Regardless, Rahm and Duncan have promoted Noble... |
Below, you will find a piece written nearly three years ago
warning our readers in the “blogosphere” what was really going on in
Charter-World, especially when it comes to pulling in profits for a CEO like
Milkie.
"If
you don’t like it – you can leave.” - (a
description of CEO Milkie’s and Mayor Emanuel’s response to questions regarding
discipline policies at Noble Street Network School) – Jasmine Sarmiento, Voices
of Youth in Chicago Education.
“Noble
is forcing low-income parents to choose between paying the rent and keeping
their child in school. This is a tax on Chicago’s Black and Latino families,
and it’s wrong..” - Donna Moore, parent of a student in Noble Network
Schools.
…because they were out of money to pay the fines... |
Back in the day, I mean way back in the day, students
actually got to determine their own form of discipline – a long piece of green
hickory branch usually cut by the very student about to be switched. This was considered a vast improvement in
exchange for the cane used during the 17th and 18th
centuries. Ah, progress.
After the mid-nineteenth century, continued
disciplinary progress for public students included the paddle, in my own case,
hung in plain sight above the principal’s office desk as a reminder of his overt
ability to dispense justice in the form of extreme pain. But I was just one of many south side kids
being “taught” and civilized in a continuing grand experiment on a national
level.
Before all of us, even unto the mid 1850’s,
education in America was provided primarily to the wealthy, and the overriding
sentiment was that the poor were both uneducable and unworthy any attempts at education. It wasn’t until 1852 that Horace Mann, then
Secretary of State for Massachusetts, urged all states to provide education to all
students, creating what he hoped would be the great equalizer and the ultimate disappearance
of poverty.
5 lashes or $5? |
In the early 1900’s, as schooling became mandatory
for all American youngsters, teachers found themselves stepping further and
further into the roles of parents (in
loco parentis), and “one value attached to this development asserted that while
adults should be punished for their crimes, children should be rehabilitated
for theirs, thus formalizing a beginning to the separation between juvenile
misconduct and suffering as its remedy” (www.public.findlaw.com/education/school_discipline_history.html)
. I’m often sorry my own principal had
not harkened to these findings…but I digress.
Augmenting these modifications of the kinds of
discipline painfully dished out in the working houses and boarding schools of
the past, the 20th century educator awakened to the concept that
education was more than simply transfer; instead, with the assistance of
forward thinkers like Rosenblatt, Berne, Spock, etc., psycho-social arguments
promoted the student’s own involvement in a transactional paradigm of learning.
In short, teachers and educators moved way
from the traditional belief that students learn best by rote and by sitting
demurely in linear rows at rigid attention; quite the opposite, best practice
now held to a more personalized and interactive learning/teaching construct.
Introducing NOBLE STREET.
The Noble Network of Charter Schools, which runs 10
city high schools and yearns for more after recent school closings, has found
an entirely new, novel method of exacting discipline for student
“misbehavior.” This is the same network
of schools that Mayor Rahm Emanuel praised for having the “secret sauce” for
improving students’ scores, behavior, and success rates. It would appear that the secret sauce of
which the Mayor and Superintendent Brizard crow is in great part actually a
monetary disciplinary fee that has raised nearly $400,000 this year for Noble
Street, left parents foundering to scrape together fines that are imposed upon
them for their own student’s deportment, and has caused the flight of
nearly 13% of students from the Noble Street charter schools back into the
public system from whence they came – seeking opportunity and assistance to
improve their own lots in life and finding failure for disciplinarily high
expectations – monetarily?
Milkie gives them a true sense of worth... |
Following the kind of schema found in the factory/transference
models of business and schools of the early 1900’s, Noble Street has
implemented the “SMART” disciplinary code.
Here is what SMART’s acronym entails:
S = Sit up straight and be ready to learn.
M= Make eye contact when addressed.
A= Articulate in standard English and speak in
proper volume.
R= Respond appropriately.
T= Track the speaker.
Each of these misdemeanors comes with a fine of $5
or more. In fact, infractions include an
unbelievably long list of potential infractions not necessarily spelled out –
chewing gum, carrying “chips,” forgetting your belt, tardiness, carrying a
marking pen, having an energy drink, making a noise with a pen, etc. Each infraction (and others) will cost a
student $5.00 or more (Rossi, Rosalind.
School’s discipline: you act up you pay up. Chicago Sun Times. 14 Feb. 2012).
By the way, if a student is having a bad day – or
time of it – 12 detentions/infractions or more will result in a $140 fine (they
call it a fee) to attend an obligatory class on “behavior.” Additional detentions will result in an additional
discipline class for an additional $140.
Any student (more likely their family) who cannot pay will be held back
from moving on to the next class – regardless of his or her grades. Please keep in mind that even though Noble
Street schools are funded by wealthy benefactors like Penny Pritzker, nearly
90% of the families are low-income (Schmidt, George), and cannot afford the
mounting fees for students who are having difficulty adapting to the “SMART”
model.
Unlike the public system, Noble is allowed tougher
disciplinary policies than the CPU because it is a charter – remember our
earlier changing characterizations of public vs. private when it came to our
model Chicago Math and Science Academy (see Vocabulary – Feb 19 & 26). Meanwhile, CEO Mr. Milkie affirms that SMART
and the other “disciplinary policies at NOBLE promote basic, common sense
citizenship things, which you know teenagers need” (Golab, Art. www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=3055)
On the national level, school chief Arne Duncan also
touts Milkie’s Noble Street agenda and, along with Pritzkers and other wealthy
benefactors, endorses the programs used there:
“’ We’re dramatically changing the opportunity structure,’ Duncan told Chicago a few weeks before leaving his
CPS post to become the U.S. secretary of education. ‘We have tried to make this
[city] a mecca for people who want to make change in public education ‘”
(Rodkin, Dennis. Charting a new course. Chicago Magazine.com. 29 Feb. 2012).
Northing like going back to the days when I was a kid where a child in my class in Chicago was hung in the coat closet from his collar and the teacher forgot about him and went home. Real education--nothing like teaching the love of learning. And fining parents who don't have money--there seems a much more incidious purpose here. A little extra pocket-change for the charterites.
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