Melissa Harris-Perry: Casualties in the Education Reform Wars

Melissa Harris-Perry is professor of political science at Tulane University, where she is founding director of the Project on Gender, Race, and Politics in the South. She is author of Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America. She is also a contributor to MSNBC.

Rolisa is a married mom with four kids. Two of them are successful graduates of Chicago’s public schools—her eldest graduated from college in 2011, and the second is a college junior. Her younger kids are in the fourth and sixth grades at a small public school on the South Side. The class sizes are at the city average, and the test scores are above the state average. Her kids are pretty happy there. Or at least they were, until the standoff between the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Rahm Emanuel transformed them into students of Rolisa’s makeshift kitchen table school.

As the strike loomed, Rolisa secured a curriculum from her kids’ teachers, coordinated with other working parents and enlisted her eldest daughter. But even with this preparation, the strike was a harrowing time for her. Rolisa suffers from COPD, a serious breathing condition. As a result, she works from home, which made her impromptu home school possible but not easy. In addition to the exhausting days and the financial burden of hosting and feeding neighborhood kids every day, the uncertainty of when and how the strike would end kept everyone on edge. Rolisa worried about the dangers teens in her community might encounter during days of unstructured idleness. Like the majority of Chicago parents, she sided with the teachers, but she was frustrated and worried about her children’s short- and long-term prospects....