscal monitor appointed by the city, it will lack the revenue to fund even its police, fire and ambulance services. The monitor calls for much of the rest of Gary's services to be privatised - but as city officials point out, once privatised they cannot enforce job guarantees that allow the city to employ local people. Says the monitor, bluntly:

"The city will simply have to give up some long-standing - and often important - services that are the responsibility of other governments, even when it is likely that those governments will not provide the same level of service."

 This is the cost of "Manifest Destruction." Gary isn't suffering from Urban Blight -- that's just a symptom of the real problem. It's not suffering from crime, high foreclosure rates, bad schools, or lack of outside capital investment in the infrastructure (and potentially investors who would open up businesses that could provide some semblance of a commercial tax-base); it's suffering from the unmentionable legacy of the migration of Black people and the overwhelming of a once prosperous white city.

Earlier this year Karen Wilson-Freeman became the first Black female mayor of Gary. Her goal? Increase the efficiency of the almost entirely Black-run government, which calls "small victories" fixing potholes, repairing sidewalks, and not dropping the calls the 84 percent Black constituents who call to complain about he poor city services [Meet Indiana's First African-American Female Mayor, The Atlantic, 12-29-2011]:

While U.S. Steel still employs 6,000, that’s a far cry from the 50,000 people who once worked there, and the loss of those jobs is reflected in the boarded up homes and empty streets that spread across town.

At its peak in the 1950s, Gary’s population topped 200,000, only to plunge in subsequent decades to about 80,000 in 2010.

Freeman-Wilson says she wants to heal the sometimes tense relationship between employer and town. “Certainly, they have a responsibility to our city, but we have a responsibility to be a good partner,” she says.

To hold up its end, willing to start with “small victories,” like better lighting, pothole free streets and repaired sidewalks.

But beyond that, Freeman-Wilson speaks of making Gary a cleaner city, not only in appearance, but also in the way it deals with residents, who frequently complain they cannot reach anyone at city hall.

“You should be able to get through without being transferred five times,” Freeman-Wilson says.

The decline of Gary correlates to the rise of its Black population and the decline of the overall percentage of its population (remember, roughly 100 percent white in 1920). 

Indeed, where the white people went once they escaped Gary, prosperity flourished. Thriving business and commercial districts, safe streets, outside investments, and good schools were just an outgrowth of this migration [ Hurt feelings continue over Northwest Indiana town's creation [Merrillville, Ind. experiencing now a little of what Gary did 40 years ago, WBEZ 91.5, 8-31-2012]:

U.S. 30 and Interstate 65 in Northwest Indiana is among the busiest retail corridors in Indiana. For a long time, this area, much of it in the Town of Merrillville, was the envy of Northwest Indiana, but none more so than for folks living in Gary.
To Steel City residents, the establishment of Merrillville a little more than 40 years ago was seen as a racist slap in the face allowed by Indiana state lawmakers.

But today, if you need to buy a new car, or celebrate a birthday or buy that special gift or see a concert by a top-notch artist, if you live anywhere in Northwest Indiana chances are you’re doing it in Merrillville.

“Merrillville is the Main Street of Northwest Indiana,” said Rich James, a retired political columnist from Northwest Indiana.

While shops dominate the Merrillville landscape now, James remembers it wasn’t always like that.

“Fourty-one years ago, Merrillville was pretty much a cow pasture,” James said. “It had a name, it wasn’t incorporated.”

But what the area did have was plenty of open land; land to build homes and businesses on. This area became pretty attractive just as the City of Gary began its steep decline as steel jobs began to dry up in the once-thriving community of 175,000 residents.

But loss of jobs wasn’t the only issue facing Gary.

In the mid-1960s, blacks increased in number in what was then a very ethnic-white Gary.

Confined to living in one section of city for decades, blacks pushed for the right to live anywhere they chose, including in affluent white sections.

Richard Gordon Hatcher became Gary’s first black mayor in 1968. In the years up to his election, Hatcher pushed for an open housing law. It wasn’t easy.

“Every time it came up for a vote the council chambers would be packed with screaming and yelling. I liken them to the Tea Partiers today,” Hatcher told WBEZ. “They were yelling and all kinds of racial slurs and they would intimidate. I introduced that bill at least six times. It was defeated five times.”

White fam­­ilies from an increasing black Gary left in droves once Merrillville became a town.
The hurt from that time still exists today even as Merrillville’s demographics have shifted.

But it won't last, with the Black Undertow escaping their city of Gary and migrating to where ever white people go. Merrillville is now 40 percent Black:

Merrillville incorporated as a town in 1971, developing at a rapid pace with not only new residents, but retail development over the next decade.

As life breathed into Merrillville, in Gary, it was just the opposite.

Residents fled and Gary’s once thriving downtown – devastated.

Carolyn E. Mosby remembers growing up in a rapidly deteriorating Gary and couldn’t understand why it was happening.

“When you see these boarded up buildings on Broadway or you see these vacant homes, a lot of the people who chose to leave, a lot of the people who chose to leave didn’t decide to sell their businesses or sell their homes, they just boarded them up and left,” Mosby said.

By the 1980s, Mosby was a teenager who often found herself not shopping at the Merrillville area’s new mall or other stores – pretty much at the insistence of her late mother, Carolyn B. Mosby, a longtime state legislator from Gary.

“She was very involved in the community as well and this was something that was very near and dear to her was to really support those people that chose to stay in Gary, the businesses and the folks who didn’t abandoned their home and moved to Merrillville,” Mosby said.

Just last year, Merrillville celebrated 40 years as a town.

This town of 35,000 residents is no longer lily white.

In fact, it’s now more than 40 percent African American, with many continuing to move because its school district is considered better than Gary’s.

No town in America is safe from the Black Undertow. Gary was overwhelmed, to the point where without the infusion of $200+ million of stimulus funds in 2009 it would have ceased to be a city. This is the legacy of the Black Migration from the South, an event that has led to the ruin of Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and decentralized the Black dysfunction that was once reserved solely for slave-holding states.

But it was in reading S. Paul O'Hara's book that the realization that the 1948 Shelley v. Kraemer U.S. Supreme Court ruling (outlawing restrictive covenants) was the nail in the coffin for the long-term prospects of America became crystallized. On p. 138 of Gary, the Most American of All American Cities we learn that the election of Gary's first Black mayor signaled the coming of disaster for the white residents of the city:

Fear of a city run by a black mayor led many white residents to move away. "For Sale" signs popped up as residents feared declining property values. A rash of white flight of both capital and population occured. "I been here all my life," reported one white resident to Harper's.

I got me a house I paid $35,000  for, but I'm leavin' it.... It's not that I hate the colored or anything, but I'm dumpin' it all. Who the hell wants to live this way, I ask you. Bein' scared somebody'll hit you on the head all the time, you can't go out of the house after dark. You work all your life for something, and then they start movin' in, and suddenly you don't have anything - it's not yours anymore. First person that makes me any kind of half-ass offer on that house now, it's his, and I'm gone. With once exception - I'm not sellin' to no goddam colored. I'd put a torch to it first. 

The prospect of sharing a neighborhood, especially for a city built upon an image of strict separation, was seen as undermining the very thing people had worked for in the mills. "Mr. Hatcher, We are a big group of women, who would like to know a few answer," stated one letter to the new mayor:

We have nothing against the colored people but we would not like to have them live next door to us. Yet it seems that the colored people are always pushing... Please can you explain to us why black people want to be near us when we don't want them deep from our hearts & never will?

Questions that will never, ever be answered. Instead, billions upon billions of stimulus must be spent to try and "save" cities like Detroit and Gary --- the reason being that "Manifest Destruction" destroyed the social capital, community, and infrastructure that white people had created before their arrival.

Without restrictive covenants, the future of all American cities resembles that of Gary, Indiana.

It is, after all, the most American of All America Cities: In Black-Run America (BRA) that is.

And like that fistful of sand from the Rod Stewart song, civilization in Gary has slipped through the hands of the Black people who inherited the city after whites left.

Mind the Gap: The Chicago Public School Teachers Strike and Racial Realities

Do the CPS teachers strike because of an understanding of racial realities?

Lawrence Auster has been discussing the Chicago Public Schools teacher strike, and pointed out something that seems to fly in the face of the Waiting For Superman crowd:

In today’s post on the Chicago public schoolteachers’ strike, a reader explains in clear terms what the teachers are striking against: the prospect of teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores. The teachers refuse to accept a system in which their career, their salary, their future is determined by their ability to educate the ineducable.

Of course, not a single Republican politician or mainstream conservative writer in the country would understand this, since they believe that blacks have the same intellectual abilities as whites, and that it’s only the soft bigotry of low expectations that is holding the blacks back…

Remember, it was a few weeks that SBPDL published the racial breakdown of the students of 400,000+ students enrolled in the CPS system, and it doesn’t look anything like that of the Chicago high schools John Hughes immortalized in his 1980s films:

 Total: 404,151 (FY2011-2012) Student enrollment

Preschool: 24,232

Kindergarten: 29,594

Elementary (1-8): 236,452

Secondary (9-12): 113,873

Student racial breakdown

African-American: 41.6%

Latino: 44.1%

White: 8.8%

Asian/Pacific Islander: 3.4%

Native American: 0.4%

Better though, is the breakdown of the teachers, administrators, employees, and principals of the CPS system [all information courtesy of the Chicago Public Schools official Web site]:

Total: 40,678 (2009-10)

Total positions:

Public schools: 35,711

Non-public schools: 35  

Citywide: 3,473 

Central/regional: 1,459

Principals total: 529

African-American: 49.8%

White: 30.8%

Latino: 17.5%

Asian/Pacific Islander: 1.5%

Native American: 0.3%

Racial breakdowns (all staff):

African-American: 40.0%

White: 36.1%

Latino: 20.4%

Asian/Pacific Islander: 2.9%

Native American: 0.7%

Teachers total: 21,320

African-American: 29.7%

White: 49.7%

Latino: 16.1%

Asian/Pacific Islander: 3.6%

Native American: 0.9%

We already know the teachers are striking over the indignity of being offered a pay raise of only 16 percent (from an average salary of $76,000), which Chicago Teachers Union has countered with a demand of a 30 percent raise. But what is truly driving this strike? 
 

Well, what if it’s the realization that Waiting for Superman to close the racial gap in educational achievement ain’t gonna happen any time soon and that proposed metrics to tie student performance (scores on standardized tests) to ¼ of a teacher’s assessment is the primary grounds for pedagogical rebellion in the Second City? [Question at heart of Chicago strike: How do you measure teacher performance?, Sevil Omer, NBC News, 9/12/2012]:

With negotiators trying to hammer out an agreement that would end Chicago’s teachers strike, one of the key sticking points is how to evaluate whether a teacher is doing a good job, an issue that has riled school boards across the U.S. in recent years.

Chicago’s school leaders are proposing that student performance on standardized tests count toward 25 percent of a teacher’s assessment, growing to 40 percent in five years, according to NBCChicago.com.

But Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis is critical of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s push to make great use of standardized tests in teacher reviews, calling the process flawed. Union officials say the system wouldn’t do enough to take into account outside factors such as poverty, crime and homelessness.

"Evaluate us on what we do, not the lives of our children we do not control," Lewis said in announcing the strike. It was unclear what union officials proposed instead.

White kids in Chicago schools can only be found in 1980 John Hughes films (like The Breakfast Club)

Keep in mind that one school system, Atlanta Public Schools, tried to cheat its way to improved test scores in its predominantly Black system – with the entire educational bureaucracy in America cheer leading each time the test scores showed tremendous overall improvement. With big-time financial bonuses and promotions tied to a teacher’s ability to improve the standardized test scores of their pupils, APS administrators applied insane amounts of pressure for improvement, “By any means necessary” (Cheating report confirms teacher's suspicions, Paul Frysh, CNN, 8-8-2011). 

 

Recall the reason that such cheating was necessary in the overwhelmingly Black APS system (School: Teacher Helps Students Cheat Because She Says They’re ‘Dumb As Hell’, CBS Atlanta, 8-28-2012):

A former fifth-grade teacher implicated in a cheating scandal reportedly gave students the illegal assistance because she thought they were “dumb as hell.”

According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, math teacher Shayla Smith was accused of offering students the answers to a test they were taking at the time. She had reportedly been responsible for supervising them while the tests were being completed.

Schajuan Jones, who taught a fourth-grade class across the hall from Smith’s former room, overheard her talking to another teacher about the test.

 “The words were, ‘I had to give your kids, or your students, the answers because they’re dumb as hell,’” Jones was quoted as saying about the interaction between Smith and the unidentified third teacher.

Though few will ask the question, it is vital to inquire of those striking CPS teachers if they too feel the way about their students as Shayla Smith did of her pupils in the APS system. 
 

Are the striking teachers in Chicago afraid to tie their salaries (and career aspirations) to primarily non-white students that are “dumb as hell,” knowing that to have these students test scores – those same students they baby-sit teach - count toward 25 percent of their evaluations would be tantamount to spotting an opposing football team a seven touchdown lead?

Let’s quickly look at the reality of life in the CPS system:

• In Chicago, white students comprised three percent of suspensions -- and 10 percent of the total student population -- but black students, who had a larger overall representation at 42 percent, comprised 76 percent of the city's school suspensions. The data show that in 2009 to 2010, Chicago suspended the third largest percentage of black students among the country's 20 biggest school districts. The only districts with higher black suspension rates were Philadelphia and Prince George's county, outside of Washington, D.C.  "Some of the worst discrepancies are in my home town of Chicago," U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who formerly led the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) system, said on a Monday call with reporters. "We began peer juries where students were responsible for disciplining each other and finding alternative ways to resolve disputes. It is clear that Chicago –- and many other cities -- still have a lot more work to do." [Huffington Post, Chicago Public School Students Face Racial Discipline Gap Education Department, 3/6/2012]  
• What about improvements in test scores?

Twenty years of reform efforts and programs targeting low-income families in Chicago Public Schools has only widened the performance gap between white and African-American students, a troubling trend at odds with what has occurred nationally.

Across the city, and spanning three eras of CPS leadership, black elementary school students have lost ground to their white, Latino and Asian classmates in testing proficiency in math and reading, according to a recent analysis by the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research.

Even for schools so often weighed down by violence, poverty and dysfunction in their neighborhoods, news of this growing deficit was surprising to researchers considering the strides African-American students had made nationally over the same period.

"It has certainly been shocking to us to discover there has been progress in some areas but without equity progress not shared equally among all the students," said Marisa de la Torre, a researcher on a recent report by the consortium that examined two decades of changes within CPS. "You don't really want to leave one group of students behind."

Since the early 1990s, black fourth- and eighth-graders in the U.S. have improved their reading and math scores at a greater rate than whites on the annual National Assessment of Educational Progress tests, a key performance indicator across demographics. Educators and politicians hailed this as an important step toward closing an achievement gap that had confounded them for decades.

This is an important issue in Chicago, where almost half of CPS students are black, the vast majority from low-income households. Yet for all the talk and attention paid to boosting African-American achievement in recent years, there has been no such breakthrough.

"It's not the students' fault. It's our fault as adults," CPS' new chief, Jean-Claude Brizard, said recently in a speech to the Chicago Urban League. "In order to turn things around, we must make sure that the students and their achievement always comes first. Not adults. Not politics. Not administrators. Not contracts."

Poor test scores are only part of the equation. Only 1 in 2 African-American students in Chicago graduates from high school, a number that has increased over the past decade but not at the rate of other racial and ethnic groups. School suspensions, expulsions and disciplinary cases also affect black students disproportionally. [CPS fails to close performance gap

Black students still losing academic ground despite reforms, study finds,

11-14-2011, Chicago Tribune]

How about scores on the ACT?:

This year’s new counting method emerged after complaints that some high schools were trying to boost their scores by preventing low-achieving juniors with too few credits from taking the PSAE and the ACT until their senior year, meaning the potentially lower scores would not be counted against the school.

Using an apples-to-apples, juniors-versus-only-juniors comparison, results contained in a CPS Powerpoint released to reporters Thursday indicated the average ACT score racked up by CPS juniors rose from 17.3 to 17.4 on the 36-point college admission test.

Again, comparing only juniors to juniors, the percent of CPS students considered “college-ready’’ in all four ACT subjects tested — reading, English, math and science — also increased from 7.2 to 7.9 percent, a paltry showing but still an uptick nonetheless.

And, under the old counting method, the percent of CPS juniors who passed the Prairie State this year held flat, at 29.3.

But CPS’s news release reflected only the new counting method in its reported scores. As a result, CPS found that the percent of students passing the Prairie State declined one full percentage point, and the CPS ACT average dropped by 0.1 of a percentage point, to 17.2.

The headlines of the CPS news release were uncharacteristically negative: “Mostly Flat and Declining High School Test Results Underscore Need for More Time on Task and Extended School Day for Students. PSAE shows that only 7.9 % of student test takers meet college readiness benchmarks.’’

Chicago Public School officials emphasized the more dire score calculations, however, and contended they proved the need for a longer school day and year, as Mayor Rahm Emanuel has been demanding.

“These results show we have work to do,’’ new Chicago Schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard said in a news release. “Students need more time in the classroom with their teachers and that time needs to be best used to boost student achievement.’’ [CPS High School ACT Scores Go Down – and Go Up, Chicago Sun Times, 8-18-2011]

What are some of the current metrics for students when it comes to grade-level proficiency in reading and math?:

Seventy-nine percent of the 8^th graders in the Chicago Public Schools are not grade-level proficient in reading, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and 80 percent are not grade-level proficient in math.

In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education administered National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in reading and math to students around the country, including in the Chicago Public Schools. The tests were scored on a scale of 0 to 500, with 500 being the best possible score. Based on their scores, the U.S. Department of Education rated students’ skills in reading and math as either “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” or “advanced.”

Nationally, public school 8^th graders scored an average of 264 on the NAEP reading test. Statewide in Illinois, the 8^th graders did a little better, scoring an average of 266. But in the Chicago Public Schools, 8^th graders scored an average of only 253 in reading. That was lower even than the nationwide average of 255 among 8^th graders in “large city” public schools.

With these NAEP test results, only 19 percent of Chicago public school 8^th graders rated proficient in reading while another 2 percent rated advanced—for a total of 21 percent who rated proficient or better.

79 percent of Chicago public school 8^th graders were not grade-level proficient in reading. According to the U.S. Department of Education, this included 43 percent who rated “basic” and 36 percent who rated “below basic.” [U.S. Department of Education: 79% of Chicago 8th Graders Not Proficient in Reading, CNSNews.com, 9-10-12]

And what of the ACT average of the teachers who are tasked with educating what Auster deems the “ineducable” in Chicago? Try a whopping 19:

You’ll hear a lot of numbers bandied around in the coming days regarding the Chicago Teachers Union strike – average salary, anticipated size of the district’s deficit, level of state financial support.

But the number I find most disturbing is: 19.

That’s the average Chicago Public School teacher’s score on the ACT test if they took it when attending high school, according to a 2008 Southern Illinois University study.

Despite all of the bright teachers, there are enough who scored so badly on the ACT that they dragged the average down to 19 out of a possible score of 36.

To put that number in perspective, today every high school junior in Illinois – whether they are going to college or not – is required to take the test.  This year their average test score was just shy of 21.

But none of this stuff matters, right? Let’s just keep our eyes averted from reality and look to the skies, Waiting for Superman together. 

Chicago Public Schools is going the way of the Detroit system: basically, the teachers are paid to provide surveillance for eight hours a day (and the school to offer free lunches that the parent(s) can’t afford), baby-sitting students so that the police department in the Second City can have a momentary reprieve:

Chicagoans are likely going to notice more uniformed officers on the streets during the duration of the teacher strike.

"We're emptying out our offices," police Supt. Garry McCarthy said Sunday night at a press conference at the Harold Washington Library. "We're taking officers who are on administrative duties -- we're shutting down administrative duties -- we're putting those officers on the streets to deal with potential protests at various locations throughout the city."

And this city, Chicago, is labeled a “world class city”? Maybe now you understand why Mayor Emanuel sends his kids to extremely private the University of Chicago Lab Schools:

The University of Chicago Lab School is an elite, diverse and costly school that has long educated the children of Chicago’s rich, famous and clout-heavy. Annual tuition at the Hyde Park school ranges from $21,876 for grades 1-4 to $23,676 for grades 5-8 and $24,870 for high school students.

In Chicago, you must always be prepared to Mind the Gap in racial achievement: now you know why the teachers of the Second City are striking, as having their salaries and careers tied to student achievement (where no measurable achievement will ever be quantified, unless you pull the APS method of cheating) is a metric they aren’t willing to have on the bargaining table.

View more videos at: http://nbcchicago.com.

Let Them Die

Remember, of Chicago's K-12 Public School enrollment (just under 415,000 students), 40% are Black; 44% are Hispanic; and only 8 percent are white.

Heather Mac Donald recently wrote at City Journal (Undisciplined, Summer 2012):

Arne Duncan, of all people, should be aware of inner-city students’ self-discipline problems, having headed the Chicago school system before becoming secretary of education. Chicago’s minority youth murder one another with abandon. Since 2008, more than 530 people under the age of 21 have been killed in the city, mostly by their peers, according to the Chicago Reporter; virtually all the perpetrators were black or Hispanic. 

Between September 2011 and February 2012, 25 times more black Chicago students than white ones were arrested at school, mostly for battery; black students outnumbered whites by four to one. (In response to the inevitable outcry over the arrest data, a Chicago teacher commented: “I feel bad for kids being arrested, . . . but I feel worse seeing a kid get his head smashed on the floor and almost die. Or a teacher being threatened with his life.”) So when Duncan lamented, upon the release of the 2012 discipline report, that “some of the worst [discipline] discrepancies are in my hometown of Chicago,” one could only ask: What does he expect?

What is life like in those schools? Natalie Pardo, back in September of 2007, wrote this for the Chicago Reporter (Chicago Public Schools: Expulsions Rise, But Safety Issues Persist):

At a time when schools in rural and suburban America have been shocked by random acts of unexplained violence, Chicago schools continue to crack down on what, by most measures, has become regrettably commonplace. The number of students expelled from city public schools has jumped dramatically in the last three years, from 57 in the 1995-96 school year to 318 last year, according to an analysis of school records by The Chicago Reporter.

And while schools are seizing more weapons than ever, students are devising ways to beat the system. Five Chicago public school teens told the Reporter how they smuggled weapons–"for self-defense, they say–"past metal detectors and other security stops.

"It's a terrible commentary on society in the 1990s when people feel the need to have a weapon to protect themselves," said Chicago Public Schools Chief Education Officer Cozette Buckney.

But the former high school principal said the system cannot tolerate any violations. "The school has a right to a safe environment," Buckney said. "When you bring a gun, you bring a gun, you bring a gun: It's hard to see a gray area."

The board's zero tolerance policy, initiated in the fall of 1995, required principals to report all acts of misconduct. And now all high schools must have metal detectors. Lawmakers also have acted. On July 31, Gov. Jim Edgar signed legislation making the unlawful use of weapons on or within 1,000 feet of a school a class 3 felony, which carries a two- to five-year prison sentence. And last year the Chicago City Council prohibited the possession of utility knives and box cutters by anyone under 18.

Heavy Metal 

In June, Vallas announced that metal detectors would be installed in the remaining 11 high schools that do not have them.

But on Aug. 25, no detectors were in place at Whitney M. Young Magnet High School, 211 S. Laflin St.. The school, considered the crown jewel of the Chicago system, has expelled seven students since 1995. It has three metal detectors, but it should have nine, board records show.

The Local School Council has voted against metal detectors, said Principal Joyce Kenner. "We feel it's under the control with security personnel and staff in the building."

Still "we are very vigilant about safety. Everyone has their eyes and ears open."

"I feel fortunate –¦ privileged to say that I have never viewed any type of metal detector inside of Whitney Young," said senior Khandicia N. Randolph, 17.

Because of the high caliber of the students and parental support, metal detectors aren't needed on a daily basis at Kenwood Academy High School, 5015 S. Blackstone Ave., said Assistant Principal James Williams. The school has security cameras and personnel, and the walk-through detectors will be up soon, he said.

Sixty-one high schools and four elementary schools have a total of 270 hand-held metal detectors, board documents show. But the Reporter's survey in July and August found the schools only could account for 196 of the devices. The schools told the Reporter they had 149 walk-through detectors; the school board counts 169.

 K-12 schools for Chicago Public Schools (remember, only 8 percent of the 415,000 are white) are basically low-level detention facilities; they exist to babysit the detritus, the children of parents who can only care for their kids because of the generosity of the welfare state (free school lunches, EBT/Food Stamps, Public Housing/Section 8 Housing).

The Chicago Reader provided us more details on just why the public school system in Chicago operates as a low-level prison facility (More young people are killed in Chicago than any other American city, By: Kari Lydersen and Carlos Javier Ortiz / January 25, 2012) ):

In Chicago, more than 530 people under the age of 21 have been killed since 2008 and many more have been shot or have otherwise suffered violence—often at the hands of their peers and particularly in the city’s African-American and Latino communities. Nearly 80 percent of youth homicides occurred in 22 black or Latino communities on the city’s South, Southwest and West sides—even though just one-third of the city’s population resided in those communities. The rate of youth homicide in West Englewood on the city’s South Side, for instance, was nearly five times higher than the citywide mark.

In contrast, there have been 22 other Chicago communities with no more than 1 youth killing since 2008. Many were located on the city’s North Side, but others like Beverly, Garfield Ridge, Hyde Park and Mount Greenwood did not lose any youth to violence but are next to or just a few minutes drive from others with some of the highest youth homicide rates in the city like Woodlawn, Roseland and Morgan Park.

It's time to turn off the welfare spigots. It's time for those remaining 8 percent white students in Chicago Public Schools to be evacuated out of the city (perhaps to Gary, Indiana, where they and their families will be tasked with fixing up that city) and for one thing to happen: concede control of Chicago to those who the administrators of the Chicago Public School system work so hard to baby-sit.

Turn the metal detectors off in the schools (how racist of the CPS to deny freedom to the 84% Black and Brown students enrolled there!) and desist in suspending unruly Black - and Brown- students, which brings so much chagrin to Crusading White Pedagogues (CWP) like Duncan.

Give control of Chicago to --- the people.

Warriors... Come Out to Play: Why Chicago is the Perfect City for a re-make of "The Warriors"

The Warriors is movie in dire need of a re-make. Made in 1979, the movie is a tale of rival gangs in New York City and, well, isn't a good movie.

Yes, crime in Chicago does have a color: the same hue that Paramount said had no "commercial appeal" in The Warriors

Based on a book by Sol Yurick, the director and casting agents of The Warriors was forced to add white characters to the eponymous gang because Paramount (which would be distributing the film) didn't think an all-Black cast would have any "commercial appeal."

Yurick's book doesn't have a white character, and the re-make of The Warriors should try and be as true to the source material as possible.

With one exception: move the location of the gang-war to Chicago, a city already besieged by the type of violence Yurick wrote about. More to the point, the participants are already the correct racial hue.

The violence in Chicago has been documented here - and here, here, and here - on many occasions (and at VDare), but the night of August 23 and the morning of August 24 broke new ground. With most of the violence and mass shootings confined to the weekend, a ready-made cast of Black miscreants for The Warriors re-make decided to diversify the shootings and liberate Friday night/Saturday morning/Saturday night/Sunday morning from monopolizing the violence [19 People Shot in Overnight Shootings in Chicago, Chicago Tribune, by Peter Nickeas]:

Nineteen people were shot across the South and West sides from Thursday evening through early Friday morning -- 13 of them wounded over a 30-minute period, authorities say.

The overnight shootings peaked between 9:15 p.m. and 9:45 p.m. That's when eight people, many of them teens, were shot at 79th Street and Essex Avenue about 9:30 p.m.

The shooters and those being shot are almost all-Black. The Chicago Tribune noted in an article published on July 12 that virtually all of the homicide victims have been non-white (Black or Hispanic); virtually all of the offenders non-white; and a sizable majority of both victim and offender boasting police records:

Violent crime has long afflicted minorities in Chicago at a much higher rate than the rest of the population, and the spike in homicides in the first half of this year provides an especially stark measure: 201 of the 259 homicide victims were African-American.

While blacks make up about 33 percent of the city's population, they accounted for nearly 78 percent of the homicide victims through the first six months of 2012.

By comparison, just 11 homicide victims in the first six months of the year were white, and 44 were Hispanic, according to police data.

The pattern is a familiar one in Chicago, where most violent crime happens in impoverished, mostly black neighborhoods on the South and West sides. Annual Chicago police statistics show a majority of both homicide victims and offenders are young black men with criminal records. With one exception, African-Americans have made up more than 70 percent of homicide victims in Chicago every year for the last two decades.

 Writing in Crain's Chicago Business, Dr. Arthur Lurigio reminds us that most of the violence in Chicago is confined in just six districts, meaning that the area of the city needed for filming The Warriors re-make wouldn't pose a geographical burden, keeping shooting costs low:

Homicide rates in Chicago have been lower recently than those in other cities in the United States and in the world. Rates of homicide have declined steadily since the 1990s and recently have been as low as they were in the 1960s. Murders in the city are concentrated in six districts (the murder corridor), all of which are plagued by intergenerational poverty, gang infestation, single-parent households, social disorder and economic blight. In 2010, 52 percent of the city's murders were committed in these six police districts. The remaining 19 are relatively safe.

The breakdown of Chicago's communities by percentage of Blacks living in each zone

The condition of a community (or in the case of Chicago - those six districts) is nothing more than a reflection of the majority population that inhabits the area, an outward indicator of the type of morality - or immorality - that flourishes there.

That the "murder corridor" in Chicago also happens be an area of the city where Black people make up nearly 100 percent of the population is of course unmentionable in polite company, unless you are of the Disingenuous White Liberal (DWL) variety and wish to whine about 'segregation', 'economic apartheid', and 'racism'. Luckily, Mr. Steve Bogira of The Chicago Reader stepped up to fill that role [Separate, Unequal, and Ignored
Racial segregation remains Chicago's most fundamental problem. Why isn't it an issue in the mayor's race?, February 10, 2001]:

But most African-Americans are clustered in two areas, as they were in the 1960s: a massive one on the south side, and a smaller one on the far west side. The south-side section, between Western Avenue and the lake, stretches more than a hundred blocks north to south, from 35th Street to the city limits at 138th. This African-American subdivision of Chicago includes 18 contiguous community areas, each with black populations above 90 percent, most of them well above that. The west-side black section includes another three contiguous 90 percent-plus community areas. Fifty-five percent of Chicago's 964,000 African-Americans live in these 21 community areas, in which the aggregate population is 96 percent black. Two-thirds of the city's blacks live in community areas that are at least 80 percent black.

On the flip side are the 33 community areas, most of them on the north and southwest sides, with less than 10 percent African-Americans. In 26 of these community areas less than 5 percent of the residents are black.

 Bogira can't blame Black people for their problems or for the condition of the districts where they constitute the demographic majority -- knowing that to blame Black people for problems found in their communities that are noticeably absent from white communities would represent the iceberg for the titanic known as Black-Run America (BRA) to run smack into. Discussing Black violence in Chicago, Lawrence Auster of View from the Right made this point as to why Bill O'Reilly's guest on his Fox News show must harp upon the lack of caring by white people about the Second City's descent into Mogadishu-levels of violence:

He is only repeating a fundamental axiom of liberal society, which is that blacks are not responsible moral agents, and that everything blacks do is but a function of something that whites are doing to them, or something that whites are failing to do for them.

Bogira would go one-step further in repeating that axiom of liberal society that Mr. Auster refers to in this piece at the Chicago Reader [Concentrated Poverty and Homicide in Chicago, July 26, 2012]

Because concentrated poverty in Chicago is inextricably linked to being African-American, I've also included the percentage of African-Americans in these community areas, calculated from 2005-2009 Census Bureau estimates. If the homicide rates in the poor black areas were twice the rates in the better-off white areas, that would be significant. The differences above, averaging about 13 to one, are staggering. This is what apartheid looks like.

The only thing more reprehensible than homicide rates so grossly disparate, from poor black neighborhoods to middle-class white neighborhoods, is that we've tolerated them for decades.

Concentrated poverty? Try a concentration of Black people.That's the problem that Mr. Bogira can't come to terms, instead blaming "apartheid" (one of the most overused words by leftists now) for the problems that Black people cause in their communities.

What Bogira found was that the poorest community areas in Chicago also tend to be almost all-Black; oh, and they have astronomically high homicide rates:

Riverdale: 61 % poverty; 98 % Black; 37 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)
Fuller Park: 56% poverty, 97 % Black; 63 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)
Englewood: 42 % poverty, 99 % Black; 48 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)
West Garfield Park: 40 % poverty, 96 % Black; 36 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)
East Garfield Park: 40 % poverty, 93 % Black, 42 Homicide rate (out of 100,000)

And there is your setting for The Warriors re-make: a true gang-land film, with the perfect 21st-century American gang-land shooting location. Chicago is your city for a movie that showcases the reality of gangs and violence for all too see.

Then again, we probably don't need a movie. Black people come out to play in Chicago on a weekly basis, providing the nation a glimpse of why living in areas with few (if any) Black people is the surest indicator of high property value, quality schools, and low crime rates.