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Opinion | May
2003 Issue
LettersSubstance reporting on Board legal costs
inaccurate?
Dear George: In that copy of your publication, you indicated that our firm had received fees from the Chicago Board of Education in the amount of $15,000 for work related to the case of Munoz, et al., v. Board of Education, 99 C 4725. In fact, we received a total amount of $1,878 for representation of one or two of the individually named Chicago Public School employees in that lawsuit. I believe that the confusion arises from the fact that although the General Counsel received Board authorization for payment in the amount of $15,000, we received only the lesser amount because of the minimal legal work involved. We have never represented the Chicago Board of Education, and in this case we also did not receive the amount indicated in your newspaper. Finally, I would note that in this instance, appointment of outside counsel was an appropriate decision on the part of Law Department of the Board, as the Board itself was also a defendant, and there was a potential conflict of interest in representation of both the Board and the individual defendants. Please feel free to contact me should you have any additional questions. Sincerely, A major audit of Chicago legal costs must
be conducted This instance, however, brings to light some extraordinary facts and calls into question the integrity of public records maintained and presented to the public by the attorneys of the Chicago Board of Education for the past eight years — not of our reporting. These matters require elucidation. In the context of the past eight years of Chicago public school history, the astronomical legal costs paid by the taxpayers to buttress corporate style “school reform” were one of the most important (and expensive) aspects of the era. Throughout the period of the now discredited “Chicago miracle”, lawyers were used to silence critics, suppress dissent, and slant the news in the major media. (Yes, the Board’s lawyers went out of their way to become sources for reporters in other papers, continually slanting stories in the direction of corporate “school reform” and the tales of the “Chicago miracle.”) We will also be reporting on these matters in other stories (which begin in this issue) now and in the future. In January 2003, we reported in our lead article that the Chicago Board of Education had approved the expenditure of more than $10.5 million, over a four-year period, to pay outside attorneys to do legal work for the Board. As our report noted, that money was in addition to an unprecedented expansion of the Board’s own internal legal department. Our reporting for that story was accurate, based on what should have been the most credible of sources — the official published proceedings of the Chicago Board of Education. It is the duty of a newspaper to verify the facts it reports from reliable sources, to inform its readers of those sources, to double-check those facts when there is the possibility of inaccuracy, and to provide individuals mentioned in stories the opportunity to comment on those facts. In most instances, the official proceedings of public bodies are considered reliable sources. In our January report on outside lawyers, most of the discrete facts we reported were in the form of a four-page spreadsheet containing 191 separate entries. This spreadsheet contained the names of all outside law firms which received retainers from the Chicago Board of Education between January 1, 1999 and December 31, 2002, a period of four years. They were sourced according to the official “Agendas of Action” of each of the 48 meetings of the Chicago Board of Education (which was called for part of the time “Chicago School Reform Board of Trustees) during those four years. The “Agenda of Action” comes out after each monthly meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. The Agenda of Action reports the vote of the Board on each of the items that has been on the public agenda of the meeting. The Agenda of Action also reports items which have not been placed on the public agenda of the meeting because they are considered exempt from certain provisions of the Freedom of Information and Open Meetings acts of the State of Illinois. The include most reports from the Board’s Law Department, personnel items (such at suspensions and terminations of employees), and real estate transactions. As we reported in our January article (and in its headline), the total amount paid to outside lawyers indicated in those official board reports was $10.5 million. We also reported that during the same period, the official record indicates that the number of lawyers working inside the Board of Education more than doubled. Clearly, these facts deserve careful public attention, although we are still the only newspaper in Chicago to have reported them. Now we have a well-founded challenge to the accuracy of our reporting on this important matter of public concern. The above letter from Mr. Piers is not the only communication we have had from attorneys who have told us that the sources for our story were inaccurate. We have heard from other attorneys who received less than the public record shows, and we have reason to believe that some attorneys have received more than is being made available in the public record. Either way, it is now clear that the official record is not accurate. We are being criticized for again publishing the truth based on official Chicago Board of Education documents. There has been no criticism of our sourcing. Each item in that large January spreadsheet indicated the number of a Board Report, the date of that report, the name of the law firm involved, and, where available, the name of the case (or activity) for which the money was being paid. To describe these situations are “Orwellian” or out of “Alice in Wonderland” might provide some insight, but let’s try to review the facts and the history. The years since the Chicago “miracle” was proclaimed by Mayor Richard M. Daley in 1996 at the National Press Club (and reiterated to the world by the President of the United States in at least two State of the Union addresses) have been interesting ones if facts and accuracy still matter. But we’ll leave that to other times and places. We are sorry that the facts regarding outside legal costs (which are also available in the public record on the Board’s Website) caused misunderstanding about the role of Mr. Piers’s law firm. Yet we have to state that the misunderstanding arises from the unusual way in which the public record has been manipulated in Chicago, and not from our reporting of items in the public record. As Mr. Piers indicated, the information from the Board Report that appeared in a four-page chart accompanying our January 2003 article on the cost of outside lawyers was inaccurate. It was inaccurate insofar as it was taken to represent the amount of money his firm actually received from the Chicago Board of Education for work on the case in question. Since that article appeared with the accompanying chart, we have heard from other law firms to the same effect. They have told us that the information available to the public through the board reports is not accurate. As a result, we gladly publish the above letter to clarify this one inaccuracy. However, the public now faces a much bigger problem. All indications are that the official record of expenses on outside lawyers, as contained in Board Reports, is inaccurate. In some cases, the amount indicated in the Board Report is well above the mount actually paid to the attorneys in question. In others (and we are still investigating this), outside attorneys seem to have received more than the Board Reports, in toto, indicate. Beginning in August 1996 and continuing until she left the Chicago Board of Education in February 2003, Marilyn Johnson refused to provide the public with any further information about the costs of outside attorneys than the information reported in the Board Reports which we compiled for our January 2003 article. , Ms. Johnson served as the Board’s General Counsel (also called, at various points, “Corporation Counsel” and “Chief Attorney”) from 1996 until this year. During that time, as we have reported, the expansion of the Board’s Law Department took place inside the board (with the hiring of more than 30 new attorneys and an equal number of others to work in the Law Department) and in relation to expenses on outside counsel. From 1996 until her departure, Marilyn Johnson and her subordinates routinely and cynically violated or ignored the Illinois Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Beginning in 1996, we requested the specific information about how much outside lawyers were actually paid (and for what work). At each point during those seven years, the Board’s attorneys refused to provide that information, either ignoring out letters of denying our requests. Because we were unable to sustain additional litigation during that time, our reporting on these (and other) matters was forced to base itself on the information that was available in the public record, in this case, the Board Reports such as the one Mr. Piers discusses. There is a cloud over the professional work of the Law Department of the Chicago Board of Education. The Law Department has provided the public with inaccurate information over a period fast approaching a decade. It has also refused to provide the public with accurate information. Substance is not the only newspaper in this city to find its FOIA requests routinely denied (often with the backing of “legal” opinion signed by Marilyn Johnson or Robert Hall, one of her top assistants). There is a hint of high-level scandal here. The Board of Education has refused to conduct any internal audit of the actual expenses of its Law Department. Nor has the Board’s Inspector General investigated the unusual relationship between the public record (the Board Reports, as we published) and the actual expenses to the public as checks were cut and paid to the dozens of outside law firms that did work for the Chicago Board of Education during the years Marilyn Johnson served as head of the board’s legal work. During most of those years (and during the years of greatest expansion of outsourcing of legal work), Gery Chico was Board President and Paul Vallas was Chief Executive Officer. Recently, the new administration at the school board has begun providing us with a small amount of the information necessary for the public to determine whether the money spent on outside lawyers is necessary and appropriate. As we reported in our March-April 2003 issue, one of the outside attorneys who worked against Substance was paid between $210 per hour and $310 per hour between 1999 and 2002 for work that was also being done by Board staff attorneys. Our reporting on the money paid to Patricia Felch and Laura DeMoor was based on information provided to us by Arne Duncan’s Chief of Staff, Peggy Davis. However, the information provided to Ms. Davis seems to be, as we have reported, incomplete and inaccurate itself. Large periods of time were not included in the information we received, and all information regarding the work itself was “redacted” (i.e., deleted from the pages). We have renewed our FOIA request for reports on all of the law firms which have done work for the Chicago Board of Education during the time in question (January 1, 1997 - January 1, 2002). We have also written to all members of the Board of Education (as reported in this Substance) regarding this unseemly affair. We hope that when the information is available and open to the public, misunderstandings such as the one Mr. Piers brings to the attention of our readers, will not recur. However, such misunderstanding are inevitable when the activities and expenses of government — in this case, the expenditure of more than $10 million during a five year period — are done in secrecy, or partial secrecy. Ironically, this is another time in the past four years where we reported facts which then turned out not to be “facts” which were supposed to be reported to the public in Chicago. In all of these cases, our facts were completely accurate (according to the Board of Education’s official version of history). Yet we found ourselves questioned regarding our reporting. The more impressive of these cases begins with our January-February 1999 report on the CASE tests. We had been covering CASE in particular for several months by that point, and the abuse of standardized testing for years. To illustrate our point about the shoddiness of CASE in January 1999, we published several different CASE exams (after they had been administered), indicating that we would publish other the following month. No one challenged the accuracy of our information. Those were the CASE tests administered prior to our publication to more than 90,000 high school students in more than 60 public high school in Chicago. Instead of discussing the serious public issues raised by those silly examinations, the Vallas administration, through the Board’s Law Department, suppressed public debate by suing us for “copyright infringement”. Expensive outside lawyers were hired to support the dozen Board lawyers who also worked on the litigation and related legal attacks on Substance. To repeat: We were sued for $1 million for publishing the truth. The accuracy of our reporting was never in question, and the Board has admitted that those public documents (the 1999 CASE tests) are authentic. We have been forced to spend the past four years in court defending ourselves in that litigation (at a cost of more than $130,000 to our attorneys to date), and I was fired from my teaching job (and slandered in the media) for what we did. For four years, we have been sued for publishing
the truth. We provided the CASE tests to the public as part
of our critique
of the abuse
of standardized testing.
We obtained them, as we have reported often, from off-the-record
sources. We verified their authenticity. We then provided
them to the public
under the
protection of what we thought was a First Amendment that
applied in Chicago, even under
the Daley administration and during the era of the “CEO miracle” in
school governance. We were sued for a million dollars. I was fired from my teaching
job for fulfilling my civic responsibilities on my second job (editing this newspaper).
Our readers can read the entire history of that spat on our website (www.substancenews.com). Schools in second place to war
Dear Substance, Angela Valenzuela, Austin, Texas The War on Schools Actually, that’s wrong. Strike the word “can’t.” The correct word is more damning, more reflective of the motives of the people in power. The correct word is “won’t.” Without giving the costs much thought, we’ll spend hundreds of billions of dollars on an oil-powered misadventure in the Middle East. But we won’t scrape together the money for sufficient textbooks and teachers, or even, in some cases, to keep the doors open at public schools in struggling districts from Boston on the East Coast to Portland on the West. In Oregon, which is one of many states facing an extreme budget crisis, teachers have agreed to work two weeks without pay, thus averting plans to shorten the school year by nearly five weeks. A funding crisis in Texas, where the state share of school financing has reached a 50-year low and is expected to go lower, has local officials preparing for cuts in everything from extracurricular activities and elective subjects (like journalism) to teachers, counselors and nurses. “ Districts across the state have been in a cost-cutting mode for a number of years,” said Karen Soehnge of the Texas Association of School Administrators. “When you continue that cutting over a lengthy period of time, you’re cutting to the bone. We’re concerned because in Texas we have increased standards for student learning. So we have increasing expectations and diminishing resources, two irreconcilable forces.” Similar stories can be heard in state after state. In New York, more than 1,000 students, teachers, administrators and activists traveled to Albany on Tuesday to march against proposed state budget cuts that are so severe they mock the very idea of the sound, basic education the state is obliged by law to provide. Among the banners and signs waved by the students was a placard that showed an American flag and said: “Public Education ‹ An American Dream. A Dream That No One Wants to Pay For.” The superintendent of the Buffalo school system, Marion Canedo, was among those who traveled to Albany. When she talks about the cuts she’s had to make and the cuts currently being considered, her voice has the tone of someone who has just witnessed a chain-reaction auto wreck. “ It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been in the district 35 years,” she said. “I mean we’re looking at crazy things, like a four-day week, no kindergarten, no pre-kindergarten, no sports.” If Gov. George Pataki’s proposed cuts are enacted, the Buffalo schools will be in a $65 million budget hole, with no viable solutions in sight. “ I’ve done everything I could think of,” Ms. Canedo said. “I’ve closed schools. I’ve suspended service at schools. It’s been horrible.” There is no way to overstate the gulf between the need for funding and the reality of funding in urban school districts. And that gulf is widening, not narrowing. Ms. Canedo gave one example of the many extraordinary needs. “I have students who come here as maybe sophomores speaking no English whatsoever,” she said. “We have to make sure they pass the English Regents or they’re not going to have a high school diploma. Our job, our core mission, is to educate, not to warehouse. So we need to give that student extra English all year long.” Education is the food that nourishes the nation’s soul. When public officials refuse to provide adequate school resources for the young, it’s the same as parents refusing to feed their children. It’s unconscionable. It’s criminal. The public school picture across the country is wildly uneven. There are many superb school districts. But there are so many places like Buffalo (including big and small cities and rural areas), where the schools are deliberately starved of the resources they need, and those districts are the shame of a great nation. When it comes to education financing, the divisions among federal, state and local government entities are mostly artificial. It’s everyone’s obligation to educate the next generation of Americans. It’s an insane society that can contemplate devastating and then rebuilding Iraq, but can’t bring itself to provide schooling for all of its young people here at home. Kudos on CASE (partial victory) Dear Substance, Sincerely, Kudos on CASE (partial victory) II Dear Substance, Now what? How will the departure of Marilyn Johnson and the rest of that ilk impact your case? As a result of the new Illinois legislation, will CTU have more influence in dismissal procedures of teachers? Do you believe that these various CPS departures will create a more positive environment for relations between CTU and CPS? Are all of the vestiges of the Chico/Vallas regime gone? Also, I believe that during these times, there must be a more aggressive advertisement of Substance. Many of the elementary school teachers have never heard of Substance. In the high schools many of the teachers are new; ergo, they are not aware of the news within the system. Of course, the other problem is that most of the veteran teachers are very silent on issues. I am very pleased about those Curie teachers who spoke out against CASE. Continue to keep us informed. Good luck. Sincerely,
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