Dyett High hunger strike enters its second week

As it wasn't getting national news attention for some time, you may have missed that twelve people have been on a hunger strike since last week to try to save Dyett High School in Chicago. Dyett is (sound familiar?) slated for closure in a neighborhood mainly served by charter schools; it is the last open-enrollment high school in that section of Chicago's South Side. Slate has a good summary and the larger parallels:

The story of Dyett is remarkably parallel to the one Jelani Cobb tells in this week’sNew Yorker, about the closure last year of Jamaica High School in Queens, Cobb’s alma mater and not so long ago a crown jewel of the New York City public school system. The death of Jamaica High, like the death of Dyett, can be traced not just to broader demographic changes in the community—higher poverty rates, more English-language learners—but to how the municipal powers that be deal with those changes. You can give the schools the additional support they need, or you can abandon them in the name of greater choice.   

The mayor (not surprisingly) is not exactly covering himself in glory with how he's handling the situation. Meanwhile, support rolls in from all over.