Less than one year after he announced that he would be appointing a completely new Board of Education and administrative hierarchy for Chicago's public schools, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has continued to encourage massive purges of the top executives he was responsible for putting in power.
The intended departure of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) chief education officer is yet another example of the “chaos of Clark Street.” According to reports, Noemi Donoso will allegedly resign her position in May. This is the third turnover of a high-ranking CPS administrator in recent weeks. -- Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis
The purges of top executives and administrators at Chicago's public schools continued on April 27, 2012, with the quiet announcement that the school system's "Chief Education Officer," Noemi Donoso, was out of her job effective immediately and was resigning as of May 31, 2012. The press release announcing the departure of Donoso was placed on line on the CPS website late in the afternoon on April 27, 2012 (a Friday).
The chair once occupied by "Chief Education Officer" Noemi Donoso was empty throughout the April 25, 2012 Board meeting. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt. news of Donoso's missing in action were first reported @ http://www.substancenews.net
Much of Emanuel's original education team is no longer in place in less than a year. Earlier on in the Rahm education team, Chief Financial Officer
Diana Ferguson left. Last week it was
Barbara Bowman, chief of Chicago Public Schools' early childhood program and mother of White House adviser Valerie Jarrett. Then there are the more recent departures of Chief Community and Family Engagement Officer
Jamiko Rose and CEO Chief of Staff
Andrea Saenz, both gone.
The woman Mayor Rahm Emanuel plucked from Denver to serve as Chicago’s No. 2 education person is resigning — the fourth high-ranking departure from Chicago Public Schools in recent weeks.
The resignation of the former Denver chief of innovation and reform is effective May 31 — long before her two-year contract is up.
In a news release, CPS officials said Donoso, 40, who made $195,000 a year, has “indicated her intention to resign to pursue national projects that will support the next generation of leaders in urban education.’’
http://www.suntimes.com/...
Though she is resigning, CPS Spokeswoman Becky Carroll told the Chicago Tribune that a severance package is being worked out, which indicates that Donoso was forced out.
http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/...
Then there are the anticipated retirements of the top attorney in the district Patrick Rocks, General Counsel and Rachel Resnick, Chief Labor Relations Officer. Not to mention the estimated 200 local principals and administrators that are either retiring or resigning come the end of the school year. The principal vacancies are going to be difficult to fill sinc ethere is a 2 year process to get on the official principal eligibility list.
It should be noted that if a certified instructor abruptly left their position in the middle of an instructional cycle they could put their certificates in jeopardy, but luckily none of these folks were certified educators in the State of Illinois.
Only the guys are still on Rahm's island. Above, the mayor's table was filled with the new appointees to top administrative positions in Chicago Public Schools and the Chicago Police Department as Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel hosted a breakfast for more than 100 Christian preachers (and launched the "Rent A Preacher" program) at Sox Park in the Union Airlines Scout Lounge on August 25, 2011. Left to right (above, at the table) are Chicago Public Schools "Chief Executive Officer" Jean-Claude Brizard (who had been appointed by Emanuel out of Rochester New York in May 2011), "Chief Education Officer" Noemi Donoso (who had been appointed by Emanuel out of Denver Colorado in May 2011), "Chief of Staff" Andrea Saenz (appointed in June 2011), Police Superintendent Garry McCarthy (who had been appointed by Emanuel out of Newark, New Jersey in May 2011), and Mayor Rahm Emanuel (far right, elected in 2011 and sworn in in May 2011). On the left side are reporters who covered the August 25 media event (one of more than 400 staged by Emanuel during the first eleven months of his administration) and one of the mayor's ubiquitous bodyguards. By May 1, 2012, both of the women CPS administrators in the photograph above had been purged by the Emanuel administration. So far, Brizard and McCarthy are still among the finalists in Emanuel's game of "Survivor". Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.
CROSS POSTED @
http://www.substancenews.net/...
The backstory regarding how Donoso was forced out of her job will be unfolding during the next few weeks, but first readers can easily update their own memories of recent Chicago Public Schools history here.
The last functioning "Chief Education Officer" at CPS was Barbara Eason Watkins, who wielded considerable power during the years Arne Duncan was Chief Executive Officer (July 2001 through December 2008). After Duncan was appointed U.S. Secretary of Education by President Barack Obama in December 2008, then Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed an ex-police officer named Ron Huberman as "Chief Executive Officer" and Duncan's successor. Reliable sources across the school system confirmed that Huberman virtually ignored Watkins, until she finally resigned and retired (at a decent pension following her years as a principal and administration in CPS) and took a job as superintendent of the tiny Michigan City, Indiana public schools.
During his brief time as Mayor Daley's protege and chief of Chicago's public schools, Huberman spent millions of dollars on a thing called "Performance Management", ignoring warnings from veteran educators that the complex, computer based systems his appointees were using were a poor or dangerous way to track and evaluate the complex realities of teaching, learning, and administering real public schools in Chicago. During the two years that Huberman served as CEO of CPS, almost all of the power overseeing instruction and the functioning of the city's real public schools was stripped away from the city's teachers and principals and placed in the hands of technocrats who had little or no educational experience, training, or certification.
In addition to establishing the "Office of Performance Management" under a controversial team of former analysts from the Chicago Transit Authority (headed by Sarah Kremsner), Huberman changed the requirements for being chiefs of the city's dub-districts. The sub-districts, which had been called "regions" under Paul G. Vallas, the first CEO of CPS (1995 - 2001) had been renamed "Areas" by Arne Duncan. But with Watkins as "Chief Education Officer," Duncan kept the rule that in order to be head of one of the "areas," an administrator had to be a certified Illinois educator holding an Illinois Type 75 administrative certificate. The area leaders during those years were thus called "AIOs" (which stood for "Area Instructional Officers"). The word "instruction" indicated that those individuals had some knowledge of and experience in actual education of actual children, usually in actual Chicago public school classrooms and schools.
At the same time Huberman placed the major work of evaluating teachers and principals in the hands of a team of people, led by Sarah Kremsner, who had done their previous work trying to make the city's bus and subway routes more efficient, he also ruled that the area chiefs no longer had to be certified educators. The names of the areas remained the same, but the administrators of the areas became "CAO" — which stood for "Chief Area Officers". Teachers and principals began referring to them as "COWS", and a series of stormy outbursts of opposition to the technocratic edicts of Kremsner's department ("Performance Management") and the cows became a major source of internal strife within the 400,000-student school system. During the Huberman years, Eason-Watkins quietly resigned and was given a sentimental sendoff at a meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. No such courtesy was extended to her successor, Donoso, whose seat simply showed up empty at the Board meeting of April 25, 2012, to be followed by a couple of more days of specualtion, and the late-afternoon press statement from CPS.
Huberman didn't even bother to search for a new "Chief Education Officer" after Eason-Watkins left. He simply ran the system through his network of technocrats in the area offices and in "Performance Management," while creating several ludicrous narratives about the growing financial problems supposedly facing CPS. But the abrupt announcement by Huberman's mentor, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, of his resignation prompted Huberman to resign in the middle of the 2010 - 2011 school year.
Following the abrupt resignation of Huberman, the city's rulers scrambled for a replacement, finally settling on Terry Mazany, who served as "Interim Chief Executive Officer" from December 2010 through May 2011. Mazany kept the "Performance Management" and "Chief Area Officers" in place, but did fill the vacancy left by the departure of Barbara Eason-Watkins more than a year earlier. Mazany appointed an "Interim Chief Education Officer," University of Chicago Professor Charles Payne, to serve alongside the system's "Interim Chief Executive Officer" (Mazany).
"She's one of the go-to people in the country about young children and the education of at-risk and minority children," said Samuel Meisels, president of the Erikson Institute.
Barbara Bowman, chief of Chicago Public Schools'early childhood program and mother of White House adviser Valerie Jarrett, is stepping down from the district.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/...
Following the February 2011 election of Rahm Emanuel, word spread through the school system that Emanuel was going to sweep out as many of the "old" system administrators as possible and bring in an entirely new "team" to promote his "reform" agenda for the city's more than 600 real public schools and ever expanding network of charters (which are funded by the public schools' budget but allowed to avoid most of the rules and regulations governing the real public schools).
The chaos of those leaving in central office will not compare to what is about to happen in the schools. Anytime I speak with a colleague from another school I hear, "Principal X is retiring from School Y". It's not limited to veteran administrators, but the newest "new leaders" and Tier 1 schools. Recently I was told Neil, McDade,King,Dixon...etc, etc If this is true....Rahm has a serious problem on his hands!! Massive loss of talent and experience, was this his intention?
In late April 2011, Emanuel announced that he was appointing the controversial superintendent of the Rochester New York public schools, Jean Claude Brizard, to become the new Chief Executive Officer of CPS. Brizard and Emanuel then announced that the administration had hired a Denver Colorado educator, Noemi Donoso, to become the new "Chief Education Officer" in the Brizard administration. Emanuel also appointed a completely new seven-member Board of Education.
Brizard created chaos in Rochester -- It’s so different, one wonders about Brizard’s management style. Perhaps the former Rochester superintendent truly believed in large class sizes and limited electives. The only other explanation is he was incompetent, evil or lacked creativity.
http://therochesterian.com/...
Donoso arrived in Chicago in June 2011, one of the major appointees of the new Chicago Board of Education appointed at that time by incoming mayor Rahm Emanuel. Donoso becomes the third women to be forced out of top administrative jobs in three months in the central administration of the nation's third largest school system
Discrimination charges are nothing new to rahmbo or his puppet schools chief
ThyssenKrupp Racism Allegations after Rahm endorses company
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
3 Federal discrimination lawsuits CEO Brizard brings with him from Rochester New York
CPS chief Brizard faces another federal lawsuit from Rochester years
December 13, 2011
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/...
Emanuel's pick to head CPS faces civil rights lawsuit
Thursday, June 16, 2011
http://abclocal.go.com/...
Brizard Targeted in Rochester Lawsuits
Apr 24, 2011
http://www.nbcchicago.com/...
Less than a year after Mayor Rahm Emanuel hand picked Noemi Donoso as the chief education officer, the brusque administrator who hailed from out West is resigning.
Prior to Donoso, the district had not had a chief education officer for a year and a half following the departure of Barbara Eason Watkins in April 2010. Donoso was charged with implementing a more rigorous curriculum and with helping schools prepare for new teacher and principal evaluations.
The official resignation follows weeks of speculation. Though she is resigning, CPS Spokeswoman Becky Carroll told the Chicago Tribune that a severance package is being worked out, which indicates that Donoso was forced out. Exactly what went wrong is unclear
http://www.catalyst-chicago.org/...
After denying rumors for days about the pending departure of yet another mayoral appointee, Chicago Public Schools confirmed Friday that Chief Education Officer Noemi Donoso is on her way out.
CPS sources said Donoso had gone through several staff members and formed difficult relationships with CPS executives since joining the district in May 2011.
CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll said details of a severance package for Donoso, whose salary is $195,000, have not been finalized.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/...
One of the first to respond to the purge of Donoso was Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, who issued the following statement:
Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis said the intended departure of the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) chief education officer is yet another example of the “chaos of Clark Street.” According to reports, Noemi Donoso will allegedly resign her position in May. This is the third turnover of a high-ranking CPS administrator in recent weeks.
“Donoso’s departure is an unwelcome signal of instability on the education side and yet another example of the chaos on Clark Street,” Lewis said. “It appears that anyone who knows anything about teaching and learning has a short shelf life at CPS. This type of internal chaos manifests itself at neighborhood schools when we know nearly 200 principals and administrators are set to leave their positions at the end of the year. It is equally troubling that Donoso is leaving the district at a time when seven or eight new initiatives have been imposed and implemented on teachers, paraprofessionals, clinicians and their students.
“The rampant turnover and turnarounds at CPS are indicative of the type of convulsive environment created by the people in charge of our public schools,” she said. “When you have leaders who believe 25 percent of our students don’t matter, it’s easy to scapegoat educators and parents and lay blame at everyone else’s doorstep—and in this case everyone is at fault but the District itself.”
Disaster Capitalism - the free market policies of Nobel Laureate Milton Friedman have risen to prominence in some countries because they were pushed through while the citizens were reacting to disasters or upheavals. It is implied that some man-made crises, such as the Falklands war, may have been created with the intention of pushing through these unpopular reforms in their wake.
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Keeping Tabs on Rahm to rate his job performance
There is a new website up where every day citizens can rate Rahm Emanuel's job performance. Then group, "Tabs on Rahm" states that it has pioneers this approach with "TabsOnObama..." The information and link are below.
http://tabsonrahm.org
TabsOnRahm.org is a non-profit, non-partisan web site whose mission is to revamp the vague, traditional approval rating with a detailed Netflix-like rating system. TabsOnRahm.org extracted all of Emanuel's campaign promises from ChicagoForRahm.com in Feb 2011 and asks ordinary citizens to rate his administration's performance from 1 to 5. The purpose is to engage both the active voter and more importantly the casual voter to make a more informed decision in the 2015 Chicago mayoral election. TabsOnRahm.org is creating relationships with organizations and individuals, both conservative and liberal, to write blog posts on current issues facing Chicago and directly link back to a campaign promise.
TabsOnRahm.org is created by the folks behind TabsOnObama.org. For more information, see the Jan 2010 article printed about TabsOnObama.org in the Metro (New York City). Last, TabsOnRahm.org will provide a forum for the 45% of Chicago voters that supported one of Emanuel's opponents (including Chico, Moseley Braun, and Del Valle). The vision is to keep the administration “in check” for a potentially lengthy tenure in office due to lack of term limits in Chicago.
http://tabsonrahm.org