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Vallas’s shameful record includes countless stories of his harm
to individuals and schools
Anybody but Vallas
By Sharon Schmidt
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17. Inequitable focus of academic programs. Vallas’s threats
against the staff at schools in danger of (or on) probation, reconstitution,
intervention and reengineering resulted in test-prep curriculums. In those
schools, academics and extracurricular subjects other than Iowa and TAP
test-like reading and math suffered neglect and cuts. Wealthy neighborhood
schools and magnet schools with selective enrollment (schools that could
never be put on probation because all of the students had above average
test scores) were free to focus on an enriched curriculum and many choices
of extracurricular activities.
18. High school redesign. Vallas created “High School Redesign.”
The program attacked everything in the general high schools without noting
that the general high schools took the children whose academic problems
had begun during nine years of elementary school. Redesign particularly
attacked fine arts, vocational education and physical education programs.
Its propagandists claimed that the high schools were the source of educational
failure in Chicago.
19. New abuses of power for principals and appointed bureaucrats.
Vallas gave principals and his appointees the ability to discharge teachers
they didn’t like and get around seniority by supposedly changing
the focus of schools through designations of “career academies,”
“academic magnet schools” or “military academies.”
20. Callous behavior regarding tragedy. Vallas refused to acknowledge
the widow of Farragut High School English teacher, Joe Hillebrand, after
Hillebrand’s tragic suicide in July 1999. Hillebrand killed himself
because his principal, Edward Guerra, had told him that he was removing
Hillebrand from Farragut. Even though Hillebrand was a dedicated, superior-rated
teacher with 19 years of seniority, Guerra had the power not to keep him
on because Vallas gave the school the designation of “career academy.”
Hillebrand had left a note for his wife that said, “I cannot explain
to you the intensity of my torture. My career is over. There is no way
out.” Mrs. Hillebrand received no call or card from Vallas, who was
aware of the suicide and quoted in the Chicago Tribune regarding Hillebrand’s
death.
21. “Honorable discharge” of more than 200 tenured teachers.
By 1999, Vallas was firing veteran tenured teachers despite a growing
teacher shortage. These teachers were not fired for cause, but because
the Vallas administration worked to make sure that principals would not
hire them after they had been displaced from their previous schools. “Teacher
bashing” became a growing national scandal by the late 1990s, and
was pioneered in Chicago by Paul Vallas.
22. Destruction and reduction of vocational and business programs.
Vallas cut over one half of the vocational and business education programs
in the high schools. Two schools were sacrificed to create academic elite
schools. Other vocational education programs were slashed in order to
give the work done by vocational teachers to private nonunion contractors
like De Vry Institute.
23. The decimation of Jones Commercial and Near North high schools.
Vallas wiped out two schools that focused on teaching job skills to
average students, creating two elite high schools in their place. Part
of Vallas’s plan in changing Jones to an academic magnet school was
to create a need to expand the school building and force the Pacific Garden
Mission to move out of its South Loop location. The school closings are
devastating to students who want a business or vocational education and
to the many teachers who lost their positions. Vallas refused to acknowledge
the strength of the job internship program at Jones Metropolitan High
School (which had partnered with over 500 Chicago businesses). Vallas
said to this reporter, “Those jobs at Jones don’t amount to
anything.” Vallas also claimed that “Nobody wants to send their
kid to Near North.” There were 700 applicants for the freshman class
that year.
24. Callous behavior toward teacher job losses. Vallas lied to
teachers at Taft High School, saying that only three teachers had lost
their positions at Jones (when there had been 19 who had been let go).
Vallas slandered those teachers by snidely telling the Taft faculty that
the Jones teachers who were not hired back to the new “academic magnet
school” were lousy teachers.
25. Shooting off his mouth. Vallas tended to shoot off his mouth
before he knew the facts of any particular case. Throughout the Vallas
administration, a standing joke was that Vallas’s orders were “Fire.
Ready. Aim.” One example turned the entire student travel program
upside down when Vallas threatened to fire a Morgan Park High School teacher
because a student who had lost his passport was left behind — in
competent adult hands — after a field trip to Spain ended. After
Vallas was chastised for threatening to fire the popular and politically
connected teacher he again reacted impulsively and angrily, saying on
a radio show that an unrelated Austrian trip (for Morgan Park 7th and
8th graders) would be canceled due to safety concerns. After an Austrian
diplomat assured Vallas that there would be no problem, Vallas still cancelled
the trip based on a paper work technicality. Many students were crushed.
26. Employee Discipline Code. Vallas instituted a “discipline
code” for board employees that gave the board the power to suspend,
without pay, teachers and other employees for the most trivial reasons.
Vallas and other administrators used the code to suppress dissent and
to harass veteran teachers who didn’t follow the whims of principals
to the letter.
27. Arbitrarily reversing LSC principal selections, charging LSC’s
“in crisis” to centralize control. Vallas, his underlings,
and his numerous investigators spent years undermining local school councils
which tried to act independently of Vallas’s central control.
28. Vendettas in print. Vallas supplied former Sun-Times columnist
Ray Coffey — and at times other media personalities — with official
“truths” and “facts” in order to smear the reputation
of teachers and LSC chosen principal candidates who opposed him. Among
Vallas’s most outrageous charges published by the Sun-Times were
that Substance editor George N. Schmidt was racist and that the Gale School
LSC–chosen principal, Beverly Martin, was anything less than qualified
on her own merits. Dozens of other teachers and principals faced similar
slanders, all of which originated from Vallas and his appointees.
29. Vendettas through court. Vallas spent nearly $1 million to
take Martin and Schmidt out of the principal position and teaching position
they rightfully deserved. Millions of dollars more were spent on cases
involving other teachers and principals, dozens of whom ultimately defeated
the board at great cost in time and dollars.
30. Disinformation campaign at board, including censoring monthly board
meetings for television. Vallas has refused to publish even the most
routine information about the school system (such as the annual directory
of administrative offices, which was published for more than 50 years).
Vallas censored the broadcast version of Board of Education meetings in
order to cut out the words of anyone critical of his claims.
31. Desegregation efforts reversed. Vallas increased racial segregation
in Chicago’s schools for the first time in more than 30 years. Illegal
segregation of both staff and students has increased markedly since 1995.
32. Abuse of parents and school reform groups. Vallas attacked
and publicly ridiculed veteran school reform organizations such as Parents
United for Responsible Education (PURE) and Designs for Change, while
working to subordinate every critical voice or silence it through the
most dictatorial methods.
33. The destruction of five high schools through “Intervention.”
After the failure of the 1997 “reconstitution” of seven high
schools, Vallas returned in the summer of 2000 for an expensive encore,
the “Intervention” program aimed at five high schools. Like
“reconstitution,” Intervention failed after driving large numbers
of veteran teachers from the schools and undermining the work of staffs
that had dedicated their lives in many cases to the most difficult communities
in the inner city.
34. Ridiculous CASE tests. Vallas spent more than $5 million over
four years on some of the nation’s most ludicrous “standardized”
tests, the “Chicago Academic Standards Examinations” (CASE).
The CASE program, like most of Chicago’s testing program, is a burden
on the schools and takes away from learning and teaching. Vallas’s
multi-million dollar lawsuit against Substance for publishing six of the
January 1999 pilot CASE tests has already cost the taxpayers more than
$300,000 for attorneys’ fees and legal costs and promises to cost
twice as much as the Board of Education drags the litigation through both
federal and state courts.
35. More, and more, and more… The most amazing thing of all
is that this list could continue. The destruction of Chicago’s public
schools by the Vallas administration will take a decade or more to repair,
once the damage is honestly acknowledged and the repairs begun.
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