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Board Delays CASE Case Until After Primary Election
By George Schmidt
 Substance published
six of 22 systemwide high school achievement tests (in subjects like English
and history) to show what an absurd waste of time and money they were.
In response, the Chicago board fired Substance’s editor (George Schmidt)
as a teacher and sued Substance for $1 million. But now, the Board’s
attorneys are using every delaying tactic in the book to keep the case
from coming to trial.
By March 4, it was
clear that the Chicago Board of Education’s lawyers cared less about
retrieving the $1 million they claimed Substance had cost them by publishing
six of the 22 January 1999 CASE examinations and more about stalling the
federal lawsuit, at least until after the March 2002 primary elections.
When attorneys for both sides returned to court on March 4, the Board
of Education was still withholding evidence and still delaying the organization
of its own case.
Substance (a newspaper)
and I (its editor) were sued for $1 million by the Chicago school board
on January 26, 1999. The board’s lawsuit claimed “copyright
infringement” after we published six of 22 Chicago Academic Standards
Examinations (CASE) in our January February 1999 edition of Substance.
Chicago’s response
was to deploy a team of lawyers who got a federal judge to issue three
extraordinary writs:
- A temporary restraining order
- A writ of seizure
- An order of protection
All these extraordinary
orders were gotten from U.S. District Judge Charles Norgle Jr. against
me and Substance on the afternoon of January 26, 1999 — even though
none of us was in court.
Despite the unconstitutionality
of all three of those writs (against a newspaper), Chicago justice prevailed
that day. It has still been in charge throughout the 38 months of the
ordeal. Substance has been tied up in court since January 1999. During
2000, the Board of Education also convened a kangaroo court and fired
me from my 30-year teaching job. Now is the stall.
After an enormous amount
of media hoopla (and some libels and slanders against us) in 1999 (including
a typically one-sided piece in “Education Week”), there has
been a local media blackout on the CASE case. The Wall Street Journal
published more about it in 2001 than Chicago’s press. Outside attorneys
for the school board have cost the taxpayers $205,000 by August 2000,
but the story is not news in Chicago.
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