Chicago Style Graffiti and Street Art

Along wall that runs under the El tracks just south of the Devon at Loyola's Lakeshore campus are these Graffiti murals: 

What do these murals evoke in you?  What do you think when you see them?  How do they make you feel?  What do you associate them with?

Some people will associate these generally with "urban" America or minorities or crime or vandalism or even street gangs.  While these associations may be true in some cases, many may not realize that graffiti is distinctly different from tagging and street art.  And as it's own art, graffiti has unique styles, including a Chicago style.

The Newberry Library covered the Chicago style in a presentation with Pengo, East and Dulce Maria Diaz available to watch at the Newberry's Youtube Channel here:

Here was an exhibition of Chicago style graffiti that was on display at the Epiphany Center for the Arts:

Also:

Here are 22 street murals from Secret Chicago.

Here is a guide to other street art in Chicago 

From Chicago Council on Global Affairs, How Chicago's street art connects the city to the world,

Chicago boasts over 400 murals, according to the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events Mural Registry. Though the art form has taken off in recent years — more than four dozen new murals were added to the registry between 2021 and 2022, for instance — Chicago also has an unusually long history of muraling. The “Wall of Respect,” created in Bronzeville in 1967, is thought by many to be the first example of the type of outdoor community mural that is commonplace in American cities today — and, though it no longer stands, several Chicago-area murals from that era still do. John Pitman Weber, a Chicago artist who co-founded the Chicago Public Art Group, told the Chicago Sun-Times that three Humboldt Park murals dating back to 1971 could be the oldest surviving community murals in the country.  

One of the three is “The Crucifixion of Don Pedro Albizu Campos,” painted by the Puerto Rican Art Association. It shows figures from Puerto Rico’s Nationalist Party, who advocated for the island’s freedom and revolted in 1950. 

Murals like these that represent Chicago’s immigrant populations are a common sight across the city. Mexican muralist Hector Duarte, for instance, has created over 50 pieces of public art in the more than 30 years he has worked in Chicago, and most of his works tell the story of Chicago’s Mexican community. One notable example appears on the side of Duarte’s Pilsen home and studio, where the 3,000-square-foot “Gulliver en el País de las Maravillas” depicts a Mexican immigrant as the titular character from
“Gulliver’s Travels.”

Pilsen in general is an important site for immigrant muraling. The neighborhood has been the center of the Mexican American mural movement since 1968, when Mario Castillo painted an anti-Vietnam War mural on the side of the Halsted Urban Progress Center and set off a wave of Chicano street art in the area.  

Using art to show solidarity

More recently, artists in Chicago have used murals to express solidarity with places in conflict. Earlier this year, artist Langston Allston unveiled a new mural in Pilsen depicting Palestinians against a war-torn backdrop. The mural, organized by the nonprofit Mural Movement, came as the Israel-Hamas war passed the 100-day mark, and it was meant to show a growing solidarity between Chicago’s Palestinian, Black, and Latino communities.

“A lot of people are like, ‘Oh, it’s none of our business or whatever’ … but who has really shown up for Chicago people?” Mural Movement founder Delilah Martinez told WBBM. “It has been a lot of my Palestinian friends consistently through the years.”  

In Ukrainian Village, murals painted since Russia’s full-scale invasion have invoked solidarity and community in the neighborhood. Artist Sean Archer painted a mural on the Ukrainian Village Veterinary Center’s wall in 2022 depicting a young Ukrainian woman with flowers coming out of her palm. Each flower has significance to Ukraine: sunflowers, an “unofficial national symbol” of peace; poppies, a symbol for the remembrance of victims of war; kalyna berries, which have deep roots in Ukrainian folklore; and marigolds, traditionally placed in wreaths to represent fidelity and devotion. 

How public art can help business  

Wicker Park and Bucktown are home to over 40 murals and public art installations, including “Kintsugi Memories” by Japanese artist Mami Takahashi. That work consists of two blocks of sidewalk along Milwaukee Avenue, whose cracks Takahashi filled with gold epoxy using the traditional method kintsugi, by which broken pottery is repaired with gold. 

Alice Howe oversees the Wicker Park Bucktown Special Service Area (SSA), which funds public art projects in the neighborhood using taxpayer dollars from property taxes. The SSA is administered by the Wicker Park Bucktown Chamber of Commerce. 

Howe told ChicagoGlobal that the SSA is always looking to represent diverse perspectives and cultures in the neighborhood’s public art. For “Kintsugi Memories,” it was actually Takahashi who approached the SSA.

“So we were really excited to see that,” Howe said. “We have a pretty high foot traffic of tourism, and we want to keep that international element. I think that draws artists specifically to Wicker Park because they will get that exposure, so we just want to continue drawing on that.” 

The SSA has multiple ways that public art projects come to fruition. An arts committee made up of local business owners and artists can help brainstorm projects; artists can approach the SSA, as Takahashi did; and business owners can commission artists to paint murals on their businesses’ walls. All of this can help bring foot traffic to the neighborhood and its businesses, Howe said. 

“Most recently we just did a collaboration with Heaven Gallery on the back of their building to do a memorial mural that can be seen from the Blue Line station,” she said. “For that one specifically, we were able to do a pretty large ribbon-cutting and an opening ceremony that drew a lot of people to the business.” 

Chicago Made: Factory Networks in the Industrial Metropolis by Robert Lewis

Robert Lewis's book Chicago Made from U of Chicago Press,

From the lumberyards and meatpacking factories of the Southwest Side to the industrial suburbs that arose near Lake Calumet at the turn of the twentieth century, manufacturing districts shaped Chicago’s character and laid the groundwork for its transformation into a sprawling metropolis. Approaching Chicago’s story as a reflection of America’s industrial history between the Civil War and World War II, Chicago Made explores not only the well-documented workings of centrally located city factories but also the overlooked suburbanization of manufacturing and its profound effect on the metropolitan landscape.

            Robert Lewis documents how manufacturers, attracted to greenfield sites on the city’s outskirts, began to build factory districts there with the help of an intricate network of railroad owners, real estate developers, financiers, and wholesalers. These immense networks of social ties, organizational memberships, and financial relationships were ultimately more consequential, Lewis demonstrates, than any individual achievement. Beyond simply giving Chicago businesses competitive advantages, they transformed the economic geography of the region. Tracing these transformations across seventy-five years, Chicago Made establishes a broad new foundation for our understanding of urban industrial America. 

Table of Contents:

BUILDING THE INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS

1    Chicago, the Mighty City
2    The Suburban Solution
3    Four Factory Districts, 1860–1940
4    The Shifting Geography of Metropolitan Employment:

      Starts, Additions, & Moves

SECTION II.

NETWORKING THE INDUSTRIAL METROPOLIS

5    The Metropolitan Geography of Firm Linkages, 1872–1901
6    Forging the Calumet District, 1880–1940
7    Chicago’s Planned Industrial Districts: Clearing and the

      Central Manufacturing Districts

8    Networked Space: The Connected Metropolis in the 1920s

9    Manufacturing Production Chains and Wholesaling

10  Local Production Practices and Inter-Firm Linkages:

      Chicago’s Automotive Industry, 1900–1940

Here's a review from JSTOR:

Timuel Black

 

I was fortunate to work with Timuel Black, a Chicago historian, educator and activist a number of times for over a decade.  As an aloof undergraduate in Sociology 125; Chicagoland, I went on a tour of Bronzeville with him.  Then, as a graduate student at Loyola's Center for Urban Research and Learning (CURL), I met him again and it was then when I fully appreciated his significance and brilliance. After that, I contacted him myself to bring teachers on tours of Bronzeville as a professional development opportunity.  We often stopped for lunch at one of his favorite soul food restaurants, Pearl's place before dropping him off at his house on Drexel.  He was incredibly down to earth and kind, but wise and so thoroughly knowledgable.  Then in January of 2009, in frigid weather, at the inauguration of Barack Obama I bumped into him.  By chance, we were both sitting in section orange.  I felt incredibly privileged to be at that event in that section with him.

Timuel was a Studs Terkel of Chicago's Bronzeville Neighborhood.  His book Bridges of Memory (in two volumes) captures the rich and complicated history of Bronzeville.

From the publisher:

A collection of interviews with African Americans who came to Chicago from the South. In their first great migration to Chicago that began during World War I, African Americans came from the South seeking a better life--and fleeing a Jim Crow system of racial prejudice, discrimination, and segregation. What they found was much less than what they'd hoped for, but it was much better than what they'd come from--and in the process they set in motion vast changes not only in Chicago but also in the whole fabric of American society. This book, the first of three volumes, revisits this momentous chapter in American history with those who lived it.

Oral history of the first order, Bridges of Memory lets us hear the voices of those who left social, political, and economic oppression for political freedom and opportunity such as they'd never known--and for new forms of prejudice and segregation. These children and grandchildren of ex-slaves found work in the stockyards and steel mills of Chicago, settled and started small businesses in the "Black Belt" on the South Side, and brought forth the jazz, blues, and gospel music that the city is now known for. Historian Timuel D. Black, Jr., himself the son of first-generation migrants to Chicago, interviews a wide cross-section of African Americans whose remarks and reflections touch on issues ranging from fascism to Jim Crow segregation to the origin of the blues. Their recollections comprise a vivid record of a neighborhood, a city, a society, and a people undergoing dramatic and unprecedented changes.

And his memoir is Sacred Ground: The Streets of Timuel Black

From the publisher,

Timuel Black is an acclaimed historian, activist, and storyteller. Sacred Ground: The Chicago Streets of Timuel Black chronicles the life and times of this Chicago legend.

Sacred Ground opens in 1919, during the summer of the Chicago race riot, when infant Black and his family arrive in Chicago from Birmingham, Alabama, as part of the first Great Migration. He recounts in vivid detail his childhood and education in the Black Metropolis of Bronzeville and South Side neighborhoods that make up his "sacred ground."

Revealing a priceless trove of experiences, memories, ideas, and opinions, Black describes how it felt to belong to this place, even when stationed in Europe during World War II. He relates how African American soldiers experienced challenges and conflicts during the war, illuminating how these struggles foreshadowed the civil rights movement. A labor organizer, educator, and activist, Black captures fascinating anecdotes and vignettes of meeting with famous figures of the times, such as Duke Ellington and Martin Luther King Jr., but also with unheralded people whose lives convey lessons about striving, uplift, and personal integrity.

Rounding out this memoir, Black reflects on the legacy of his friend and mentee, Barack Obama, as well as on his public works and enduring relationships with students, community workers, and some very influential figures in Chicago and the world.

Open, Free, and Clear or Restricted, Expensive and Built? The Tension on Chicago's Lakefront

 

The Chicago Reader 1991, How the Lakefront Was Won provides an insightful critical analysis of Lois Wille’s 1972 book Forever Open, Clear and Free: The Struggle for Chicago’s Lakefront and the mythos it created.

From the Reader,

Chicago’s public lakefront dates from 1836. That year three commissioners, appointed to supervise the sale of public lands to finance the Illinois and Michigan Canal, decided not to sell the narrow strip along the lakeshore between 12th and Madison streets. That muddy stretch, they declared on the plat, was to be “a public ground–a common to remain forever open, clear and free of any buildings, or other obstruction whatever.” These words were the legal foundation for subsequent court challenges to various building plans in what became Grant Park; and the spirit of these words undergirds the whole of the lakefront protection movement. 

It might do to examine that fateful decision more closely than Wille does, however. In 1836 the commissioners set aside land for a “common”–less a park than a public square. (The first U.S. urban parks as we would recognize them were not built until the 1850s.) Commons were used as parade grounds for local militia, for markets, public meetings, auctions, political rallies, and other business. Setting aside land for one was a sensible and commonplace provision in a new town, and arguing from that to a mandate for the recreational use of public land and a sweeping antidevelopment law has required some ingenious legal interpretations.

Most of the latter sprang from the pocketbook, if not the pen, of Montgomery Ward, the mail-order king who looked out over Grant Park from his Michigan Avenue office as if it were a sentry box. It was Ward who went to court four times, beginning in 1890, to stop a series of public construction projects in what became Grant Park, suing a succession of City Hall regimes eager to use the space for fire stations, armories, civic centers, museums, and libraries. 

And the 2021 book Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago by Joseph Kearney and Thomas Merrill gives a more factual and legal history of Chicago's coveted lakefront.

From the publisher,

How did Chicago, a city known for commerce, come to have such a splendid public waterfront—its most treasured asset? Lakefront reveals a story of social, political, and legal conflict in which private and public rights have clashed repeatedly over time, only to produce, as a kind of miracle, a generally happy ending.

Joseph D. Kearney and Thomas W. Merrill study the lakefront's evolution from the middle of the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. Their findings have significance for understanding not only Chicago's history but also the law's part in determining the future of significant urban resources such as waterfronts.

The Chicago lakefront is where the American public trust doctrine, holding certain public resources off limits to private development, was born. This book describes the circumstances that gave rise to the doctrine and its fluctuating importance over time, and reveals how it was resurrected in the later twentieth century to become the primary principle for mediating clashes between public and private lakefront rights. Lakefront compares the effectiveness of the public trust idea to other property doctrines, and assesses the role of the law as compared with more institutional developments, such as the emergence of sanitary commissions and park districts, in securing the protection of the lakefront for public uses.

By charting its history, Kearney and Merrill demonstrate that the lakefront's current status is in part a product of individuals and events unique to Chicago. But technological changes, and a transformation in social values in favor of recreational and preservationist uses, also have been critical. Throughout, the law, while also in a state of continual change, has played at least a supporting role.

Here's Geoffery Baer's lakefront tour on PBS.  

Chicago Magazine has a 2 part tour of the Lakefront: Part 1 the Northside and Part 2 the Southside.

National Museum of Mexican American Art

 In Chicago's Pilsen neighborhood, a neighborhood that the Czech immigrants who settled it named after a town from their homeland, there is the National Museum of Mexican American Art.  This strange confluence is a great example of the changing identity of both neighborhoods and people that is highlighted by the museum's permanent collection, Nuestras Historias; Stories of Mexican Identities.

Neighborhoods, like societies, are dynamic.  They are constantly developing and changing.  Every moment is different and being recreated anew. Pilsen which was originally a home to Czech immigrants who have been replaced by more recent Mexican immigrants who kept the name.  This is how immigrants add to and remake neighborhoods and how societies grow, evolve and change with their immigrant populations.

Similarly, individuals' identities grow and change and evolve and they are complex.  The museum highlights the complexity and changing identities of Mexican-Americans.

From the exhibit,

Nuestras Historias (Our Histories) highlights the Museum’s Permanent Collection to showcase the dynamic and diversestories of Mexican identity in North America. The exhibition presents cultural identity as something that continually evolves across time, regions, and communities, rather than as a static, unchanging entity, and features ancient Mesoamerican and colonial artifacts, modern Mexican art, folk art, and contemporary works from both sides of the U.S.–Mexican border.

The vast diversity of Mexican identities demonstrated in these works defies the notion of one linear history and a singular identity.

Don't just do something, stand there! Nothing and Thriving

"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."

- Blaise Pascal

Our culture constructs a reality where we are not allowed to just be. We must be doing at all times; it is valuing personal achievement, time, work, competition, materialism and success. Note that happiness is never a apart of the equation.  The hegemonic assumption is that happiness simply comes with those values.  See this post about happiness and it's relationship to money.  Contrast these values with the values that Michael Buettner writes about in his book Thrive.  What are the lessons you learned from Thrive?  How would you like to live your life differently after reading this?  What would be a message you would like to share with the rest of your classmates who don't have the privilege of being in our class?

Bernard McGrane's experiment explores the idea of doing nothing in American culture. In his book, The Un-Tv and the 10mph Car he explores doing nothing as a way of being able to detach and see all that is actually going on - both in others and in ourselves. By detaching from the social world, can you see the ways the world controls who you are? We go about our daily lives without question drifting along doing the things that we do. We never have to stop and think about why we are doing what we do and whether we want to do that. Some of the questions McGrane addresses are: How did you react and what occurred to you in being unoccupied? How did the world around you react to doing nothing? How does this relate our work to our identity? See this link for a discussion guide to the nothing experiment. This is from McGrane's book. If you don't know why we did that experiment please read it!
The last point about work and identity reminds me of how Americans get acquainted with one another. The first question is usually "What is your name?" (usually answered very individualistically with the first name.) And the next question is usually "What do you do?" This highlights the importance of job and work identity. What does this mean for teens who might not have a job or parents who spend their days taking care of children and making a home. It is a sad message. An example of a different way that some cultures do these introductions is something someone from Australia told me. He said they get acquainted by asking "Where have you been?" So the focus is more on one's previous life experiences and travels. Another example is described in Richard Strozzi Heckler's book Holding the Center. In it, he describes a group of presenters at a health conference who were introducing themselves,

The distinguished men and women described their degrees, awards, publications, university positions, and their current research. The sixth person was an Ojibway Native American who introduced himself first by naming his tribe and family lineage and then describing in specific detail the land in which he and his tribe lived. He spoke of his relatives, many generations back on both sides of his family, who his sisters, brothers, and children married, his relationship with his aunts and uncles, and then the birds, fish and animals, the trees, rivers, lakes. He finished by saying, "this is who I am." He then politely requested that others provide the same information.

This is a marvelous example of other ways of defining their identity. Whereas Americans would define their identity based on their individuality and that would have a strong focus on their job, others (like the example above) would define their identity by their community and where they came from. It is much more communal than individual and less focused on your individual role. Finally,Here is a funny video of a group that appears to do nothing, but they are actually doing "freezing". For the purposes of McGrane's experiment, they are not detached, but it is funny nonetheless to watch.

Our culture constructs a reality where we are not allowed to just be. We must be doing at all times; it is valuing personal achievement, time, work, competition, materialism and success. Note that happiness is never an apart of the equation.  The hegemonic assumption is that happiness simply comes with those values.  See this post about happiness and its relationship to money.  Contrast these values with the values that Michael Buettner writes about in his book Thrive.  What are the lessons you learned from Thrive?  How would you like to live your life differently after reading this?  What would be a message you would like to share with the rest of your classmates who don't have the privilege of being in our class?

From TED, When Did You Last Take Some Time to Do Nothing?

A $300 Million Educational Problem

 A $300 Million Educational Problem

This is a story about one of the problems with education: a $300 million problem.  It is about the detrimental effects of privatized consulting on student success and mental wellness and teacher retention. 

 

I was a veteran and award-winning teacher for 25 years at one of the most lauded public schools in America: Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, IL.  I was rated by students as an outstanding teacher who made a difference in their lives for over a dozen years and I was awarded Ambassador Awards by the Board of Education.  The school’s required survey about the social and emotional health of students revealed data that I was eighteen percentage points higher than the average teacher at my school in areas like: classroom belonging, classroom learning strategies and teacher-student relationships.  In 2022, I publicly resigned for ethical and pedagogical reasons.  You can read my resignation letter that details the concerns I had for nearly a decade here and you can watch my plea to the School Board to address the ethical and pedagogical issues that were affecting students and teachers alike.   My public plea resonated across the country.  I got emails of support from teachers from California to Massachusetts and everywhere in between.  And, I got dozens and dozens of messages from students - both current and former students who agreed with me.  My story made it to local radio WGN 720 and eventually found Trish Spurgeon who runs the Youtube channel "Teacher Therapy."  Trish's interview with me hit 43K views in less than a week;  It resonated with teachers and the comments confirm that.  However, more importantly, it created a catharsis in myself as I reflected on what had been happening over the last several years at my former high school.

 

The $300 Million Problem

I realized that the path my school was taking was to serve the personal interests of administrators who work with and profit from Solution Tree, a $300 million privately owned educational consulting corporation.  My school had been wildly successful in the 1990s and the superintendent at the time created an educational consulting group.  He retired from my school district but he kept close ties.  As the new administration saw the potential for massive profits from educational consulting they began to work with the consulting group while still running the day to day operations of the public school.  Over the years, the administrators have been able to build consulting into their contract! They are allowed to do consulting work and get paid privately while still receiving their salary from the public school.  Simply put, the administrators in charge are incentivized to sell for-profit consulting even if it is not serving the students and parents of their school (School Officials Consulting Raises Questions of Transparency, Chicago Tribune, 2015.)

 

Despite the scrutinization from the Tribune, the practice has continued and the taxpayers of the district pay for it - both literally and figuratively. One example of how they pay for it is that the school has a team of marketing and communications with a director who makes $148K per year.  Stevenson uses this team to  carefully manages its image by brushing under the rug serious issues like racism, drug dealing, overdose deaths, sexting, and even confiscating the student newspaper when articles threaten to tarnish the Stevenson brand (Chicago Tribune 2010).  Yes, all schools deal with issues like this, but Stevenson's use of marketing allows problems to fester and go unaddressed.  Their carefully scripted marketing pushes the brand and the public image while behind the scenes the school squashes teachers and students who try to address these issues or raise questions about them.  The school even makes teachers sign an acceptable use agreement saying that if a teacher says anything that might damage the school's reputation then they can be fired for it.  All of this is important to understanding how problems can go unaddressed by the school.

 

The problem that led to my very public ethical and pedagogical conflict with Stevenson came as the school spent nearly a decade branding and selling its grading practice known as Evidence Based Reporting (EBR).  During the late 2000s, there was a movement especially among elementary school teachers to grade based on standards, or standards-based grading.  There were some dubious authors promoting this practice; they had little experience and little evidence that it worked and they did not have models or parameters for how to do this at scale in a large high school.  But they were a part of Solution Tree, the educational consulting group that was founded by Stevenson's former Superintendent and now closely working with the current administration to make huge profits.  

 

The way that the grift  works simply is this:

Stevenson administrators (who work for Solution Tree) hire speakers from Solution Tree to speak to the school.  Then, the administrators re-brand what the speaker talked about to brand it Stevenson.  So for example, they brought in a speaker who talked about standards-based grading.  Stevenson re-branded that as "Evidence-Based Reporting."  At the time, the school was already a leader in high school education - it had won numerous Blue Ribbon Awards, had an extremely high graduation rate and was rated the number one public school in Illinois.  Why did it need to change the entire practice of grading? There was never a case for why this change was necessary or what was not working.  Nonetheless, by 2012, the school pushed teachers to experiment with this grading and pilot new grading methods. I was one of the teachers willing to try new methods and grow, but I realized early that the grading method had serious flaws and I tried to collaborate with my administration about it.  They were not interested in my ideas. “This needs to be addressed,” “This is not working,” “How about we try this?” Etc... All were met with no, no no.  It was hard to fathom why the school would ask me and others to pilot this idea but not be open to feedback about it.   

Then I found out that the school’s administrators  were publishing a book (through Solution Tree) that claimed the school was already doing this grading - despite that  it was only being done by a few teachers who were piloting the system and many had concerns about the system, and their system was still changing.  This book was published in September of 2015 without peer review, empirical data or research. But the administration could use the school's success to sell its book.  The consulting and books also bring other schools to Stevenson for "site visit days" (also here).  When these schools visit Stevenson, they meet with the upper administration like the superintendent, assistant superintendents and principal.  This creates opportunities for these administrators to offer their services to consult with these schools beyond the site visit day.  Hundreds of teachers visit Stevenson costing their districts thousands of dollars and that leads to more consulting gigs for the administration selling grading practices that they were not even using.  All of this adds up to a $300 million business for Solution Tree.

 

The bigger problem 

It seems dishonest to be selling educational practices that are not even being implemented, but there is a larger problem.  With a focus on the brand and selling the brand to other schools, the teachers and students suffer.  Students are frustrated with the grading going on.  They don't know their grade.  They don't feel prepared for college.  And they don't feel it is fair that they are competing against other students.  All of this is documented in  the messages I got from students who agreed with me and wanted to show support. They explain the ways that this grading stresses them out and creates bad habits making them not ready for college.  And Stevenson school district conducts its own survey as well as an independent survey audit by the University of Chicago.  Both of these surveys (detailed here) confirm my accusations.  Stevenson’s own survey of graduates shows that students feel they are not learning how to take important tests; not learning time-management and organizational skills; not learning how to do reading; not learning how to meet deadlines; and not learning how to do homework.  All of these are not graded under the system that the administration forced on teachers and is selling across the country.  And in all of the years before this grading was mandatory, less than 1% of students said that they were less prepared than their peers for college, but since the grading has been mandatory that number has climbed by 400%.  And when I raised concerns about this publicly in the spring of 2022, the school union urged teachers to take the anonymous 5 Essentials survey from the U of Chicago.  Nearly all of the teachers (99% ) at Stevenson took the survey and they rated both leadership and teacher-principal trust as weak.  In one case, 3 of my students failed to turn in their final paper resulting in a failing grade.  Although administration initially approved failure notices for these students, the students complained over the summer and then turned in the assignment.  When we returned to school in August, I was pressured to change the students’ grades.  I felt morally and pedagogically compromised.  As I mentioned earlier, I received dozens of letters of  support from teachers who felt the same but were afraid to speak out for fear of losing their job.  Stevenson’s administration does not want to dialogue with teachers but instead prefers protecting the brand which has led to a politics of protection (detailed here) that stresses teachers out pushing them out the profession. 

This story resonates with teachers, students and parents everywhere!  I continue to get messages of support from all of them.  If you would like more information or are interested in my story, please don’t hesitate to contact me.