Editorial: Teachers union’s circus act doesn’t help kids

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Updated: January 24, 2012 8:12AM

The war between the Chicago Teachers Union and the school system over how best to improve schools is getting uglier by the day, with the CTU and its allies largely to blame.

Last week, it was a revolt at a Board of Education meeting, with protesters hijacking the meeting to protest proposed school closures and turnarounds. CTU President Karen Lewis says she played no role but the union’s fingerprints were everywhere. On Thursday, CTU organized protests at eight schools targeted for closure or turnaround, a reform where the kids remain but most adults in a school building change.

We appreciate great street theater. We also love to see parents and teachers tell the board it has made a mistake in choosing an individual school, which turns out to be true far too often.

It’s too bad, then, that the protests have gone off the rails, with CTU and allied community groups resorting to exaggerations and inflammatory language to rally the troops and, most importantly, failing to acknowledge that the school system, despite its flaws, wants just what the protesters want: to improve the city’s weakest schools.

That is one key reason we stand behind CPS’ efforts to turn around chronically troubled schools and, in extreme cases, close a handful of the weakest ones. CPS wants to turn around 10 schools and close four, hardly radical in a system of more than 675 schools.

Parents and teachers should speak up if they think CPS has chosen the wrong schools. CPS’ new leadership brags about hosting more community meeting than ever, but gathering reaction to plans is not the same as letting the public help shape policy. But for most of these 14 schools, CPS is doing the right thing.

In extreme cases, a fresh start is needed if there’s any hope of a different outcome. In recent years, CPS has moved away from closures, which haven’t proven helpful for kids, towards turnarounds, which are showing promising results. Despite the union’s contention that turnarounds don’t work, a report due out next month by the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research on the early years of turnarounds shows elementary turnarounds managed by the Academy for Urban School Leadership, a private non-profit, made “significantly greater” gains in reading and math than did comparable schools.

And then there’s CTU’s dismissive claim that a turnaround is merely handing schools “over to private interests.” Yes, AUSL is a private company and, yes, it has ties to a top CPS official and CPS Board President David Vitale. But it’s working, and in our book that’s what matters most. (A side note on Vitale: His dismissive behavior toward protesters at last week’s board meeting, and generally toward anyone with a beef with CPS, does nothing to ease the tensions between CPS and its adversaries).

We agree with the CTU and others who say CPS should invest as much in struggling neighborhood schools as it does in turnarounds. We also agree that CPS has weakened schools that end up as targets for a turnaround or closure by forcing them to accept students from closed schools or opening charters nearby that cream off top students.

But if you take a step back from CTU’s us-versus-them mentality, it’s clear these are not arguments against turnarounds or closures. These are arguments, instead, for strong investments in the dozens and dozens of weak schools that aren’t being closed or turned around, schools across Chicago that are in desperate need of help.