Explore our content

All types | All dates | All authors
All categories
Quick Hit
by Ellyn Fortino
2:55pm
Tue May 21

Philadelphia Community Group Stands With Chicago Activists Against School Closures (VIDEO)

Parents and community groups from Chicago and Philadelphia stood in solidarity against school closings at a gathering outside the Chicago Board of Education’s headquarters Tuesday morning. The activists also blasted the national trend of privatizing education.

“There’s another agenda going on in this city and throughout this country, and that’s the agenda of private business corporations taking over the schools,” said Shannon Bennett with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization (KOCO).  “But the community and the people have spoken, and we’re going to continue to do our due diligence, to do the work that we have to do, to dismantle this system.”

Read more »

PI Original
by Ashlee Rezin
11:53am
Tue May 21

Protesters Wrap Around City Hall Demanding A Stop To Chicago School Closings (VIDEO)

Education

Three days of marches from across the city and countless acts of civil disobedience culminated on the steps of City Hall Monday, as more than 500 protesters called on Mayor Rahm Emanuel to stop closing Chicago’s neighborhood schools.

PI Original
by Ellyn Fortino
5:06pm
Mon May 20

Education Activists Take School Closing Fight To City Hall (VIDEO)

Education

A few hundred education activists kicked off the last day of the Chicago Teachers Union's three-day march against school closings at William J. & Charles H. Mayo Elementary School Monday morning. Education activists also delivered a petition calling for a moratorium on school closings to City Hall this afternoon. Progress Illinois was there for the actions. 

Quick Hit
by Ashlee Rezin
4:20pm
Mon May 20

Chicagoans Continue Three-Day March Calling On CPS 'To Keep Our Schools Open' (VIDEO)

The West Side leg of the Chicago Teachers Union's (CTU) three-day march against school closings saw dozens of parents, teachers and education activists blocking traffic throughout the area's streets Monday, chanting “Save Our Schools!”

“We are marching to keep our schools open,” said Jesse Sharkey, vice president of the CTU, at the launch of Monday’s West Side march at Elizabeth Peabody Elementary School, at 1444 West August Blvd.

Peabody is one of 54 schools slated for closure under a CPS proposal to shutter, consolidate and turnaround a record-breaking number of schools at the end of this school year. The district says it is attempting to address a $1 billion deficit and “utilization crisis” of more than 100,000 empty seats. The proposed plan has incited massive protests and outrage throughout Chicago.

“If some of these schools don’t come off the closure list, there’s going to be a ton of outrage and moral indignation from people all across the city,” said Sharkey in an interview with Progress Illinois. “But how do you do get your point across to a board that doesn’t really listen? This thing is being driven by the mayor, and the mayor doesn’t care.”

Read more »

Quick Hit
by Ellyn Fortino
2:57pm
Mon May 20
1 comment

Former Obama Staffers Reflect On Life Inside The White House

Working inside the White House is not as glamorous and eventful as some popular TV shows make it out to be, former Obama administration staff members said at a recent panel discussion in Chicago.

“The truth of the matter is that not every single day is incredibly action packed in the White House,” said Elizabeth Jarvis-Shean, former White House research director.

Although Jarvis-Shean worked on issues she said she had a special interest in, such as the Affordable Care Act of 2010 and repealing "Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell," about 50 percent of her time consisted of “mundane” day-to-day assignments.

Some of her typical tasks included editing speeches or vetting somebody expected to stand on stage with the president, among other things, she said.

Also, White House staffers are not as witty as the characters on “The West Wing” TV show, said Chris Lu, former White House cabinet secretary.

“If you’ve seen ‘The West Wing’ TV show, you know the whole thing is walking and talking,” Lu said at the discussion, sponsored by the University of Chicago Institute of Politics. “You can’t walk and talk in the West Wing ... it is tiny in the White House.”

Read more »

Quick Hit
by Ashlee Rezin
1:12pm
Mon May 20

CPS Policies Reinforce Segregation In Chicago, Finds CTU Report

On the 59-year anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court's landmark decision to end segregation in public schools, Brown v. Board of Education, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) released a report claiming widespread segregation still exists in Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the district’s administration is doing nothing to address it.

In the 2011-2012 school year, 69 percent of African-American students in CPS were in schools with more than 90 percent of the student body composed of the same ethnicity, according to Friday’s report, titled “Still Separate, Still Unequal” (PDF).

“The newest CPS leadership frames the district’s current inequities as an inevitable result of demographic trends,” the report reads. “Their fraudulent attempts to absolve corporate reform of any culpability in our separate and unequal school system are an extension of the resistance that enforcement of desegregation faced in the decades after Brown v Board.”

Read more »