Russian Graveyards

VISITING A RUSSIAN GRAVEYARD
By Stephen Wilson


            In his charming short story, 'The Dead', James Joyce mentions how 'the dead' are always with us and are never completely banished from our minds. We can't forget them. And we should not forget them as snow falls on both the living and the dead.

            In Russia, frquently visiting graveyards is not always deemed morbid or eccentric but as maintaining a relationship with your dead friends and relatives. A week after Easter, on 'parents' day', many Russians continue the custom of visiting their dead relatives and laying flowers, tidying up around the grave saying a prayer, and even leaving drink and food for the dead.

            The living might even speak to the dead and wish them well.

            For example, Oksana Chebotareva, a teacher told me 'When I and my two daughters visited my father in law he took us all around those graveyards where all his relatives lay. He would take my daughters to his late wife's graveyard and say 'Oksana has brought her two granddaughters to visit you .. Andrei is doing quite well in his job..'  Anyone who is familiar with Russian customs won't be surprised to hear this. According to Yuri Ryabinin's new book, The History of Russian Graveyards 'Under the wings of eternal peace', Ripol, Moscow, 2015, only available in Russian at bookshops in Russia, the Russian word 'Kladbashchii,'( a place or stake in the earth given to the dead) is not synonymous with the Greek word Necropolis, which means 'city of the dead'. On the contrary, it is a resting place of the living in another world. Ryabinin claims 'Concerning the God of Russians, there are no dead'. On the contrary, the Christian dead are awaiting the future resurrection and a grave is an important stake or place where they can abide, dwell or be reached by other people. A graveyard represents a profound meeting place between the living and the dead. A gravestone is not just a slab of concrete of remembrance but a door to a dead person. Keeping knocking on it and the dead person will surely come out of it.

            A QUEST

            With this in mind, Oksana and I ventured into one of Moscow's famous graveyards; the Vvedenskoy or German cemetery. Our aim was to find the grave of a former professor of Moscow State University, Professor Irina Aleksandrova, who had died in 2006. According to Oksana, 'She did a lot to help students.

            'Not only was she always at hand to assist a student with studies, but with other problems. She kept on visiting one student in hospital who had fallen ill with schizophrenia,
helping to feed and comfort him. When she died, she was
so poor she could not afford funeral expenses so all her
colleagues had to donate money to finance this'.

            We searched and scanned but failed to find the gravestone.

            There were just so many bewildering graves that loomed up.

            However, during our search we came across some famous gravestones, such as the legendary 19th century Doctor Haas who is regarded as a saint who endlessly helped relieve prisoners, the poor and the sick. He is reputed to have talked a despairing Dostovesky out of committing suicide.

            On his grave is written his motto, 'Hurry up and  do good.'

            The graves of Peter the Great's assistants, Patrick Gordon and Francis Lefort, are thought to lie here but no historians have ever found them. They appear to have been destroyed, removed or simply vanished into obscurity. I never found the grave of the famous Scots soldier, Patrick Gordon but at least came across the graves of brave French airpilots
who had died fighting along with Russians during the Great
Patriotic war.

            OLD  BRITISH TEACHER'S GRAVE
            We came across one graveyard that reminded us that the British have been teaching English in Russia for centuries. On one very small grave was written -

            Sacred to the Memory of

            Richard Bradshaw, captain

            of the Russian service and

            teacher of the English language

            who departed on this life on the

            24th of May, 1828 

            This modest stone what few vain marbles can may truly say here lies an honest man, erected to a loving husband by his disconsolate widow. They don't write such lines on graves like this anymore.

            LEGEND
            In regard to 'disconsolate widows', there is a legend that one widow used to visit her husband's grave every day. She could not get over her husband's death. So she prayed strongly and wrote on the chapel wall, ' I can't live here without my husband'. Then, shortly afterwards, a man appeared who was just like her husband in appearance, manners and character and they both got married. Since then, a custom has arisen where people write their wishes on the chapel walls in the belief they will come true. Oksana even wrote a secret wish on the chapel. On this chapel was written many different requests such as - 'I want Oleg to stop drinking'  or ' God grant I and my parents good health and let them live for a long time'. 

           'God let me pass this exam' or  'Let me give birth to a son'.

           The most bemusing request we came across went - 
           'God help me meet a nice loving man that will be generous. Let me find well-paid work that is very interesting. Let my salary be a bit higher, help us build a home without neighbours and let me have a new BMW 573'. The moral seems to be if you are going to make a wish, make a big one!

           The graveyard is rumoured to be haunted by a ghost who plays a flute during the early hours of the morning within the vicinity of the chapel. Some people speculate that this is the ghost of Francis Lefort himself as people who have seen the ghost claimed he was dawning early 18th century clothes.

           On our second attaempt we never found the grave of the professor. We even began to wonder whether any such grave actually existed. Maybe the professor's colleagues had failed to arrange such a funeral. I doubt this. I think when we next visit the graveyard it will be a case of third time lucky!

LaRaviere CPS commentary

Why does Rahm Emanuel put business ahead of our children?

By Troy LaRaviere, Chicago Tribune

I am a principal in Chicago Public Schools. A reporter called me recently and asked what the impact of CPS' proposed 1,400 job cuts would be on my school, Blaine Elementary. I could not answer without seeing a specific budget, but the cuts will chip away at the quality of CPS schools.

There are non-negotiable budget requirements just to get a school to the point of being functional, such as teachers in classrooms, an administrative team, basic curriculum and supplies.

CPS, stop blaming Springfield

However — as I understand it — we do not want to stop at just being functional. We want to be effective. We want to be excellent.

For that to happen, we need early at-home interventions for preschool-age children from low-income households, smaller student-to-teacher ratios, thoughtful training for teachers, a competitive compensation and benefits package to attract skilled professionals. We need a rich arts curriculum, exceptional educators whose efforts are focused on the children who come to us less prepared than their peers, a rigorous curriculum tailored to local student needs and the thoughtful use of technology in schools.

The 2013 budget cuts meant that many of our students lost some of those things — the resources that move a school from being functional to being excellent. The 2015 budget cuts will mean that my students — and students across Chicago — will lose even more.

CPS pension woes made me fall out of love with Mayor Daley

Politicians frame this as pension payment vs. classroom investment — as if those were the only two expenses our tax dollars are used for and one of them has to be sacrificed. This is patently false. City Hall has had many opportunities for sacrifice in other areas, but it has refused to make those sacrifices.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel had a chance to sacrifice the diversion of $55 million in taxes to a hotel near McCormick Place. He could have invested some of that tax increment financing money in the pension system instead.

Emanuel had a chance to sacrifice his relationship with the banking community by suing the banks that are siphoning $100 million from CPS as a result of toxic financial deals brokered by his hand-picked CPS board president, David Vitale. Emanuel has refused to try to recoup these dollars, which he could invest in the pension system.

Aramark Corp. and SodexoMAGIC Corp. failed to keep CPS schools clean, but Emanuel and CPS would not sacrifice their relationship with those companies by voiding their $340 million in contracts. Some of that money could have been invested in the pension system.

Saving Chicago schools

Emanuel's appointed school board gave SUPES Academy $20 million to provide "training" that I believe was poor in quality and completely unresponsive to the district's professional development needs. That money could have been invested in the pension system.

City Hall, with such a blatant history of being unwilling to make well-connected and powerful bankers and businessmen sacrifice, has the audacity to announce that it has no choice but to make children sacrifice their education.

This mayor is like a man who just bought a sports car, an entertainment center and a vacation home, and then tells his children they'll have to sacrifice on clothing because he has to pay their grocery bill.

Emanuel says one thing, but his behavior says another. He has put investor profits over investing in our teachers and their classrooms.

He wants us to get used to that. I will never get used to that.

And neither should you.

Troy LaRaviere is the principal of Blaine Elementary School.

City College tuition hike

City Colleges hits students with tuition hike
By John ByrneChicago Tribune

Many City Colleges of Chicago students are in line for significant tuition increases this fall under a budget trustees overseeing the seven-campus system approved Thursday.

The board, which is appointed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel, voted without dissent to raise tuition as part of a $696 million spending plan that includes no property tax increase. By raising costs for students instead, City Colleges can balance its budget without resorting to the politically painful broad tax hikes Emanuel is facing as he tries to deal with pension shortfalls and budget holes at City Hall and Chicago Public Schools.

Emanuel's City Colleges tuition changes will drive up costs for some

The tuition increase was announced to students in an email two days before the vote and after many of them had started signing up for fall classes. City Colleges Chancellor Cheryl Hyman defended the hike, saying it will make costs for students more transparent by eliminating extra fees. Hyman said the aim is to get more students to take full-time course loads of 15 credits each semester by making it less expensive to do so on a per-credit basis.

City Colleges officials said 60 percent of students now in the system take fewer than 12 credits each semester. Those part-time students in many cases will face the steepest increases under the new tuition setup. City Colleges has long been an inexpensive way for Chicagoans to earn college credit a few classes at a time, often while also working jobs that make it tough to carry heavier course loads.

Currently, students taking fewer than 12 credits at a time pay at least $80 in fees per semester, on top of base tuition costs of $89 per credit hour. In some cases, costs are higher, usually for science or manufacturing classes that come with steeper fees. Other classes, often in the humanities, come with fees on the lower end.

A student taking a single, three-credit class now pays at least $347, according to City Colleges spokeswoman Katheryn Hayes. Under the new tuition setup, these "single-class students" will pay $599 for any one course, with the fees built into the tuition. That's a 73 percent increase.

Tuition also goes up for part-time students taking more than one class. Those taking two three-credit classes, who now pay at least $614, will see their per-semester cost go up to $1,069.

And "full-time" students taking 12 credit hours or more will pay $1,753 in tuition under the new system. That's up from current costs of at least $1,068 in tuition and $200 in fees for 12-credit semesters at City Colleges, and at least $1,535 total in tuition and fees for 15-credit semesters.

Hyman said a two-year associate degree from City Colleges now has more value, thanks to the push by Emanuel to remake the system by linking individual campuses with particular industries in a bid to make the degrees "more relevant to the modern workplace."

But Jessi Choe, a professor at Wilbur Wright College, blasted the board for voting on the tuition increase so soon after students and faculty learned about it, and for pursuing a financial model that she said punishes the very working-class college students City Colleges is supposed to help.

"Reducing fees? Let's cut to the chase here, we're raising the bottom-line cost for students who are starting to enroll, many of whom have already started to enroll for fall semester in a couple months," Choe said during testimony at the meeting. "So in my view, and I think for most people, if you have common sense, I'm not an economist, but if you raise the price of something, the rate of purchase is going to go down."

"When you raise the cost of tuition like that — kind of on the sly, I have to say, to make this decision in the summertime when a lot of people are on vacation and to sneak in an email 1.5 days before the board is set to vote on this — I call that wrong."

Hyman acknowledged Thursday that it's not possible to "incentivize on finances alone" but said officials hope more students will opt for the 15-credit course load that puts them on track to graduate with an associate degree in two years, pointing to class schedules she said make it easier for busy students to take several classes at once.

"One of the greatest barriers is juggling family, work and other things," Hyman said. "So when you put pathways in place where they have their structured, semester-by-semester program already mapped out for them, and put that on top of predictive scheduling where they now can predict when they take those classes, along with a financial incentive, I think we need to look at it in the whole."

The tuition increase comes less than a year after a re-election-seeking Emanuel announced the Chicago Star Scholarship, which he touted as a way to make City Colleges more affordable for CPS graduates with good grades by covering the cost of tuition, fees and books.

jebyrne@tribpub.com

Urban Prep Fired Union Activists

Teachers Say 17 Firings at Urban Prep Charter Schools Were Retaliation for Unionization

by CRYSTAL STELLA BECERRIL AND ARIELLE ZIONTS

Inthesetimes.com

On June 19, during their biannual semester-end interviews, 17 teachers were informed by school staff that they would not be returning to Chicago’s Urban Prep Academy come fall. The terminations came just weeks after 61 percent of Urban Prep’s teachers voted to form a union; activists say the firings were a blatant act of anti-union retaliation.

Last Thursday, around 100 teachers, students, parents and supporters attended Urban Prep’s board meeting to protest the firings and accuse the board of harming their community and hindering student progress. They also accused the board of resisting transparency and accountability, and creating a high teacher-turnover rate through firings and policies that push teachers out of the school.

This is only the latest case of such allegedly unjust firings, as more and more charter schools in Chicago and across the country are organizing to unionize despite the legal hurdles, backlash, and the common belief—at least among school management—that charter teachers don’t need unions.

Matthias Muschal told Catalyst Chicago he was fired after working as a lead English teacher at Urban Prep's Bronzeville campus for six years for “insubordination—specifically because he threw a pizza party for student-athletes and their families without notifying administration,” according to the administration. He says the real reason was his union activism—a huge disappointment because “I wouldn’t be able to teach my students anymore,” Muschal told In These Times.

Urban Prep CEO Evan Lewis wrote in a statement that "the suggestion that anyone was fired as a result of their organizing activity is both wrong and offensive. … “We respect and support the right of our teachers to choose a union as their exclusive representative. … Many of the teachers returning next year were active in the effort to organize, and we look forward to continuing our work with them."

At the board meeting, 26 people signed up to speak, although roughly half were allowed to address the board. Parents also delivered over 200 letters in support of the fired teachers in an effort to influence the board's decision. Not all board members, however, were present at Thursday's meeting—even though, according to Samuel Adams, a former Urban Prep English teacher, they all live in Chicago. Those who did not attend the meeting called in—a gesture seen by some union supporters as disrespectful.

Teachers, parents and students who attended the meeting praised Urban Prep’s mission and success, but said the recent firings go against the school's mission and will ultimately harm the students. Englewood Junior Lamar Strickland told the board he “would just like to ask that you guys bring back our teachers because ... they have all taught us something different that we can take in our life."

Students were especially upset about the firing of English teacher Natasha Robinson. Robert DuPont, a junior at the Englewood campus, said Ms. Robinson went above and beyond her responsibilities like calling students she knew were having trouble getting to school on time. Mr. Adams said that his former colleague had the highest freshmen test scores in the school and continued to teach even soon after her mother died.

Of the outpouring of student support over the past weeks, Robinson said, "It's nice to know I made an impact during my time at Urban Prep—to know that I was able to help these young men." (Urban Prep is an all-male school.)

At the meeting, James Thindwa of the American Federations of Teachers (who is also a member of the In These Times board of directors) also accused Urban Prep’s majority-black board of directors of harming the black community and instituting measures similar to anti-union, right-wing politicians like Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

“I can't believe that this institution, this publicly funded institution, ... anchored in the black neighborhood, that is itself reeling from economic disinvestment that in part has been caused by the attack on labor unions ... is participating in a vile attack on a legitimate institution that serves as a legitimate counterweight to what we're seeing as unchecked corporate power in the United States.”

In a press release, Thindwa wrote that because black Americans hold a disproportionate share of public-sector jobs, they have been hit especially hard by the decline of public-sector jobs and the attacks on their unions.

The audience highlighted the irony in these firings, as one of the main reasons teachers wanted to unionize was to change what they say are Urban Prep’s high teacher turnover rates. They say students don’t know if their favorite teachers will return the following year, which affects their learning environment.

“It's unfortunate that they would fire veteran teachers and that there will be so much uncertainty for these students going into the new school year,” said Robinson, who had taught at the school for seven years. Teachers say high turnover rates also mean devoting important time to train new teachers rather than to develop the skills of existing ones.

According to Brian Harris, a special education teacher at CICS Northtown Academy and Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ACTS) president, “across the network, only nine teachers have been at Urban Prep more than five years. Now, only about half of them are returning.”

"Students are calling for a stable learning environment, and their teachers know that unionization is the only way to get stability for these students and their communities," says Rob Heise, an educator and activist who says he was fired from an UNO Network charter high School earlier this month for his involvement in helping unionize his school last year. Heise filed his own unfair labor practice complaint with the NLRB two weeks ago.

Chicago Teachers Union members made their way to the South Side school from their own union's contract negotiation meeting earlier that afternoon to show support for the fired Urban Prep teachers. Sarah Chambers, a special education teacher at Maria Saucedo Scholastic Academy, was among them. Chambers said that all the Urban Prep teachers who voted to unionize wanted was a voice for their students. Having played a major role in preparing her school for the historic 10-day CTU strike back in 2012, Chambers knows first hand the power of belonging to a union and added that teachers "know that if they don't have a union they don't have a voice."

"Urban Prep punished their staff for unionizing. They lied about what ACTS is and used teachers' professional development time to spread anti-union propaganda," said Brian Harris. "Their actions show a real disrespect for teachers and democracy and scream ‘we don't want to be accountable to anyone.’ ”

Chris Baehrend, Vice President of Chicago ACTS and English teacher at Latino Youth High School, said retaliation is the main reason why 39% of eligible voters chose not to join the Urban Prep union. "They're afraid. They're afraid of things like exactly what happened right here happening to them."

An unfair labor practice suit has been filed with the NLRB, and Chicago ACTS will be planning future demonstrations.

During the public comment period, Samuel Adams called on supporters to put pressure on Urban Prep by sending emails, and parent Shoneice Reynolds called for a local school council. Reynolds cited Urban Prep’s creed to make her point: "It states, we have a future for which we are accountable. I challenge you all to be accountable for our children's future."

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/18134/teachers_say_17_firings_at_urban_prep_charter_school_were_retaliation_for_u

CRYSTAL STELLA BECERRIL AND ARIELLE ZIONTS

Arielle Zionts is a freelancer writer and, beginning in August, a producer at the Interfaith Voices radio show in D.C. She studied anthropology at Pitzer College and radio at the Salt Institute for Documentary Studies. Crystal Stella Becerril is a Chicago-based Xicana activist, writer and photographer who regularly contributes to Socialist Worker, Red Wedge and Warscapes.

CRPE

The Gates owned Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) right here in Seattle

https://seattleducation2010.wordpress.com/2015/06/23/the-gates-owned-center-on-reinventing-public-education-crpe-right-here-in-seattle/

Whenever Bill Gates wants to justify his ideas that he imposes on school children around the country, he relies on the Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE) to appear with a research paper or study, that is not peer reviewed, to prove his point. They do as he bids.

Recently CRPE held a forum on charter schools at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The panel was made up of pro-charter folks with the notable exception of School Board Director Sue Peters who is also co-editor of this blog.

Apparently the forum did not go as planned and everyone in the audience who had an opportunity to speak or ask a question was against charter schools being in our city.

I heard Sue was brilliant but I would expect nothing less.

Recently an article describing CRPE in the Progressive was posted online and is the best description I have found so far of this corporate backed group.

Some of their backers include:

• The Broad Foundation (remember them?)
• The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
• Fund for Educational Excellence (be wary any education related organization with the word “excellence” in it)
• Michael and Susan Dell Foundation (they sell computers to schools to be used for standardized testing)
• National Alliance for Public Charter Schools (say no more)
• The Seattle Foundation (see The Lines of Influence in Education Reform)
• US Department of Education (Gates and Broad give the DOE money that then goes back to Gates and Broad-backed organizations. Thanks Arne Duncan.)
• Walton Family Foundation (need I say more?)
• The Brookings Institute
• The Business Roundtable

So without further ado:

The Secret Group That Wants to Take Over Your School

Don’t look now, but there’s something creepy coming toward you, and it wants to take over your public school system. Sure, it’s connected—through all-important grants—to many of the big names in today’s education reform movement (Gates, Walton, Broad), but most people have probably never heard of it.

This “education reform powerhouse” is the Center on Reinventing Public Education, which goes by the acronym CRPE—or “creepy.” How fitting. While there are many individuals and organizations on the front lines of the free-market education reform movement—from Teach for America, to Education Secretary Arne Duncan, to the Recovery School District in New Orleans—CRPE has not been publicly outed. Instead, it has steadily carved out an influential role for itself behind the scenes.

In fact, CRPE operates in a manner that is strikingly similar to ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council), the secretive, powerful group funded by the Koch brothers and a large roster of corporations. Here’s a look at how the two organizations work:

1. Member networks: Both CRPE and ALEC have a “secret club” component, through their member networks. With ALEC, the members are state legislators. With CRPE, they are school districts from across the United States (there are currently thirty-nine of them).
2. Network meetings: Both CRPE and ALEC host member network meetings or conferences, where a common philosophy (based on a distinct rightwing ideology) is honed, articulated, and shared.
3. Model legislation: Both CRPE and ALEC create sample, model policies (CRPE) or “cookie-cutter bills” (ALEC) for the districts or legislators who are part of their member networks.
4. Free-market funders: Like ALEC, CRPE is funded by very wealthy, free-market-focused special interests, including the Walton Foundation.

CRPE Founder Paul T. Hill stepped down as center Director and named Robin Lake to succeed him.

One difference is that ALEC has been around since the early 1970s while CRPE is a more recent concoction. University of Washington political science professor Paul T. Hill founded the group in 1993, just as the “accountability” movement in public education was taking off, and it is housed at the University of Washington-Bothell. CRPE is affiliated with the university, but Hill explains, “Our work is funded through private philanthropic dollars, federal grants, and contracts.” And, although CRPE describes itself as engaging in “independent research and policy analysis,” in 2011 the Center for Media and Democracy’s Source Watch website tagged the group as an “industry-funded research center that . . . receives funding from corporate and billionaire philanthropists as well as the U.S. Department of Education.”

While Hill may not be well known nationally, he is no shrinking violet when it comes to agenda-driven policy work. Beyond CRPE, he has been affiliated with the right-leaning Hoover Institute and its Koret Task Force on K-12 Education, which focuses on vouchers and other market-based, privatization-centered reforms for public schools.

And that right-leaning stamp is all over CRPE, which has built a network of “portfolio school districts” from New York City to New Orleans and beyond. It promises to run these districts like a stock portfolio. Under this model, schools are to become more “autonomous,” and districts will be decentralized for a more “hands-off” approach. In an eighteen-month portfolio implementation guide that CRPE provides school districts, a suggested strategy for the first two months is to “announce the district will replace five schools with charter schools.” Schools will be closed for such failures as “negative labor-management relations.”

Many people in progressive-minded Minneapolis would be shocked to know that the Minneapolis public school system has been part of the CRPE network since 2010 (thanks to a makeover, led, for free, by consultants from the global consulting firm McKinsey and Company). Today, this shadowy organization is on the verge of completely overhauling the public school district’s entire operation.

Anyone needing proof should look no further than the 2013 CRPE meeting for Portfolio Network members that was held in Seattle. A video from that meeting lays bare the competitive, resource-scarce mindset behind CRPE, and it even uses the Minneapolis public schools—albeit superficially—as a test case for the presentation.

Marguerite Roza

The video—available on YouTube as “Dollars and Sense Accountability”—offers attendees lots of suggestions for how schools can expand their limited pots of money. The assumption always seems to be that schools just need to do more with less, so the suggestions are pragmatic. They include encouraging schools to grow their enrollment (the presenter, Marguerite Roza, who now works for CRPE, recommends pushing schools on this, because they’ll always say they’re too full). CRPE also suggests paying teachers extra to teach more kids, and pitting schools against one another in a battle for resources. All of this is based around a central question: What does it look like when a district starts to view schools like businesses?

To begin, Roza praises Minneapolis for its “enormous cooperation,” because the district has offered its data for use as an example of how to view schools “in terms of cost and outcomes.” Roza then shows participants a graph, where Minneapolis school sites (unnamed) are splayed out according to how much money they spend in comparison to how “high performing” they are. Before she delves in too deeply, however, Roza makes one point very clear: “I hope when you leave this session, you realize that the money part of the equation has to be part of the accountability bit, so you have to start connecting the spending and the outcomes together,” she says.

Throughout the video, it becomes clear that what Roza means is that the ideal school is one which spends less money but gets high test scores. It also becomes clear that, to Roza, and by extension CRPE, kids and schools are mere widgets in the Hunger Games-like landscape of school finance that CRPE promotes.

At one point, Roza points to the graph full of Minneapolis examples and says, “Look at the relationship between spending and outcomes! It’s pretty dismal, right?” Roza acknowledges that “schools are messy,” but then veers back to CRPE’s market-driven ideology: “If we’re trying to get to a system where we’re leveraging our money to get the best possible outcomes we could get, we need a more robust relationship between spending and outcomes than we have.”

In the video, Roza zeros in on the concept of “nice” schools, which fall into the high-spending, high-performing part of her graph, and she then makes a whole lot of creepy allegations about them. In her Minneapolis example, there is only one such school, which sits by itself up in the lonely far corner of the graph.

Roza seems to assume that this school is a high-spending hog, feeding off the trough, and getting great outcomes on every other school’s “dime.” If such a school exists in your district, Roza tells the hushed crowd, “You should figure out how much extra you’re spending for those kids,” because this is not a “replicable model.” It’s just too expensive, Roza concludes.

Her solution? Force such schools to “take more kids,” and don’t listen when they tell you they’re too full. In fact, when they do tell you they are too full, simply ask them, “All right, did you want to give up the jazz band or the golf team?” Because, it seems, they must be lying about their ability to “cram more kids in,” as Roza puts it, just so they can protect their elite, district-funded programs. (Roza seems not to understand that, in Minneapolis, there are wealthy neighborhoods, but there are no wealthy schools rolling in district dollars.)

It turns out that the school Roza was referring to is Minneapolis’s Dowling Elementary, a K-5 site that indeed spends a lot of money. But it spends a lot because it serves an “unusually large percent of special needs kids,” according to Minneapolis’s former budget director Sarah Snapp, who was at the CRPE meeting. Snapp shared this information after Roza gave her fiscally conservative spiel.

Dowling Elementary is named after educator and legislator Michael Dowling, who, according to the school’s website, “succeeded in having the first bill passed providing state aid for handicapped children in 1919. Being handicapped himself, Mr. Dowling realized the importance of equal access to education for all people.” Even today, the school has a program for students with health-related disabilities. These students have their own special education classification, and Dowling was—and is—designed to meet their needs, alongside Dowling’s non-special-needs population.

At the CRPE meeting, Snapp tells Roza that Dowling does have a “unique set of factors” that make it look like a big spender, and also warns that lumping all students in a district together “might mask some of what’s going on.”

Still, Roza moves on in her presentation, and makes a joke about the next section, called “Performance Funding,” saying wryly, “This is where the school does well and we give them more money.”

Not quite. This would be a dangerous path to go down, Roza warns, because if you give a school “cash” for doing well (on standardized tests, of course), then that “high-performing” school will also become a “higher spending” school. Forget that, says Roza. Instead, she advises redefining “accountability” as, simply, the “right to continue to operate” according to a “continuous improvement model.”

Roza persists with her, and CRPE’s, definition of accountability, saying schools will—no,must—“seek to continuously go up,” with no “threshold” or end in sight, in terms of test-based measurements. The stakes are very high in this model. Roza explains that it is “constantly the lowest-performing, at a particular spending level, schools . . . that should go away or improve . . . and then you get a system that’s constantly striving for higher performance.”

The overall goal is to strip schools down from their messy, complicated “overspending” heights, and collapse them all into a pure “student-based” funding model. (CRPE shares their love of funding students, not programs, with ALEC, which has a model “Student-Centered Funding” bill, essentially a school voucher program.) Then, says Roza, districts will have arrived at a cost and outcomes Nirvana, where they can “just manage on performance.”

This, she explains, will yield a “vertical line full of dots” on a graph.

That may be the ideal way to view schools, students, and teachers from a CRPE point of view. On the ground, in Minneapolis, community members would probably object if it were known that their schools are being guided by the CRPE’s rightwing ideology.

But this may be changing.

At an April 14 Minneapolis school board meeting, parents, teachers, and students from across the city came to express their frustration with the district and its latest plans.

First up, there was a contingent from Roosevelt High School, an old-time school in south Minneapolis that has 80 percent students of color and a high proportion of kids in poverty (76 percent). In March, Roosevelt parents and staff received their school’s budget for the upcoming school year; it was $248,000 short of what they needed. The worst part? The budget cut—which was deceptively framed as an increase—came as Roosevelt stands to grow, by adding 100 new students to its incoming freshman class after years of being seen as one of Minneapolis’s “less desirable” schools.

It also came just as Minneapolis Public Schools Interim Superintendent Michael Goar was making very public claims about “right-sizing” the district’s budget, in order to send millions of dollars back into the pockets of the district’s schools.

This strategy—of “right-sizing,” with the promise that this will bring autonomy and funds straight to the schools—is CRPE all the way. Tellingly, a brief CRPE video about the virtues of school autonomy includes the insistence that schools must be given the “freedom” to control their money, as the ultimate goal, in the words of CRPE founder Paul Hill, is for a school to be “as free about what it does as a charter school.”

But the Roosevelt parents and students are not buying it. For the first time in years, under the energetic leadership of parent Jeanette Bower, the school has been getting organized—and vocal. School supporters went to the school board meeting to rally for Roosevelt, and to continue changing the school’s image from that of a “ghetto school,” in the words of ninth grade student Lewis Martin, to that of a school people choose to come to.

Their list of complaints about the lack of funding for Roosevelt were long, and will sound familiar to anyone who has been watching the move to defund and privatize America’s public schools:

Roosevelt is the only high school in Minneapolis with no theater program, and the district is not providing any funds to remedy this.

With budget cuts, the school will have to lay off its community liaisons, who have been going out into the community to change the narrative of “failure” (due to test scores) that hovers over the school.

The school will have to let its librarian go, and class sizes may increase.

Also, the district will only provide funding for the 100 new students who have signed up to attend Roosevelt next year in the fall, when the students actually show up. The problem with this, in the eyes of the Roosevelt community, is that the school can’t hire extra teachers because the hiring season is happening now, in the spring. (This is CRPE’s preferred way to fund schools: only according to the numbers of students who show up.)

For Roosevelt High School senior Shahmar Dennis, who also spoke out at the April 14 board meeting, the lack of clear information from the district around Roosevelt’s budget is troubling.

“We are a school on the rise, but our music program will suffer,” he says. “We have more students coming next year, but we can’t buy new instruments.”

Dennis explained that he is going off to college in the fall, but that he still deeply cares about his school: “I won’t be here next year but I want to see Roosevelt High School growing and doing well academically, with a good theater program.”

That desire is diametrically opposed to the CRPE agenda.

************************

Sarah Lahm is a Minneapolis-based writer and former English instructor. She blogs about education at brightlightsmallcity.com.