Sodexho in the Chicago Public Schools

Abstract

Most in my adopted hometown of Chicago will remember the summer of 1995 as the summer of the deadly heat wave that conservative estimates say cost 465 Chicagoans their lives. For eight intense days temperatures hovered between nighttime lows in the upper 80s and daytime highs up to 106 degrees Fahrenheit. I remember that summer as the time I was hired to teach at Lincoln Park High School. It was, as well, precisely the time the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) hired its first CEO, Paul Vallas. In fact, on the July morning that I went to the Byzantine world of the Chicago Board of Education headquarters on Pershing Road to be “staffed,” the term that’s used to describe how Chicago teachers are placed in their schools, news trucks and photographers were there to announce the mayor’s appointment of Vallas, a corporate executive and his former chief of staff, to the top post in the CPS. What became apparent only in subsequent years was that the death toll from the heat wave wasn’t the sole tragedy unfolding in Chicago that summer. Equally dangerous has been the way that Paul Vallas and his successor Arne Duncan have remade Chicago schools, part of the elite’s attempt to transform Chicago into a global city.