Subscripts

…Nobody who survived the political and media rape of Jones Commercial High School at the end of the Vallas era will be surprised to hear that former Jones “College Prep” principal (and night stalker of teachers’ desks) Cynthia Barron is now on the Alpha list of AIOs to facing regime change. It should come as small comfort to Barron to have been praised by Arne Duncan at the April Board of Education meeting. (Teachers from Williams school still remember how Arne and just about everybody else was singing the praises of Williams less than six months before they mendaciously announced the school was being closed as one of “Chicago’s worst” last April). Barron should take heart, even if in a small way. As Substance readers — and fans of former Intervention blatherer JoAnn Roberts — know, even the craziest top dogs at “CPS” never get fired or demoted; they simply go into other high-paying jobs where their bullying and BS are less in the public eye. Out in AIO land, it’s a now a very close competition between Barron and Joyce Bristow for the top spot on the list of hyperventilating teacher bashing meddlers who are trying to turn the AIO scam into another stage on which to bully teachers and principals. Our sources hear that Barron will edge out Bristow (now that Lee Brown has taken a medical departure from her AIO position). Among the other reasons for Barron’s being atop the list is the delicacy with which the Duncan administration goes about its political correctnesses. Barron’s bizarre, teacher-bashing intensity probably would get her the nod despite Bristow’s smarmy charms. The real question is when the Board of Education is going to admit that the AIO plan doesn’t work. It was a like giving the zoo a three-headed pig with its four hands alternating between nose picking and rubbing the usually private areas of its body in public. That’s clearly not the kind of animal you’d want to display in front of the public for too long (even in a town like Chicago where most reporters have been embedded with the ruling class for so long they are being treated for chronic bed sores)…

…One of the most interesting things about Chicago is how difficult it is to get the simplest questions answered when those in power don’t want the answers to become public. Back in February, Substance asked how many chauffeurs were driving around the top dogs of the CPS this year. Fans of politicians’ perks will remember the following. A couple of years ago, Channel 7 — in a rare burst of interest in the self-serving priorities of the Vallas - Chico administration — revealed that the Board’s chieftains were being ferried around town by very highly paid Board drivers in very expensive Board cars. The privileged then included Paul Vallas, Blondean Davis, Gery Chico, and Cozette Buckney. Like many of our counterparts in the news business, Channel 7 seems to have assumed that once the story was told the necessary corrections would be made (viz., no more automotive and bodyguard perks for the top dogs). So in February (2003) we asked about the situation. Turns out, there are still six Board security guys (they’re all guys) making between $60,000 and $80,000 last year for ferrying the top dogs around town. Corrections seem to have been made, however — but only in the job titles used to describe the people doing the driving. They once were “School Security Supervisors.” Now they are called “Security Equipment Technicians”. Their jobs? Driving around the top dogs. But if you look for the jobs in the budget, you don’t find any, so the Orwellian hair splitters in City’s Hall’s propaganda ministries (that’s a definite plural) can honestly say there are no “drivers”, “bodyguards,” or “chauffeurs” on the school board budget. There is also a question of how many top officials of the school system are (or have been) driving cars provided to them at taxpayer expense. But that seems to be an even greater mystery than the definition of “bodyguard.” In response to the same Freedom of Information request (tendered in February), an April 8 letter to Substance from the Board also said: “A list of individuals being provided with leased automobiles will be forwarded to you as information becomes available…” Somebody must have the information somewhere. Or do the friends and neighbors of Arne Duncan and Barbara Eason-Watkins who get hired for those administrative jobs just line up and drive out in Board automobiles as part of their package of perks?

…Since nobody ever gets to see the questions Chicago (and Illinois) asked on our high-stakes tests — unless you’re willing to risk getting sued for $1 million, like we did — it’s not possible for concerned citizens to vet the tests and prove that sometimes they are not all they are cracked up to be. We were recently reminded of the necessity of openness in testing by two news reports, one last month from Georgia and one late last year from Massachusetts. On March 28 (2003), the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (in an article headlined “Print errors limit use of school test — Questions from practice exam repeated) reported: “The state’s most important standardized exam — the Criterion-Referenced Competency Test — will be given to only fourth-, sixth- and eighth-graders this year after printing errors were discovered in the exams.… The state curriculum test, known as the CRCT, was scheduled to be given to all public school students in first through eighth grades in April. But State Superintendent of Schools Kathy Cox announced Thursday that some questions that schools used in practice exams were also printed on the regular test. The problem was first discovered in late February….” Guess who makes the Georgia test (and some of the test prep materials Georgia school districts spend book money on instead of giving kids books)? Riverside Publishing, the same outfit that gets more than $1 million per year from Chicago for the Iowa tests. We love the next part: “Cox said it’s not clear if it was a problem with Riverside or the company that had the contract before it — Measured Progress. But questions that were supposed to be secured for the actual exam got mixed with practice questions. As state educators were proofreading the test for this year’s exams, some teachers recognized the questions.” The result? Nearly 600,000 Georgia students won’t take the test this year… Meanwhile, an alert high school student helped get scores raised on the math part of the Massachusetts “MCAS” test after she discovered that one question had two correct answers. Last December 5, the Boston Herald reported that Jennifer Mueller “found a second correct answer to a question on the MCAS exam she took last spring…” The Herald didn’t explain how the $15 million exam could have had such a boo boo in it — or how thousands of teachers who administered the test (under threats of termination if they violated “secrecy”) could have missed the error… We don’t have such problems in Chicago (or Illinois). Here, the tests and the companies that produce them are perfect, which is why the tests are TOP SECRET. In the Land of Lincoln,x all we have to do is sit down, shut up, and take their word for it when the scores come out…