Yes, Sullivan High School. There is a Santa Claus. The good news was officially delivered on January 3, 2006, when Dr. Andrew Rowlas, principal since September 2004, was finally removed from the embattled Rogers Park school. His tenure was marked by egregious displays of disrespect towards faculty, staff, the LSC, and even the students, who demonstrated their displeasure with a walkout just before Thanksgiving. Watch for a more detailed follow-up. But now that Rowlas has left Sullivan, the question becomes how many other guys like Rowlas — who had very little Chicago teaching experience, if any — are still running some of Chicago’s major schools. And why?…...............

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As we promised last month, Substance will be publishing the true history of the Chicago Teachers Union — using official documents — on our website each month until the CTU stops Stalinizing its version of its own history. By March 15, you will be able to read the May and June 2004 issues of the Chicago Union Teachers in PDF format at www.substancenews.com. Of course, you should be able to read it at the union’s official website (www.ctunet.com), but that’s as likely, as we’ve already pointed out, as getting an honest curriculum for Russian history in a high school in Tashkent in 1938. Each month, on the 15th, we’ll be checking the CTU website to see if it’s still lying and cheating and stealing you out of your right to an honest compilation of the union’s history. On January 15, the furthest back the union’s newspaper archives went was September 2004 (go to the union website and then to CTU News Archive). Right now, our plan is to develop this true history feature at two months of the union newspaper per month on the web. Depending upon the number of hits we get (and the number of subscribers to Substance who thank us by contributing to this effort), we’ll be adding features like House of Delegates minutes and the annual reports of committees. If that goes over, we’ll add a vast array of media reports on union activities from the days when the union had articulate, intelligent leadership, rather than mumbling greedy thugs at the top…

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… We were glad to find that the Chicago Sun-Times is finally taking an interest in the resumes and qualifications of Chicago’s most expensive public servants — those who run things at “CPS” — but we have a hunch the sleuthing at the Sun-Times will stop short of most of the incompetent hacks now at the top across CPS. These thoughts we inspired by the story (January 17) that a guy with the wonderful name of Yaov Yaakoby had become a “project manager” overseeing school construction based on the fact that his buff wife works as “personal trainer” for Mayor Daley. No matter how you buff, it, Yaakoby, reported to have a BA in “political science” and no other qualifications to oversee multi-million dollar construction jobs, is not the only incompetent who has risen into a $100,000 a year job at CPS or its environs (officially, Yaakoby worked for the “Public Building Commisssion”, which is part of the three-card monty game of funding projects in our town). A year ago, CPS denied a simple Substance Freedom of Information request for the curriculum vitae of everyone working as a principal or assistant principal in a CPS school (public or charter). According to Arne Duncan and Michael Scott, the actual qualifications of CPS administrators are none of the public’s business, even as every parent is getting a letter (or an on-line Internet look) at the “qualifications” of every teacher and teacher aide in the city thanks to “No Child Left Behind.” Now we can understand why the Daley administration wants to cover up this information. After all, if the main reason you got a job overseeing a hundred million in public construction was that your wife was spotting the mayor in bench presses and urging him to grind out another five reps to feel the “burn”, you’d be shy, too. When the information finally becomes public, Chicago will see a scandal in its public schools to make “Hired Truck” sound like sandbox stuff…

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...Is it true that Arne Duncan is hatching plans to put a “military academy” in each of the six high school districts, and that next in line for the honors is gang-infested Farragut “Career Academy” High School, a mile west of the beseiged Collins High School? And is it also true that Arne Duncan and Michael Scott (who lives a few blocks from Collins) originally said that Collins students could attend Farragut (which is much closer to Collins than Crane, where the kids are going), but that Mayor Daley’s people blocked the idea because the plans to militarize Farragut are already moving forward? Finally, we are wondering how many of Farragut’s powerful street gangs will be given the right to troll the “new” military school the way they’ve been blessed, with a few minor restrictions, at the current Farragut. When Farragut gets more militarized, it will give a whole new meaning to the term “recruitment” and make “counter recruitment” a lot more exciting than it’s been for the pacifists who are currently organizing against the militarization of Chicago’s high schools...

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…Everyone who is paying attention knows that Chicago’s charter schools are already becoming a national model — for how to ripoff public dollars. Deregulation has ruined everything from half of China’s drinking water to the ability of people in Chicago to get low priced home heating fuel during the winter, as profits always come before people. And though Chicago has only a couple of charters that are actually trying to make a corporate “profit”, every charter has a corporate stench already. And already, they are bending the rules. Consider the old Yuppie game of “pump and dump.” Pump and dump was played by stock hucksters and had its heyday during the late 1990s and early 00s, just before the crash in stock prices that gave the world billions of dollars in losses (think ENRON, World Com, Adelphia and a dozen others whose CEOs were indicated for starters, then the hundreds that took your money but never broke the law). In a pump and dump scheme, callers would inflate the prices of a stock, then dump millions of shares when it peaked, leaving the rubes holding worthless pieces of paper. Here’s how Chicago charter schools’ pump and dump works. If a charter schools keeps a kid for 20 days, the charter gets the entire semester’s per pupil funding (roughly 90 days). So the charters pump their numbers at the beginning of each semester, then dump the kids back into the local public schools after the 20th day. Since Arne Duncan and his University of Chicago buddies are teary eyed fans of “choice”, “charters,” and similar cons, they don’t even have audits or controls in place to gather the numbers just in case someone might be doing a pump and dump. It’s like California being cheated out of billions of dollars when ENRON ran up electrical prices a couple of years back, or all of us in Chicago being similarly cheated this winter in a similar scheme by Peoples Energy. The difference is, we have agencies who just might catch the crooks when the energy cons pump up our prices. As long as Rich Daley and Arne Duncan are fronting for the crony capitalism of charters and similar cons, the only people who are gathering the numbers of these pump and dump schemes are local public school administrators and teachers — and Substance…

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...We have a couple of questions — among many many many — about those Aspira schools that are proliferating like spring weeds on Chicago’s north side. First, has Arne Duncan bothered to ask whether the students are actually getting those “laptop” computers they were promised (in the case of Mirta Ramirez, more than two years ago). Second, what are the main qualifications for getting a contract to provide “security” at the new Aspira Haugan Middle School? Oh, and one other thought. When a kid at Haugan or Mirta Ramirez is seriously hurt — or worse — because of the expansion of all those street gang problems Aspira Haugan is bringing as the weather gets warmer, will the Chicago Board of Education have to pay damages when the family sues because the Board gave a major new building — and all of its marketing clout — to a group with some very curious community ties?...

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…What do that spoiled George W. Bush and Marilyn Stewart have in common? Three points come to mind for starters. (1) With the help of powerful friends and nasty lawyers, they stole an election, then acted as if they had gotten 90 percent of the vote and began lying about and purging all of those who disagreed with them. (2) They can’t handle real questions from the press or anyone else in the real world, so they surround themselves with fawners and stage media events where they don’t have to face real questions. (3) They lie about most things, but most especially about recent history. So they try to rewrite as much history to reflect their lies as possible (don’t you just love the “Chicago Union Teacher” as posted at www.ctunet. com)? That’s where the history of the union’s newspaper begins in September 2004, after Marilyn had stolen power. Send us your suggestions for continuing this exploration into the New Year. Having reread our accounts of last year, we think we could come up with a couple of these each month until January 2007…

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…Before parents go gushing around town about how neat it is that their “school” has a lot of volunteers working closely with kids, let’s take a second look at the recent Papal discussion of love. For most of us, the phrase “I love children...” is one of the answers to the question “Why are you teaching in a public school?” That kind of “love” is, according to the Pope, Agapetic — the generalized love you’re supposed to feel for other human beings. It’s one of the things that supposedly separates us from the beasts. But what if “I love children...” means the other kind of love — Erotic love? Then we have a problem. One of the reasons why schools were so highly regulated, before Arne Duncan and his orgies of privatization and charterization, was that for a pedophile an open door policy in public schools is like opening the candy store to the sugar junky. Unlimited access to children — and “love.” We’re enjoying hearing from parents and teachers who are beginning to wonder about the affections they hear from charter school hucksters and their quickly assembled staffs. But on the far side of the pulic schools, we also hear that some places with some rather exotic viewpoints on diversity are also opening their doors (and promoting on their websites) every Tom, Harry and Dick who wants to “volunteer” to “work” at the school. By the time this round of deregulation and privatization is over, Chicago’s going to have enough scandals to fill a shelf of books. And since sex scandals are always good for selling tabloid newspapers, we can imagine what the Chicago Sun-Times will do the next time (there have already been first, second and third times) somebody is caught with his hands in the wrong place...

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...According to the Chicago Board of Education, the salary of every employee of CPS is public information, but the salaries of charter school operators and staff are none of your business. That’s “Freedom of Information” in an era of privatization...

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