Links!

A school district in Michigan has fired all of its teachers and closed every school, due to budget shortfalls.  Just a reminder that yes, this could be the endgame.  Chris Hayes has more.

Online charter schools spend millions of taxpayer dollars every year to advertise their schools on things such as Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.  The largest of these educational management organizations, K12 Inc. (which is publicly traded on the NYSE) is currently being sued for making "misleading statements about the academic successes of its schools."

And, speaking of lawsuits, the Chicago Teachers Union is planning to file two federal lawsuits today to stop the Board of Education from closing 53 Chicago elementary schools.  The way in which these closings adversely affect African Americans should, I hope, be seen as a violation of their civil rights under, maybe the 14th Amendment?

"...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."  I would consider taking away a child's education as depriving them of property without due process of law, but that's just me.

The Chicago Way, Part One

One issue that I think is very important right now is Mayor Rahm Emanuel's plans to close down 54 Chicago public schools this year.  If successful, this would be by far the largest year of school closings in any American city, ever.

Here is a graph that was put up by the Washington Post last month:

As you can see, the vast majority of school closings in Chicago will be affecting Black students.  From the Chicagoist, here is a map depicting the locations of the schools to be closed:

Go back to that demographic map of Chicago from my last post, and you'll see how the school closings almost perfectly match-up with the African American neighborhoods in the city.

Emanuel was elected mayor in 2011, when he won with 59 percent of the city's Black vote.  Since then, he has systematically moved to gut the city of all of its services, such as closing half of the city's mental health clinics (predominately on the South Side),  or raising public transportation fares, which again hits hits working class and minority families.

Of course, Emanuel is acting within a longstanding policy of making life in Chicago less comfortable for African Americans in the hope that they will leave.  From 2000-2010, Chicago shrank by about 200,000 people - and 180,000 of those people were African American.  Without access to housing, jobs, health care, transportation, and, now, education, Black people really don't have much incentive to stay in Chicago.  Which is a good thing for Rahm.

Now, Rahm hopes to attract more business to the city by calling on taxpayers to foot $100 million for a new basketball stadium for DePaul University - at the same time that he is citing a (dubious) $1 billion shortfall as justification for shutting down 54 public schools on the South and West side.  In addition, plans are in the pipes to call for public funding of two new "mega" hotels near downtown "in the hopes of aggressively growing convention and meeting business in Chicago."

And this is the pattern that has been ongoing for decades: Slash funding for public services needed by the poor and minorities in the hope that they'll just "go away," and then use public money to fund private enterprises where the public never gets their money back.

And we haven't even mentioned the UNO Charter Schools, and the massive profits that come from running a charter school in Chicago!

Maps of Segregated Cities

Business Insider (from Australia) has an interesting series of maps depicting the high degree of racial segregation in many major U.S. cities.  They have 21 over there, but I just wanted to highlight a few in particular.  First up: Chicago. 

Chicago has a 75.9 "black-white dissimilarity score," and anything higher than a 60 is considered highly segregated.  The blue dots on this map are where the black people live, and the red are white people, and the orange is hispanic people.  Green is Asian.  When my wife, Robyn, and I first moved to Chicago in 2007, we lived in Hyde Park, where the University of Chicago is.  Hyde Park is that red blob surrounded by the blue on the South Side.  So this was one of the major steps in my development of beginning to think about race.  Later, we moved to Roscoe Village, which is on the North Side, kind of right where the red blurs in with the orange, where Mexican and Puerto Rican neighborhoods are being gentrified by White folks.  Like us.

This link takes you to a map of the United States.  See if you can find Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland on the map.  It's not hard.

Here's New York City, which has a black-white dissimilarity score of 79.1, higher than Chicago:

I'm surprised that New York is actually more segregated than Chicago.  You can easily see the parts of Brooklyn and The Bronx where the black people live, and that Manhattan is pretty much White-only these days.  And Harlem keeps getting moved further and further uptown.  

Here's Detroit, #1 in segregation at 79.6:

I have never been to Detroit.  But there is very clearly a literal dividing line between the White neighborhoods (the suburbs) and the Black, the city of Detroit: Eight Mile Road.  

So, my question is: Why do we pay for schools using local property taxes?

Other cities:

San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley

Boston 

Seattle 

Portland, OR is very white

New Orleans, 2010

St. Louis & East St. Louis

Portsmouth, NH: No race problems here!

Savannah, GA

Damn.  I was hoping to find my town of Champaign, IL.  Seriously, they have Portsmouth and Boise, ID but not Champaign??  

Here's some of the relevant info that I wanted: The Champaign-Urbana metro area as of 2010 was 74.3% White, 10.6% Black, and 4.8% Hispanic.  But the Champaign school district student population as of 2012 is 41.2% White, 34.9% Black, and 8.8% Hispanic.  Why is that??? 

Why do we pay for schools with local property taxes? 

Post-Script: I found it!