For anyone who still thinks Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and his corporate scriptwriters are trying to improve public education for the majority of children in the third largest city in the USA, we suggest another look at what Daley is doing — not at what he’s saying.    

 Daley’s ‘Renaissance’ and his high school ‘reform’ plans are a frontal attack on democratic public education — hypocritical schemes to enrich the few at the expense of the many and to dismantle hundreds of years of public school traditions. He is  screening a plan to replace as many public schools as possible with private entities, enriching outsiders with no regard for education.

    From the day in April 2002 that Daley announced that he had to “save” Williams, Dodge and Terrell elementary schools in Chicago by forcing a “renaissance” on them, the increasing privatization of Chicago’s public schools has been the policy of the Daley administration and its appointees at CPS a few blocks down the street from Daley’s City Hall office.

    Despite the fact that Daley’s “Renaissance” (which became official policy two years after the initial attacks on Williams, Dodge and Terrell) has been marked by some of the most dishonest public relations this side of President George W. Bush’s WMD claims before invading Iraq in 2003, Daley and his acolytes, with amplification from the corporate press, continues to repeat the lies about “Renaissance 2010” and the claims of miracles since he took over the public schools in 1995.

    Daley’s “miracle” is as credible as the one his colleagues George W. Bush engineered in Texas before Bush took over the White House. Difference is, Daley is still being praised, while Bush is finally being audited. 