…This month we begin our discussion of Dumb Duncan Digits (DDDs). We think there will be enough of these to take up a few lines every month. DDDs are memorialized here in honor of British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, who said, “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” In Chicago, we have DDDs. At the Board of Education, DDDs are Duncan digits.

 At City Hall, they are Daley’s. Either way, they are stupid numbers fed into a gullible press by politicians whose aim is to obscure not clarify reality. Take the ratio of applicants per seat in Chicago’s selective enrollment schools. This has been an almost pornographic fascination of the Chicago Sun-Times and its various education writers. Trouble with the number is it pretends to tell you something about whether a particular school is desirable when all it tells you is that the people quoting it are either (a) mendacious, (b) innumerate, or (c) all of the above. If a school has 100 seats and gets 1,000 applications, 900 more children want to go there than get in. What if the school has 1,000 seats and 9,000 applications (which means that 8,000 additional kids want to get in)? According to the DDDs, school A is more desirable than school B because 10 ‘times’ as many kids want to go to school A than there are seats, while school B has only nine ‘times’ as many kids wanting to go there. Look more closely at those numbers. In the real world, 8,000 more kids want to go to School B than to School A, but the Sun-Times rendition of these DDDs makes it seems like School A is “better.” How does this work in the real world? In the real world — where Lane Tech is taking 1,000 kids and Whitney Young is taking 600 kids into their 9th grade classes — DDDs make it seem that the much smaller Payton and Jones are “better” — even though fewer kids are applying to Payton and Jones. Chicago’s been like this for a long time…

…Every month, the Chicago Teachers Union is treating members of its House of Delegates to a fawning speech supporting CTU President Marilyn Stewart from somebody in the “labor movement.” The script for that speech — whether it’s delivered by Illinois Federation of Teachers President James Dougherty, Chicago Federation of Labor President Dennis Gannon, or some other luminary — requires that the person delivering the speech repeat, over and over, that Marilyn Stewart is a true leader of labor and not simply a greedy puppet for the greedy old leaders of the union. We were originally hoping that delegates would just get up at some point during one of these patronizing effusions and start laughing until the whole thing was cancelled, but that’s apparently not about to happen. Meanwhile, CTU continues to lie about its own history in its newspaper, on its website, and just about everywhere else it can. Beginning now, we will report on whether CTU has begun to put up on its website copies of the Chicago Union Teacher were produced between July 2001 and June 2004, when Deborah Lynch was union president and the current officers (Stewart, Dallas, Ochoa, McGuire, and Porter) were childishly disrupting monthly union meetings in their pursuit of power and profit. (Reread our reports — or better yet the transcripts of the meetings — if you don’t think “childish” is the best adjective for what they were doing for three years). Once a month, we’re going to check the CTU website and see if the actual history is being posted there. As of January 4, 2006, the last issue of the Chicago Union Teacher on the CTU website was dated September 2004, when history officially began. That issue features the “new” union leadership on Page One. A historian would get the impression that the union, which began in 1936, had no history prior to September 2004. As a service to readers who want a more complete history, Substance is considering posting the Chicago Union Teacher prior to September 2004 in PDF format on our website, going back from June 2004. If we get enough interest (and that has to include subscriber calls, e-mails, and subscriptions saying “Do it”), we’ll begin to correct the official version of CTU history so that delegates don’t have to listen to all those claptrap speeches about how great Marilyn is without an antidote. The mendacious version of CTU history is available on the Chicago Teachers Union website (www.ctu net.com). By March, with enough support, we’ll start doing this if the CTU’s dishonesty doesn’t end. For now, you can get a more complete version of recent CTU history by going to the Substance website (www.substance news.com) and reading our monthly union news reports. We’ll let you know if the CTU sues us for “copyright infringement” for making the truth available to the public. It’s possible, since the leaders of the CTU — like the leaders of CPS — believe in the Big Lie and in ruthlessly distorting history. After all, we’ve been attacked (and sued for ‘copyright’) before for publishing the truth. How do you spell CASE?…

…Red baiting after watching “Good Night and Good Luck”? Question of the Month. About what aspect of public education in Chicago in 2005 was the following said by Arne Duncan: “It lacks integrity. It’s a communistic system that doesn’t help anyone…” Was this said about Chicago’s practice of hiring top public school executives — with no training, certification, or experience in public schools — into jobs that pay $100,000 or more because they came “down from the Hall” and were part of the ruling political party (like top executives were hired in Moscow, in, say, 1975)? No. Was the “communistic practice” the trend of hiring political bosses — Chicago commissars — rather than experienced educators to run the third largest school system in the USA? That’s what’s happened in Chicago since Mayor Richard Daley appointed his hand picked budget flunky and all-around commissar and fixer Paul Vallas to run “CPS” in 1995. If anything, Duncan’s more of a flunky and less qualified than Vallas. No. Hiring incompetent cronies like Arne Duncan is not a “communistic system” in Chicago in 2005. Might then this newly discovered form of “communism” in Chicago consists of giving away public school buildings worth tens of millions of dollars to groups with strange ideologies (but who are loyal to the maximum leader) like Arne Duncan has been doing with schools as disperate as the New Haugan (where students now have to adhere to the precepts of a thing called “Aspira”) or the old Good Counsel (rehashed as “Chicago International Charter School, Northtown Campus”), but will the same Catholic teachers and administrators as it was when it was Good Counsel and a Catholic School? No! Was this “Communism” perhaps the practice of putting more and more children and teenagers into military uniforms and marching them around militaristically while giving an increasingly militarized curriculum to the rest of them — like the Nazi Hitler Youth or the Communist Young Pioneers?No! The “communism” referred to by Arne Duncan (as reported in the December 28, 2005, Chicago Tribune) is the “Communistic” way Chicago public school principals have been evaluating tenured Chicago classroom teachers. Duncan uncovered the Stalinistic scheme and joined with CTU President Marilyn Stewart at the end of 2005 announcing a plan to root it out…

…Arne Duncan can call the evaluation of tenured and certified teachers by certified principals in Chicago a Commie Plot, but nothing’s said about the fact that Duncan and his cronies are the most unqualified, overpaid, and undersupervised group of executives in the history of public education in Chicago. The only basis Duncan and his master Richie Daley has for evaluating the top executives at CPS is political croneyism — just like in Moscow back in the days of the Communist dictatorship. The hiring and performance of Duncan’s executive staff (and all of them are now being paid more than $100,000 a year) are based on a totalitarian political model. Under corporate “school reform” nowadays, the “CEO model” is not dictatorship, but efficiency. Arne Duncan didn’t get his present job on merit or by holding an Illinois superintendent’s license or learning the ropes teaching school. He’s a fraud and a factotum who reads carefully prepared scripts from the Ministry of Truth. And the infection has been spreading. Under corporate Chicago’s (and Mayor Daley’s) “Renaissance 2010” plan, you have a better chance of getting to run a “public” school if you’re a Catholic zealot (the bunch at Good Counsel on the north side; Paul Adams and his cohorts at Bunche) than if you have worked in a public school with democratic public school credentials, public school experience, and public school values. Totalitarian propagandists of the 20th Century always said that if you are propounding a lie, tell it loud and tell it often. The key was controlling the mass media. With the help of the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, and the rest of the corporate propagandists, Arne Duncan let loose a whopper with that “communism” quote on December 28. He should have been laughed out of town. Instead of yelping for Duncan’s scalp in editorials and commentaries, however, Chicago’s corporate media commissars continue to hail “CEO” Arne Duncan and all the other works of Duncan’s dictator, Richard M. Daley…

…It’s a good thing Dennis Gannon, president of the Chicago Federation of Labor (CFL), didn’t go into the December Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) meeting from the front entrance to Plumbers Hall — or he might have had to turn around and leave. Why? Scab printing. Had Gannon entered from Washington St., rather than the parking lot, he would have noticed that Marilyn Stewart was engaging in a form of scabbing against some fellow unionists who are prominent CFL members. The leaflet distributed by Stewart’s United Progressive Caucus (UPC) at the Washington St. door didn’t have a union bug on it. Nor did it indicate “Labor Donated.” Under such circumstances, Gannon would have been forced to say something other than that strange speech which praised Stewart robotically every five sentences. Once upon a time, he’d have had to walk out of the meeting. In some eyes, scab printing is the equivalent of scabbing. Ironically, this violation of Union Label rules by Stewart’s UPC came just two months after Stewart, in the pages of the CTU newspaper, made a big deal about union printing. For those who need more info, we have links on the Substance website...