Editorial

CASE: Gone but not forgiven

At the end of this month, Chicago’s high schools will still face problems, but at least our 99,000 students and 6,000 teachers won’t have to face the annual humiliation of the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations) again this year. Instead of CASE between January 21 and 24, Chicago high school students will take final examinations based on what they have done in their classes with the teachers they’ve had since September (or whenever classes were “levelled” and staff finally assigned to all the schools). It’s a small victory. The fact that it was won by the courageous actions of our colleagues makes it all the more sweet.

But after the cheering has stopped and the last CASE test prep material has become the last paper airplane (too bad the stuff was printed on both sides, so it couldn’t be used as scrap paper), let’s remember a few things.

First, CASE still lives, expensive and foolish as ever. This year’s CASE tests are actually in print. The Board of Education spent over $220,000 to print the CASE examinations, based on a contract they approved in October which went through a print shop on the city’s northwest side. CASE was prepared, CASE pre-press was completed (amid the usual Keystone Kops “security”) and thousands of CASE instruction manuals, tests, and “rubrics” were printed. [We look forward to receiving our usual allotment over the transom, for those who might have thought we lost interest, by the way.]

Second, CASE is still being given to students in Chicago’s public schools this month — just not in the high schools. As we’ve reported exclusively in these pages, CASE has been given in the city’s gifted classes, at the elementary level, for the past three years. Students have been told that they are getting “high school credit” if they “pass” CASE. At least one high school has students who have been “CASEd up” into higher classes because they’ve already “passed” high school classes they were never required to take.

Any of our colleagues who wants to see CASE after Chicago has been unCASEd can go to any of the eight elementary “regional gifted centers” between January 21 and January 24 — and there will be CASE going on in seventh and eighth grades.

Third, CASE will go on for years in the courts. The school board has spent more than a quarter million dollars on outside lawyers since it began its jihad against Substance in January 1999. They’ve spent an equal amount on the half dozen school board lawyers who have worked on the litigation and related matters (termination hearing; unemployment challenge) now for four years. That’s a half million taypayer dollars the Chicago Board of Education has spent on lawyers in the past four years to persecute Substance and our editor for publishing some of the more ridiculous CASE tests since January 1999.

Despite the Pentagon Papers case (New York Times v. United States, which says that the government cannot invoke “secrecy” rules against newspapers — even in time of war), Chicago’s school board — an agency of the government — is still putting taxpayer dollars behind its legally ludicrous “copyright infringement” secrecy claim against this newspaper and editor George Schmidt.

Despite the (the U.S. Supreme Court) “Pickering” decision, Chicago is still in court defending its “right” to fire a teacher for editing a newspaper that pointed out its CASE (and other) corruption.

That’s two major constitutional issues that have to be resolved before CASE is finally buried for good. Can some goofy government bureaucrat (even one as hyperkinetic as Paul G. Vallas) invoke copyright law to create a category of “secret” documents that the press cannot discuss or publish (even if a judge as infamous as Chicago’s Charles Norgle — of “avalanche of errors” fame — sides with Vallas at the local court level)?

Two other issues are also up in the legal morass surrounding CASE — “Trade Secrets” and the viability of “whistleblower” protections in Illinois. For nearly four years, Chicago maintained that Substance had violated an Illinois “trade secret” law by publishing CASE. For the government to have “trade secrets” (like the formula for Coca Cola or the sauce on a Big Mac) needs to be thought through. It’s a serious legal issue.

And we were reminded the first week of January — thanks to Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” issue featuring corporate whistle blowers — that our attorneys tried to invoke the Illinois whistle blower protections three years ago when the school board ran its kangaroo court to fire our editor.

That’s four big legal questions that linger despite the defumegation of the CASE closets in most of the city’s high schools. But there is still more...

CASE may be dead in the high schools, but CASE lives on both in the elementary schools, in the courts — and in the hearts and minds of those who try to dictate what people think and how people view public schools and public school teachers, so...

Fourth, CASE is part of a teacher bashing corporate agenda. The agenda, pushed through both Chicago newspapers (whose editorial boards take dictation from the spin doctors of corporate Chicago and then recycle it as “news”) and spread from the likes of The Business Roundtable and Leadership for Quality Education says just one thing, over and over. The propaganda says that the results of one secret test — no matter how shallow, silly, or shoddy — can be substituted for any teacher’s judgment of 20 weeks of student work.

In that light, the secrecy of CASE and the viciousness with which CASE was protected from the light of public scrutiny is still a major issue, since Chicago children and teachers still face at least two major secret tests and a host of lesser ones.

Because of the decade of teacher bashing propaganda that has oozed from what we call the testocracy, CASE lives on as an attitude in the hearts and minds of the people who run Chicago’s public schools (led by Arne Duncan and his highly paid but woefully incompetent executive staff).

CASE lives on in the scripts being pushed on all of us by the business interests — and some “community leaders” — that are seeking to strip the schools of democracy and dictate a corporate agenda to all of us. Finally, CASE lives on in the hearts and minds of every teacher and principal who sits mesmerized in front of a bank of vacuous numbers, believing that the “bottom line” of education can be measured like the numbers of cans of cat food coming off an assembly line.

So, CASE is not dead. We have a lot of work to do.