| |
SUBSCRIPTS
…Maybe we should just call him “Chief Perjury Officer”
(like some people on the 11th floor are doing behind his back) and that
monstrous patronage bureaucracy he runs the “Unaccountability Office”.
When you make the rules and enforce the rules, there is no rule you’ve
ever broken. It’s sort of like between yourself and God. Just ask
yourself if you’ve been a good boy when you say your prayers at night.
So it is with Chicago’s sanctimonious perjurer, “Accountability”
chief, Phil Hansen — and his wife; his extended family; his 19th
Ward political cronies (er, “family”); and anyone else who comes
by for a political favor and gets the nod from Hansen’s sponsors
out on the far South Side. The North Central Association of Colleges and
Schools (the prestigious outfit that accredits high schools) seems to
agree with Hansen’s double standard for deciding what’s right
and what’s wrong — even at the risk of smelling like Enron’s
accountants in the process. Conflicts? Who, us? Recently, Phil Hansen
served on the Mother McAuley High School North Central evaluation team.
(For those readers not from Chicago, Mother McAuley is one of Chicago’s
most powerful Catholic high schools). Never mind how Hansen found the
time with all his other “accountability” duties; he did it.
Problem? Actually, problems, which are many. Follow the accountability
money and you learn that Hansen’s version of a “good” school
is a parochial school. Forget the rampant white supremacy for a minute.
The parochial school model (all those “values”) become a major
reason the public schools have been facing tumult since Hansen took over
“accountability” for Paul Vallas six years ago. Vallas and Hansen
routinely bash the teachers in the public schools — while holding
up as examples the teachers in the Catholic ones. Segregation isn’t
a problem; that’s the status quo. Tribalism. Ditto racism. You can
preach about “diversity” as long as you don’t practice
it in your basketball or admissions programs too much. White’s right;
the whiter, the better. (Just visit a few of those parochial schools in
Hansen’s neighborhood and south of Hansen’s home — especially
check out the schools attended by the little Vallases — and count
the black kids…). A white parochial school teacher doesn’t have
to give tests to prove she’s doing a better job than thousands of
Chicago public school teachers. That’s a given. No accountability
necessary. No “Intervention” there either. That’s for other
types of human beings. Is “Accountability” for driving the public
schools into the ground, firing public school teachers and principals,
and giving our jobs can to connected parochial people who’ve never
taught a day in the harsh reality of an inner city public school? That
may account for how Hansen can serve on the accountability committee of
North Central for Mother McAuley— and hold accountable the school
that employs his wife as a teacher while she also serves (as a community
rep) on the Sutherland Local School Council. Elsewhere, these things are
called unethical and conflicts of interest. In Chicago, they’re business
as usual…
Return to Top
...John Hancock, he ain’t. Chicago Schools CEO Arne Duncan had better
fire the person who’s been forging his signature. On February
26, Duncan announced that he was cutting the budget by $8 million. Amidst
great media fanfare, Duncan convened his second press conference in three
weeks and bragged modestly about how he was continuing to save the taxpayers’
dollars by continuing his supposed crusade to “cut bureaucracy...”
Included in that cut, he told the well attended press conference, would
be “bureaucracy” and “consultants.” After that, details
were sparse and things got, as Alice in Wonderland said, “curiouser
and curioser.” Duncan’s trouble was, as Substance pointed out
at the time, on the agenda for the Board of Education meeting that was
being held that day. The agenda included a motion (called a “Board
Report” hereabouts) that would have awarded $10 million in consulting
contracts to various auditors, including the controversial KPMG Peat Marwick
and the infamous Arthur Andersen. When asked about the inconsistency (announcing
a “savings” of $8 million while proposing to spend $10 million),
Duncan at first denied he knew about the motion. He claimed it was “the
Board’s business...” as if what the Board of Education did had
nothing to do with the Board of Education’s Chief Executive Officer.
Trouble was, the motion had been signed by someone named “Arne Duncan.”
When confronted with the Board Report, with his “signature”
on the bottom, Duncan dodged the question again. At the full meeting of
the Chicago Board of Education three hours after his media dog-and-pony
show, however, Duncan quietly withdrew the $10 million suggestion as if
it never had happened. It’s one thing to be the kind of executive
who delegates things. It’s another to suggest the taxpayers give
away $10 million and then forget you made the suggestion. Duncan should
pay more attention to the stuff that’s done in his name before his
name gets put up on the “Whoops, I forgot that, too...” Wall
of Shame alongside Enron’s Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling...
Return to Top
...Never underestimate the power of the Chicago Board of Education
to surprise you. During February, thousands of “CPS” employees
received an offer to take out a “Chicago Board of Education Platinum
Visa Card.” The fine print read like a memo on test security from
the Office of Accountability. Although the offer touted “0% fixed
APR”, of course it turns out that the actual cost of the card will
be between 12 percent and 20 percent per year (depending upon whether
the card holder runs a balance and how that balance is managed). One question:
who approved the “CPS Platinum Visa” and who gave out the CPS
(home address) mailing list to the “Bankcard Processing Center”
that mailed out the offers? We looked, but we didn’t see any Board
Report on this giveaway of a mailing list. Since this is Chicago, we’re
also wondering who got paid off on the deal. Finally, this (from the promotional
material): “Each time you use your card to make a purchase —
a contribution will be automatically made to the children of the Chicago
Public Schools...” Huh?...
Return to Top
..We didn’t report in January or February that the Chicago Board
of Education (at its December 19 meeting) had raised the stipends of school
board members considerably. We decided to wait until the drumbeats
began for local school council candidates. Now let’s put things in
perspective. On December 19, 2001, the Chicago Board of Education approved
Board Report 01-1219-PO1, “Amend Policy on Reimbursement of Board
Members.” Prior to December 2001, school board members got $300 a
month for expenses. Since December 2001, school board members have gotten
$1,000 a month (for the board president) and $700 a month (for the other
members) as their monthly “reimbursement.” While Board President
Michael Scott may not think $12,000 a year is a lot of money, many of
his employees are trying to raise families on not much more than that
(especially since Scott’s school board has continued the privatization
scams that were favored by his predecessors Gery Chico and Paul Vallas).
Yes, there are people working “full-time” in Chicago’s
schools earning less than $20,000 per year. In fact, some of those people
are substitute teachers. So Scott’s stipend has to be put into perspective.
But there’s another perspective as well. By the middle of February,
the school board was beating the bushes for candidates to run for local
school councils. Why should anybody run for a job where if you do the
job you get to be bullied by thugs like Scott’s guy James Deanes,
and all you get is grief and no “reimbursement” for expenses.
The money the Chicago Board of Education has wasted on the “investigators”
sicced on LSC members who ran afoul of Paul Vallas, James Deanes, or some
politician in the past couple of years could have paid a stipend to every
LSC member. But in Chicago, the school board would rather pamper itself
and maintain is ever expanding secret police than take steps that would
really encourage citizens to serve on LSCs...
Return to Top
..Sanctimoniousness is rarely a turn-on. When it’s combined with
political pandering — and empowered by a well-funded Secret Police
budget and some self-serving survival skills — it’s usually
called hypocrisy (as in “I will spit you out…”). Therefore,
the departure last month of Maribeth Vander Weele as Inspector General
of the Chicago Public Schools leaves a void that won’t be filled
easily on dozens of levels of ethical and emotional conflictedness. A
textbook case. On the one hand, Vander Weele’s time as Chicago’s
public education KGB chief was marked by a lot of nonsense that could
only be called political witch hunting on behalf of the boss. One the
other hand, at its best during the Vander Weele years, the IG’s office
did some decent work and produced some interesting results. Our favorite
was the investigation of the Vallas busing scandal, now brought back for
the world by the gubernatorial debates. For more than a year, that bit
of crony capitalism was ignored by the downtown media because they’ve
always let Paul Vallas get away with lying, cheating, bullying, and even
(in the case of the crony capitalism on the busing management contracts)
stealing. Sad to say, there is a long list of teachers who were victimized
by the expansion of spies, spooks, and spurious investigators during the
Vallas years — and Ms. Vander Weele was part of that stuff. A whiff
of J. Edgar Hoover, there. A careful review of the “inspector general”
notion as it’s been implemented in two of America’s three largest
school systems (Chicago and New York) shows that whatever the intentions
of the person in charge, the office becomes a political hive of teacher
bashing and cronyism. Vander Weele’s reputation rests with those
of her two colleagues, Paul Vallas and Gery Chico. She owed a lot of apologies
before she left Chicago for her new job in Washington, D.C. It’s
a measure of the person that she didn’t make any, actually believing
to the bitter end the legends…
Return to Top
...Is it true that Arne is planning to return the schools to the old
“District Office” administrative model? Stay tuned...
|
|
