…QUESTION: When is a lawyer not a lawyer? ANSWER: When it is being counted by Catalyst in a report on CPS administrative staff cuts. Catalyst retained its position as one of the top apologists for corporate lies about Chicago’s public schools with the following report in its April edition: “CPS Reorganization.

 Central office will undergo yet another reorganization, this time in an effort to cut $25 million in administrative costs… When the reorganization is complete this summer, central office will have trimmed its management hierarchy from nine lawyers to five…” Wow! That’s a big cut in lawyers! If it’s true. Which it isn’t. In late May, CPS had more than 40 people (known as “attorneys” and “counsel”) in its Law Department, which anyone can visit on the 7th Floor at 125 S. Clark St. Chicago is the town that used to pride itself on training reporters (before they became “journalists”) in the boot camp of the old City News Bureau (now dead). The editors at City News used to drum into novices the mantra “Check it out!” There was even a motto: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” That was back before journalists became corporate propagandists. That was before we had “school reform” and constant public relations style adulation for all the things Mayor Daley has done to the schools from the foundation courtesans who write and edit publications like Catalyst. Maybe it’s the word “lawyer” that confused the Catalystas. The Chicago Board of Education is stuffed with “attorneys” and “counsels”, but no one who sports the title “Lawyer.” The problem is that the Board of Education doesn’t list anyone as a “lawyer” in its budgets or position files. A visit to the 7th Floor at 125 S. Clark St. would find a lot more attorneys than Catalyst would have its public believe are there. At the present time, CPS has one “CORP COUNSEL” (a lawyer named Patrick Rocks, at $153,000 a year). CPS also has one “FIRST ASST ATTY” (lawyer James Bebley, at $138,000 per year) and seven ASSOC ATTYs (lawyers all; we won’t list all of them, but their pay ranges from $110,000 per year to $129,000 per year). That’s a total of nine people working in the Law Dept. with three titles indicating they probably do law for a living. But the Law Dept. also lists at least five people with the title SNR ASST ATTRNY (we assume that means “Senior Assistant Attorney”) at salaries of between $90,000 per year and $110,000 per year. And that’s not all. In the current CPS position file, the Board also lists, by name, at least 28 individuals with the job title ASST ATTORNEY (which we assume means “Assistant Attorney”). Salaries this year for an “ASST ATTORNEY” range from about $70,000 to more than $100,000. We did this Subscript quickly and didn’t actually walk through the 7th Floor to check it out and count the lawyers. But we have a hunch the 7th floor hasn’t been vacated since CORP COUNSEL Marilyn Johnson went to work at the Illinois Tollway more than four years ago. We suspect our quick count has left out several lawyers in the Law Department. We’ve also left out some lawyers who are working in other departments (Special Ed comes to mind). We’ve also left out some people with more exotic job titles working in the Law Department. But next time Catalyst’s editors want to continue their cheerleading for Arne Duncan’s “administrative cuts”, we’d advise them to pick on something a little less obvious that the massive number of lawyers and legal types that fill the entire 7th Floor at the corporate HQ of CPS. It’s just to easy to count the number and discover just how bad Catalyst is at math. Our suspicion is, however, that this is just one small part of their overall job, which is to provide constant propaganda on behalf of corporate school reform in Chicago…

…We thought that Chicago’s loss would be Florida’s gain and that the preaching would finally be far enough away from here so that we wouldn’t have to listen to Mike Klonsky repeating his talking points about the virtues of “small schools.” Alas, we were mistaken. The Blogosphere and all that. In recent weeks, Klonsky has been in full throat. He claims in his blog that school violence would be reduced if there were fewer security people in the schools (honest, that’s the only conclusion you can reach reading his recent post about Clemente High School). He’s also said that Cicero would be gang and weapon-free in its newest school if only the town had listened to Klonsky and created a half dozen or so “small” schools instead of the new middle school the town does have. Klonsky’s foray into Cicero was prompted by the finding of a gun on a student at the new middle school. According to Klonsky, the gun wouldn’t have gotten into the school if the school had been officially “small.” Like a lot of other theological arguments, this one rests on faith, rather than on evidence. But when you take together two of the latest Klonskyian claims – that Clemente has too many cops and that Cicero would be safer with smaller middle schools – you wonder how that works. It was school security in Cicero that found the gun. It’s been school security at Clemente that people have been demanding more of, not less. Ah! if only the schools had embraced the religion of “small schools” everything would be fine, gangs would disappear from Chicago’s streets and schools and... Right…

…The way the right wing repeats its talking points, you’d think that children would be crushed every day as teachers run out of the schools at three o’clock in the afternoon, jumping over children to get into their cars and zoom away. We were reminded of how much the “debate” over educational choice is dominated by a new breed of lies – urban myths? – like the teachers running home by the May 14 edition of “60 Minutes” which sandwiched another charter school huckster between Andy Stern (of the Service Employees International Union) and the Dixie Chicks. Stern heads a union that is trying to organize the unorganized, and was talking about that. The Dixie Chicks are making a country music comeback after being bombarded with hatred by the right wingers for criticizing George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq. In the middle, “60 Minutes” put another advertorial for charter schools, this one coming from Harlem (New York). As usual, one of the talking points against public schools and their evil unions was that the teachers rush to the doors at 3:00 and can’t be fired like they were “hands” during the days of Charles Dickens. We’ve heard that urban legend as close to home as an Arne Duncan press conference at Good Counsel High School (er., Chicago International Charter School Northtown Campus) and as far away as an op ed in the Los Angeles Times by one of David Horowitz’s clones. First time we heard it in Chicago, though, was 20 years ago, when Marva Collins was developing the first versions of what has since become a right wing script. Collins, whose frauds were first exposed in the pages of Substance, tailored her scripts to those who funded her, denouncing public schools and unions as her fame spread (in part, thanks to “60 Minutes”, which did an uncritical feature on her in the early days of the Reagan administration). These same union teachers were running out the door of the same public schools into the same parking lots in the same way on “60 Minutes” back then as they were on May 14, 2006. Too bad “60 Minutes” doesn’t do some fact checking when the latest right wing ideologue pushes another version of the same old song. At least in the case of the Dixie Chicks, the music is new…

…One of the saddest phrases to anyone with heart goes: “Every man (or woman) has his price.” As the Board of Education goes through another quarter of cuts, we read that phrase and think of Chicago’s principals and all the good they might have done. The fact is, the median salary for Chicago’s 600 public school principals is now $114,811 per year. The highest paid principals now make $132,000 per year, while the lowest-paid are making $100,000 per year. (Eight are listed at slightly less than $100,000 per year). The median salary for assistant principals (who were made part of “management” by CPS in the early days of corporate “school reform”) is now $93,206 per year. Assistant principals now range in pay from $79,000 per year to $107,000 per year. As we answer the phone at Substance and hear another story about some stupid central office program that principals are cramming down the throats of classroom teachers, we realize the Mephistophelean logic to what the Board did when it reorganized management at the local school level. Once upon a time they (or almost all of them) were classroom teachers. They knew you can’t do those crazy things in a real world of children and too few teachers. But once they began getting six figures (and the hopes of the pension that would flow from that if they kissed up long enough), they shelved their experience and became company people. The final betrayal usually comes when someone in “management” sells out the last handful of friends she had when she was a teacher. Most principals in Chicago (still) were once classroom teachers (although that number is dwindling with all the new management methods). They know better than to try some of the things they are forcing teachers to do. It’s a question of philosophy — and the “bottom line” of those six figure salaries. The handful of principals who aren’t reading “Management Secrets of Attila the Hun” or attending those Paedia seminars on “The Prince” are few and far between. We’d like to hear from our readers about both types over the coming months. At what point did you realize that a former friend had sold you out? We’ll let you know the precise price he received, including what his pension is if he sold out his friends and school ten years ago, back when Paul Vallas was first “reconstituting” high schools to save them...

…Subscripts hears that teachers at the Rickover Naval Academy, currently housed within Senn High School, constantly bad mouth the students and teachers at Senn. It was to be expected. “Good Teacher/ Bad Teacher” is one of the oldest divide-and-conquer games in the books. And isn’t the whole New Schools thing a divide-and-conquer tactic poised on the edge of an even bigger teacher bashing and union busting scenario? After all, if teachers at Northside and Payton are allowed (even encouraged) to bad mouth their colleagues at schools that don’t have the privilege of selecting only the highest scoring (and usually most middle class) kids, why should anyone get angry at the Navy militarists for doing the same things from inside Senn?…

… Alderman Marge Laurino and her political buddies are getting ready to create a third scab school in Laurino’s 39th Ward. Isn’t it time that the Chicago Teachers Union stop playing footsie with Laurino, State Rep. Rich Bradley, and the other northside politicians who are trying to have it both ways? Laurino and Bradley supported the Aspira-Haugan charter school (and, more quietly, the conversion of Good Counsel) despite the fact that they knew the schools would be run as anti-union things...