The day of the Tribune editorial, we were preparing a story that even shocked some of our more jaded reporters. Over the past three weeks, we discovered that the remaining public high schools in Chicago — including the magnet schools and high schools in the city’s few middle class communities (like Taft and Morgan Park) — were all facing the same insurmountable problems. While privatized entities (even those run by convicted sex criminals) are praised in the corporate press, the attack on public high schools escalates, backed by millions of dollars from the the world’s richest guy, Bill Gates and prattle from pitchmen and propagandists.

Staff cuts and programming straight jackets — ranging from dozens at places like Steinmetz High School on the Northwest Side to more than a dozen at most public high schools — have created a situation where the high schools are going to spend the first weeks of October starting over, as we report in our page one story. For many (if not most) Chicago public high school students, October will be the first time they get the teachers they will have in their classes all semester and the books they will be studying every night at home (if there are enough books to go around at their schools).

To add a truly idiotic but contemporary cachet to this entire public relations monstrosity, Arne Duncan’s staff (which now includes dozens of Yuppies with no urban high school teaching experience) has declared that all advanced courses — Advanced Placement (AP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) — have to have 28 students in each class even if only a dozen kids are really ready for that level of study. Principals are forced to pad the classes or cut back. While suburban kids are in AP classes of 15 or 20, city kids are jammed in classes called “AP” with double that number. So the city’s best high schools — Lincoln Park, Northside, Von Steuben — are screwed, too. Duncan’s fraud won’t show until the results of the AP exams come in — July 2006, long after the damage has been done. By then, there will be another pirouette of spin and mendacity from City Hall and the propagandists at 125 S. Clark St.

More and more of the city’s general high schools have been forced to admit — even in the face of increasing pressure mouth New Age clichés about “High Expectations” — that only a handful of 11th and 12th graders in their schools have enough prior training and knowledge to really do AP and IB work in subjects like calculus or literature, Duncan’s boys and girls, unimpeded by real world experience, repeat lines from teacher-bashing scripts like “Stand and Deliver.”

“Students will rise to our level of expectations,” Don Pittman, the former basketball coach who is now the chief of the city’s high schools, told Substance September 19. Hollywood clichés are now policy. While Pittman would never have put a short, overweight asthmatic 14-year-old on a basketball court against his rivals from King High School 20 years ago, he now proclaims that English, math, science and social studies teachers should do the equivalent of that. And the media ignore the reality. Stupid is a mild term for this. But that’s one thing Richie Daley — and his regime — have always been.