Duncan: Education plan not causing deaths

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CHICAGO (AP) — Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday it is ridiculous to suggest that an ambitious plan to improve education in Chicago contributed to a surge in violence among students.

Maybe. What does the evidence say?


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Since 2005, dozens of Chicago's public schools have been closed and thousands of students reassigned to campuses outside their neighborhoods — and often across gang lines — as part of Renaissance 2010. While the plan has resulted in replacing failing and low-enrollment schools with charter schools and smaller campuses, it has also led to a spike in violence that has increasingly turned deadly, many activists, parents and students say.

Before the 2006 school year, an average of 10-15 public school students were fatally shot each year. That soared to 24 deadly shootings in the 2006-07 school year, 23 deaths and 211 shootings in the 2007-08 school year and 34 deaths and 290 shootings last school year.

Few deaths have occurred on school grounds, but activists say it's no coincidence that violence spiked after the school closures.

It may be no coincidence; or it may not be causal.

There's certainly no doubt that the root cause of violence isn't a school issue, but a social issue that politicians, and too much of the rest of the nation, have been willing to ignore since the Reagan administration.

It's also true that when poor performance in school is directly related to those social issues, and we know that it often is, changing schools, closing schools, and shifting students around isn't going to fix the problem.

I'd say the same thing is true of student violence.

Why IS violence spiking since the inception of the Duncan plan? Do changes in schools and shifting of students have anything to do with it? If so, what? If not, what IS the source of the spike?

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2009-10-07-chicago-violence_N.htm?POE=click-refer

Which simply supports the premise that, if you want things to be better at school, academically or socially, you address the social conditions prevalent in the community.

Including poverty, and including the opportunity to make a decent living.

the latest failure of duncan..close to 2 million dollars of computers were stolen from the chicago school system under his watch.that does`t include other property that was stolen.

duncan can`t hide the fact that he was a disaster for public education in chicago

Districts need leadership that is focused on education, not corporate goals. Educators.

just about everyone involved blames the problem on the converting a school into a military academy and forcing the different high schools/neighborhoods together. the CPS solution to the problem was to have the police escort students to and from their new school. the day of the killing everything went wrong.

violence is related to the Duncan restructuring of schools.

And we've stepped further into bizzaro world, where, when violence threatens the lives of students, we send police escorts to get them back and forth, rather than addressing the source/s of violence in the communities. Let the violence flourish, give the students an armed escort.

WTF is wrong with our policy makers?

but that`s what a lot of people on the streets/community is looking at.

It's always good to get a local perspective.

:hi:

Those being interviewed said exactly what you're saying now.

to look too closely at the underlying condition because that would mean that they would have to do something about it.

to address the source. That would be "socialism," or "throwing money at a problem." This way, they have a convenient scapegoat, and it's easy to whip up disdain for public education.

And, by extension, get public approval for whatever policies are good for political agendas, but bad for students.