We must not let our political leaders pit us against one another…. We must see our common destiny as families of Chicago and work to build a city and public school system that invests in the realization of the potential of every single child.

Introduction

In the first installment of our report on racial discrimination in Chicago Public Schools we uncovered the fact that CPS officials awarded schools that serve majority white student populations 60% of the additional special education funds they requested, while awarding just 14% to majority Hispanic schools, and a paltry 9% to schools serving majority African American populations. In this, the second installment, we highlight yet another egregious example of racial discrimination against students of color in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago Public Schools. Click any of the following hyperlinks for a short overview of the background of our study, or to see the raw CPS data at the root of our analysis.

Context

In 2016-2017, CPS instituted a funding strategy that drastically reduced special education budgets across the district and created demands for additional resources.  CPS officials responded to the demand for more resources with a budget appeals process. If you were a principal and the resources provided to your school were inadequate, you had the option of submitting an appeal.

85% of Expressed Need Went Ignored

“Only after parents made threats to go to the media did the district partially fund the appeal.”

Appeals were filed by 158 schools. Collectively, they appealed for $24,110,764. In response to these appeals, CPS granted $3,519,709 — less than 15% of the total requested.

Of those that were approved, several school leaders indicated it took pressure from parents and community members and that, even then, they received far less than they requested. In responding to a survey in the winter of 2016, one principal wrote, “Only after parents made threats to go to the media did the district partially fund the appeal.” While it is unacceptable to fund less than 15% of the needs of the students represented in that $24 million request, a more detailed analysis revealed even more appalling outcomes.

The Extremes of the 10 Most and Least “White”

As the above infographic illustrates, CPS officials approved the appeals of the 10 schools with the highest percentage of white students to the tune of $1,033,000. At the same time, the 10 schools with the lowest percentage of white students–all majority African American–were denied completely. Below is a school-by-school analysis.

Note: Forty-one of the schools that filed appeals have 0% white students. For our 10-to-10 comparison we selected those with the 10 highest poverty rates (97.6 to 99.7). Only 5 of the 41 schools with 0% white students received funding ($323,400).

The following infographic combines the previous graphic and table to paint a clear picture of the process and its toxic outcomes:

Graphic developed by Troy Laraviere and designed by Anthony Moser of DesignVolunteers.org

Download this infographic here.

The Influence of Politics

It is also interesting to note that the two majority white schools that did not receive funding are associated with school principals who have openly expressed concerns with CPS policies and programs: Me (Troy LaRaviere), formerly at Blaine, and Nathan Pietrini who was principal at Hawthorne at the time of this appeal.

Political considerations may have also played a part in the fact that two of the highest awards to individual schools ($300,000 and $248,000) went to majority white schools in the 19th Ward where Alderman Matt O’Shea worked with City Hall in a failed attempt to shut down a high-achieving majority African-American school (Kellogg) — and overcrowd another majority African-American school (Sutherland) — in order to create additional space for students at a majority white school (Mount Greenwood).

Conclusion

The racially discriminatory behaviors of the Emanuel appointees at CPS uncovered in our analysis are profoundly disturbing. However I want to make it clear that although this report highlights disparities between resources allocated to schools serving white students and those serving black and brown students, this is not a call for people of color to protest the resources given to white students; it is a call for all people of good conscience – regardless of race and ethnicity – to voice our profound discontent with the race and class based decision-making of the Mayor’s appointees at Chicago Public Schools:  In addition, the woefully inadequate base funding that created the need for the appeals process is depriving all schools of critical resources they needed to develop the full human potential of their students because it pits schools against one another to beg for a share of an artificially low pool of funds.

To say it more directly, majority white schools like Mount Greenwood and Edison Park should not be the targets of our discontent. On the contrary, it is my hope that the majority white community of Mount Greenwood will express its outrage at the denial of resources for majority black schools like Mount Vernon, and that the families at a majority white school like Edison Park will voice their discontent with the abject neglect with which CPS treats majority Hispanic schools like Hanson Park.

We must not let our political leaders pit us against one another. We must not let them set us up to fight over the scraps they throw behind for our children after doling out multi-million dollar contracts, tax breaks, and interest payments to the profit driven selfish corporate interests they serve. We must see our common destiny as families of Chicago and work to build a city and public school system that invests in the realization of the potential of every single child.

“It is my hope that the majority white community of Mount Greenwood will express its outrage at the denial of resources for majority black schools like Mount Vernon, and that the families at a majority white school like Edison Park will voice their discontent with the abject neglect with which CPS treats majority Hispanic schools like Hanson Park.”

Next Key Finding: Measuring CPS’s Belief in Black and Brown Children

Of the $3.5 million awarded to 158 schools, $828.000 was given to just four majority white schools. We took those four schools and put them on one side of a scale. Then, we began to add Hispanic schools to the other side of the scale until we reached a number of schools that got an amount comparable to what CPS awarded those four majority white schools. Then we did the same for majority African American schools. How many black and brown schools do you think it took to reach a comparable dollar amount? We’ll reveal that result in our next installment and discuss its implications.

Troy LaRaviere, President
Chicago Principals and Administrators Association
Twitter: @troylaraviere
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: fb.me/TroyAnthonyLaRaviere

Invest in our Work

At CPAA, we believe that if Chicago residents have a better understanding of how policies impact our children, they will be better prepared to push our elected officials to create better policies. Our small four-person staff is completely dedicated to this work. Please contribute to our efforts to raise public awareness and defend public education by clicking the donate button below.  Thank you.

Graphic developed by Troy Laraviere and designed by Anthony Moser of DesignVolunteers.org

Download a PDF of this infographic here.
Download a PNG of this infographic here.

Introduction

The information illustrated in the above infographic comes from Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) own internal documents. It is a small part of an upcoming Chicago Principals and Administrators Association (CPAA) report, Emanuel Administration Policy in Chicago Public Schools Leads to Systematic Discrimination Against Poor Students of Color with Special Needs. Since our report is fairly comprehensive, over the next few weeks, at regular intervals, we will release selected key findings of the report via short articles and infographics. We hope that this way of releasing the information will allow adequate time to process the extent to which the Mayor’s Office and CPS have victimized Chicago’s students; particularly students of color from poor neighborhoods.

Background

Divestment and Diversion

There has been a continuous stream of disinvestment from CPS and its students over the past decade. CPS has cut school funding repeatedly in order to redirect those funds to other priorities (e.g., Navy Pier, debt service, custodial privatization, wasteful and redundant school construction, subsidies for wealthy developers, etc.).  Before the 2015-2016 school year, special education students had not been the direct targets of these divestment and diversion efforts.

Targeting Special Education

In 2015-2016, however, a pilot special education funding strategy was instituted and expanded district-wide this past 2016-2017 school year. This strategy drastically reduced special education funding across the district and created demands for additional resources.  CPS officials responded to the demand for more resources with a budget appeals process. If you were a principal and the resources provided to your school were inadequate, you had the option of submitting an appeal.

Investigating the Appeals Process

CPAA conducted surveys and focus groups with principals and assistant principals, and collected appeals data from individual principals to produce a timeline of two schools’ appeals for special education funding. After CPAA made that timeline public at a Board of Education meeting in the spring of 2017, reporter Sarah Karp of WBEZ submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for special education appeals data. CPS handed over the data and Karp subsequently made it publicly available.

CPS failed to include demographic data for each school, so CPAA’s Special Education Policy Team added demographic data for each school listed, combined the amounts awarded to individual schools who submitted multiple appeals in order to treat each school as one appeal, and then conducted a race- and income-based analysis of that data. The results of that analysis are at the heart of our report. Those results are also the basis of the findings depicted in the above infographic.

Disparity in Percent of Request Granted

76 of the 158 schools submitting appeals were majority African-American; 60 were majority Hispanic, 10 were majority white and the rest did not have any racial group over 50 percent. Since there were only 10 majority white schools, we started by comparing each group of schools based on percentage of request granted.  That is, each group of schools filed appeals for a total amount. So how much of that amount were they granted?

As the graphic depicts,  CPS officials granted 60% of the amounts requested by schools serving majority white student populations. However, schools serving mostly Hispanic students received 14% of the amount they requested, while majority black schools received just 9% of what they requested. Specifically, 10 majority white schools were given $1,033,000 of $1,717,583 requested; 60 majority Hispanic schools were granted only $1,286,239 of $9,024,755 requested; and CPS conceded only $1,110,470 of $12,023,534 requested by 76 schools serving majority African-American students.

Fighting the Right Battle

While we must certainly notice and address the repulsive racial discrimination practiced by CPS officials, it is even more important for us to notice that no group received everything they needed. All too often–when we identify racial discrimination–we miss this critical point. The core purpose of racism is to divide and distract us from the cruel reality that while some of us are being fleeced more than others, we’re all being fleeced. We must not quarrel amongst ourselves over the scraps this administration throws to our children with one hand, while the other is doling out multimillion-dollar contracts, tax breaks, and interest payments to the self-serving, profit-driven corporate interests they serve. We must see our public destiny as families of Chicago and work to build a public school system and city that invests in the realization of the potential of every single child. This administration is draining schools and communities of vitality as it pits them against one another to vie for an artificially low pool of funds. Ultimately, this deprives students of all backgrounds of the critical resources they need to develop their full human potential.

This means we must do far more than ask for a more fair appeals process. We must challenge the oppressively inadequate funding levels that created the need for the appeals in the first place. We hope that our report and pre-report essays on the flagrant and violent discrimination practiced against schools that serve African American and Hispanic children helps to create the public demand for our district to end its divestment and diversion tactics, generate adequate revenue for our city’s schools, and hold these officials accountable for the crimes they’ve committed against our city’s most vulnerable children.

Next Key Finding: Extreme Disparities

In our next pre-report essay we will publish the results of what we found when we asked the question, “What was the total amount granted to the ten schools with the highest percentages of white students, and how does that compare with the total granted to the ten schools with the lowest percentages of white students?”

Invest in our Work

At CPAA, we believe that if Chicago residents have a better understanding of how policies impact our children, they will be better prepared to push our elected officials to create better policies. Our small four-person staff is completely dedicated to this work. Please contribute to our efforts to raise public awareness and defend public education by clicking the donate button below.  Thank you.

Troy LaRaviere, President
Chicago Principals and Administrators Association
Twitter: @troylaraviere
Email: [email protected]
Facebook: fb.me/TroyAnthonyLaRaviere

My intense passion for ensuring all Chicagoans get to realize their god-given potential was on full display at the Chicago Board of Education yesterday. The Chicago Principals and Administrators Association will be releasing new research on rampant discrimination against our most vulnerable students: children of color who need special education services. I gave a preview of the grotesque findings of that research at the July Meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. We don’t have to play this zero sum game. With the right leadership–and a public willing to hold leadership accountable–we can realize the potential of all our children.

 

This is the logic that Emanuel embraces: Where there are no consequences, there is no accountability.

As a teacher and principal in CPS under Rahm Emanuel, the “accountability and consequences” ideology meant that my colleagues and I worked under the threat of school closures, poor school ratings, and loss of funding tied to student enrollment. The basic idea being that if there are no consequences, then schools and educators have no real incentive to improve. Although I have some serious issues with the assumptions that underlie this logic, my issues are irrelevant to the topic at hand. What is relevant is the fact that this is the logic that Emanuel embraces: Where there are no consequences, there is no accountability.

If he embraces consequence-based accountability for educators, then he should embrace it for himself in terms of holding his own administration accountable for effective police reforms. It was this kind of accountability that the mayor committed our city to in January when he signed an agreement in principle with the Justice Department to negotiate a consent decree that would be overseen by a federal judge who would have the power to hold City Hall accountable by levying consequences should it fail to live up to its promises.

If Emanuel embraces consequence-based accountability for educators, then he should embrace it for himself.

The U.S. Department of Justice stated Chicago’s problems were too “deep,” and “longstanding” to be reformed without the guidance and force of a judge.   The judge would work with monitors to oversee the reforms and order compliance when the city falls short of the agreement’s goals.  The judge would also set time frames for compliance, and ultimately fine the city if it fails to meet those requirements.  Emanuel signed this agreement at a time when Chicago’s policing issues were a lead topic on national and local news outlets.  

Now however–with far less attention on him–Emanuel has done a complete about-face and instead is seeking an independent monitor with no power to hold the city accountable with consequences. In doing so, he has betrayed his stated commitment to holding his administration accountable for reforming the Chicago Police Department. Even worse — according to the Chicago Tribune — Emanuel planned on keeping quiet about this reversal, and only announced it because his staff had the false impression that Chicago Fraternal Order of Police President Kevin Graham was going to expose Emanuel’s flip-flop during a radio appearance.

One of the tell-tale signs of a great leader is that he holds himself up to the same standards he demands of everyone else.

To be clear–just as with schools–police need more than just consequence-based accountability. They need support, training, guidance and resources. However, after listening to Emanuel talk about accountability and consequences for our schools for the past six years, I find it incredibly hypocritical that he would maintain the status quo by seeking to establish a powerless oversight body that cannot hand out the kinds of consequences that produce real accountability.  One of the tell-tale signs of a great leader is that he holds himself up to the same standards he demands of everyone else. Such leaders secure respect, admiration, and commitment from those they lead.  On this critical measure of leadership, Mayor Rahm Emanuel has fallen far short.

Troy LaRaviere
President, Chicago Principals and Administrators Association
Principal of Chicago’s #1 Rated Neighborhood School (Blaine Elementary, 2011 – 2016)
@TroyLaRaviere

“Regardless of how you feel about ‘school choice’ the more important point is that government has no business subsidizing a model for schooling that produces poor options for parents to choose from.”

The WBEZ overview consists primarily of the four graphics dispersed throughout the text below.  The pension graphic immediately below is particularly informative.

Photo illustration: Paula Friedrich/WBEZ
The image of the handshake illustrates the 1981 agreement that CPS would directly pay 7% of the 9% employee pension contribution, instead of paying that 7% directly to employees as part of a raise.  In essence, CPS agreed it would divert 7% of teacher compensation to pensions rather than pay it directly to teachers.  This was a mutually agreed upon way to compensate educators for their work.  There has certainly been no decrease in the amount of work required to teach, so should there be a decrease in compensation for that work?
The second graphic illustrates the issue of educators paying more in healthcare costs as CPS pays less.  The manner in which both sides present the issue is fairly straightforward. Basically, if you believe CPS has been paying health care costs for decades–not as compensation for teachers’ work–but as a perk completely disconnected from the value of a teacher’s work, then you agree with the CPS assertion that if they stop paying a major portion of teacher healthcare costs, it is not a pay cut. If however, you believe that CPS has been paying health care cost as part of the larger package to compensate educators for their work, then a drastic reduction in CPS healthcare payments is indeed a pay cut. A far simpler way of looking at this issue is that any contract change that leads to teachers getting less take-home pay is, in essence, a cut in pay.

Photo illustration: Paula Friedrich/WBEZ

The last issue–steps and lanes–is in my humble opinion, the least well articulated and explained.  So I offer what I hope is an improved analysis following the illustration below.

Photo illustration: Paula Friedrich/WBEZ

There is a much stronger case than the one presented here for why step and lane increases are not full pay raises.  In order to understand this we need to realize there are two types of pay raises, and CPS is trying to get rid of one of them.

Type 1: CPS pays teachers for more education and experience.  These are called “Lane” and “Step” increases. CPS pays teachers more because they’ve taken some steps to become better teachers: they’ve studied for advanced degrees (lane increase) and gained experience (step increase).  You can see this reflected in the salary schedule below: teacher compensation increases as the years of experience (steps) increase. This table also shows the difference between pay for a teacher in “Lane I” (bachelor’s degree) and a teacher in “Lane II” (master’s degree).

Degrees, certifications and experience are supposed to lead to advancement, promotion, and corresponding compensation increases. However, the only way to get promoted in the teaching profession in Chicago is to leave the classroom to become a dean, assistant principal or principal.  Lane and step increases attempt to address this by keeping highly trained and experienced teachers in the classroom as a career.

Type 2: Teachers receive a yearly Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA).  For example, in FY 2013 a first year teacher with a bachelor’s degree earned $52,094 (including pension contribution).  In 2014 a first year teacher with the same bachelor’s degree would have taken home $53,136. This is illustrated below in the difference between 2012-13 and 2013-14 salaries.

Discussion: As part of the contract negotiations CPS is attempting to completely eliminate the COLA, implying that the lane and step increases for an individual teacher from one year to the next constitutes enough of a “raise.” However, there is an important reason that CPS has always paid educators a separate COLA aside from step and lane increases: what CPS’ new argument completely ignores is that without yearly cost of living adjustments, the value of teachers at each level of experience would decrease each year as a result of increases in the cost of living.

The 15-year truncated salary schedule below illustrates this point by following the amount CPS pays to fifth-year teachers with bachelor’s degrees (yellow highlight).  While the actual salaries and duration of the contract are still being negotiated, this illustration takes current contract amounts and tracks them over a 15-year period to show the logical conclusion of eliminating the COLA.  It also illustrates the impact of CPS reneging on the 1981 agreement to pay part of a teacher’s salary through a 7% pension contribution. This analysis clarifies the impact of CPS’ proposal on the teaching profession.

If taken to its logical conclusion, CPS’ effort to end the COLA means the salary for a fifth-year teacher in the year 2030 will be the same as it is today.  However, A dollar in 2030 will be worth less than today’s dollar, and so will that salary. This means that overall teacher pay in 2030 will be effectively cut, since that amount will buy less in 2030 than it does in 2016. The negative impact of CPS’ argument to end yearly pay increases becomes even more apparent when you see that although individuals within the system will see some increases in pay over the course of their careers as they move from step to step, the wages of the entire profession will effectively go down as pay in each step and lane stagnates, while the cost of living rises over the years. Teacher pay gets even lower when the lack of a true salary increase is combined with CPS reneging on its agreed upon pension contribution.

The key question we must ask ourselves is, “Is that the kind of compensation model we think will attract and retain the best teachers for Chicago’s children?”

Clearly, step and lane increases are inadequate.  There must also be yearly increases within each step and lane to account for inflation driven increases in basic cost of living. Without this, CPS cannot realistically claim to be offering teachers a pay raise.

Photo illustration: Paula Friedrich/WBEZ

CTU and CPS aren’t just doing different math; they’re basing their arguments on different versions of history.  CPS officials’ argument can only stand if we ignore the facts of history. It can only stand if we ignore the fact that CPS itself proposed the pension pick-up as a direct response to teachers’ need for a pay raise.   One theory about why CPS proposed the pension contribution option is that it allowed them to hold on to that 7% so it could earn interest on investments until the end of the year when CPS was supposed to transfer the funds to the Chicago Teacher’s Pension Fund.  Of course, we know that for over a decade, CPS never made those payments.  We know that it squandered the money on things like SUPES, interest on bad loans, penalties on toxic financial deals, custodial and engineering privatization, and building nearly 40% more schools in a district that is losing students.

Instead of owning up to its fiscal mismanagement and recklessness CPS has been engaging in a decade long public relations campaign to convince Chicagoans that teacher pensions themselves–not CPS mismanagement of pension funds–are the problem.

The term “pension crisis” obscures the real problem: we have a crisis of fiscal recklessness and lack of financial competence in our district officials and the city officials they report to.  Even today, as they claim poverty, CPS and City officials continue to squander hundreds of millions of dollars on wasteful building projects that enrich their benefactors in the banking industry.

Perhaps teachers should have demanded their raise in 1981 instead of trusting CPS to stay true to its end of the pension bargain.  In the end, it appears that it’s not the pension contribution, health care costs, or annual raises that need to change.  Even if teachers accepted every loss CPS is asking them to take, the waste and mismanagement of our district and city leadership would keep us operating in financial crisis mode for decades to come.

You might read that last sentence and think that the change I will recommend is a change in city and district leadership.  You would be wrong, or perhaps only half-right.

We elected these people.  For decades we’ve been electing and re-electing officials who have done everything from selling off our parking rights, to undermining our school system. We elected the people who mismanaged teacher pensions and now City and CPS officials are trying to convince us that teachers should “sacrifice” for our poor choices at the ballot box, including the choice of not participating. How can we look teachers in the eye and ask them to let CPS renege on their pension agreement because of a crisis that we initiated when we elected the city and state officials who created it?

We did that Chicago, and we are the ones who need to change.

@TroyLaRaviere
[email protected]

In 2010 Chicago Magazine ranked Blaine Elementary School as the 16th best elementary school in Chicago, and the 6th best neighborhood school.  After being hired to lead Blaine in the fall of 2011, I told my Local School Council (LSC) I had a “six-year plan” to turn Blaine into the #1 neighborhood school in Chicago.

I have the pleasure of informing you that I lived up to my promise to the Blaine LSC, and I did so a year earlier than promised. Last Monday, Chicago Magazine released its elementary school rankings for 2016.  Blaine is now ranked as the #1 neighborhood school in Chicago, and #3 public school in the City overall.  In the process, working with motivated teachers and engaged parents, we increased the percentage of students meeting reading standards from an already high 79% to 89% in just our first two years.  That kind of growth from an already high performing school–without the addition of a selective enrollment program–is unprecedented.

Behind this significant accomplishment are a series of basic concepts based on empirical evidence regarding effective school practices and thoughtful consideration of how we might apply those practices at Blaine.  One fundamental element of improving the school was ending selective access to advanced curriculum.  When I arrived, less than 30% of students had access to it; today more than 90% have access. As is the case with most CPS schools, Blaine has a talented hard working staff.  Another critical element of our success was to involve that staff in an effort to create systems, relationships, and patterns of collaborative activity that are proven to improve teacher performance, and therefore improve student achievement.  In many ways, that was the easy part.  

The difficult part was mustering the will and stamina to remain steadfast in our commitment to use evidence-based practice in the face of tremendous pressure–from politicians like you–to adopt baseless “school reform” ideas like “tracking” (school based selective enrollment), “choice,” and the over-evaluation of teachers; ideas that are grounded in ideology and politics as opposed to proven effective educational methods. In a word, the biggest obstacle to Blaine becoming the #1 neighborhood school in Chicago was politics. And while many people contributed to this problem, nobody in our great city is more responsible for that political obstruction than you.  

I spent a lot of time fighting those politics during my first two years at Blaine. Some of the people I fought had good intentions, but it was abundantly clear that they did not understand effective education policy. Rather, they came with ideology and politics. We came, instead, with empirical research and evidence.  

I take my profession seriously and I practice it with integrity. I did not succumb to corporate educational fads. I did not pander and I did not bend to the selfish aims of a privileged few. If an idea was not in the interests of the school as a whole, it did not happen under my watch. However, during those first two years I kept my fight behind-the-scenes and between the walls of Blaine.  Like all CPS principals at the time, I took no public stances against your incompetent and uncaring mismanagement of our school system. It was my sincere hope that internal advocacy and leading by example could and would prevail.

Instead, the achievement gap steadily increased under your mismanagement as you and your appointees at CPS made one disastrous decision after another, in defiance of the evidence and research on educational practices.  You have made it increasingly difficult for principals and teachers to provide strong academic programs for our students.  

Accordingly, in the summer of 2013 I began efforts to ensure that the residents of our city understood the negative consequences of your administration’s backward and reckless management of our school district. I did so for the following reasons:

• Decisions by you and the board you appointed and completely controlled had damaging consequences for our school system.
• Although your board was unelected, and therefore unaccountable to the residents of Chicago, you were indeed elected and could be held accountable.
• As a public servant it was my responsibility to ensure the public understood the negative consequences of your school-related decision-making so they could hold you and your board accountable.

So for the next three years, I consistently and publicly advocated for credible evidence-based education policies. This, in turn, made me also be a consistent public critic of the ideological and politically driven policies coming out of your office and implemented by your hand-picked board.

One might think that after witnessing the unprecedented academic gains of Blaine students, you and your appointees might call on my school leadership team to help you understand how we improved at such an incredible rate.  Instead, at your direction, your appointees are pushing forward with efforts to terminate my employment. It is clear that I am being punished for my advocacy, and that this retribution is more important to you than effective public education for Chicago’s children.

Instead of learning from our work at Blaine, your appointees attempted to suppress that work and silence my voice.  When CPS officials removed me as the principal at Blaine, I was already planning to relinquish my post to assume the office of president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association (CPAA).  However, after being chosen by my colleagues to serve as CPAA president I decided to fight the removal on principle, and to use the administrative hearing process to demonstrate the charges against me are baseless.  Now, in light of the factors listed below, I will conclude that process by tendering my resignation:

• Since I have taken on the role of CPAA President, I cannot return as Blaine’s principal, no matter what the outcome of the hearings.  Meanwhile, the Blaine school community cannot move forward and hire another permanent principal until my case is resolved. I cannot allow those for whom I have worked so hard in the last five years to suffer the consequences of your destructive political agenda.
• The hearing process is, of course, a kangaroo court that ends with a determination by your appointed school board; the very school board that voted to censure me in the first place. I don’t expect your appointed board to deliver justice any more than I expect it to practice fiscal responsibility or competent educational management.
• Thus far, during the hearing process, your appointees have failed to produce any of the requested communications to and from your office regarding me and my work at Blaine. Yet the records you produced to justify your refusal contain clear evidence that your office was involved in my removal. You confess that at a minimum the CPS legal office communicated with the City legal office multiple times regarding my termination. I will therefore have to fight for these documents outside of the hearing process through FOIA requests and possible litigation should your office continue its pattern of refusing to release information that, by law, should be publicly available.
• The flimsy charges you’ve leveled against me–combined with the recent elevation of my school as the #1 neighborhood school in Chicago–makes it obvious that your actions against me have everything to do with politics and nothing to do with what’s good for students and families.  Therefore the point that I wished to make in the hearing process, has already been made–loudly and clearly.

With the above factors in mind, I hereby resign my position as principal of Blaine Elementary School.  However, my efforts to reverse your poor fiscal and educational management of our school system are just getting started.

In just six weeks since since I became its president, the CPAA has saved the Illinois Administrator Academies for principals after your appointees at CPS attempted to sabotage the program; made significant amendments to the Education Platform of the Democratic Party; worked with principals to form action teams that will influence city and state education policy; built relationships with elected officials in order to create access to the legislative process; created the foundation and framework necessary to build a democratic representative structure for both CPAA governance and input in CPS decision-making; joined with the engineers and teachers to oppose your wasteful expansion of absentee facilities management under Aramark and SodexoMAGIC, and started a news service that keeps school leaders informed by providing them with a thematic summary of the week’s education and political news.  We intend to build on this work for Chicago and its school children.

In closing, should you ever decide to prioritize student learning over the profits of your campaign donors, feel free to reach out to me and the principals I was elected to represent. We have an abundance of ideas for improving the system for the students we serve.  In the meantime, we will continue in our efforts to vigorously advocate for the kind of effective evidence-based education policies and practices that your office does its best to ignore and suppress.

Sincerely,

Troy LaRaviere, Former Principal
James G. Blaine Elementary School
Chicago’s #1 Rated Neighborhood Elementary School

@TroyLaraviere