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and staff and dismissed and replaced. Dismissals are handed down
regardless of qualifications or experience, and are followed by a CPS
selection process to re-staff the school.
“CPS terminates every single employee when it subjects a
neighborhood school to ‘turnaround,’ regardless of qualifications and
experience,” said attorney Robin Potter. “The inequity of the most recent
‘turnarounds’ is not merely perception but a reality.”
Approximately 90 percent of students in CPS’s 578 non-charter
schools are minorities. Forty-two percent of these students are identified
as African-American, but the African-American teaching population has
gradually declined in recent years, from 40.6 percent in 2000 to 29.6
percent in 2010.
It should be noted that once CPS “turns around a school,” one of two
operators are given control over the school—either the CPS Office of
School Improvement or the Academy for Urban School Leadership. Under
both operators, schools remain subject to the terms of the CTU labor
agreement, CPS policies and Board rules. The operators are also
responsible for the hiring process to re-staff the school.
The Board of Education approved the turnaround of 10 schools in
February 2012, stating that each of the schools was selected because of its
alleged poor performance. Each of these schools was located on the South
or West sides of the city, where the student and teacher populations are
predominantly minority.
The school district has yet to release any information on how these 10
schools were chosen from over 180 allegedly poor performing schools in
the CPS system. The Board has been roundly criticized for its lack of
transparency and published criteria in selecting schools for turnaround. In
fact, the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force, a statutorily-created
oversight group, called for a complete halt of turnarounds and other school
action, saying, “CPS’s historic and continuing lack of transparency and
evidence-based criteria for decisions resulted in the pervasive climate of
public suspicion about what drives CPS to take school actions and allocate
resources, often in ways perceived to be highly inequitable.”