CN December 6, 2012

Posted on December 6, 2012 by Ken

Jesse Ruiz was appointed Vice President of the Chicago School Board when Mayor Emanuel took office. Two years and one teachers’ strike later, his Board is facing a budget shortfall of nearly a billion dollars, stubbornly intransigent academic improvement, and about a hundred-thousand unused seats in the schools -almost a 20% surplus.

Is he concerned that there was such a wide-spread public perception that he and his board-mates were installed for the purpose of turning over a maximum number of schools to private charter operators?

“I’m neutral on the type of school it is”, he says. “I’m pro-providing good options for students.”

Sarah Karp, Catalyst-Chicago’s ace reporter, also joins the panel.  She asks Ruiz about the new schools-closings commission that CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett has created to deal with the incredibly complex issue of closings – before declaring a five-year moratorium on any further shut-downs.  She says it doesn’t seem clear whether the commission is just going to recommend a general direction or devise a specific list of schools to be put out of business.

“It’s a decision that hopefully this commission tackles and gives us actionable recommendations”, he explains. “And that would mean, I would think, a list of schools that, this would be the best combinations. And that would be closures, but also consolidations.”

Acknowledging the difficulty of closing and/or consolidating schools, he says it simply has to be done. There are schools built for hundreds of students with barely a hundred in them, and few prospects for enrollment increases any time soon.  And it’s worse in the most economically stressed neighborhoods.

“I grew up in the Roseland community, my parents still live there, same street for fifty years”, he tells us. “And all the jobs they look at, all the gentlemen who were working at Sherwin-Williams and General Motors, those jobs are gone. And so if those jobs are gone, people left the area…The reality is we have this situation, we have to address it today.”

Further complicating matters is that, in addition to the 300-or-so “underutilized” schools, there are also more than 80 that are overcrowded.

He says that something the Board is looking at is the life-span of a school building. The average age of the City’s fleet of schools is 74, he says. “We build schools, supposedly for a hundred years, and maybe we shouldn’t be building hundred-year schools. Maybe we should build them a little less durable because we know in 25, maybe 40 years we have to address demographic shifts.”

Still, he acknowledges, there isn’t much use for a 70-year old school in a struggling neighborhood, especially if it needs a million-dollar boiler replacement. So many of them will simply have to be demolished.

We ask a direct question: does the number of union teachers actually drop significantly if you close 50 or 60 schools?  “It could,” he says, “but I don’t think it’s gonna be significant, and that’s not one of the drivers here. The driver is the cost of the physical plant.”

Sarah asks about the Gates Foundation, which has announced that it will not be funding CPS at this time because, it says, of the recent staff changes at the top. However, CPS has been invited to reapply in a few months.

“There’s this figure in the application for the Gates money, saying we’re gonna put in sixty charter schools over he next five years”, Karp asks. “I’ve heard CPS officials say, oh, that was just a promise, it’s not really gonna happen. But you go to these meetings and everybody says, how are we closing a hundred schools and opening sixty charters? Aren’t we just going to be in the same place in five years? ”

Ruiz reiterates that nobody has said a hundred schools will close, that the commission will be helping decide that.  “The goal is to have high-quality options in every single neighborhood of the city. We look at charter operators as an opportunity to do that and to bring high-quality options to certain neighborhoods…It’s gonna be a challenge for us,  frankly, to bring those options to a district where we’ve already right-sized things…but we’re not gonna add excess capacity where we just took out excess capacity.”

Is it fair to say that the hundred thousand empty seats have been created in part because forty thousand kids have been pulled out of traditional schools and put in charters, we ask? “It could be a factor”, he responds. “There’s a number of factors. Is it a one-to-one correlation? Probably not.”

Sarah: “I’m wondering whether one of the plans is, because you don’t want to open up new schools, is to sort of give some of the existing buildings over to, say Noble Street, like, let’s say ‘Marshall High School-hyphen-Noble Street?”

“When we talk about adding new schools, that could be an option”, says Ruiz. “Given what we have today, and who we have out there, the teams that, how many years have some of these schools have been at a level-three status, that we just can’t wait, and maybe somebody else that has a slightly better proven track record…”

We ask about the billion dollar deficit. Sarah Karp points out that most of it is pensions, and that any solutions will come from Springfield. So isn’t the pension piece unfairly inflating the “we have a billion dollar shortfall” argument?

“So, yes, largely due to the pension issue, but those are our obligations until maybe there’s some reform in Springfield that lessens that burden, and federal support that has helped us in past years and this year they’re gone…without going to the taxpayers every year to seek more revenue, we’ve gotta be able to run the system with what we’ve got”, he says.

And a parting question. Was Ruiz shocked to see the near unanimity of the CTU, and the strong support from parents? (and their ability to supersede the 75% support level demanded by new State legislation).

“No. Not that shocked. I expected, maybe not the level they got to, in terms of the percentages, but we need our communities to support our teachers.”

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CN November 29, 2012

Posted on November 30, 2012 by Ken

It’s hard to keep track of how many candidates are currently in the 2nd District race, because people are declaring and dropping out almost every hour.  Rich Miller (Capitol Fax) says Donne Trotter has the edge, because he’s close to having enough votes for the Cook County Dems’ endorsement, according to WBEZ’s political reporter Alex Keefe. He’s looking forward to their mid-month meeting.

“December 15 is going to be really important in this race”, he says, “because if you remember the last special election we had in Illinois which was the race to fill Rahm Emanuel’s old seat up in the Fifth District – I remember going to a debate, there were seventeen people on the stage – and the party couldn’t slate a candidate. Hopefully they’ll be able to winnow the field a little bit”.

But what of Jesse Jackson Jr, who has resigned the seat?  “It won’t take too much for Jesse Jackson to rebuild whatever reputation he needs to move on to his next chapter”, asserts Fernando Diaz, Managing Editor of Hoy Newspaper.  “He’s clearly not going back to Washington. But I don’t think he’s done. It’s just  matter of what will he end up facing in terms of prosecution or actual charges. Or jail time. If the real issue here is that he was using campaign funds for home improvements, that’s just galactically stupid.”

Rebecca Harris (Catalyst) also joins us. The big issue this week is school closings. Barbara Byrd-Bennet seems to have won a big victory in the Legislature with her plan to  get all the school closings done at once, and then wait five years for the next round. But closing schools is complex, Harris says. It’s more than just finding schoolls that are half empty.

“It’s not just a population loss problem. It’s a population shift problem in that the African-American neighborhoods have been losing population , whereas in the Latino neighborhoods the population has been booming and in many cases the schools are overcrowded. So part of the reason they’ve been having to open new schools has been to alleviate overcrowding in some neighborhoods.”

It’s not just population loss or movement, though. Some of the “empty seats” have come about because charters and alternative schools have taken away students from the traditional schools. And just closing a school might not make much of a difference.

“It could be if they closed a hundred schools”, Harris says, they’d save “fifty to eighty million dollars, which, when you’re looking at a billion dollar budget deficit, that comes to seem like a paltry amount.”

“All of these populations shift and they will continue to shift”, Diaz adds. “So whatever school closings happen now might not be effective five years from now, or ten years from now when the communities have moved into other neighborhoods. If you look at Pilsen right now, Little Village, Humboldt Park – they are changing rapidly. There’s a lot fewer kids today in Pilsen than there were ten years a ago. A lot fewer.

We also kick around the latest happenings in Chicago journalism – the debut of DNAInfo, the likely sale of the Tribune, the almost inexplicable decision by the Sun-Times publisher to play the death of his friend/mentor/benefactor as page-one news, and the continuing role of wealthy benefactors as the people who are funding professional journalism.

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CN November 22, 2012

Posted on November 24, 2012 by Ken

The exit polls and political analysis from Nov. 6 all seem to agree that younger voters played a key role in Barack Obama’s re-election. It was a bit unexpected – the conventional wisdom was that younger voters were turned off and would take a pass.

So we convened a panel of four Chicagoans, aged 20-25, to talk a little politics. Turns out three of the four voted, and Dakota Loesch (25), who didn’t,  considered non-voting a valid political choice.

His decision stems, he says, from a specific instance when he was growing up — the Gore vs. Bush debacle.

Cristina Perez (25), who’s an Elections in Action Director at Mikva Challenge, told him it was “time to get over it.” There are too many local issues, she said, where a few votes can make a  big difference.

Dakota also got push-back from Katherine Iorio (21), a Columbia College journalism student, who writes for Chicago Talks and Chicago Phoenix:  “It’s just so shocking to see so many people in our age group who are like– ‘ Well my vote doesn’t matter, what’s the point of going out and voting?'” Katherine told Dakota: “It’s sad. It’s like for women, African-Americans, for all of us — we’ve fought for that chance TO vote and then you’re not taking that opportunity.”

Paris Jackson(21), attends De Paul University and works with an advisory group recommending policies to Mayor Emanuel, says a lot of younger minorities voted because they were energized by what was perceived as an effort by the Republicans to suppress the vote. But he says he knows plenty of young people who voted simply because they think it’s their duty.

While we have them at the table, we ask them about lifestyle issues. Each of them still shops in the brick-and mortar world, and they each had purchased some of their clothes in stores. They still watch conventional TV, although they do watch a lot of programming on-line. That’s especially important to Katherine Iorio, who is also an investigative reporting intern at WBBM TV.

Newspapers – not so much. And radio? They listen to public radio, and occasionally to commercial music radio, but not too often.  And Paris doesn’t own a free-standing radio at all.  Music is mostly on line, and Dakota, who’s a musician with  Animal City, says he’s absolutely fine with people stealing his music on-line.

“I hope so. God willing. Pass it around, please,” says Dakota.

It’s a fun visit, but there’s a serious underlying statistic. Today, there are 46 million eligible voters between 18-29, and there are about 39 million seniors eligible to vote. The seniors vote in huge numbers, of course, but if younger voters ever got serious they could start to run the country.

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CN November 15, 2012

Posted on November 15, 2012 by Ken

Public pensions take the spotlight in today’s discussion, featuring Mayoral Tutorial‘s Don Washington and education blogger Fred Klonsky.

At the urging of many activists and civic groups, the referendum issue on the state ballot last week that would have restricted the ability of legislative and policy bodies to increase public pensions and benefits –  was defeated.  Both our guests agree that the defeat was a good thing. But they emphasize that the battle over how to fund the gaping hole in the state’s public pensions has only just begun.

Yesterday, Ty Fahner, writing for the Commercial Club of Chicago, said that the pension issue was “unfixable”, and he urged immediate, drastic cuts in pension benefits, increases in eligibility ages and other actions.

None of this impressed Klonsky.

“Here’s a guy who, when he was attorney General under the governorship of Jim Thompson, it was the worst time for the funding of state pensions under any governor,” he says. “They went from paying 90%of their obligation to 30% of their obligation. While Ty Fahner was the Attorney General. Now Ty Fahner goes on Chicago Tonight on WTTW and says that if an employer in the private sector were to do what the state did to their employees (renege on payments into their retirement plan), they would be indicted. So he would have had to indict himself.”

We asked Don Washington if it didn’t make some sense that many taxpayers, frustrated by their own dwindling paychecks and benefits, would think it unfair that public workers continue to receive what taxpayers might consider extravagant benefits.

“What’s happened to the private sector is that it’s been cannibalized,” he says. “It’s been eaten whole by corporations that have wiped away union protections, wiped away good, middle-class jobs, good working-class jobs, where they’re…basically devouring the base of the economy. And the only thing that’s left are the public workers who have public unions. They’re the last guys standing before a third-world country.  We shouldn’t be up in arms about how good the people have it who still have public jobs. We should be up in arms about the fact that the people who run our politics and our economy are so dysfunctional that they’re turning everybody into what amounts to wage-slaves.”

And Klonsky offers a fairly simple, if politically unthinkable, approach. “The actual solution for the funding problem in Illinois is for the Legislature to enact a progressive income tax. It makes no sense to think that you can fund the State of Illinois by taxing those who make the least the same as those who make the most.”

Last week’s election also resulted in a lopsided victory for a non-binding referendum in 327 Chicago precincts calling for an elected school board for the city. Don’t expect one to materialize any time soon though, since Mayor Emanuel and the leaders of the state legislature (who would have to approve it) are obviously opposed.

So wouldn’t an elected school board bring on a raft of unanticipated consequences – like special interest money buying seats, and mediocre candidates being elected by a handful of apathetic voters? Maybe, says Washington, but that’s the price we pay…

“When you ask for an elected anything, what you’re volunteering for is an endless fight. You’re volunteering that you’re gonna care enough about this body to be directly engaged in it. The more people are engaged in it, then you won’t have these problems. It’s just like any other political system. The more alienated and the further away people get from it, the more it becomes purchasable, the more it becomes reflective of the people who have powerful interests that never go away.”

And there’s another factor to consider. This Board will be determining how to manage the schools our children attend. If it involves children, parents will get involved, both  panelists assert. Further, Klonsky says not having an elected Board essentially disenfranchises a largely minority population that is the school system’s largest client.

“It’s simply a denial of the right to participation in a democratic system to say that only mostly minority people in the City of Chicago are not allowed to choose the people who run their school system. Everyone else (in Illinois) can do it, but not the folks in Chicago”

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CN October 8, 2012

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Ken

It’s our election wrap-up program. Being a Thursday show, we have the luxury of an extra day to reflect on What It All Means, so we assembled Carol Felsenthal (Chicago Magazine and The Hill), Ben Joravsky (Chicago Reader) and Kyra Kyles (Jet Magazine) for the conversation.

Some highlights:

Carol: Romney ran a twentieth-century campaign in the 21st century. The Adelson money should have been spent on the ground-game instead of on insulting commercials. In the end, the Super-PACs meant nothing.

Kyra: “There were a lot of bigoted comments, there were a lot of comments about taking the country back. You had Donald Trump come out and say we need to wage a revolution. It’s inflammatory.”

Referring to Republican efforts to combat voter fraud, which was widely interpreted as an attempt to suppress voter participation in minority communities, Kyra cited her mother and people of her mother’s generation. “That’s like a flashback. You know, when you would go to the polls and someone would try to dissuade you from voting. It triggers a visceral reaction, it really does.”

Ben: “This is the second election in a row where they sort of targeted black people as a voting mass. Instead of trying to win a black voter over, they just say well, we’re gonna try to deter you from voting, implying that in black areas there’s overwhelming fraud. Just by virtue of the fact that it’s a black area.”

Carol: The news today that Jess Jackson Jr. might have “bought a $40,000 Rolex for his girlfriend, that will stay in your mind forever.  That kind of detail. That’s twice as much as the house I grew up in in West Rogers Park.”

And Ben has a suggestion for a Republican who could reunite the Illinois party and get votes from Democrats. “George Ryan”, he says. “A lot of Democrats in my family still like George Ryan.”

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CN November 1, 2012

Posted on November 9, 2012 by Ken

It’s our pre-election program, but there are very few races on the Chicago ballot this time. Charlie Meyerson (independent journalist and blogger, Northwestern University) and Curtis Black (Newstips.org) talk about the upcoming  referenda covering public-employee pensions and the push for an elected school board.

We also find some time to talk about media issues. It’s the first day for the new Tribune digital edition, complete with limited paywall. And Charlie recently posted a thoughtful piece about the important role Twitter played in coverage of Hurricane Sandy, so we debate that for a while.

Also on the program: Jesse Jackson, Jr.’s invisible campaign and the (perhaps momentary) recognition in the public debate that perhaps our planet’s climate is changing. Curtis paraphrases Bill McKibbon: We have one party that’s owned by the oil and coal industry, and one that’s terrified by it.

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CN October 25, 2012

Posted on October 26, 2012 by Ken

In Chicago, you have one choice. You’re either prey or predator.

That sentiment that was conveyed to Diane Sawyer as she convened her Chicago Violence town hall on ABC last week, and it was distressing to Jet Magazine Senior Editor Kyra Kyles, who joined our latest discussion.

“And the really sad thing was some of the things the gang leaders were saying. They all came into the same room which is definitely a step in the right direction, but most of them were saying they could not think of a single way to fix the way things have gotten,” she says.

“But it really did look like a piece on Afghanistan. You know, you go down into the enemy trenches and you get the war lords together and you try to broker peace. It was depressing.”

Panelist Eric Zorn (Chicago Tribune) said the conversation really highlighted the role technology now plays in urban violence. “It’s like instant graffiti, insulting you,” he says. And Kyles related conversations she’d had with gang members during some earlier reporting.

“If they see a tweet that angers them, they’re going to find the person who sent that tweet right then. And they were asked well, do you think if you waited an hour you’d still take this course of action – and the response was, you don’t have an hour. Here, you just have to act. ”

Both Eric and Kyra expressed frustration with the rate of development of charter schools in Chicago, especially in light of the Wednesday Tribune story about Barbara Byrd Bennett’s involvement with charters in Cleveland, where she was once Superintendent and where charters are not considered especially successful overall.

“I think most people think of it as a slam-dunk,” says Kyles. “The minute you get rid of all these restrictions, learning can just grow unfettered. And we’re seeing that this is not necessarily the case. I wonder if having this publicized in this way will cause them to proceed in a more cautious way when it pertains to just opening the flood gates for charter schools and shuttering Chicago Public Schools.”

“I think this headlong rush toward charters, you need a lot of people who are saying – wait a minute,” added Zorn. “And I don’t see that in this administration. Say your parents don’t care? Say you’re living in a bad neighborhood and your parents don’t care about education. So then the City just writes you off and doesn’t try to improve your school.”

Both panelists agree that Barack Obama bested Mitt Romney in the second and third debates. But Zorn says he thinks the president’s most important criticism was of Romney’s “1950’s social policy”.

“In his heart I don’t think he accepts gay people. Obviously he doesn’t accept marriage equality, and I think a number of things about the way society has evolved don’t really fit with the world view that he grew up with, that he’s comfortable with, “he says. “He seems like a dad in a TV show when I was a little kid. And there’s that sense that that’s the kind of America that he would like us to go back to. ”

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CN October 18, 2012

Posted on October 19, 2012 by Ken

Miguel Del Valle was very pleased with Barack Obama’s performance on the second presidential debate. The first one, not so much.

“Having served with Barack for eight years, the individual who showed up for the first debate was State Senator Barack, not President Barack,” he tells us.

Del Valle’ also concerned about the “safety zone” signage he sees being installed around his community on Fullerton, Central and Kedzie Avenues, presumably in preparation for the new speed cameras.

“We didn’t need these cameras from the very beginning,” he says. “I think to a great extent the media really failed to scrutinize the original proposal. When the mayor’s people presented the so-called evidence that there was a need – there wasn’t a need, we already had our speed bumps and school zone speed limits. This is strictly a revenue-generator.”

The Reader’s Ben Joravsky adds that this is a way to raise revenue without the hot-button issue of raising property taxes. “Politically the way it works is, as long as taxpayer A doesn’t have to pay the bill, he or she doesn’t care about taxpayer B. So it’s like, you know you ran the light, so leave me alone,” he says.

Joravsky tells us about some recent work he’s done at the Reader in which he compares traditional pubic schools with charters.

“I don’t like using standardized tests as a benchmark, he explains. “But since the charter school advocates are using them as benchmarks and feel no compulsion to be accurate in the use of these scores, I had to weigh in.  And the reality is that unionized schools in Chicago by and large are outperforming charter schools. You have to go through forty unionized schools before you reach a charter school in the ranking of these test scores. So I feel the public has been misled into believing that charter schools have a magical formula because they fire teachers.”

“I don’t understand why you’d be creating new charters at a time when you’re claiming you already have too many schools,” Joravsky adds. “It’s just a basic way of diverting money away from unionized schools to non-union schools. I think that’s ultimately what this fight is about.”

In fact, Joravsky, well known for his crusade against Tax Increment Financing, says he almost regrets Mayor Emanuel’s decision to declare $25 million in TIF funding as surplus, providing as much as $10 million to the City and several millions more to CPS and other entities. “I almost don’t want them to start returning TIF dollars to the schools because I  don’t trust them to spend that money prudently.”

Miguel Del Valle, who voted against the charter authorization bill when he was in the Legislature, says he nevertheless agrees that there is a place for charters and some are working. But he strongly disagrees with the current rush to build more and more of them.

“When you starve Chicago Public schools in neighborhoods for the purpose of using dollars to create this dual system, that’s wrong,” he asserts.  “When you say that you’re going to close schools because you have too many seats, you’re under-enrolled, but at the same time you open up a charter, then how do you reconcile those two? It’s a dishonest approach. It’s obviously an approach being led by individuals who want to privatize public education.

“One of the things about the rush to privatize is that we’re sacrificing quality. We really are. And the sad thing is we’re not going to find this out, we’re not gonna be able to document this until years from now.”

Del Valle and Joravsky both say they don’t have serious disagreement with Toni Preckwinkle’s proposals to increase taxes on guns, bullets, slot machines and golf course admissions, but Ben admits that he’ll probably have to start buying his bullets in Indiana.

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CN October 11, 2012

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Ken

Mayor Emanuel has released his 2014 budget, and, despite the fact that there was vey little traditional community input beforehand, it has been accepted so far with relatively little criticism. In fact, editorials in the dailies were fairly positive, acknowledging that Emanuel’s in a tough situation with looming pension payments that promise to bust future budgets.

CMW’s Thom Clark tells us that it’s important to keep in mind just how many constraints now bind the budgeting process.

“The total property taxes collected are only paying for pension and debt service,” he explains. “Not a single policeman or fireman…is covered by the City’s corporate share of the property taxes. I think most taxpayers don’t realize how hemmed in the Mayor’s budget office really is.”

A big piece of new revenue projected for next year is about thirty million dollars from the controversial new speeding cameras, which are still at best unproven.

“$30 million from cameras, and there are a couple of legal issues, still. You’ve gotta capture kids in the picture in order to assess the fine because otherwise it’s just speeding and a cop has to catch you, ” Clark says. “The law on which this was built, a school safety thing, actually requires that the documentation for assessing a fine show a kid at risk from your speeding.”

There has been some apparent success with the Mayor’s new “grid system” for the collection of garbage, and soon for the distribution of other City services.

“I really think it took having a new mayor, though, to make that happen,” says NPR’s Cheryl Corley, who’s reported on the budget for NPR’s nationl audience. “It really was such an entrenched practice, and political, and you had to have somebody new make those changes.”

But the big issue, of course, is the looming pension payments, which will have to be made starting in about two years unless the Illinois Legislature finds a way to offer relief. As Cheryl tells us: “The Mayor’s floor leader, Patrick O’Connor said – if it comes to the point where nothing is done, you’re gonna have a situation where you’ll have to increase property taxes by 150%. You’ll have everybody fleeing Chicago.”

Because the City will shortly be facing collective bargaining with both fire and police, there’s still another layer of uncertainty complicating the budgeting process. But it has also revived, Clark says, some discussion about community policing.

“As someone who worked closely on that issue twenty years ago, we never really had full-fledged community policing,” he says, “and once CAPS was implemented, cops who were in that program looked to get out because they could not advance in the ranks the way cops traditionally did because they weren’t making arrests.  If there’s an effort to really implement community policing I’m convinced we’d see more community engagement and an impact on the crime rate, but the way cops get evaluated will have to be changed or they won’t stay in the system.”

CMW recently published the third edition of The New News:Ranking Chicago’s On-Line News Scene, in partnership with the Chicago Community Trust. It’s an effort to track how people in the Chicago area access their news in this multi-faceted information environment.

“What we found this year,” says Clark, ” looking at originally a thousand sites and then more closely at about two hundred and ranking about fifty into five different categories, is that the daily newspapers, now more on-line, still frame a lot of the news agenda.

“We also discovered something we couldn’t measure well, which is how much information people are getting through list-serves and other really unconventional sources. In fact, going to a media outlet’s home page is rarely the way people are accessing news any more. People are sending them links through Facebook or Twitter, and they’re coming in through side doors.”

And hopefully watching Chicago Newsroom once in a while, too.

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CN October 4, 2012

Posted on October 5, 2012 by Ken

At Wednesday’s presidential debate, Mitt Romney, explaining what would be his energy policy, said the following:

Mr. President, all of the increase in natural gas and oil has happened on private land, not on government land. On government land, your administration has cut the number of permits and licenses in half. If I’m president, I’ll double them, and also get the — the oil from offshore and Alaska. And I’ll bring that pipeline in from Canada.

Kari Leydersen is this week’s guest.  A well-respected Chicago reporter who has traveled the country observing energy extraction processes, she says the situation isn’t that simple.

“This whole idea of energy security he’s alluding to – that we need to tap the coal and the gas as though that somehow makes us safer and gives us cheaper, better energy – all these things are world markets.”

In fact, the introduction of incredibly inexpensive natural gas to the domestic market – through the use of hydraulic fracturing, which extracts pockets of gas from thousand of feet underground – has the potential to skew the entire world energy mix in the short term. The availability of cheap, plentiful gas has resulted in the construction of new power plants that can be built inexpensively and have many fewer pollution issues. So coal plants – like Chicago’s State Line, Crawford and Fisk – are being closed.

But don’t look for a net reduction in global pollution.  “Because of all these power plants closing, the coal companies are really looking to ramp up their exports to China, and possibly to Europe. They don’t care where the coal goes as long as they get the money,” she explains.

And to further complicate matters, the American gas producers, looking for higher prices, are investing in liquefaction plants and tankers, so they can ship gas around the world. That’ll raise the price of gas, which might make oil and coal more attractive here in a few years.

What it all comes down to is that our demand for electricity keeps rising. It’s not just our big new TVs. It’s also the looming demand for plug-in hybrid cars.

Leydersen has researched efforts to bring large-scale renewable energy to market. She was recently in Germany, where they confidently predict that they’ll get 80% of their energy from wind, solar and other sources. But that’s a long way from reality in the U.S., where “drill baby drill” remains a favored solution.

Leydersen has also reported extensively on labor issues. She sees the recently-settled CTU strike as an important victory for labor in general, but cautions against some of the more euphoric predictions.

“It will have lasting impact both in terms of showing that a union can get what they want to a large degree by being bold and by risking alienating some people, and it focused a lot of attention on the school reform debate, she says. “But that alone is not going to change labor relations in the U.S. or in Chicago. And in some ways it might make it harder for some unions, too, because some segment of the population, probably a small segment, may feel more negatively about labor than they did before. I mean, the Mayor probably does.”

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