CN Feb 20, 2014

Posted on February 20, 2014 by Ken

More than a thousand full-time tenured and non-tenured faculty members staged a 2-day strike at UIC this week to demand salary increases and other workplace improvements.

Although the issues seemed to play well in the media, DNAInfo Chicago’s Ted Cox says it’s not going to be an easy sell at the U of I.

“The State doesn’t support these institutions any more like they did,” he asserts. “So if you pay professors more then who’s going to pay for it? Where’s the money gonna come from? How many people are already in line in Springfield with their hand out?”

Catalyst-Chicago’s Sarah Karp sees the issue as more than money, and compares it with the 2012 CTU strike.

“Where I see a big connection with the CTU strike is the question of tenure. That’s a big issue with education, because tenure has been basically obliterated in the last couple of years. So I think that’s a big issue. Is it really a good thing to have faculty and teachers  having job protection? And how much job protection should they have?”

Over the past couple of weeks, we’ve seen joint press events between the CTU and unions representing firefighters, police, librarians and other public-service workers. What they all have in common is their deep concern about the potential loss of chunks of their legally-binding pension agreements.

“Karen Lewis of the CTU, her point is that we can afford pensions,” explains Karp.  “That we just have to prioritize. And we need to look at bringing in more revenue. She put out a report on Friday saying that if you cut pensions of police, fire and teachers, it destabilizes neighborhoods. Especially in Chicago, where you have to live in the City in order to get these jobs, their money is going right back into their community.”

“But at the same time,” she says, “there’s something like $600 million due from CPS to pay for the pensions this year, and no one knows how that’s gonna play out.”

Cox says this coalition, if it lasts, could have some power. “I think when you’re talking about teachers getting together with police and fire, that’s a really powerful alliance. I think that’s their best and only hope is to ally.”

Did you see those stories in the past couple of weeks about how suspensions at CPS are down, and a new kind of discipline is taking root? Well, sometimes things aren’t quite what they seem.

“It all started with an exclusive that they gave to the Tribune, saying that suspensions are down,” Karp explains. “The next day, the press release came out, and their number was different from what they had in the Tribune. So when you start seeing the percentages get shifted a little bit you start to ask, well, what are the actual numbers?”

Then Karp lays out for us how things can go wrong when a government agency gives a newspaper an “exclusive.”

“What they did was they slightly changed the definition of what they were giving them. And it’s right but it’s a very small little slice of rightness.”

She explains the origin of this supposedly positive story. “Advocates have been pressing CPS for many years to publish school-by-school suspension data, which is very difficult to get.  And they won an agreement to get it.  So that’s supposed to happen very soon, maybe even today. But before you get the school-by-school numbers, they’re going to put out an overall percentage. The way I saw it was to sort of smooth the waters.”

“They know,” Karp says, “that the individual school numbers will be highly varied, but they want a focus on the overall number. “Now they’ve got all the media putting out a story saying suspensions are down so it sort of negates this school-by-school data which isn’t gonna show that.”

Then the plot thickened. Karp says she received an anonymous email containing details of the report. “Basically what it shows is that elementary suspensions are actually up and have been rising, and the biggest increase is in pre-K and kindergarten suspensions. Actually, in the Student Code of Conduct it says you cannot suspend Pre-K and kindergarten students.”

“I think there’s always been pre-school and kindergarten suspensions,” she adds. “I think we’re maybe seeing that there’s more on the books than before, because people would send your kid home and say, hey,  your kid’s acting out. But now this is an official suspension. It’s on the kid’s record over time.”

“My hypothesis is they knew that when the school-by-school data came out, it was gonna be clear that elementary school suspensions were perhaps going up,” Karp says. “So they wanted to put out the story that there is a slight decrease in high school suspensions. However, the other odd thing about this is that the number of high school students has decreased by about 6,000, the ones in district-run schools, not charters. And this data does not include any charter schools. So if you say there’s a 10,000 drop in suspensions among high school students but yet there’s 6,000 fewer students, you could make the argument that maybe there’s just fewer students to suspend.”

Another factor is the disproportionate racial breakdown.

“Between 77 and 85 percent black students are being suspended, and they only make up 40% of the kids in our  school district, and they’re primarily males – over 70%. So it’s probably mostly black male students, who as they get older they drop out more, they go to prison more. And maybe when you start suspending them in kindergarten, a lot of studies have shown that even one suspension any time in your elementary school career greatly increases your chance of eventually dropping out.”

And the whole thing’s further complicated, adds Cox, by the Charter rules. “Charters actually have their own deals going on with suspensions and fines. They keep their own data.”

Karp says she’s FOI’d that data from the State, which requires charters to keep such records, and the numbers for suspensions are high. “So the fact is that really when you look at it overall including charter schools, which are public schools, we actually might be seeing a huge increase in suspensions.”

You can read Sarah Karp’s article here.

In the past few weeks, the City Council has started trying to deal with the epidemic of smart-phone theft. And they’re focusing on ways to keep stolen phones from being returned to the marketplace.

“It started out as an advisory resolution, to insist that phone manufacturers and carriers, their phones have a “kill switch”, Cox tells us. “So that when your phone gets stolen, you can remotely disable it so that it can’t be used again and resold. There’s a big market for these things and that’s why people steal them, is to resell them.”

“But a lot of critics have said that the manufacturers and carriers have no interest in this kill switch because they make the nice money and lucrative business from reselling phones and selling insurance to cover them. And now in addition to that original resolution, which passed, Aldermen Bob Fioretti and Ed Burke, unlikely allies, have joined in sponsoring a City Council resolution that would make it illegal to sell a phone without a kill switch in the City.”

But we’ll give the last word to Chicago’s technology community, who’ve advanced the theory that it would be better if the carriers simply agreed not to reactivate any phone of which they couldn’t trace the history.

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CN Feb. 13, 2014

Posted on February 13, 2014 by Ken

 

Dan Rutherford has some explainin’ to do. He’s obviously correct in stating that he hasn’t been found guilty of any wrongdoing, and the charges of sexual and business misconduct brought forth by a subordinate remain only charges.  But the State Treasurer’s in a tough spot just a couple of weeks out from the primary election.

Steve Edwards, Executive Director of the U of C’s Institute of Politics, has some thoughts on this political situation.

“I think these questions that have surfaced around Dan Rutherford, he’s come out and he’s done what he could do,” he tells us. “The only thing he had to do on this issue was to try to refute them with whatever evidence he has, but there’s no question that this is now the focus of the conversation – at a time when the issues in  Illinois are very, very pressing.”

But as the Chicago Reader’s Mick Dumke points out, it’s complicated. “This is a workplace issue,” he asserts. “The allegations are about his role as a supervisor of employees, so  that is an important distinction.  The Sun-Times a couple of weeks ago did a story about his travel schedule. Why is the Treasurer of Illinois, which is, in a lot of ways a clerical job, why is he traveling all over the world? So all this stuff has come up about his performance in the job.”

Edwards agrees. “I think these allegations are damaging. It’s about the workplace, it’s about leadership. And it’s also about competence in the job, which was the one thing he was advocating. That was his calling card. I’ve run statewide, I’ve run a State agency, I’m an executive. I’ve been in the State Legislature. I know how to do this.”

So that brings us to the new clear frontrunner, Bruce Rauner. Rutherford has tried to hang the harassment flap on Rauner, claiming that Rauner engineered it. But he hasn’t, so far, been able to prove anything. At this point, the Republican nomination for Governor could be Rauner’s to lose. “He’s certainly brought in a very sophisticated campaign organization, so for a guy who’s never run for office before, he is running a top-flight campaign.” says Edwards.

So if Rauner gets the nod, does that mean Pat Quinn is in trouble? Neither of our guests thinks so. “It’s easy to underestimate this guy. He’s a pretty wily politician in his own right, and I think there are going to be a lot of people rallying around Pat Quinn just because he’s not Bruce Rauner,” Dumke says.

And what about Paul Vallas? Other commitments have kept him out of Illinois until next month, but then he hits the campaign trail full force, stumping as Quinn’s Lt. Governor.

“Paul Vallas is somebody who is very smart, very loquacious, and doesn’t wait to be asked for permission to speak on things,”according to Edwards. But he brings good and bad to the ticket. There’s always the chance that he’ll go off-message, and that he’ll suck all the oxygen out of the room, upstaging the boss. And he was the earliest energetic advocate for charters, seen by many today as having lost their luster.

However, according to Edwards, his positives are important. “Vallas had strong appeal when he ran for Governor himself among suburban voters. He won the collar counties. He’s someone who has an issues set that appeals to many voters in that part of this region – that’s an important area for the Democrats to be competitive in. And he’s also someone who brings gravitas around budget issues and education issues.”

“As time has gone on,” Dumke injects, “I think he’s remembered fondly by a lot of people, even in education circles,  because, especially up against Bruce Rauner? Are you kidding me? He started some of this (charter) stuff, but he hasn’t called essentially for the demise of the Teachers’ Union. He’s still thought of fondly by what I think of as the “Rainbow-PUSH set”, these kind of old African-American activists in the City. He’s still considered a person they can work with, I think.”

In the most recent Reader, Mick Dumke wrote a profile of Gerald Vernon, an NRA-supporting former college administrator who came of age in the Malcolm X and civil rights era, and who says that, despite disagreeing with the NRA on most issues, he believes passionately about private ownership of firearms and the right of his community to defend itself against the epidemic of  gun violence in which he and his neighbors live.

Dumke said interviewing Vernon broadened his own understanding of the issue.

“Traditionally this debate has come down as, you’re against gun violence, therefore you’re for gun control, or damn it, I want to carry my gun. You’re not gonna pry it out of my cold, dead hand. You know, Its a lot more complicated than that.”

Dumke explains that Gerald Vernon puts it pretty succinctly: “I live in a high crime area. Are you gonna look me in the eye and tell me that as someone who’s never broken the law besides maybe a speeding ticket, that I can’t carry out my constitutional right to bear arms?”

But, as Dumke says, it’s more complicated than that. “Let’s just break it down,” he says. “If there aren’t guns, there’s not gun violence. That is true. There is something to be said for the argument that as you open access to guns, you do increase the possibility – the probability – that they’re going to be misused and fall into the wrong hands. That people are going to slip through the cracks in the registration process. Human nature being what it is, when there’re weapons around, things can get more dangerous.”

But Steve Edwards cautions that we in Illinois might be getting a little too agitated. “We’re talking about a state of affairs that’s dramatically new in Illinois, but not in most other states in the nation,” he reminds us, pointing out that we were the last state to allow legal concealed-carry.

Both panelists have reason for guarded optimism. “Maybe that sign that says ‘no guns allowed’ is not a concession to the law, but actually an affirmation about the role guns should play in our lives,” Edwards asserts. “And I think if we could actually figure out how to have a new kind of conversation, it might help all of us get to the underlying question of violence.”

“I assume people have been carrying and concealing forever,” says Dumke. “In certain neighborhoods violence is very visible and the numbers are higher, but I think a lot of people do have guns at home and a lot of people carry them with them even when they are not supposed to.”

And Steve Edwards gets the final word. “Whether you are adamantly against it, or adamantly in favor of gun ownership rights, there needs to be a coming together around the issue of how do we adequately insure that those with access to guns are doing so in a way that’s responsible to each other.”

And, by the way – take some time and check out Mick’s spectacular reporting on the west side heroin trade that he did in a partnership between the Reader and WBEZ.

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CN Feb 6, 2014

Posted on February 6, 2014 by Ken

According to Chris Fusco of the Sun-Times, the current Republican race for Governor  is “one of the goofier political races we’ve ever observed. “

And WBEZ’s Tony Arnold had a front-row seat for one of the more bizarre chapters this week at a Republican forum in Naperville. Candidate Bill Brady said the following:

“The number one issue I run into when I travel around to manufacturing plants particularly, when I ask them, ‘How’s it going?’ They say, ‘I can’t hire my people back.’ They say, ‘They’re enjoying – I’ll use – their unemployment insurance. And I can’t get them back to work.’ So we’ve gotta motivate people to get back into the workforce.”

“I really wanted to know form Bill Brady, who’s telling you these things?” says Arnold. “This is something that hasn’t come up in the whole campaign. And now all of a sudden you’re saying it’s the top issue you’re hearing from Illinois’ manufacturers?”

Brady told Arnold he wouldn’t name the manufacturers because  he didn’t have their permission to identify them.

Of course, Bruce Rauner  continues his aggressive TV ad buys, which gives him far more visibility. And Rauner can keep the TV commercials coming. Money isn’t a problem. “He has plenty more to keep going as long s he wants to,” Arnold tells us.

As we know, there was quite a dust-up recently between Rauner and candidate Dan Rutherford, who claimed that a staffer in his office  had made allegations of wrongdoing against him. Arnold describes the bizarre press event. The allegations “are wrong, they’re false,” Rutherford says,  ”and he’s being put up to it by my opponent Bruce Rauner. Any questions? Well, yea, we have a million questions. What are the allegations?”

Arnold’s predicting a pretty quiet upcoming session for the General Assembly. There will possibly be an attempt to “fix” the Chicago pension crisis by cutting benefits for current and retired City employees, but as Governor Quinn campaigns for re-election, Arnold says, Governor Quinn will need the support of all those City workers.  ”When they’ve tried to bring up Chicago pensions in the past, it’s not gone over well at all,” he concludes.

However, there could possibly be a hike in the Illinois minimum wage. “The last two times the General Assembly has passed a minimum wage increase it’s been right around campaign season. And so here we are right on schedule for 2014,” he says.

Possibly the biggest story of the week was the unsealing of Special Prosecutor Dan Webb’s report on the Koschmann case. Chris Fusco, along with a team of dedicated S-T reporters, have been dogging the story for years. The report added some new facts to the public knowledge of the case.

“We know that early on,” Fusco explains, “independent of whatever the Mayor knew, there was an Area 3 Lieutenant where this crime was being investigated that said within hours, surely within a day or so, both he was aware of this incident and he had discussed it with his commander.”

It was about this time that a police investigator attired yet another “quote of the week”.

“Holy crap, maybe the Mayor’s nephew is involved”

“We know that when the two detective went out to interview Vanecko’s friend Kevin McCarthy, McCarthy is lying to them telling them he doesn’t know who’s at the scene. But yet at that same time frame it appears that the Area 3 brass, going up to the Commander level, is discussing that the nephew is involved. Fast forward. The police in their official report they gave us when this case was closed said – we didn’t know Vanecko was involved for 18 days. Well, we all know now that’s impossible.”

“Webb leaves you with the impression that the point of the 2011 investigation was to justify the 2004 investigation, which wasn’t really an investigation to begin with,” Fusco concludes.

Arnold and Fusco were the reporters for a recent collaborative series by the Sun-Times and WBEZ in which they examined the deaths of infants and children who were “in contact with” DCFS.

“We’ve gone over ten years of child deaths in Illinois that have resulted from abuse or neglect,” Arnold explains. “We went through those case by case and we looked at the circumstances of each one of them,” he says, and what they found was a higher number of neglect deaths than had been reported before. That’s due in part to DCFS itself beginning to report different types of neglect deaths, such as unsafe sleeping arrangements.  Although the number of outright abuse deaths – what might later be judged as murder – has not risen significantly, when the new data about neglect is added in, the totals essentially double.

“The bottom line,” says Fusco, “is that the individual stories where you have failures in the system, they are so horrific. One of those is eye-popping and it makes you wonder about other cases in the system where kids aren’t dying.”

There’s a related issue, according to Arnold. “Ten years ago, DCFS made a drastic policy shift to remove fewer kids from their homes. And since then, there hasn’t been a big evaluation of whether that policy is working well. And we looked, not just at child deaths, but different elements, and that’s the one that really popped out to us.”

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CN Jan 30, 2014

Posted on January 30, 2014 by Ken

 

Is the Internet a public asset? Is it something like Lake Michigan, that we long go decided should be “forever open, clear and free”?  If it is, how do we deal with the private companies that bring us that Internet?  Should they be treated as “common carriers”,  and told that they must make everything on the Internet available at all times to all customers?

On January 14,  the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit  struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s open internet rules, commonly known as “Net Neutrality” because Internet Service Providers are not classified as “common carriers” by the FCC. As a result, ISPs now have freedoms that they didn’t have before. For example, your provider may deny you access to movies or content that are created by one of its competitors. Or, the provider might charge a content creator for the privilege of carrying their content to its subscribers.

This has the Internet community pretty divided.

“You’ve got content providers on one side who absolutely do not want to go to the cable/satellite model of having to pay access fees to the internet service providers,” says Frank Sennett,  Director of Digital Strategies at Crain’s. “You’ve got the broadband providers on the other hand who would desperately like to start getting their hands on that money…I’m at least glad that there are warring huge corporate interests and it’s not just one-sided, because then we’d be lost.”

And if the community is divided about how ISPs should be regulated, it’s even more divided about how to navigate the new landscape since the Court of Appeals ruling.

Demond Drummer, Tech Organizer for Teamwork Englewood, is part of a group that fights to gain Internet access to underprivileged communities where the Internet has historically developed more slowly than in other places. Drummer says that a new financial order might bring some benefits, because big gobblers of bandwidth such as Netflix are being subsidized by people who pay for internet access but don’t watch their site.

“A lot of folks in some parts of the city don’t subscribe to Netflix. They may watch YouTube..but these are not heavy users of the Internet, so it may well be the case that with the Court shooting down this open Internet order, that maybe there’d be some pricing schemes that may, on the back end, make broadband Internet more accessible because right now we are paying  as consumers for the cost of pumping HBO and Netflix through…”

And Sennett lays out a possible scenario for what the Internet might look like in a few years.

“What if you’ve got a provider whose marketing plan is free unfettered Internet? That’s gonna be a pretty good selling point. Another competitor could come in and say, we’re gonna give you the best streaming video experience and it’s gonna be prioritizing that. That’s gonna be a potent marketing tool as well. There might be a third provider, and this is interesting to me because there might be censorship implications…you could have a provider and a lot of parents, I think might like this…a provider could say, our marketing plan is, we’re going to throttle everything in the hinterlands of online erotica. We’re going to put these filters in place…we’re gonna give you the cleanest, most G-rated Internet, and for some people that would be a selling point. So if Internet neutrality is completely struck down, there are a lot of interesting ways that it’ll game out.

But, Sennett continues, this could be very different in different parts of the country.  “I’ve gotta think that in the wireless world (that part including smart phones and tablets) there’s always going to be that competitor that says, the unfettered, the free, that’s our calling card. In smaller towns and in rural areas there often actually only is one option…and that’s a little frightening to me, that one player might decide for a lot of people what their Internet experience is gonna be.

Tribune columnist Phil Rosenthal  has concerns that the data hogs could begin to impinge on news and information sites.

“Watching a movie takes a lot of bandwidth. Finding out what’s going on in the world, talking to other people in the world without the entertainment aspect, takes a lot less. Should the people who want just the basic information have that information come at them at a much slower rate because the bandwidth is choked up with this other stuff, that’s a legitimate question.”

Complicating matters, according to Rosenthal, is his perception that the “FCC clearly doesn’t want to engage on this point. They say they’re for net neutrality, but they aren’t doing what’s necessary to make it happen. ”

And that opens the issue to pure market forces, which could clearly leave many in the dust. “We talk about – if you’re willing to pay, if you have the money, they’ll find you. There are huge portions of this and every community where this is a real challenge, and there isn’t the money to lure a business to create competition and demonstrate demand. and how they’re going to be protected – that’s a great concern.”

Oh, and here’s a parody provided by a Redditor showing how your Internet bill might look in a couple of years…Screenshot 2014-01-30 09.02.32

 

 

 

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CN Jan 23, 2014

Posted on January 23, 2014 by Ken

When the court-ordered six-thousand page “document dump” related to the Chicago Archdiocese priest sex abuse scandal happened earlier this week, Sun-Times reporter Art Golab set about reading them. His share was well over 1,000 pages.

“From what I learned after reading all those documents, many of them very depressing, was that, yes, the Church presents itself as a moral authority,” Golab tells us. “But in all too many cases the Church is made up of human beings, who cannot necessarily always live up to those standards.”

It was difficult reading, he says, but for the first time, it laid out in black and white the deeply personal stories of the Church’s sex-abuse victims.

“There’s certainly a lot of outrage, especially among the people who were abused. A lot of anger. And what really makes it tough for a lot of people is that this is the Church that they put their faith in, literally. And they believed. And these priests were like their heroes.  They were authority figures who basically abused their position of authority – and therefore, people feel betrayed.”

But why now? How did these documents come to be in the public view? Both Golab and writer/blogger/activist Matt Farmer explained the process. It began, Golab says, with several attorneys in Minneapolis.

“There’s been a battle,” he says, “for at least seven years, for the church to release these documents. The plaintiffs had a choice. They could have probably squeezed more money out of the Archdiocese. But a lot of what these victims wanted was for these practices to become public. To find out who did what. It was the victims’ choice. They pressed for it.”

And as Farmer says, despite this loss in court, the Archdiocese did keep the records away from the public for years. “Two of the three cardinals who oversaw the abuse and litigation are dead. Fourteen of the thirty priests are dead. So they were successful in keeping this stuff out of the sunlight for quite a while.”

And what of the legacy of the widely-respeced Cardinal Joseph Bernardin?  Some might say he was just “overly optimistic about the priest’s possibilities for rehabilitation,” Golab explains. “Other people would say that he actively covered this up.  And the evidence showed that that is what happened. I think he did what he did for what he thought were for good reasons and for the good of the Church.”

Charters are back in the news again this week. Actually, they’re rarely far outside the news. Seven new ones were approved by CPS, but only three outright. The others were given a provisional approval. But ten others were rejected at this time.

Golab says  there just might not be enough money to continue the rapid expansion. “When the City closed fifty schools last year, they made a commitment not to close any more for five years,” he says. “So at this point, if they can’t close more schools, where are they gonna find the money to give to new charter schools? Because that’s how this whole process has worked. I think they’ve got to slow it down.”

The argument has been that Chicago needs more charters in overcrowded neighborhoods in parts of the Southwest and Northwest sides. But few of the charter schools proposed in this round would have served to seriously alleviate overcrowding.

Several of the schools approved yesterday are religiously affiliated, according to Farmer.

“One is affiliated with the Reverend Charles Jenkins, who has a mega-church, and has been one of the Mayor’s advisors since Day One. We’ve got another charter that’s affiliated with the Moody Bible Institute, that was approved. We’ve got additional charters that are affiliated with the Gulen Movement, sort of a quasi- political/religious movement out of Turkey whose founder is living as a recluse in the Poconos. How it came to be that those seven – rather than the ten that were not approved – came to get a pass, I don’t know. It was an opaque process.”

But Farmer doesn’t think the charters will make much headway in the far northwest corner of the city.

“The question that always comes to my mind when I hear about charter expansion and the need to provide choice in overcrowded neighborhoods: Take Sauganash, take Edgebrook, where the neighborhood schools are and have been overcrowded. The Mayor doesn’t dare come up there with the charter crowds and say – folks, we want to open these charters in your neighborhood – because he knows they’re not buying what the charter folks are selling.”

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CN Jan 16, 2014

Posted on January 16, 2014 by Ken

 

“It’s the quintessential Chicago story. They used political connections to grow into one of the largest, most powerful organizations in the city.”

That’s how Andrew Schroedter sums up The Rise and Fall of Juan Rangel, the Patron of Chicago’s UNO charter schools, recently published in Chicago Magazine. Written by Cassie Walker Burke in collaboration with Andrew and his colleagues at the BGA, the lengthy article combines original reporting with a rich aggregation of other reports, beginning with the first stories in the Sun-Times last February by Dan Mihalopoulos and Tim Novak.

The story’s focus is Juan Rangel, one of Chicago’s most connected and influential community leaders, and how he came to power at UNO after his predecessor, Danny Solis, was appointed to an aldermanic vacancy. And how, in a few short months, he lost all that power.

“They did use the jobs, the contracts, the capital and the money to help them build power,” Schroedter explains. “They employed the daughter-in-law of Ed Burke. Contracts and jobs went to other UNO insiders, relatives. We did see that old-fashioned nepotism there.”

But the story begins before Rangel. “It’s really Daley that brought it from point A to point B,” he says. UNO began to exert significant power in Chicago when it sent a clear signal to Mayor Daley that it was willing to be helpful to the Mayor. From there, the once grass-roots organization began its meteoric climb.

But it wasn’t always in the schools business. When then-CPS chief Arne Duncan contacted them about taking over some closed Catholic schools and operating them as charters, Rangel seized the opportunity and never looked back.  But he needed money.

“What impeded that growth in the beginning was capital,” says Schroedter. “Because in order to fix up or open schools you needed money, and in the beginning they did not have a lot of money. But as the years went on and their political connections grew, that changed.”

In a few short years, they went from one school to a “campus” system of sixteen. And their buildings were, by most accounts, physically attractive and well-run.  The neighbors Schroeder and his team talked with were pleased.

“The general consensus was, we’re happy that UNO’s here. We like having an option in our neighborhood,” they told him. “And even though the test results show they’re essentially neck-and-neck with their neighborhood school, people seem to like it. And seem to appreciate it. So I don’t think that can be discounted. However, I don’t think you can tell the story of UNO without talking about how greed got the best of them.”

Over five years, through a combination of payouts from CPS and the State, UNO has acquired $280 million in various taxpayer funding for its now-sixteen schools.

“UNO has had access to capital that other charter school operators just haven’t had,” Schroedter concludes. But the problem is that it’s very difficult to follow the money.

“Despite all this tax money that’s being funneled to them , there’s not a lot of people that are watching how this tax money’s being spent. And one of the things we found most alarming is that nobody’s watching the store, he says. “UNO in some cases pays itself rent on the buildings they own, which is fine. They’re paying themselves hefty management fees, which total ten percent, so you’re talking about five million dollars in 2012. Now that’s just money that goes from the charter schools to a parent organization, and they can do whatever they want with that…so it’s almost like taxpayer money is disappearing down this black hole.”

The expenses for UNO’s schools – including salaries and operating costs – exceed that of comparable public schools. Rangel was paying himself a salary higher than Barbara Byrd Bennett’s – and she runs more than 500 schools.  Some of those expenses would be hard to justify under almost any circumstance.

“We FOIA’d the credit card bills for the UNO Charter School network. 48,000 dollars on meals in 2012. Trips to New York and Beijing and Disney World and on and on and on,” he tells us. “Things that, if a local principal was doing, he’d lose his job.”

In the end, Rangel, and his long-time friend (and Senior Vice President) Miguel d’Escoto lost their jobs. And the charter school network they created has become a target for those who believe the charter system is siphoning money away from the traditional public schools.

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CN Jan 9, 2013

Posted on January 9, 2014 by Ken

 

As 2014 settles into its groove, the economy, jobs and wages continue to the the major topics for so many Chicagoans.  In the last few days we saw Republican candidate for governor Bruce Rauner opine that the minimum wage should be brought down a buck in Illinois, only to quickly reverse himself yesterday when the quote became widely distributed.

“But isn’t that an interesting indication of how much this minimum wage discussion  has become more public and has really shifted in a month?” asks Thom Clark of Community Media Workshop. “From where Rauner thought he could get away with a casual statement on a small-market radio station, only to have it come back and haunt him. And not only did he have to flip his comment, but he’s now suddenly on the bandwagon … for a ten-dollar minimum wage.”

The reader’s Ben Joravsky continues the thought. “Mayor Emanuel has also come out for increasing the minimum wage. He followed up President Obama. Everybody’s for increasing the minimum wage. They just don’t seem to be able to do it.”

The minimum wage debate has now been tied to the battle over extension of unemployment insurance, which is facing heavy fire in the Congress.

“The recession’s supposedly over,” says Clark. “But most of the middle class doesn’t feel that yet. We’ve not recovered the 30% loss in home equity, the jobs that have come back are not great jobs, the whole vote around the Boeing engineers thing was a setback for the middle-class. The floor that union organizing has traditionally provided since the depression has been disappearing. That’s why the minimum wage becomes more important because it’s been stagnant. The unemployment insurance thing is particularly important to me because that’s a direct infusion to the economy – every one of those bucks get spent today on stuff that people need. and with 60-70% of our economy dependent on consumer spending, it seems to me that’s a pretty inexpensive investment for this heavily-in-debt federal government.”

Joravsky has written a series of articles about how Mayor Emanuel has pushed forward so aggressively with expansion of charter schools, which he clearly seems to prefer over most traditional public schools. Joravsky says the mayor has created a “process to endorse his plan for more charter schools”.

“The Mayor is determined that he’s going to transfer schools from unionized work forces, which are the regular public schools, to a non-union work-force, which is the charter schools,” he explains. “My personal belief is that that union dynamic is at the heart of why he’s doing what he’s doing. There’s certainly no proof that charter schools do any better than union schools at teaching kids. So the Mayor set up this process where the community would have a say in determining whether these charter school applicants were worthy of receiving money. And the way that procedure was set up essentially guaranteed that the charter schools would get the sign-off for the money. So he set up a process to guarantee the outcome he wanted all along.

And we engage in some lively debate about whether the City did a good job clearing the streets, a favorite winter exercise for all Chicagoans.

 

 

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Dec. 19, 2013

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Ken

Some questions we kicked around on this week’s Chicago Newsroom with Education expert and consultant Paul Goren an Chicago Reader Senior Writer (and 2014 Studs Terkel Award winner)  Steve Bogira:

Could CPS schools be significantly improved if, taking their gross racial and economic isolation into account, they became part of a “metropolitan solution” in which kids from the suburbs and kids from the city were mixed?

Despite the obvious drawback that selective-enrollment schools can “cream” more committed and better-performing students from the traditional neighborhood schools, wouldn’t we be better off if CPS had continued to build more Whitney Youngs and Walter Paytons?

Is it plausible that city and CPS officials have tacitly acknowledged that some portion of the student population is so far behind, and so disadvantaged  academically and socially, that they’re just being given up on?

For our last show of the year, we try to take a really big-picture of where CPS stands today. And where it stands can be daunting to contemplate.

“Enrollment is 86% black and Hispanic City-wide, and 85% low-income. And that didn’t just start. It’s been this way for years and years,” says Bogira, who favors a metropolitan solution and is guardedly in favor of more selective-enrolment expansion “because it helps keep middle-class families in the city, and it helps some middle-class families decide to send their kids to the public schools, which I think gives the schools more clout, and because I believe kids learn from each other, it’s better for the lower-income kids who are in those classrooms.”

But Paul Goren, Executive VP with national education consulting firm CASEL, says it’s important not to lose sight of the ever-present need to simply improve the schools we currently have. “Because if we don’t, then poverty, which is absolutely a part of the issue, becomes an excuse…we have to have some focus on reform within the system.”

For Bogira, though, the central issue is segregation. “Since government played such a role in segregation throughout Chicago’s history,” he says, “by backing restrictive covenants, by building public housing projects in the ghetto, by supporting red-lining and by subsidizing white-flight (with federally-built highways and mortgage subsidies, etc.), government should play a leadership role here, too, in desegregating.”

“Being intentional about a metropolitan solution makes sense,” says Goren. “But all is not lost in every single Chicago Public School. I think we need to pay attention to where there’s potential for growth. Even in situations where there’s highly concentrated poverty or racial groups that are isolated from each other, with…an environment conducive for learning, you can make a significant differences in the lives of kids in those schools.”

But Bogira holds firm about economic and racial segregation. “Kids who grow up in segregated schools end up living segregated lives.”

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CN Dec. 12, 2013

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Ken

Looks like, with pension legislation having been passed and signed in Springfield, Chicago is next in line for “reform”.

But WBEZ’s political reporter Alex Keefe just dug into the history of Chicago’s funds and discovered what he calls “a uniquely quirky piece of math”. It’s a multiplier that’s used to calculate how much money the City has to pay into funds like those for Police and Fire, and as Keefe explains, “if something happens that changes the amount of money going out the door, the multiplier stays the same, and it hasn’t increased since 1982.”

Those “somethings” include incentives for early retirement, which the City used often in recent years. It reduces the payroll, but shifts the burden to the pensions. And then there’s the Baby Boom Problem. For the first time, more people are leaving the system than coming in, so the system is stressed in so many ways.

“This has been around a long time,” Keefe insists. “People have known about this and have been documenting it and making a lot of noise about it for decades and decades. I was sitting down with the secretary of the Chicago Firefighters pension fund. And he has these old handwritten books. And we’re talking 1924 and 1927 they’re sending letters to Springfield saying, hey, guys, this pension math you have is wacky. We’re gonna go broke by 1930. And we need you to increase, and change the way you fund pensions.”

But wait, there’s more. In order to pay the pension bills, Chicago’s funds have been selling off their investments, making them even poorer. “Since 2000, the rate at which Chicago’s four pension plans has been liquidating their assets has tripled. Last year, they cashed out a billion dollars in investments,” Keefe says.

You can see Keefe’s solid report here.

So Office Depot has decided that, forced to chose between Naperville and Boca Raton for their new HQ, and given that the State of Illinois didn’t come up with any tax breaks to entice them to stay – they’re outta here.

Shortly afterward, House Speaker Mike Madigan, who rarely makes quotable public statements, said the following:

“I find it very difficult to support tax giveaways for corporate CEOs and millionaire shareholders whose companies pay little in state taxes. I question our priorities when corporate handouts are demanded by companies that don’t pay their fair share while middle-class families and taxpayers face an increasing number of burdens.”

Pretty radical stuff.

“If only he were telling the truth,” laments Don Washington of Mayoral Tutorial.

“Eighty percent of the money that the State of Illinois raises in taxes comes from ordinary citizens,” he says. “Nine percent comes from our corporate citizens and the rest comes from fees, according to the State of Illinois. I’d just like it to be, heck, if it was 50/50 that’d be nice.”

“Why does he bring this up now?’ asks Keefe. “It wasn’t that long ago that he was calling a special session to talk about gargantuan tax breaks for CME and Sears. And the only thing I can think of is – because he lost. Because Office Depot went to Boca Raton.”

Tom McNamee, Editorial Page Editor of the Sun Times, says he thinks there was another factor. “I think the Archer-Daniels Midland effort to get a tax break rubbed him the wrong way,” he says, “because the amount they’re looking for is so minuscule compared to what they actually do in business. It’s almost like we want to get a tax break just to get a tax break. And the idea that they would either pick up and leave the state or not move their corporate headquarters to Chicago just seemed rather ludicrous. At some point it just seems that a corporation is asking for a tax break just because they can.”

And McNamee says all of these discussion are being shaded by a sobering reality. “This general sense of the widening gap between the haves a and the have-nots,” he says.”That’s for real…no one can deny that there’s a growing gap between the wealthy and the rest of us.”

A Sun-Times reader recently pointed out (and McNamee later verified) that the CEO of McDonald’s earns $9,000 an hour. It would take one of his minimum-wage-earning restaurant workers 3-1/2 months to earn what the CEO earns in an hour.

There are good reasons, he says, for arguing for an increased minimum wage. But it isn’t a panacea, and there are convincing arguments that there is a  point at which a minimum wage floor can actually harm the economy.

We close the show with speculation about what the Supreme Court will do with the pension plan they’ve been handed.

Says McNamee:

“The question is, will they resolve it on its merits, or politically? And the Illinois Supreme Court is a political body. The question for me is what will be the calculation in whatever they do? They may say, on the one hand, it’s not constitutional, but on the other hand, we need to do this. That may be the way they look at this. “

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Dec 5, 2013

Posted on December 5, 2013 by Ken

 

“Is anybody surprised in Illinois when Michael Madigan can put a deal together in less than six hours?”

That’s the reaction blogger/activist Fred Klonsky had when he learned that a new pension bill – one that would strip him and his fellow retirees of potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars each over the coming decades – had been cobbled together quietly and quickly passed in both houses.  “When Madigan wants something he can get it and he wanted it now because it would have been more difficult next year as we get closer to an election,” he explains.

Many of the same Democrats who voted against an almost identical bill in May because they deemed in unconstitutional, voted for it this time. They argued that the courts should sort it out.

“These are Democrats speaking,” says Klonsky. “They’ve cut all they can from social programs, from poor kids, from schools, they can’t cut any more, and now it’s just the retirees that are left. The notion that they can raise money by going after the corporations or the wealthy in this state, that could change the way in which we raise revenue, never seemed to occur to them. It was just a matter of who they could cut, and we were what was left.”

At the heart of this debate is a clause in the Illinois Constitution, written in 1970, which refers in part to “an enforceable contractual relationship, the benefits of which shall not be diminished or impaired.”

And the labor unions will certainly challenge this new legislation, which Governor Quinn signed privately this  afternoon. “If the courts decide that this is an unconstitutional bill, which I hope and believe that they will,” says Klonsky, “we’ll be back here again, except the hundred-billion dollar liability will now be larger, and people will have to pay more.”

Sun-Times Digital Editor Marcus Gilmer looks at it through a political lens. “This was considered a victory for Pat Quinn,” he says. “How he was able to peel off that label of being a guy who didn’t get things done. But I don’t see how this is a win when he’s flying in the face of the union and labor groups who are his supporters, and who aren’t going to go and vote for Rauner or whoever the Republican Governor candidate is next year. Are they just going to abstain?”

Teacher pension members are not concentrated in Chicago or in University towns, Klonsky asserts. They are equally spread out in every legislative district in the state. He says his blog is getting letters from precinct workers downstate who are saying – I’m not pulling for the top of the ticket. Or for any Reps who voted for this bill.

“I think the Democrats are in trouble,” he explains. “They thought they could get away with positioning themselves just to the left of the Tea Party. They thought they could pass a bill, for example, same sex marriage, and that would be enough. Because we would all vote for them because it’s the lesser of two evils.”

They may be calculating that, in the end, the average voter will not support the unions.

“That was a miscalculation,” claims Pulitzer Prize-winning Mark Konkol (DNAInfo Chicago). “When you look at what happened with the teachers’ union with the strike, with the 90% vote, they thought they had that wrapped up. When you talk about closing all those schools, with the big protests and the march. That was a miscalculation. What I’m saying is, they might be wrong, but what they’re banking on is that they’re right. So we’ll see leading up to the next election. But they’re gonna do it, and now’s the right time to do it.”

Klonsky says he feels a groundswell from disaffected Democrats. “Within the Democratic Party and to the left of the party is the emergence of a working-families party, a labor-based party, ” he says.

Changing topics, we focused on Konkol’s recent three-part series about young kids and guns. Since 2010, about 900 Chicago kids have been arrested each year for gun possession, according to his series. Fewer than 400 a year have faced charges. Of those, only about 70 kids a year are found delinquent by a juvenile court judge. And 80 percent of them don’t get locked up.

“And of the guilty, 87% are given probation or supervision, ” He tells us.

“Superintendent McCarthy said it’s one of those things I’ve been dealing with for ten years and I don’t have a solution for it. States attorney Anita Alvarez said I don’t know if locking kids up is the answer. And it just kind of sits there. We throw our hands up. What do we do? So if we’re gonna have a culture change with shooting in Chicago, the only way to do that is to start with the kids.”

Konkol tells the stories of two kids from the former Cabrini-Green area, Rodnell Davis and Quentin Evans. When he was only thirteen, Davis shot and killed a nine-year old boy. He turned himself in and after 20 years in prison was recently released. Over a scone at the Panera overlooking the sites of the once notorious high rises, Davis told Konkol that the gang leaders force young kids to carry their weapons, because the lenient laws will assure that they’re almost never punished for carrying.

“Juvenile justice law from the eighties says that you’re supposed to give the least restrictive sentence to Juveniles, no mater what,” Konkol explains.  “And carrying a gun isn’t the same thing as shooting a gun or hitting someone. So if you have a gun, it’s not really violent yet. But as Supt. McCarthy explained, having a gun is a precursor to killing someone.”

So should juvenile laws be tightened? Supreme Court justice Anne Burke told Konkol that intervention programs work for kids, but so much money’s been cut in recent years that very few programs still exist. And the programs are cheaper than incarceration, both fiscally and socially. But she summed it up. “There’s no political will”, she told him.

And we bid farewell to our friend Marcus Gilmer, who’s leaving Chicago behind for a great new gig in San Francisco. Good luck, Marcus…

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