Svigos buys another closed Chicago school

Svigos Assets bought Peabody. Put a charter in it. 

After they sat as empty blights on the community for nearly three years, the sell-off of closed CPS neighborhood schools has begun in earnest. Board members on Wednesday approved the sale of three vacant schools that were shuttered in 2013, providing "a small windfall of cash for its struggling budget".

Liza Balistreri is in charge of real estate at Chicago Public Schools and is running the sales of Near North Elementary in Noble Square, Overton Elementary in Bronzeville, and Von Humboldt Elementary in Humboldt Park.

Among the developers looking to make a profit on CPS real estate is Svigos Asset Management Corp. based in suburban Buffalo Grove. Svigos specializes in developing and managing commercial and residential properties, and owns apartment buildings in Lakeview, Logan Square and Albany Park.

Svigos is buying Near North for $5.1 million and plans to turn the school into "residential and commercial development". His company previously purchased the old Peabody Elementary for $3.5 million in 2014 only to turn around and sell space back to Rowe Charter School. Previously, district officials had said no closed school would be used as a charter school. The former Peabody was also developed as market-rate housing.

Paul Svigos has been a regular campaign contributor to Rahm Emanuel. The well-connected Svigos family has also made big contributions to the Daley's and other Democratic Party candidates.

Svigos was a former top Merrill Lynch stockbroker who the firm fired in October 1992. He hasn't been allowed to practice brokering since. But he recently won a huge settlement in his court battle with Lynch over the firing.

Svigos also runs the Fresh Farms grocery chain.

The Destabilizing Affect of Charter School Closings

"A lot of people in the school choice movement like the idea of accountability, but when accountability hits home, it's really hard to maintain your focus on results," said Brandon S. Brown, the director of charter schools for the Indianapolis mayor's office. "It's the authorizer's responsibility to hold an absolute bar for performance, which means that, sometimes, low-performing schools will not continue to operate." -- EdWeek

Privately-run charter school networks try and operate on a corporate business model, even though they are supposedly public entities, supported with public funds and accountable to public oversight. While their original charge was one of collaborating with their public school cousins to drive innovation and school improvement, their business model is one that puts competition ahead of collaboration and market measures ahead of public good.

In order to attract both public and private investment, charter operators need to manipulate competitive market measures, such as test scores and other comparative indicators of school success to show that they are supposedly outperforming, not only public schools, but competing charter chains as well. This high-stakes competitive drive has often led to a lack of transparency, test cheatingas well as cooking the books and other forms of financial mismanagement.

Such market competition requires a continuous process of weeding out "low performers" in order to boost average measurable outcomes, gathered in various research studies and performed by willing academic or private research organizations. In the process, overseen by so-called authorizers,  thousands of children's and families' lives are disrupted as schools are closed and teachers fired (without due process) and new ones open. These children and families are often the ones most in need of stability. Teachers and students (overwhelmingly poor and students of color) become the flotsam and jetsam of charter school failure.

In 2011, conservative pro-charter Center for Education Reform reported: " Of the approximately 6,700 charter schools that have ever opened across the United States, 1,036 have closed since 1992."

It's a system that operates much like giant retailers Wal Mart, Target and Starbucks, which turn over their entire work force on average, nearly every six months. 

Edweek reports that in cities like Indianapolis, "failing charters closing abruptly, blindsiding parents and sending them scrambling to find new schools" has become a major problem.

The charter sector has long stood by the premise that if the independently run public schools fail to perform, they are shut down—an idea often referred to as the "charter bargain." But as the movement matures, it increasingly faces the messy reality of closing schools—a situation that could become more common.

In Ohio, according to the report, when the time between the announcement of a charter closing and the actual shutdown stretches the full academic year, it is referred to as a "zombie year." Teachers and administrators learn as early as September that their school—as well as their jobs—will cease to exist come May or June. That situation is generally a product of Ohio's closure law, which mandates the automatic shutdown of the state's poorest-performing charter schools, as well as the timing for when student-assessment data gets released.

The most telling piece in the charter school-closing puzzle is, that despite all the intentional disruption and churn, the great majority of privately-run charters fail to out-perform traditional public schools on every important measure.

A similar version of this commentary is cross-posted at Mike Klonsky's Small Talk blog. http://michaelklonsky.blogspot.com/2014/11/charter-school-churn-leaves-students.html

Chicago school closings run on 'family values'

Catherine O'Connor Sugrue (Left) at CPS Board
meeting.  (Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.)

Catherine Sugrue, sister of Rahm's City Council floor leader, Patrick O'Connor, holds the newly created title of CPS director of school transition, reporting to Tom Tyrell, the retired Marine charged with safeguarding 30,000 displaced students. You follow?

According to the Sun-Times:

O’Connor noted that Sugrue is a former teacher who spent 17 years climbing the ladder at CPS before resigning three years ago to become an education consultant — first with Edison Learning, then with Innovative Consultants International. In a previous CPS job overseeing charters that she was at the center of a controversy surrounding allegations of grade-changing and strip-searching of students at Aspira Charter.

Perfect!

Walton paying for CPS propaganda campaign on school closings

Federico Waitoller and Stephanie Farmer from CReATE, present  research on school closings at today's City Hall press conference. But can education research counter the Walton-funded propaganda campaign? (Mike Klonsky photo)

The Walton Fund, philanthropic arm of the mega-billionaire Walton family (Wal-Mart), has given CPS nearly half-a-million dollars to underwrite Rahm's pro-school-closing propaganda campaign. The $478,000 grant went to setting up the  Profits Children First Foundation, an organization created by CPS which a spokesperson confirmed was to help facilitate the “community engagement process” over the school closings.

Walton dollars were also used to set up this website with a video showing a concerned CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett bemoaning the fact that her school district is not providing "all children" with a "high quality, 21st Century education." Thousands more were spent on website ads and ads on public transportation.

CPS spokesman Dave Miranda said the spots are "educational" and "not an ad campaign," and the primary goal is to spread awareness about community meetings scheduled to discuss each closure. Rahm has basically said that none of those community meetings will have any bearing on his decision to go ahead with the largest public school closing plan in this nation's history.

The CTU calls the campaign pure "propaganda." Jackson Potter, a CTU spokesperson told DNAInfo, “It's clearly a method they're using to try and sell a highly unpopular program that will have tremendous, disruptive consequences for the most vulnerable communities in our city.”

Wall St. is bullish on school closings

Moody's in no mood for public schools. 

Philly.com reports that Wall St. likes the mass closing of public schools.

The Philadelphia School District's plan to shut almost 1/10 of the district's 250 schools, as competing, taxpayer-funded charter schools draw off one-third of the district's student body and Gov. Corbett cuts state aid, is "positive from a credit perspective" because it shows school officials "are intent on reducing expenditures" even if it makes them "unpopular," writes Moody's analyst.

There's no mention of the Dept of Justice's pending actions against Moody's for defrauding investors.

Behind the Chicago's school closings: Rahm's gentrification

Greg Hinz at Crain's unintentionally gives us some clues about the real reasons for Rahm's mass closures of neighborhood schools and their replacement with privately-run charters and selective-enrollment schools. It has much more to do with reshaping the city's demography, pushing out the poor and people of color from the inner city and replacing them with a new class of young, tech and finance professionals.

Writes Hinz:

 Take, for instance, the paradox that the city has grown wealthier even as it has lost hundreds of thousands of working-class residents, most of them minorities. 

As Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago economist Bill Testa put it, it's good that minorities finally can make it anywhere, including the 'burbs. Everyone should have choices. At the same time, it's undeniable that one reason working-class people are fleeing the city is that the influx of wealthier newcomers is driving up prices.

To some extent, that's classic gentrification because, when those with money fight for space against those without, the money folks almost always win. Forcing lower-income folks out to inner-ring suburbs via pricing pressures can be a real disservice, if only because the suburbs are much less equipped than the city with public transit to get people to work.

Of course, Chicago's gentrification didn't begin with Rahm. It goes as far back as the 1950s and old man Daley's regime. The demolition of Chicago's public housing in the 80's and 90's and the forced migration of thousands of black families out of the west and south sides, out to inner-ring suburbs, began under Richie Daley. The city now has only five census tracts of majority high-income earners, but vast swaths of majority low-income households.

Chicago now has only 5 census tracts of majority high-income earners, but vast swaths of mostly low-income households.  (Chicago Magazine)

Daley together with the Civic Committee and then schools CEO Arne Duncan, also cooked up the Renaissance 2010 school debacle and the unbridled expansion of privately-run charters and new selective enrollment high schools at the expense of neighborhood schools.

Renaissance 2010 was a dismal failure in terms of improving Chicago's public schools if that was ever its real intent. It was quietly junked and replaced with the current strategy of mass school closings in mainly black and Latino communities under the banner of under-utilization.

The Sun-Times confirmed today that 90% of the students impacted by CPS school closings are African-American.

Of those 129 schools located mostly on the South and West sides, 117 are majority black. And 119 of them have a percentage of black students higher than thedistrict average. At the 129 schools on CPS CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett’s list of schools that could be closed this year, 88 percent of the students are black. Schools with at least 90 percent black students account for 103 of the 129. Just nine are majority Hispanic.

Byrd-Bennett insists that "race is not a factor" in the process to close schools in an effort to “right size” the district. Rather, she says, the population decline has led to “under utilization.” But it's not hard to see how the destabilizing of neighborhoods through gentrification and the accompanying concentration of wealth and resources in the downtown and South Loop area of the city, has pushed low-income families out of their former communities leading to this population decline.

Many other targeted schools aren't under-utilized at all but are in cusp neighborhoods targeted for gentrification. CPS has also artificially intensified the crisis by redefining under-utilization to mean classrooms with fewer than 30 students and overstating the numbers of lost school enrollment.

All part of the plan.