For the fourth year in a row, Mayor Daley’s handpicked school board and handpicked school executives — none of whom would be allowed to serve as teachers (let alone executives) in any school system in Illinois outside of Chicago — have told the world it has to close schools in order to save them.

In 2003, Arne Duncan, then in office a little over a year, patted himself on the back and dictated fulsome praise from the reactionary editorial boards of the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune, by announcing the closing of Williams, Dodge and Terrell elementary schools. Despite the facts showing that two of the schools (Dodge and Williams) should have been given additional assistance, Duncan and the Board destroyed the schools, and with them the lives of the majority of teachers and students in them.

In 2004, the targeted schools in question were a dozen on the near south side, plus others for a variety of pretexts. Ignoring warnings that the freezing of 9th grade at Austin and Calumet high schools would set off a chain reactioin disrupting more than a dozen other schools, Duncan attacked Austin and Calumet and got away with it. The predicted fallout is still being felt by schools as far from the original blasts as Clemente (on the north side) and Chicago Vocational (on the south side). Both of these, and dozens of others, have had to cope with the problems created by the addition of students from the schools that have “frozen” out their freshmen classes.

In 2005, the victims were another list of inner city schools, most of them segregated for African American children.

And now it’s 2006, and another group of schools are slated for closing. The victims are (mainly) Morse, Faraday, and Farrezn elementary schools and Collins High School. Again, Duncan has told the world that he has to do this for the children. Amid another round of lurid talking points, Duncan, Board of Education President Michael Scott, and their public relations handlers claim that the only way to “save” the children at these schools is to close the schools, disperse the children, destroy parental power (in the form of Local School Councils), and lie about the results.

Yes, lie.

Every time Duncan has done this, the majority of the children and teachers have had their lives and careers disrupted or even destroyed. The first year of this fiasco, when children were transferred from Dodge to Grant (among other schools) one of the first things that happened to the Dodge children was that they were attacked — physically — by the children from Grant. The Grant kids, not knowing any better, blamed the Dodge kids for making their school “dumber.” After all, the logic went, the kids who were being closed out because their school was “dumb” were not about to help another struggling school get “better.”

Less than two years after Grant was used by Duncan to “save” the kids from Dodge, Duncan closed Grant. A few months ago, Duncan turned the Grant building into the “Phoenix Military Academy”. The attempt to keep “Phoenix” inside the “Orr High School Campus” (another story, for another time) had failed, and Duncan had shuttered Grant just in time to accommodate Phoenix, another of Mayor Daley’s fascist fantasies.

A month ago, Duncan claimed that the closing and reopening of schools had “helped” the kids.

This is a lie.

What Duncan has done, with the help of his corporate friends, is purchased a couple of reams of dubious “research” which he trots out to prove his points until people demand that he provide all the information and details. Then Duncan says: “I’ll get back to you on that” and never does. At this point in history, the number of “research” mercenaries available to cook the educational books to fit Duncan’s mendacious version of reality is dwindling almost as fast as the number of CIA analysts who will tell the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction three years ago.

Duncan’s lies are many, but the biggest and most ugly at this point in history is the lie that claims that the children who have been destroyed by his school closings have actually been helped. If this month achieves nothing else, ending that lie will make all the effort worth it.