In CPS We are Always Fighting Over the Crumbs

CPS released its construction and capital plan for the district recently and a lot of parents are angry. I’ve been getting calls and emails from parents in various parts of the city who are incensed at some of the choices made by CPS.  “If CPS has $659 million to spend on capital improvements, why are so few schools on the list and not mine,” is the gist of the complaints. Here is a link to a Catalyst article about the plan.

Parents are also catching wind of how uneven the Tax Increment Financing (TIF) program is in terms of funding schools. The phone calls and emails are pouring in on this issue, too.   Parents are confused as to why some schools are getting TIF dollars and most aren’t.  TIF districts cover about 30% of the city right now, so some wards are rich in TIF districts and some aren’t. Some schools are benefitting from TIF right now and some aren’t. Some aldermen that have TIF funds are putting it towards their schools and some aren’t.  Some aldermen have a good relationship with the mayor to get approval for TIF funding and some don’t.

This is how things work around here.

There have also been questions about how our district was able to approve funding for twelve new charter schools last month, some to charter operators who run campuses that are performing below CPS’ average, at a time when we don't have enough resources to take care of our existing buildings.

We have an inequitable system in which resources are not doled out by any standard measure, a lack of transparency and an undefined process to determine decisions on capital expenditures and school actions. It would shock people to know that some districts around the state and country don’t operate in this fashion and have a rotating system in which schools are assessed for capital needs and then upgraded on a rotating schedule. Yes, that’s right, in some parts of the educational universe parents don’t have to scream for years at a board meeting, find an alderman willing to go to bat for them, or work full-time as a fundraiser for their school to get some basic capital need met.

Imagine that.

But here in Chicago some schools landed on the CPS’ capital improvement list and some landed on the school actions list and it’s all a bit unclear on how any decisions were made. Recently, a state Facilities Taskforce lead by Representative Cynthia Soto and Senator Iris Martinez, helped to get state law SB620 passed, in order to try and get CPS to improve the process in which they make decisions about school actions, but many feel the guidelines are too vague and there is no understanding as to how CPS chose the schools that they chose. Curtis Black had a good article detailing this: http://www.newstips.org/2011/11/school-closings-the-law-and-alternatives/.

Beyond this management problem, we don’t have enough resources to fund the needs of our district -- not even close.  Although $659 million may seem like an outrageous sum, our capital needs far exceed this. A recent Tribune article, “Old school buildings put pressure on CPS’ bottom line,” noted that “the district simply doesn't have the money to make all of the structural repairs and improvements that need to be done, forcing CPS officials to make tough choices each year about what to spend and where.”  How are these tough choices made?  In the article it is mentioned that safety concerns come first, as they should, and after that, Tim Cawley, CPS chief administrative officer says, “officials need to invest their money in schools with long-term potential. Schools targeted for turnaround get priority funding; so do higher-performing schools where enrollment is at capacity but there is little room to grow.”

That leaves out a lot of CPS students.

It would be nice to see a long-term plan and vision from our district, a true accounting of our school’s real needs and a detailed list of goals to achieve the mission. The system needs to be managed in a more proactive and less reactive way, which is difficult to accomplish when there is a new administration every 1.5 years, barely enough time to take a decent inventory of this huge district before leaving. Our district should be upfront with us and tell us how much we need to have safe and functional buildings with working boilers, air-conditioning and walls and roofs that aren’t crumbling for all of our children. What would it really cost to provide every student in Chicago with decent facilities, not to mention excellent programs inside those buildings? Why have we settled for so much less than this for our kids in this city?

What we shouldn’t do as parents is get mad at each other for winning a few scraps here and there for individual schools and let that get in the way of working together to advocate for system-wide changes. In an under-resourced and chaotic system, it’s easy to do that. No one should be faulted for advocating for their child’s education, especially when the basic standards are as low as they are, and it’s only natural to work to improve one’s own school.

If we don’t work together we will always just be fighting over crumbs -- leaving some of our kids educationally nourished and most hungry -- until we demand a better system for every child.