Lost in the media coverage of education in Chicago as mainly a budget issue is a major development. While Donald Trump is hellbent on destroying public education, our city is expanding a new model: sustainable community schools.
The concept of sustainable community schools was born from the Latina mothers who went on hunger strike to build Little Village Academy and Black community leaders who starved for 34 days to prevent former Mayor Rahm Emanuel from closing Dyett High School on the South Side.
In the face of power that saw our neighborhoods as places to ignore or our schools as facilities to close, Black and Latino Chicagoans created an educational model like Dyett where graduation rates set standards and underdog basketball teams bring home championships.
So what Donald Trump is advancing is an education policy that Chicagoans’ first experienced under Emanuel and former Chicago Public Schools CEOs Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan. Chicago is not only refusing to bend the knee, we are reconstructing our schools in their aftermath and pioneering a different direction.
While Trump is firing staff at the U.S. Department of Education, we are expanding social workers, nurses and librarians in our schools. Trump is banning any education that identifies students as part of a racial or ethnic group. We are situating schools as anchors in their neighborhoods where they celebrate and reflect their specific cultures. The president is attacking those communities. We see them as instrumental in raising and educating our children.
Because of the contract educators fought for over this past school year, Chicago’s children will be returning to their best back-to-school in the history of the city.
Elementary students will have access to state-mandated recess that CPS previously didn’t offer. They will attend smaller classes that allow teachers to provide more focused instruction to each child. The right to teach curricula that reflects and honors the cultural histories that make up our student body is enshrined in our contract. The schools young people attend will be more inclusive as LBGTQ-safe schools, sanctuary schools and schools that protect Black history.
And there will be 16 schools newly adopting the sustainable community school approach.
Where one version of school district planning sees a struggling school and moves to close it down and displace the families that live in the community, another sees a school that’s been denied adequate resources and asks how the community can make it stronger.
Instead of pathologizing our children or families, the model sees the village as the solution and places schools at the heart of it.
So while Indiana is replacing educators with virtual teachers on a screen, Oklahoma is incorporating a right-wing YouTube channel into its core curriculum and the president is shifting public funds to private vouchers, Chicago is providing a different way forward.
Here in our city, we are honoring public education as the legacy of what formerly enslaved Africans dreamed for us during the Reconstruction era when they created it in the South.
The 20 current sustainable community schools have demonstrated the power of engaging curricula, high quality teaching, wrap-around supports, positive discipline, parent engagement and inclusive school leadership.
By engaging community partners like Blocks Together, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, Enlace and Metropolitan Family Services, among others, we’ve woven the fabric of school and community tighter together for better results.
Now those 16 additional schools will adopt the sustainable community schools model as CPS is on track to expand to the 70 campuses we negotiated in our contract. Parents in sustainable community school neighborhoods will get access to parent mentorship programs just as students get expanded access to more robust learning environments and the intentional support to succeed.
So, it’s true, as our governor says, that anyone worried about the state of the Democratic party can look to Illinois to see what we’re doing here.
But look to the former hunger strikers, the CPS families and the creators of an educational model they are replicating in Mississippi and Maryland and California, not necessarily the Democratic trifecta in Springfield who is actually shortchanging it.
If the governor’s budget paid what is owed and ended the $10 billion in tax breaks for tech companies and billionaires as other states have done, then we could actually focus our city dialogue related to education on the incredible advances we are making for our children instead of the bankers’ ledgers their education hangs in the balance of.
Stacy Davis Gates is a high school history teacher, public school parent and the President of CTU Local 1.