City Colleges of Chicago students and their supporters brought their concerns about recent district policy decisions to CCC trustees at the board’s May 12 meeting.  Students have collected extensive background information on problems plaguing the City Colleges here.

“We're a coalition of people who want to fight the aggressive attacks in the public sector and are tired of the concessions that leaders who are supposed to be representing us have been making at our expense.  So far the focus has been on the City Colleges, but our concerns are not exclusive to education,” said Jessi Choe, an English department faculty member at Wilbur Wright College.

Video by Martian Macias Jr

Students and community leaders spoke out against City Colleges of Chicago policies that they believe favor politics, not students, during a May 6 press conference and protest at City Hall.  Speakers included students from Kennedy-King, Wright, and Malcolm X colleges, South Side community leaders and South Side and West Side ministers.
A coalition of students, teachers, teaching assistants, labor organizers, parents, grandparents, community and church leaders came together earlier this year to support CCC students’ April 15th protest against Reinvention, a City Colleges of Chicago initiative begun in April 2010 and described at a City Colleges website as “the collaborative effort of faculty, staff, students advised by external councils of leaders from academia, business, civic and foundations, capital planning and the community to remake our institution.”

Choe spoke about the May 6 press conference/protest in an interview later that day; the following is an edited version of her comments.

“It went very well. We did deliver a letter to Rahm Emanuel’s assistant. We don’t want a continuation of the Daley regime’s practice of top-down control over appointments - the Board of Trustees as well as the Chancellor, as well as, eventually, the presidents of our colleges. Because it’s the chancellor, the current one, who basically fired all of them except one, Donald Lackman, the president of Harold Washington College. He hails from the Civic Consulting Alliance. This is basically a group of corporate CEOs who consult quote-unquote pro bono for the City of Chicago. They’ve had a relationship with the mayor for 30 years and basically these corporate CEOs tell the leadership in the city what to do.

“Our community colleges, which are the backbone of the working-class educational system in Chicago, as well as the Chicago Public School system, we are leveling the playing field in Chicago because we get the results of the Chicago Public schools’ dysfunctional system. It’s dysfunctional because they’ve also been ransacked by the corporations, charter schools, No Child Left Behind and pro-testing assessment measures. We have students who come out of the CPS system with high school degrees but they can’t read and write with any kind of critical thinking ability. This is a lot of them, not all of them. We’ve got some really bright students, of course. This minority of students who’ve somehow gotten through the system… will be able to benefit from a system of charter colleges, just like the elite students of CPS benefit from the charter school system. “But what’s lost is the majority of the student body, who have reduced programs, reduced course availability and a curriculum that’s really designed by big business people.

“Big business is interested in cranking out an obedient labor force, they’re not interested in students who are fully developed intellectually, socially, culturally. Pro-education people and people with an education background, teachers and academics, we are interested in that. That is our bottom line. The corporations have a totally different aim than educators. As Teddy Fabriek said in a speech he gave to the press, we have engineers who are heads of engineering firms. We have chemists who are heads of chemistry firms, why do we have business people who are heads of huge educational institutions? We’re not willing to make any concessions in education programs because too much has already been cut. We’ve had hundreds of jobs cut across the district – not just any jobs, we’re talking about full-time advisors, counselors, tutors, people who work directly with students to help them navigate this very complicated higher education system. We were low to begin with.

Coverage from Radio Arte

“If the corporate CEOs take over, they are going to push for what they want. They don’t want a body of teachers who are unionized and who are protected with academic freedom. They want a force of mostly adjunct part-time instructors who make low pay and who can be axed very easily if they disagree with something. We now have over 60 percent adjuncts at the district. We need more full-time faculty, not less.

“We can run after these smaller battles, and each of them are very significant, they’ll make a difference. But until we have shared governance, an end to this top-down mayoral control over all these appointments, we’re going to be constantly struggling to maintain the little that we have. I’m full-time faculty and I was adjunct before. I was making $13,000 dollars a year. Adjuncts live out of the trunks of their cars, they have to go all over the place. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that if a teacher is not there, is not present and doesn’t have the mental rest and the space to focus on students, to focus in on writing, spending time, that’s  going to be the difference between a quality education for a student and otherwise.

“These top-down situations are too political, we end up with really messed-up departments and teaching and student situations, and students end up with less not more.

“We need communities, not just faculty and students. All faculty, including adjuncts, should have a say in policies that affect all of us. And students should have a say in matters and policies that affect them directly, that affect their education, their pocketbooks, that affect their lives. It’s their education. If that is not the foundation of our democracy, I don’t know what is.

“Community representatives have to have a say in that shared governance. Why? Because these schools are central and essential for the development of any community. So we want faculty, students, staff, community members and stakeholders to have a say in policies that affect all of us directly.  And that’s why we’re out here.”