For the past several years, we’ve watched, sometimes in awe, at the facility with which those who run Chicago’s public schools lie both in public and private. One day, it’s Board President Michael Scott telling some of his west side neighbors three years ago at Flower Vocational High School that he had no plans to dismantle Flower. A year or two later, it’s Michael Scott telling the parents of autistic children from LeMoyne school that he knows of no plans to disperse their program and put InterAmerican Magnet School into the LeMoyne building. Or it could be Michael Scott listening to teachers from Calumet High School explain the school’s gang problems in May 2004, then turning around a month later amid great fanfare to attack the school by closing off 9th grade (“We’re only going to do this for one year...”) and basically spreading the problem across the south side from Julian to Hyde Park and Kenwood.   

Or maybe the lie is Arne Duncan standing beside Congressman Jan Schakowsky in the pulpit of a north side church one year ago telling more than 400 people from the Senn High School community that his plans for a “naval academy” within Senn would not take anything away from Senn.

After several years of tracking and sometimes reporting each of the individual lies these guys and their underlings have been telling around Chicago, we continue to do that part. But it’s really a waste of everyone’s time to track down each lie when you finally know that these guys are simply liars.

Someone should make up stamps — “Lie,” “Big Lie”, “Whopper!” — to stamp on official documents coming from the Chicago Board of Education or utterings of the CEO, the Board President, and their many many overpaid and undercompetent minions. Recent years have witnessed a crisis of credibility among those who have run America most powerful institutions. Scooter Libby; President Bush’s “Iraq War Won!”(May 2, 2003 headlines); Duncan and Scott — it’s the same.