Chicago DUers with kids in school:

[HiPointDem]

3. that's why they didn't close any high schools *this time*. because previous closings

were incriminated in the rise in gang violence.

One of the signs carried by CORE protesters during the June 19, 2009, picket of the Hyatt Regency Hotel listed all of the schools that had been closed by Arne Duncan between the time he was appointed Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Chicago's public schools (July 1, 2001) and the end of December 2008 (by which time he had been announced as the choice of Barack Obama for U.S. Secretary of Education.

In January 2009, Duncan added another 22 schools to the list of 63 on the sign above, bringing to 85 the schools he had tried to close. What is left out of the corporate narrative about Arne Duncan's school closings is that most of the schools Duncan closed were not "failing" in any reasonable sense of the word. In fact, a large number of those schools were eliminated because they were in way of real estate developers with Chicago clout (e.g., Jacob Riis Elementary or because Duncan wanted to vacate the school so that he could give the building away to a charter school developer (many of those on the list, including Austin, Calumet and Collins high schools and Donoghue, Howland, Bunche, Morse, and Gladstone elementary schools)

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=746


*Those* schools were closed because they were "failing" -- *these* schools are closed because they are supposedly 'underutilized'.

It's all bullshit, because charter schools keep *opening*.

The open enrollment policy was put in place to facilitate charters.