Subscripts

...Just where did that “miracle” of the 1990s go? Like the share price of Enron stock, the education miracle in Chicago during the late 1990s was also based on cheap (and mendacious) accounting tricks and outright lies. The city’s high school dropout rate is just one tragic example. For the past seven years, Chicago has been treated to as many “miracle” stories about its public school transformations as Wall Street dished out during the heady days of the stock bubble and creative bookkeeping of 1999 and 2000. Paul Vallas (and his successor) have been as creative at their bookkeeping as ever was seen in public life in this town — easily the rival of the Arthur Andersen accountants to have audited Vallas’ books both at City Hall and at the Board of Education (until they were delicately dropped eight months ago). And Arne Duncan is nothing if not Vallas’s worthy successor, dishing out the numbers and spinning a “good story” for a gullible media as swiftly as Vallas — or the PR cons for corporate America during the late 1990s — ever did. During 2002, Chicago was overdosed on Duncan doubletalk on a range of issues. These included the “Renaissance.” Hint, all of the “bottom” 100 elementary schools were the same, despite Arne’s claims and the Tribune editorial board’s feeble attempts to prop those claims up like they once cheered Enron new business model, Al Dunlap’s management prowess, and Paul Vallas bid for the governor’s seat. Another con involves Chicago’s high school dropout rate. As careful readers of the press remember, one of Paul Vallas’s contributions to creative accounting in Chicago was to order his minions to redefine the “dropout rate.” Like so many things, this was done the same way some accountants redefined corporate revenue to mean any numbers you wrote down in that column on the spreadsheets, even if the dollars never came into your bank accounts... But Chicago’s version of “dropout” and common sense differ radically, no matter how many highly paid scholars quibble about it until the whole room is snoring. The way most of the world (and common sense) looks at dropouts, you take the number of students you begin with in 9th grade in Year One and you compare that with the number of students you have left in 12th grade in Year Four. The difference gives you your number of dropouts. The percentage (the difference divided by the number from Year One) is your dropout rate. Based on this method of counting, consider the following two sets of simple arithmetical facts. (1) Chicago had 34,042 students in Grade 9 on September 30, 1998 and only 16,116 in Grade 12 on September 30, 2001 (the most recent years for which data are available via the public “Racial Ethnic Survey — Students” released by the school board reluctantly each year). Kids who began their senior year of high school in September 2001 mostly graduated in June 2002. The “Class of 2002” began senior year of high school at the end of the same summer that began with Paul Vallas’s resignation as CEO of the CPS. Doing the math for the Class of 2002 gives you a dropout rate of 53 percent for the Class of 2002. Now let’s go back to the onset of the Vallas (and Daley) “miracle” years — 1995 (the entry point of the Class of 1998, the kids who began high school two months after Mayor Daley appointed Vallas to run the system). In September 1995, the public high schools of Chicago had 34,691 9th graders. Four years later (September 30, 1998), there were 16, 172 12th graders. According to that method of calculating, the dropout rate of the first high school class to come through during the Daley Years was also 53 percent. Nothing changed for the “better” — despite all the sound bites and media lies. Like the Wall Street stories of the late 1990s, the miracle management lies about Chicago’s public schools were fabrication. The losers in this case were the kids who lost out on the education they might have had during all that prosperity and the teachers who were subject to seven years of teacher bashing (think: “Probation,” “Reconsitution,” “Reengineering,” “Redesign,” “Intervention,” and, most recently, “Renaissance” for a few examples of teacher bashing)...

...In March, after the current noisome local elections are over, Substance will begin selling our contribution to the U.S. Senate race — the “ABC” button. For those who have some hope the Democrats might emerge from their hopeless muddle next year, “ABC” stands for “Anybody But Chico.” Gery Chico — the rich lawyer who spent nearly seven years teacher bashing and union busting as President of the “Chicago School Reform Board of Trustees” — thinks he deserves to become the Democratic Senator from Illinois. Until the past decade, a guy with Chico’s union-busting, teacher bashing and mendacious record would have been running as a right-wing Republican. What Chico did in Chicago would have been unthinkable to the most conservative Republicans as late as the reign of Gerald Ford (who left the presidency in 1976, around the time Chico was finishing college after attending Kelly High School). And Chico did it as a corporate “Democrat” (an invention of the 1990s) with the full support of another prominent union buster, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley. Anyway, we’re going to make sure that any number of the facts of Chico’s record are back on the record as he goes around trying to woo the working class behind his candidacy. And we won’t even ask him question in Spanish as he...

...It looks like librarian bashing is joining teacher bashing on our mayor’s media scripts. We had flashbacks on December 13 when we read the page one story in the Chicago Sun-Times ($18,000 stolen from library dime at a time) bashing librarians just in time for Mayor Daley’s jihad against the militants in the librarians’ union. “$18,000 stolen from library dime at a time” could have been written by the same teacher bashers (and engineer bashers) who did the scripts for the early days of the Vallas administration’s attack on those of us who work in the public schools in the mid and late 1990s. Remember the weekly press conferences from Paul Vallas or Blondean Davis, hyperventilating about the latest outrage from the proletarians? Vintage Daley. His handlers barely leave a hint of his pawprints on such a story. What’s behind the nickle-and-dime version of reality that now has the public wondering about the honesty of the librarians who collect the late book fines? The same corporate agenda that Daley pasted on the schools for the past eight years. Basically, librarians are beginning to complain because the mayor has been spending hundreds of millions of dollars of (borrowed) money to build new library buildings — then cheapskating the actual library that gets put inside each building. Once the building has been built and the ribbon cut, there’s not enough money left to pay for a decent-sized staff and a decent collection of books and other stuff that people expect to find when they go to libraries. Lately, librarians have been complaining — even through their usually quiescent union. So what do the Daley spin meisters do? Slander the librarians as a group by getting their favorite lap dog of a newspaper to put a screaming story about the “corruption” of librarians on page one. It reminds us of the screaming headlines orchestrated by Daley and his appointees from 1995 through 2000, when Paul Vallas and Gery Chico were running the schools. Remember the “corrupt engineers” stories (1995)? All the stories about teachers who were (a) beating up kids or (b) gambling with kids or (c) showing porn movies to kids or (d) stealing tests so kids could “cheat” (that last one, aimed at the editor and reporters of this newspaper). Same stuff. Our problem isn’t with the Daley slander machine, which is widely known at this point. It’s with our colleagues in the press, who are still taking handouts from Jackie Heard and her surrogates, even when they know the stuff is just part of the same corporate agenda. What’s that? The one that’s going to leave the city with a couple of billion dollars in new library buildings (without staff or books) and a mountain of debt — just as the great school building boom of the past eight years is leaving the schools with a bunch of new buildings and no money to pay teachers decently to do their jobs in them…

...We’re glad it only took our colleagues in the Philadelphia press corps four months to notice that Paul Vallas, hailed here in Chicago as the pre-eminent CEO of the “school reform” movement of the 1990s, is nuts. We’re not talking euphemisms. We’re talking “bats in the belfrey” (as it used to be said before everything became OK in the “I’m OK. You’re OK. Sorry about that bomb that killed your mother” era). From the beginning of his time in the City of Brotherly Love, Vallas lost it when reporters asked those usual unnecessary questions — like “Who?” “What?” “When?” “Where?” and “Why?” Years of adulatory editorial board briefings, PR spin, and “Coddling by Coffey” (as it was called during the days of pundit Raymond Coffey at the Sun-Times) gave Vallas the idea that reporters were on earth to enhance his rather precarious self-image and ever escalating self-esteem. But there were few Philadelphia reporters to feed Vallas the old softball Chicago questions he got for nearly seven years: “Mr. Vallas, would you tell me again how great you are and why those teachers are greedy pornographers, racists, and cads?” The pre-Christmas national news that under Vallas, kindergarten kids are being suspended from school was just the beginning. Wait until a reporter asks Vallas about “developmentally appropriate” pre-school assessments and Cozette isn’t there to answer for him. Or maybe someone will notice that “Tourette’s Syndrome” thingy Vallas always had when his waggings got out of hand, so to speak. When it’s all over, a lot of serious people are going to be demanding answers, the most important of which should be how Chicago created both the Monster and the Myth. We’re talking about the monster Paul Vallas has become and the myth of the Imperial CEO as the best thing for public school systems in a democracy....

…Henry Kissinger’s Chicago connection. One of the many interesting things about the recent flap over the appointment of Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to head the 9/11 commission is that no one in the Chicago media reported Kissinger’s very prominent Chicago connection. For several years, Kissinger has been a member of the Board of Directors of Hollinger International, Inc., — parent company of the Chicago Sun-Times. Kissinger isn’t the only world-class reactionary on the Sun-Times board. Others include Richard Burt (arms negotiator for the first President Bush), Richard Perle (who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense under Ronald Reagan), former Illinois Governor James Thompson, and Conrad Black (the controlling owner of the Sun-Times, who is now “Lord Black of Crossharbour”, a British Lord). Black and his wife own more than half the shares of Hollinger International. Black became infamous in his home country (Canada) a few years back when he renounced his Canadian citizenship to become a “Lord Black of Crossharbour” and sit in the House of Lords in England. Dr. Kissinger’s international exploits are much more famous than Black’s. Hollinger International’s mailing address is the Sun-Times building at 401 N. Wabash in Chicago, but the company holds its annual meetings in May at the Metropolitan Club in New York City. Is that because Chicago is too far for Kissinger and others to travel? It seems that doesn’t matter much. Everyone who cares knows that the Sun-Times is decidedly “conservative” in recent years, preaching all those traditional virtues like punctuality, frugality, and hard work. For those who preach old-fashioned virtues (such as punctuality and doing the work for which you are paid) as the Sun-Times is wont to do, it’s interesting to see the practice. Kissinger’s Sun-Times work ethic presents a curiosity in this regard. “The Board of Directors met four (4) times in 2001,” Hollinger International’s most recent proxy statement (filed March 28, 2002 and available from the SEC) says. “Messrs. Kissinger and Wexner and Lord Weidenfeld did not attend 75% or more of the aggregate of the total number of meetings of the Board of Directors and the total number of the committees on which such directory served.” Kissinger’s rather lax work ethic didn’t hurt him when payday arrived, however. Despite his truancy, Dr. Kissinger was paid $35,000 (more than a starting Chicago public school teacher) cash and a stock option for 4,500 shares of Hollinger stock (worth approximately $45,000 at current prices) for his services from May 2000 through May 2001. That’s a total of about $80,000 per year, by our count. We wonder if the Sun-Times is ready to support Dr. Kissinger’s Sun-Times pay as an annual salary for Chicago’s public school teachers…