Would you like to see first-hand why the issue of charter schools in Chicago is so contentious?

A proud charter school mom says she wants fully equal funding for charters – dollar for dollar – the same as traditional public schools.

A proud public school mom says charters get loads of outside funding, don’t perform statistically better than the traditional schools, and they drain many of the more engaged students away, leaving the neighborhood schools with an even higher percentage of troubled kids and special education students.

Antoinette Sea-Gerald represents a brand new organization, Charter Parents United, that was funded by corporate donations and whose logistical support is being largely provided by a well-established, powerfully-connected issues-management firm with close ties to Mayor Emanuel. CPU held a major rally at the federal plaza on May 8 that attracted upwards of 7,000 matching -t-shirt-clad people, mostly charter students bused in with their teachers and some parents.

Wendy Katten helped found Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education.  She and her group have done exhaustive research on CPS funding, schools closings and the impact of charters.

Also on our panel, respected Chicago journalist Curtis Black (Newstips.org), who has reported extensively on CPS budgeting, the schools closing controversy, the teachers strike, the CTU, the charter movement and many other related topics.

Although charters dominated our discussion, we also talked about the looming schools closure vote. Katten explains some of the research her group has done and the way in which class size has been disregarded in so many of the calculations about which schools to close.  Raise Your Hand concludes many of the schools on the CPS list should not be closed in the interests of student achievement, academic progress, student safety and negligent fiscal savings.

Why is Cook County Jail suddenly reaching the bursting point? It’s at capacity, when its population had been declining in recent years.  Well, it’s partly because we seem to be locking more people up, but it’s also because Cook County is releasing fewer people into electronic monitoring . Remember that almost everyone in this jail (it’s not a prison) is awaiting trial. So in many cases the people at Cook County Jail are those who can’t afford bail.

In the past weeks it has become a huge political fight between Sheriff Tom Dart and Chief Judge Tim Evans, with Board President Toni Preckwinkle somewhere in the middle. There was a remarkable dustup among them on Chicago Tonight a few weeks ago.

“This is not a problem that’s unique to Cook County,” explains panelist John Maki, John Howard Association Executive Director. ”This is a problem with mass incarceration – the fact that the United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world. Jails and prisons across the country are dealing with this exact same problem.”

Maki decries public policy that can jail people multiple times on minor charges, while creating long, exaggerated rap sheets.

“For a long time, we’ve used prison as, not only a primary response to crime,  but also a lot of our social ills,” he says. As a result, people with drug addictions, mental health issues and prostitution charges are filling the jails and prisons.

And that’s what leads us to the Cook County dispute. Panelist Eric Zorn, who’s written recently about it,  explains the dilemma. “The Federal courts…have given the Sheriff the ability to release up to 1500 prisoners on his own say-so, at any given time with some conditions. I feel that this is an extraordinary shoving-off onto the sheriff of something that’s a judicial responsibility. “

Sheriff Dart says that, almost overnight, County judges stopped issuing court orders to release  people with electronic monitoring, opting instead to issue “recommendations” to the sheriff.

“There’s no such thing as a judicial recommendation,” says Zorn. “the judge is not an advice columnist. A judge issues orders. he doesn’t say – I recommend that we be quiet in the court.”

It all happened very quickly, according to Zorn. “It happened in mid-November of last year, they were issuing about 25 orders a day for electronic monitoring. Ever since then, there’s only been about 33 orders total from then until now. So you’ve got this extraordinary and precipitous drop-off that Judge Evans refuses to explain.”

As a result, we’re seeing a situation in which neither law enforcement nor the judiciary seem to want the responsibility for releasing offenders who might  go back into society and commit a major, violent crime.

“We’re seeing this as a local problem,” explains Maki. “This is a national problem. I think here the politics have so overwhelmed the situation that…we need an independent broker to come in. And there are groups like this.. The National Institute of Corrections, the law enforcement group that solves these kinds of problems…they would come in as an independent – they have no relationship with these folks – here’s an analysis, here’s a road-map out of, the fact that you’ve been violating the Constitution for forty years – here’s what needs to be done.”

“I think John’s right, it’d be nice to bring in an outside force,” says Zorn. “But it ought to be and is the responsibility of the judiciary and the sheriff to work together, and to figure this out and to realize that we need to  lock up dangerous people. We all agree with that, but we also need to make sure that we’re not holding people for minor offenses,  or for non-violent offenses.”

Cook County jail overcrowding is our major topic this week, but we also talk briefly about the looming schools closure vote and Mayor Emanuel’s ballyhooed effort to soften the burden of our infamous parking-meter deal.

This week, as the pension crisis, the schools closing crisis and the urban violence crisis continued along incrementally, we took a step back from  the news of the week to take a longer look at the media. Have we begun to redefine the boundaries between old and new media after Boston?

We’re joined  by Marcus Gilmer, Digital Editor at the Sun-Times (and editor of Evening Rush), and Columbia College’s Barb Iverson, who blogs and teaches journalism.

Our attention turned almost immediately to Twitter. It was a major player in the information infrastructure during the Boston mayhem. For several hours overnight as the firefight was unfolding on Boston streets, Twitter was leading the way with rebroadcasts of the police scanners and eyewitness accounts. And it kept Gilmer up all night. 

“This was another moment,” says Gilmer, “along with Hurricane Sandy and other previous events that have really turned the corner in the way that we view – at least smart users – view Twitter. I don’t think CNN would know it if it came up and tapped them on the shoulder, it seems. But it’s a sharing of information. And you have to view it with a grain of salt. I think smart users do.”

Iverson says that, in her classes, not one of her students used conventional television or radio for coverage of the Boston events. They relied exclusively on Twitter and Google-directed sites, often landing on newspaper feeds for a more curated, balanced perspective.

“One of the things that technology has been doing for journalism as we knew it is disintermediating it,” she explains. “So if you think about the things that journalism does, there’s the eyewitness. Feet on the ground, as we say. Then there’s distribution. And then there’s the part that used to be the verification, accuracy, seeing if it’s balanced. So now, those can all be separate. They can occur in any order, where distribution used to be the last step.”

People who’ve become accustomed to these new channels, she says, understand the difference, and when they see something, they check it out for themselves by seeking other sources or sites.

That phenomenon – people becoming their own editors – is resulting in what Gilmer calls “social media’s self-correcting course”. Incorrect information disseminated on social media, he asserts, can be detected and corrected more quickly than through conventional old-media channels.

“It’s just another example of that wall coming down between the readers and the journalists,” he says. “You’ve seen it with the emergence of blogs and Internet interaction. It’s what comment sections are. Responding to reporters on Twitter. … That wall is down, you can’t put it back up. And now the users on the other side are coming over the remains of that wall.”

Panelist Alex Keefe (WBEZ) brings the story home to Illinois, as he tells us about his report on the Illinois Firearms Owners’ ID Card.

“A FOID card is like a driver’s license,” he explains. “If you want to buy a gun or have a gun or shoot a gun at a range you need this card. And in theory, you get it taken away …if you’re mentally ill, if you’re a criminal or if you have a restraining order against you.”

But that’s the problem, he says. The program is run by the Illinois State Police, and they don’t have the resources to terminate the cards when something goes wrong. “In practice, all the state does is they send you a letter, that says – please Mr. Criminal, please send us your card back because you’ve been convicted,” he reports.

The Cook County Sheriff’s office and the Chicago Police make efforts to retrieve revoked FOID cards, he says, but “As of a year ago, the state police said 70% of the cards are still floating around.”

Of course, the card itself isn’t the issue. It’s the guns an individual bought using that card that never get recovered. “No one goes to get the guns when the card is revoked. Technically you’re illegally in possession of a gun, but it’s not like anyone is knocking on your door,” Keefe explains. Literally thousands of firearms obtained with now-invalid FOID cards are still out there, he says.

And, by the way, there’s no way to know how many firearms have been obtained using Illinois FOID cards. Sales records, he says, are destroyed within 24 hours of the purchase.

This was the week when Mayor Emanuel announced some kind of settlement in the long-running attempt to modernize Wrigley Field and the surrounding area.

But panelist John Byrne (Chicago Tribune) advises caution.

“The term settlement. Now let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. This is a framework of a consensus,” he says, as Keefe adds “It’s a framework of an understanding and a consensus.”

“The mayor loves to do this, says Byrne. “We’ve seen this on his budgets, on the deal for digital billboards, where one plan comes out, and then over the next several months he extracts some around-the-edges concessions from the parties. Then he can stand in front of the microphones and tell us about how he played tough. How much he went to the mat for the taxpayers. Now, how much of this was built-in fat, with the understanding that it was going to get trimmed, so he could present himself as the hard-as-nails negotiator we know him to be, is difficult to determine.

(The Cubs conversation starts at 12:30)

Mayor Emanuel, by the way, has been very successful in raising money for his own re-election. “He raised about $386,000 since the first of the year,” says Keefe. “This means that in his pocket he has, between two campaign funds he controls – about two million bucks in political funds that he can use to influence elections.

(Our conversation about emanuel’s campaign funds begins at 19:30).

We also talk about the CTU’s announcement that it intends to challenge Emanuel politically. Both panelists say that President Karen Lewis could find alliances with unions and other groups unhappy with the Mayor. “Maybe she feels she can give a voice to this amorphous anti-Rahm sentiment,” Byrne says.

News also broke this week that in order to rehab the “welcoming” schools, CPS would have to borrow money to pay for the closure of fifty-some schools.

“Originally they had ball-parked that (closing schools) would save $43 million a year,” explains Keefe. “but now they’re saying they’re borrowing $329 million – a little more than $200 million of which will go to fund school actions. If you pay down the debt service from the money you’re borrowing that’s $25 million a year for 30 years…suddenly you’re saving a lot less money with these school closings that we thought. And this was something we hadn’t heard about before.

Given that cost-saving was the original explanation for the dramatic action that would affect almost 50,000 elementary school children,  Keefe says, “The money-saving argument becomes a lot harder to make.”

(And Curtis Black adds this - CPS may have inflated the capital needs at the closing schools in order to make the “savings” look greater.)

(Our schools-closing conversation begins at 24:30)

But the Sun-Times wasn’t completely on board with the closure plan. The paper called for a slower approach, and for the removal of schools it felt weren’t deserving of closure.

We invited Deputy Editorial Page Editor Kate Grossman to this week’s discussion.

“When you count the closures and these things they call co-locations and turnaround schools, we’re talking about  47,000 kids,” she explains. “They want to do something to their school, mostly very dramatic things, by August. This is why we say either whittle down that list, or do it over two years, and still whittle it down some. This is a bureaucracy that doesn’t do most things well even when everything is peachy-keen.”

Their recent editorial cites a UIC study that claims the school actions, only a few months away, will touch 133 schools, or 23 percent of the CPS-run elementary schools. But Mayor Emanuel’s administration has indicated that it’s time to get started, and has signaled that there will be very few changes to the plan.

“I think what will end up happening is they’ll dump a few schools off the list,” says Grossman. “And what we’ve been arguing for is that there are probably more than just a few, and they need to listen really hard because they’ve done this so quickly and…the formula is very blunt, and it packs kids into a school, and so a school that, on paper, it’s half empty, you go there and  it does not look like it’s half-empty.”

She’s referring to a field trip she took to Garvey Elementary, a school that, despite the Mayor’s claims to the contrary, will be sending its students to a school that’s academically inferior.

Read the Sun-Times editorials here and here.

Mark Brown had an emotional week. He became so involved with the tenants being kicked out of the Abbott Hotel, a single-room occupancy building on Belmont, that he resorted to ALL CAPS when he threatened the owners, who were performing a quick rehab of the building for wealthier residents.

“I will absolutely hound them in this column as long as this newspaper will allow me, because I CAN’T STAND BULLIES,” he said. He got a tip from a tenant to come and see what happens when  a developer is hell-bent on rehabbing a building quickly to raise rents and maximize profit.

“They’ve shut off the heat,” he reported. “They’ve cut off the water, and in cutting off the water they disabled the sprinkler system, so then they tore out all the sprinkler systems. They had shut down the alarms. And people were still living there. They had valid leases.”

It put the columnist in a tough position. Writing about it might actually make things worse for the remaining tenants when the City saw his story and got involved.

“I wrote the column about the bad conditions there,” he says, “and unfortunately the only solution is the City had to shut down the building. And kick the people out. Which is all these guys wanted anyhow.”

The new owners of the Abbot, it turns out, are also owners of some of that famous rooftop property facing Wrigley Field.

Things got so bad that one couple, forced from the building with an undisclosed cash payment, was simply standing outside with their bags unsure where to go or what to do next. Brown loaded them in his car and drove them to a different hotel. His frustration was very apparent in his next couple of columns.

“I got upset about it,” he said.  But to watch Mark Brown get worked up re-telling the story, you really just have to watch the show.

Mark’s Abbot Hotel columns are here, here and here.

“I push back on the gang label”, says Natalie Moore, writer, author, and south-side reporter for WBEZ. “Living in a segregated city like Chicago, where people may not go to the west side or the south sides, it may make people feel absolved of the problem – well, those are just those people down there in gangs who are probably deserving to die, and they’re killing one another. I think there’s a real disconnect.”

Part of the problem, she says, is the changing nature of Chicago’s gang structure.

“The era of big Chicago gangs isn’t what it once was”, she explains. “There are a lot of splinter groups, block crews, neighborhood crews…and some of the violence that we see is what we’d call intra-gang fighting, so these are members of the same so-called crew, or gang, who are inflicting violence on one-another. So it’s a really complicated  picture where you have to talk about segregation,  jobs and structural violence in these communities, and when you just write them all off as gangs, it’s not painting a full or accurate picture.”

“Our murder count is a lot lower today – and even last year, when we had a spike – compared to the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s,” she adds.  ”What I hear from people is that they hear more ordinary kids , or non-gang-affiliated kids are caught up in these struggles.”

A major contributor to these complex problems has been the out-migration of African-Americans from Chicago. But John McCarron, contributing columnist for the Chicago Tribune (and 27-year Trib staffer) says it isn’t all about tearing down public housing.

“The other thing is the foreclosure crisis,” he explains. “In some of these neighborhoods, one in seven, one in four, dwelling units were foreclosed on. They were really victimized by the banksters.”

McCarron takes on what he calls the “craven” 2010 re-map process. “The re-map was done to save incumbents. To not diminish black representation even though the population is way down. So it wasn’t really a racially-motivated thing. But, Rahm Emanuel really got the guys he wanted to get. Sposato was drawn out of his own ward- he’s gotta move if he wants to run again, and Fioretti was a thorn under the mayor’s saddle, so that’s the nature of the game. This is what redistricting has become.”

McCarron offers an interesting perspective on charter schools, which have been enthusiastically embraced by the president, the Secretary of Education and Chicago’s mayor. “It’s the half-a-loaf that they’re gonna use to forestall vouchers”, he says. “They’re saying well, at least the charter schools are still public schools and we’ll still have some sway. So I’ve always looked at it as a way to forestall the voucher movement and to get around the rules the Chicago Teachers’ Union has won in contract that make it almost impossible to discharge an incompetent teacher.”

“That has to be done with extreme care,” he warned. “I would recommend to the school board of Chicago to take this in a very careful manner and not to do anything that’s hasty or ill-conceived. To try and do it all in a very short period of time I think is dangerous.”

But he went further, saying he also feels that very Board should be replaced by an elected body.

“95% of the school boards in America are elected by the people,” he told us – in direct disagreement with Mayor Emanuel – ” And I think the Chicago Board of Education which for years has been appointed, it would serve us well to have an elected school board…Don’t you think that if we had an elected school board in Chcago, where I live, that more of the issues of education would be debated by folks who are elected by their fellow citizens? I think that’s a healthy process.”

Turning to the approximately $100 billion in pension liabilities the State faces, Quinn said he supports the pension reform bill sponsored by Rep. Nekritz that recently passed in the Illinois House. It’s a highly controversial bill that’s strongly opposed by many unions.

Quinn said that he agrees with key elements of the Nekritz bill, such as slowly increasing retirement age.  ”For younger people today you might have a little bit later retirement age when it’s time for them to retire,” he said. “And another one is to have a limit on how much money can be – they call it – pensionable. Social Security says it’s about $113,000, and I think that’s something we’ll do in Illinois.”

He also addressed cost-of-living adjustments, which he says need to be revisited. “The basic pension amount, I don’t think anyone should touch. But the cost of living adjustment should be accurate. Right now in Illinois it’s above the cost of living,” he said.

Quinn says that in each of his years as governor he has made the required pension contribution, something ignored by previous administrations. “I think you need to write into law that the state can never again have “holidays”.

Addressing automatic access to state health-care, he says “there’s no automatic access to the state health-care system when you retire. Now the system is set up where there’ll be a co-pay of some kind that’s going to be set up by administrative rule….unlike other states we didn’t have any kind of co-pay for those who are covered under the system, and we can’t afford that any more. We can’t afford a system where people get 100% of their retirement health-care paid for by all the taxpayers.”

He describes himself as optimistic that meaningful pension “reform” will pass. “Oh, yeah. I think this year a lot of the legislators ran in the last campaign on pension reform. The message is getting out that this needs to be done.”

Quinn recently signed a law on sentencing policy reform that’s supposed to change the kinds of offenses that can land, or keep, an offender in State prison.

“For folks who have committed a crime and have to pay a consequence, we want to make sure that if it’s a non-violent crime…that we really don’t treat everybody in a manner that just throws all the folks in state prison together,” he says. ” We work a lot with folks who have these alternative sentencing programs. It’s a big endeavor. It’s going to take a little while to implement it. But I want to make sure that our state prisons are there to incarcerate hard-core prisoners who have committed grievous offenses that jeopardize the public safety. For those who have committed less-serious offenses, there may be other alternative punishments…It’s very expensive to go to a state prison.”

Asked about the recent series by WBEZ’S Rob Wildeboer about numerous prison issues, including the housing of hundreds of men in prison gymnasiums due to overcrowding, the Governor acknowledged, but downplayed the situation:  ”The Director of Corrections and the Warden have to do what’s necessary to preserve order in the prison, preserve safety, and they were able to do that.”

On the topic of an assault weapons ban, Quinn said: “Now I believe in gun safety and I think that means we need to reform our laws. We have to ban assault weapons, also high-capacity ammunition magazines that go with those weapons..”

When the Mayor returned from vacation, he announced that the time for debate had ended, and that he was moving forward with the closings.  But there are still required public hearings for each school on the list. It’s highly doubtful, though, that the hearings will change policy.

“They had 28 public hearings in February,” explains Catalyst-Chicago’s education reporter Sarah Karp. “and now they’re gonna have 150-some public hearings. It kind of dilutes the opposition, because to some degree people feel, well, I was there, I went to two public hearings, my school’s still on the list, what more can I actually do?”

Despite opposition from the CTU and many community leaders, Karp says the record on past school actions hasn’t been positive. “I of course don’t know the future,” she says.  ”I can say that in the past, we’ve closed about 73 schools over the past decade, and for our upcoming issue (of Catalyst) I did an analysis of the neighborhood schools that are now in the communities where those schools closed. And 2/3 or them are all-black, still racially isolated. They’re under-performing schools, the lowest rating CPS can give, and they’re under-utilized.”

Karp also explains that in certain parts of the city, such as in Lawndale, large numbers of charters have been opened in recent years. In fact, more than 50,000 charter seats have been added to the CPS roster in the past decade. “Did those charter schools make the neighborhood schools more competitive? Because that’s sort of the idea. You know, you bring in the competition. And it’s not happened, actually,” she reports. Instead, the traditional schools “just become less competitive because now they’re dealing with the kids that can’t get themselves to the charter schools.”

Mike Lenehan, author of Ramblers, also joins our panel this week to talk about his new book.

“Loyola is the only Illinois team to ever win an NCAA championship. They won it 50 years ago in a dramatic, very memorable, come-from-way-behind game against the two-time defending champions, and it was one of those memorable Chicago sports moments,” he explains. “But to me what makes it interesting is that Loyola was in the forefront of the racial change that basketball was undergoing at the time, and so was Cincinnatti, the team they played in the final.  So when people tuned into this game, they saw that most of the guys on the floor were black – seven out of ten – and that was a most unusual sight. It had never happened before at the tournament, and had probably never happened ever.”

The kind of racial change that exploded onto television screens during that tournament was historic, but critic and writer Neil Tesser, also joining our panel this week, says it was part of a pattern. “This had to come from sport,” he says. “Because sport  and the arts have always been the places where merit mattered more than color. And they’ve always been the places at the leading edge of integration.  Jackie Robinson in baseball, and this book about college basketball, which was hugely more popular than the professional game at that time.  And music – Benny Goodman and his Carnegie Hall concert in 1938.”

Lenehan relates an amazing, but long-forgotten episode in Mississippi, where informal policy maintained that no Mississippi state-supported teams were to play against integrated teams. But Mississippi did eventually play in a tournament. It just required sneaking the team out of the state to do it. And Lenehan says bringing black players into the game didn’t just change history – it changed the game.

“Before African-American players took their rightful place in the game it was a much slower, floor-bound game of patterns, and Xs and Os, and moving the ball and the bodies around in order to get a shot,” says Lenehan. “When black players came in and brought their athletic skills and playground sensibility to the game, that’s when things began to change. And I would argue that’s when basketball started to become this multi-gazillion-dollar conglomerate that it is today.”

Thom Clark, President of the Community Media Workshop, takes issue with the process that CPS used in deciding about school closures.

“One of the challenges is that the decisions have been made, as you listen to parents an other school activists, in a somewhat cookie-cutter style, and have not accommodated special education classrooms that have natural smaller classroom size because of the special needs,” he explains. “There’s a lot of concern that the receiving schools are not ready to deal with special needs kids, so there are all sorts of complications. And when you talk about the scale – not 6, not 12, but 50 or 60 schools, not counting turnarounds and new charters that are gonna come on line – This is sort of a planning mess.”

Writer and recent Studs Terkel Award winner Megan Cottrell, also on this week’s panel, raises concerns about the receiving schools. “Think about those ‘welcoming schools’, she says.  ”This idea that, ‘oh, well, this school is doing well, so we can just push more kids in here’, not understanding that this school is a delicate eco-system. If it’s doing well, it’s because the right resources have been put into the right places, that the teachers and the parents and the kids are working together to make this happen.”

Megan has written several articles recently about the changing housing situation on Chicago’s north side. Many former single-room occupancy buildings, particularly in the 46th Ward, have been recently purchased and closed, undergoing radical renovation to accommodate more upscale tenants. It’s becoming a serious problem for people who earn too little money to afford a regular apartment. “That little stretch of Lakeview has lost 700 units within the last two years of SRO housing,” she explains. “The northeast side of Chicago, the numbers I’ve seen is 2,000 units of low-income housing, and that’s a significant number, especially when you’re talking about a market that’s very small. Finding these places is very difficult. They are few and far between.”

Jean Butzen also joins our panel. Today she heads Mission Plus Strategy consulting, but for many years she developed and managed single-room occupancy residences all over Chicago. She says it’s critical that Chicago preserves this unique style of housing. “If you think of all of our housing being represented by a ladder,” she says, “and every rung of that ladder you go up economically, SROs are the bottom ring of that ladder. And when we remove that rung of the ladder, people don’t have anywhere to go except to be homeless and to our shelter system.”

“When we ran Lakefront SRO,” Butzen adds, “we were great operators of housing. People welcomed us into the neighborhood. Property values actually increased, because we took dilapidated properties, we renovated them and managed them really well and kept them as single-room occupancy housing…When people are homeless, they cost society a lot more money than when people are housed in permanent housing and have a roof over their heads. So it’s just as simple as that.”

Cottrell tells us that, in her reporting, especially regarding the Chateau Hotel in Uptown, she encountered dozens of tenants – about to be evicted – who live at the building simply because the recession has crushed them financially. There are few, if any alternatives after the Chateau other than the City shelter system.

Alderman James Cappleman has been the target of severe criticism for his perceived policy of allowing – some might say encouraging – the destruction of these SROs. But buildings like the Chateau have been operating for decades, Butzen says, and serving a need for a growing number of citizens.

“…and to tear it down or to significantly renovate it so that it can’t be low-income housing…really is fundamentally changing the nature of the community from what it’s been for a long time. And I think that’s what the Alderman is not really understanding about the history of the community.”

“A complicating factor,” adds Thom Clark, “is that around the northeast side we’ve had a lot of rental housing that has been converted to condo. Those are now creating a significant short-sale dynamic in those same neighborhoods. They have not returned to rental. The market values of those under-water condos don’t speak to affordable rental, even if an owner wanted to go to one.”

“The problem is management,” Cottrell concludes. “It’s not that these buildings are inherently troublesome, but when you have someone who’s not particularly invested in that building, who isn’t making the physical upgrades or investing in the social work that needs to be done to make sure this building works, that’s what needs to change. These buildings can be problematic, but they don’t have to be. I think the idea right now is, well, we’ll just  get rid of the building and you’ll get rid of the problems.”

And Butzen ends the program with a plea to Mayor Emanuel. “We did a lot of work to change the zoning code and the building code to protect single-room occupancy housing, and Mayor Emanuel needs to learn this lesson as well. We cannot lose these units. They are valuable assets to the whole city.”

“(Church) Attendance is going down, because the number of practicing Catholics is going down significantly,” explains Art Golab, who just authored a Sun-Times analysis of the financial and economic issues facing the area’s Catholics. “A lot of people are leaving the church.  They’re not giving as much money at the collection plate. Collections have been down for the last five years…so they’re facing a number of problems, but they essentially stem from fewer people in the pews and less money coming in.”

In addition, more than half of all Catholic schools have closed since 1985. Attendance is going down, Golab reports, because the number of practicing Catholics is going down significantly. In fact, he says, while that number is going down, many who do self-report as Catholics only attend “weddings, funerals and baptisms.”  So taken together, both groups are contributing to falling weekly church attendance and school enrollments.

“They’ve got a billion dollar budget, and they’ve been running thirty to forty-million dollar deficits for the past five years,” he says.  ”When they have these deficits they dip into the endowment. And the endowment hasn’t been doing that well investment-wise.”

But the problems aren’t only financial. “There are many parishes that have one pastor serving more than one parish,” he explains. “So they’re downsizing, and they’re trying to do it as economically and efficiently as they can. And now they’re saying that because of this deficit, it’s going to get worse.”

On another subject, the number of CPS schools about to be closed could be far higher than anybody imagined – possibly 70 or 80 schools. And those school swill be overwhelmingly in the black community, Golab reports.

As children from the closed schools are pushed into neighboring schools, there’s great concern that class sizes will begin to rise significantly. In fact, spokesperson Becky Carroll hinted this week that class size might rise to 40.

“My colleagues, who are education reporters, have sat in on classrooms with national award-winning teachers who have 35 kids in their classroom,” Art Golab says. “And it’s mayhem. It takes 20 minutes to take attendance. It takes 20 minutes to go to the bathroom. By the time you’re done getting all that stuff out of the way, your teaching time is cut in half. It multiplies the difficulty of being a teacher. And I don’t see how they’re gonna get away with it.”

“If the whole purpose is connecting with students, and you’ve got 40 kids – the variable here is the kids,” adds Marcus Gilmer, Sun-Times Digital Editor. “You’re not dealing with 40 well-mannered school children who are sitting there, hands folded, apple on the desk, and listening to everything you say. This is such a disconnect from reality. We’re always lamenting the kids who slip through the cracks. Well, that’s happening with 25, 30 kids. 40 kids is ridiculous. You’re not even gonna remember every kid’s name in every class.”

And this brings up a related issue, which Eric Zorn mulled over last Friday. Why was Mayor Emanuel so insistent on lengthening the school day as a way of increasing the quality of the education experience, but seems blasé about increasing class sizes dramatically?

“The first proposition of increasing the class day was a questionable one to begin with,” asserts Golab.  ”I think it suited the Mayor and the administration because it was a way that they could say that they were doing something. But part of that whole deal was that they were going to bring in more teachers to do that. And that’s been difficult. They said we’re going to bring in music, we’re going to bring in art teachers. We’re still trying to find out exactly what they’ve done. But I think they’ve had trouble filling that longer school day.”

Mayor Emanuel got some more tough news this week with the overwhelming rejection of the Police Sergeants’ proposed contract, which envisioned later retirement and greater costs to retirees.  Golab says that, while it’s true that there’s strong public sentiment against a contract that allows sergeants to retire at age 50 with 75% of their salaries, he thinks the police and fire unions will be able to make a strong counter-argument.

“They’re gonna say, we’re out on the streets basically wearing out our bodies. Chasing people through alleys. Getting shot at. Getting hurt. You know, retirement at age fifty is not a bad idea. You want younger cops out on the street anyway. And this, by the way, is part of the deal. This is a pact between the police and the City – that we’ll take care of you, and you’ll take care of us.”

We also took some time to kick around the new CTA Ventra card, and our official Chicago Newsroom poll found that 100% of the journalists on our panel – both of them – favor killing off Taste of Chicago.