Editorial

Bennett, Bush, Daley, and hypocrisy in high places...

How many CPDUs did Arne Duncan earn this month?

What do the dead young bodies on Chicago streets and the teacher bashing and union busting policies of the Daley and Bush administrations have in common? Along with hypocrisy, many things…

By the first warm day of May, only the most inattentive knew that Chicago was the most deadly city in the USA.

Civilian casualties from the latest round in Chicago’s drug wars rival those of some of the Third World’s most intense hot spots. There are even cities in Iraq and Colombia that are safer than large swatches of Chicago real estate.

But our colleagues in the media managed to report Mayor Richard M. Daley’s rantings about the murder problem with a straight face, as if it weren’t Daley’s fault. It is as if Daley’s slavish corporate policies of the past decade had nothing to do with the horrors on the streets of the city’s poorest communities today. It is as if all the wrongs visited on the working class and the poor hadn’t happened because the city’s corporate media has failed for a generation to report them.

Our colleagues in executive suites of the other media have made no connection between their corporate attacks on the public good and the current state of affairs.

What did they think would happen after a decade of attacks on Chicago’s public servants, attacks on the city’s poor people, the widespread and hypocritical neglect of the majority of the city’s public schools, teacher bashing, union busting, the terrible homelessness that has followed the destruction of public housing (without any replacement for the poor), and “welfare reform”? The real surprise is that the current rise in gang violence isn’t worse, and that it isn’t spilling over into the city’s wealtheir precincts.

But Chicago’s version of reality has been topsy turvy for a long time. Consider just this one historical aside, and the special media reports that could come out of the juxtaposition of “school reform” hype and “New Economy” hype from the archives of the city’s own press and propaganda offices.

Four years ago, at the height of the media adulation of the vicious and corrupt educational policies of Paul Vallas, Chicago’s media were also hyping the “Dot.com” bubble and the crazy propaganda of the “New Economy.” One corporate poster child of that era — a corporation with the apt name of “Divine” and its mediagenic CEO — personified much of the inane private sector corruption and hypocrisy of those times — just as Vallas and the “Chicago educatioon miracle” personified the public corruption of the same era.

A visit to the media archives shows almost as many stories praising the bubble economic notions coming out of the CEO of “Divine Interventures” (cool names and loud prattle were always better copy than real sales and sober ideas back then, whether in corporate Chicago or in public education miracles) as there were praising the crazy notions spewing from the CEO of the public schools.

Paul Vallas and Flip Filipowski received a magic carpet ride, at public expense, fueled in part by uncritical media hype. Mayor Daley posed regularly for photo opportunities with both guys.

That was in 1998 and 1999 and 2000. Back then “everyone” knew that the New Economy was going to make everyone (with high SAT or ACT scores, a middle class home, the right business plan, and an IPO) a millionaire by age thirty. Everyone also knew it just took a little corporate know-how to whip a school system into shape. So we got “school reform,” a “School Reform Board of Trustees”, and the corporate propaganda (paid for to the professors and pundits, and not just from the PR people) to prove it.

Chicago’s current violence is rooted in the massive drug gangs that recruit and operate out of Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods. But it is equally rooted in some terrible ideas of how cities should work and the values public officials should practice.

Those gangs the mayor recently noticed (again, since he’s been aware of them going back to his days as state’s attorney two decades ago) begin training the lost children of the poor in elementary school. The public schools get the brunt of this, and nobody else even notices except the police. Private and parochial schools kick out really bad kids, so the public schools get all of them. They are concentrated in the “worst” schools in the “worst” communities. For a decade those very schools have been stripped of most resources. Their staffs have been libeled from every direction. “Bad teachers” — not bad conditions in society — are responsible for a bad “bottom line” (those test scores that are low no matter how many reforms and revisions are visited on places like Orr, Harper, or Bowen high schools).

The gangs nurture certain children from an early age, and most public servants are denied the tools to reverse the sociopathic process (or even blamed for its existence and bashed).

Then the gangs provide advanced training for those who survive long enough to get to the juvenile detention facilities or later to the scandalous Illinois prisons. The prisons — as anyone who cares to look knows — have long been run by the Black P. Stones, Black Gangster Disciples, Latin Kings, Latin Dragons, Gaylords, Vice Lords, and a dozen lesser gangs. Any Chicago high schooler can tell you whether a general Chicago high school is “People” or “Folks.” Similarly, their elder siblings can tell you which tier or section of Cook County Jail, Stateville, and Joliet belongs to which gang. They keep away from the magnet schools to avoid the attention.

How is it that the most powerful media organizations in the world and the most powerful government agencies can miss something that most children know? Could it be they don’t want to admit what their policies have wrought, so they obscure rather than illuminate the facts?

For a decade, public service has been denigrated in Chicago. Private greed has been praised. Public alternatives have been stripped since the beginning of the era of greed began. So Chicago’s street gangs now provide a home, regular income, and social structure to the tens of thousands of poor children America and Chicago have left behind in the era of the hypocrisies of corporate school reform and “No Child Left Behind.” What does Chicago think happened to the more than 10,000 children (most of them young, poor, male, and “minority”) who were pushed out of Chicago’s public schools since 1996 to make the mayor’s miracle test score numbers look good? Cooking the books has a human price, whether in billions of dollars of stock losses at Enron (and a dozen other crooked companies) or in the thousands of children who suffered the permanent loss of hope while Chicago preened a public relations “miracle” that was really only propaganda and hype.

April in Chicago was an era of massive violence on the streets — and of continuing violence against the truth in the suites.

Right after “Clean Up Week” (Chicago’s name for Spring Vacation), Chicago public school teachers returned to school to learn whether the parents of the children in their classes had received letters from Arne Duncan telling them that the teacher was not “highly qualified.”

The “highly qualified” attack on teachers foisted by the federal “No Child Left Behind” law was the culmination of teacher bashing that has gone on since the beginning of the corporate atrocity known as “school reform” came into power in 1995 with the takeover of the public schools of Chicago by a corporate junta under the city’s nominally “Democratic” mayor.

As the mayor attacked the police for failing to stem the rising tide of street gang violence in Chicago’s poor communities, we waited for someone to propose “police reform” along the same lines that birthed “school reform.”

“ Police Reform” hasn’t happened yet. Even the mayor and the media know Chicago can’t simply whip on the police the way Chicago has whipped on its public school teachers for years. If Chicago isn’t careful, the police might just find parking tickets more attractive than patrolling against crime on the Gold Coast, Lincoln Park, and the other walled communities where the rich live, visit, frolic, and learn. What would happen if a thousand Latin Kings or two thousand Vice Lords decided to start their Sunday morning at the 9:30 services at Fourth Presbyterian Church or over at Holy Name Cathedral, then head down the Magnificent Mile on a shopping spree some pretty day in May?

One of the reasons the police and fire departments haven’t become as demoralized and depleted as the public schools is that the city still knows it can’t foist a phony on those institutions the way it did on the city’s public schools, beginning with Paul Vallas in 1995 and continuing with Arne Duncan in 2001. Each highly unqualified “CEO” is an insult to each of the 25,000 working stiffs in the classrooms of this city. The same would be true if corporate Chicago foisted a “CEO” on the police or firefighters, based on the same dumb logic that was applied to the teacher bashing and union busting “reform” that has been done to the public schools.

Last month, thousands of teachers were denigrated by the latest attacks from Washington, D.C. While those attacks were going on, the scribes of corporate Chicago, as we report elsewhere in this Substance, were fine tuning their teacher bashing propaganda skills at a writers’ meeting in this very city.

Meanwhile, the blood was flowing in the streets. Yet nobody was asking how a decade of attacks on public servants, public education, and the public good might be related to that crimson tide.

Or, another question, asked in the headline that begins this editorial. While Chicago’s teachers were fending off the latest attacks and the most recent piles of paperwork and indignity…How many CPDUs did Arne Duncan (or his hundred highest paid $100,000-per-year assistants) have to earn this month to keep their jobs?

A few other observations before we leave this one.

Once the school system made it clear that teachers were going to be fired for the low test scores from the students in their schools, simple economics dictated that the schools would either get rid of the students who were going to score badly, or the teachers were going to transfer to schools that had “good” scores. The logic was the same dumb market stuff that Chicago economic gurus have been getting Nobel Prizes for these past few decades, but it only holds up in a narrow range of realities, and it destroyed public services with a viciousness unrivalled in other areas.

That’s another story, for another time. Fact is, however, that the past decade has seen an exodus of teachers from the city’s “worst” public schools, because every utterance of “school reform” was an attack on teachers in those schools, without one shred of pity on the fate of the children who had to lives under harsh conditions or the toll working in such schools took on idealistic adults who tried to stem the tides of despair that were being unleashed from the heights of corporate power in Chicago and Washington against those children, their families, and their social class.

When we first began penning this editorial, we thought to bullet various points to make things more clear in terms even a CEO (public or private sector) might understand:

• A decade of teacher bashing has undermined the authority of the public school, leaving entire communities open to the authority of the gangs instead. “You’re too dumb to teach me anything,” is a refrain pulsing through many schools today, thanks to a decade of Daley’s reforms and the new wrinkle added by the Bush administration’s “highly qualified” scam.

• A decade of privatization and union busting has led to such economic stress in working class and poor communities (especially poor and working class “communities of color”) that the gangs are offering a reasonable capitalist alternative economic model to the hopes that were stripped away when the last union-wage job was replaced by the Wal-Mart model.

• A decade of real estate manipulation continues with the latest round of school closings in Chicago. Most of the schools slated for closing (with the most dramatic example being Mulligan, which currently serves pregnant girls, most of them from “communities of color” and poor) are being close to pave the way for real estate manipulation at the expense of the public school budget. How can Arne Duncan say with a straight face that he is closing schools to “save” a couple of million dollars after the school board wasted hundreds of millions of dollars on gentrification schools for the wealthyat the expense of the poor?

• The over-regulation of classroom teachers and the ongoing indignity of having to acquire “CPDUs” in order to remain certified (and achieve “highly qualified” status) insults every man and women who worked hard to get through college (and, in the case of the majority of Chicago teachers, graduate school) to earn the right to teach in a public school classroom. While CEOs and their well-paid staffs are completely unregulated, teachers are facing more and more restraints and indignities. Teachers shouldn’t be required to gather CPDUs until Arne Duncan is required to get an Illinois teaching certificate, work the required six years in a school, pass the Illinois administrative tests, and get his “Type 75” so he can be a principal. After several years as a principal, he can apply for the top job.

Can you imagine the uproar in the police department if the mayor tried to appoint a “CEO” of Police with the same qualifications and experience as Arne Duncan (and Paul Vallas) had for the top educational job?

The Chicago mess is not only on the streets where children are gunning down one another and other children are being caught in the crossfire after Easter Sunday services.

The mess began in the suites. It roots in hypocrisy. A decade ago, one of our colleagues wrote a book about the excesses of capitalism during the late 1980s — “Predators’ Ball.” It highlighted the activities that made Michael Milken a billionaire and a convicted felon at Drexel Burnham Lambert while fleecing thousands of millions. A similar book needs to be written about the juncture of ideology and greed that produced the current state of affairs in Chicago. It could be called “Hypocrites’ Ball.” It would feature all of the players who made the lies of the Decade of Greed of the 1990s the dogmas many still live by.

On the cover, however, instead of white guys in pinstripes, there should be photos of black kids gunned down on Chicago streets.

Just as a reminder that the teacher bashing is ulikely to end. At Substance press time, Duncan appointed a new chief lawyer. The last time she worked on public school issues was teacher bashing — approving “Intervention” three years ago as part of the Accountability Council.