…Question: When is an arrest not an arrest? Answer: When the Chicago Teachers Union says so.

To virtually every news organization, an “arrest” is when the police take a person into custody and the person can’t leave without the police releasing that person. This common sense distinction is so straightforward in American journalism that most widely used news style books (including the Associated Press, The New York Times, The Los Angels Times, and the Chicago Tribune, all of which we checked as this bizarre story unfolded in Chicago) don’t even think it worth noting in their style books. If a reporter sees the police taking someone away, that person is being arrested as far as a news editor is concerned. An “arrest” takes place when the police take someone into custody and the person can’t leave without the police letting the person go. Indictments, formal charges, bail, and other things are separate from the arrest, which is done by the cop on the scene. An arrest is what happened at Chicago’s Plumbers’ Hall on June 1, 2005. Until September 2005, that common sense definition of an “arrest” was enough for most intelligent people in Chicago — including news reporters and editors. Then the Chicago Teachers Union continued is attempt to rewrite reality to its liking. In a flourish of words, the Chicago Union Teacher, the CTU’s monthly newspaper, ran a news story (without a byline) in its September 2005 issue. The story was headlined “Former president removed from June House meeting.” The CTU “news” report began with the following sentence: “Despite reports to the contrary — including some that appeared in the Chicago media — former CTU President Deborah Lynch was not arrested at the June House of Delegates meeting. Rather, she was removed from the building by police for causing a disturbance.” [Emphasis ours].
Why Substance posted this story on the Web a month early. When the Chicago Union Teacher story appeared, Substance staff decided to post the September Substance (print edition) page one story and photographs of the Lynch arrest on our website (www.substancenews.com, go to “Latest News” then to “Home”). We posted our story and photogaphs immediately so that at least a few additional people would have access to the facts, with the dramatic photographs of the event. By September 17, we were receiving calls from teachers and some honest union members, saying that the union newspaper had published “the truth” and asking why people were continuing to repeat “Debbie Lynch’s lies.” By the middle of September, approximately 40,000 people — the number to whom the Chicago Union Teacher is distributed each month at the members’ expense — were receiving the fictionalized version of “news” being offered by the CTU.

Removal versus arrest in the real world. Removing people from union meetings is nothing new in Chicago. Calling the cops and arresting them is, and that distinction makes a world of difference. As in many other things, the current leaders of the 36,000-member union are making up the rules as they go along and violating standards of decency and honesty that most union members thought were basic to the social contract between the union leaders and its members. Prior to the secret deputization of outsiders for House “security”, order was maintained at Chicago Teachers Union meetings by sergeants at arms. During the Lynch administration, the sergeants at arms came from both major political factions in the union (as UPC member John O’Brill would testify, if under oath). As regulars at Chicago union meetings know, from time to time the union’s sergeants at arms have removed people from the meetings because those people became disruptive. For a few months last year, it was common for one particular union member to be led to the lobby of Plumbers Hall within an hour after the meeting began. His removal was usually because he was cat calling and shouting from the “Visitor’s Section.” The “Visitor’s Section” is where the members who are not delegates are supposed to sit. Prior to the publication of the September issue of the Chicago Union Teacher and its distribution at Union expense to more than 40,000 people (including all union members and every elected official in Illinois), to be “removed from the … House meeting…” meant that the sergeants at arms escorted a person out. No cops.

An unprecedented attack on union democracy. Never in anyone’s memory had the police been called to “remove” a union member from a union meeting — until June 2005 when Marilyn Stewart’s team called the cops on Debbie Lynch. Substance — along with the Chicago Tribune and at least one TV station — joined the “media” that reported, accurately, that the Stewart administration had had Lynch arrested. During the 20 minutes to a half-hour or more when Lynch was in police custody, she was not allowed to exit the vehicle. She would have been restrained by police (and probably faced an additional charge of “resisting arrest”) had she attempted to do so. In anybody’s book (and in any media style book) that’s an arrest. The Orwellian locutions and fictional news reports issued by the Chicago Teachers Union don’t change that. The circulation of those fictions (along with made-up quotes and made up “facts” — including one fictional quote attributed to Lynch herself) to more than 40,000 people compound the dishonesty that is disgracing the once proud union. As the mendacious machinations of the Stewart administration, led in many cases by its million dollar lawyers (one of whom we photographed in the midst of the arrest) continue, we will do our best to report them, in our print edition and on the Internet, every month. Feel free to join our reporting staff if you wish. Or join those whose “Letters to the Editor” are making Substance and even more vibrant source of truth in a swirling tsunami of lies and spin from City Hall, from the Board of Education, and from the Merchandise Mart offices of the Chicago Teachers Union…

News” section beginning next month. Each month we are going to publish the most creative excuse given by the union’s staff for selling out your members. Share your favorite stories here..

…If there was ever an example of the Gang that Couldn’t Shoot Straight, it’s the current bunch running the Chicago Teachers Union. On a weekly basis, the CTU sends out information that thousands of people rely on. On a weekly basis, the CTU has to correct the information it sends out because the information sent out the first time is wrong. Typical from September was the “Who’s on First?” comedy about the ERO, a very important topic for thousands of teachers between the ages of 55 and 60. On September 15, for example, CTU members received the following note: “Please be advised that there is an error in the September Legislative Update pertaining to the ERO. A teacher must be at least 55 years old to take advantage of the ERO. The update should read: ‘450 teachers ill be able to take early retirement without the penalties imposed by being younger than 60 or having fewer than 33.95 years of teaching.’”

…One of the more mind-boggling examples of the racism of the Daley administration has Arne Duncan as an unlikely collaborator. We’re talking about the demolition of basketball sites north of North Ave. and the careful planning — by CPS, the Park District, and the Public Building Commission, among other outposts of the Daley Dictatorship — of recreational venues that do not have outdoor basketball facilities. It’s an open secret around City Hall that Daley has ordered that basketball hoops not be installed in locations where the “majority” population doesn’t seem to play as much basketball as people in other parts of town. But Arne Duncan himself is proof that white guys can jump, if they are given the chance. Let’s go from the nitty to the gritty. At Portage Park (Irving and Central) on Chicago’s northwest side, there are no outdoor basketball hoops for kids to play. Portage Park has a “Nature Walk” where people can find unusual procreative activities going on among the dominant mammals, hear exotic language from Eminem wannabes, and catch an herbal whiff of hemp by-products many hours of the days and nights. That’s OK. But for some reason, outdoor basketball isn’t. There is an indoor gym there. As you swing across the north side (i.e., north of North Ave.), the same proves true for many parks and school play areas. No outdoor basketball. Go to where the African American people are, however, and you suddenly see hoops sprouting like sludge water in the poorer wards of New Orleans…

...No, Arne Duncan did not get his job through the same agency that provided Michael Brown to FEMA. Although Duncan was as unqualified to lead a major urban public school system as the ‘Arabian Horse’ was to lead the nation’s emergency management systems, Duncan knows better than to ad lib when reporters are around. But Richard M. Daley, the only qualification Duncan needs to keep his job, is no more loyal to his minions than George W. Bush is to his...

…Considering that he has a lucrative lifetime appointment and is now in an emeritus position, U.S. District Chief Judge Charles Kocoras doesn’t need to spend as much time cultivating his media image as he does. As things heat up in the segregation case now before him and Kocoras nudges closer to giving his stamp of approval to the most massively segregated school system in the USA, maybe he’d at least pay attention to some of the other facts he misses regularly when he pontificates. Twice in the past two months, Kocoras has stated that finances are “tight” at the Chicago Board of Education. That’s simply not true. Kocoras’s untrue version of public school finances in Chicago is no excuse to deny poor kids an extra $17 or $34 million (out of a total budget of $5,000 million — $5 billion — remember), as the Board of Education is asking Kocoras to do. Apparently Kocoras reads the papers too much and the balance sheets too little (although we know from his case record that he is easily able to understand when accountants are lying in corporate malfeasance cases). With the Chicago Board of Education generating cash “reserves” of between $150 million and $250 million annually for the past several years, the question isn’t whether the money is there but how it’s going to be spent (or in the case of the reserves, not spent). Chicago, with Kocoras’s blessings, will doubtless keep its position as Number One in what our colleague Jonathan Kozol calls “American Apartheid.” We don’t think Kocoras has to add his imprimatur to the Board of Education’s Enronesque budget fictions as well…

…In the coming months, Substance will try to publish a “Memo of the Month” from a prominent Chicago Board of Education bureaucrat. Although we might consider publishing some of the sillier stuff that comes from principals, we find more interesting (and semi-illiterate) materials at ‘higher’ levels. The infamous “Pittman Memo” of mid-September 2005 (denying high schools new teachers) qualifies. Fax or Email them to us at 773-725-7503 or Csubstance @aol.com...