Over the last ten years Miriam Socoloff has helped build an arts program at Lake View High School that’s one of the best in the city, if not the metropolitan area. Working within a small budget and scavenging supplies, Socoloff and her two colleagues have trained dozens of students who went on to college and given many more a lifelong appreciation for art. The school, at 4015 N. Ashland, is beautifully decorated with the paintings, murals, and sculpture her students have created.
The board’s press spokesman wouldn’t respond for comment, but central-office officials have dismissed the disruption as a small price to pay for ridding the payroll of perhaps hundreds of teachers at a savings of millions of dollars. Not surprisingly, teachers and students have a far different perspective. “They’re telling us they have to destroy the system in order to save it,” says Socoloff. “It’s another example of how they drive good people out or grind them down.”
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Some teachers have been sent back and forth between schools, while desperate principals besiege the central office with phone calls, pleading that they be allowed to keep this or that teacher. And while teachers shuttle back and forth, wasting precious time in long lines at the personnel department, their classes are led by hastily assigned, ill-prepared substitutes.
Socoloff got even ruder treatment the next day, when she went to the central office to appeal her transfer. There she found dozens of other teachers waiting for a moment with the personnel honchos. “The clerks barked at us like we were dogs,” she says. “They have no respect for teachers in this system.”
“I don’t know if anyone’s listening,” says Socoloff. “I don’t know if anyone cares about Chicago’s schools. I feel I’m teaching at a good high school that’s in a bad system that smashes any good thing we do. Now you know why so many good people leave teaching.”
