Subscripts
…Without most people noticing, the first decade of the 21st Century became the Decade of The Lists. There’s Angie’s List and Craigslist and allkinsofotherlists in this Internet era. So we’re going to begin a list unique to Chicago: Leon’s List. Leon’s List is named after Leon Finney, who became a multi-millionaire by selling out poor people under the guise of “community organizing.” Without the guys and gals on Leon’s List, Chicago would have been a different place since Harold Washington died and left the town completely in the hands of millionaires and billionaires. To make Leon’s List, you have to have profited from the struggles of a community, and then betrayed the community’s interests and sidled up to the wealthy and powerful — while becoming wealthy and powerful yourself. The first four people to make the list from the point of view of this newspaper are Leon Finney (Woodlawn); Michael Scott (Douglas Park); Jacqueline Heard; and, last but never least, the entire Jackson family (Jesse; Jesse Jr.; Sandy; etc.). Without these men and women — and dozens of other lessers like them — Richard M. Daley, Patrick Ryan, and their ilk could never have gotten away with it. Marilyn Stewart is trying to work her way on to the list, but she hasn’t made it yet. A couple of more years, though, and we’re sure she’ll prosper and profit enough to stand in such august company…
Photo Above: Leon’s at 63rd and Harper (behind Hyde Park High School). Substance photo by George Schmidt.
…As fans of the CTUPC remember, last year the Chicago Teachers Union’s officers devoted hours of meeting time and pages in the official union newspaper claiming that the decline in CTU membership since August 2004 (when the Marilyn Stewart group took over) was the fault of Debbie Lynch). When Lynch left office, CTU had 36,261 members (source: membership report, September 2004, prepared by CTU Financial Secretary, Mark Ochoa). When Stewart began scapegoating Lynch for the decline in membership (one year before the May 2007 CTU election), CTU still had 33,788 members (source: membership report, April 2006). By October 1, 2007, CTU membership was down another 2,000 — three years after Deborah Lynch left office! Since Stewart took over, CTU membership has dropped to 31,597 (source: membership report, October 1, 2007) — 13 percent. That’s Stewart’s fault, not Lynch’s...
…It wasn’t until the end of September when we read Chicago Teachers Union’s Connee Fitch-Blanks explaining why she voted to give some pension business to Mayor Daley’s nephew that we realized CTU has been on a kind of negative roll for a month by then. A month before the pension debacle was exposed, Fitch-Blanks was all smiles as CTU lent her for a product placement and infomercial for the expensive and controversial “Hooked on Phonics” program at Crispus Attucks Elementary School at 39th and Dearborn on the South Side. While the pension crookedness made big news, the Hooked on Phonics little crookedness didn’t even make the news. What happened was simple: The product placement show carefully orchestrated by Hooked on Phonics marketing people (and guarded by three well armed security guys who could have been from Blackwater USA) on August 30 co-starred the Chicago Teachers Union at one of its “Fresh Start” schools (Attucks). In the infomercial, Dr. Fitch-Blanks and another CTU staffer, Nate Dickson, offered a major endorsement to Hooked on Phonics in the parking area west of Attucks. Meanwhile, dozens of well-scrubbed local children — all African-Americans — provided all the visual opportunities a marketing team could have dreamed up. Of course, Hooked on Phonics hadn’t even bothered to change its tutorials (all white children) inside the glitzy Hooked on Phonics bus. And to top off the entire show, Hooked on Phonics had the Number Two guy in the Governor’s office, Lieutenant Governor Pat Quinn, read a proclamation that the day in question was “Hooked on Phonics” day in Illinois. We couldn’t have made this stuff up if we tried. But among the many questions that arose was whether anyone at CTU has bothered to price the cost of the expensive (and not very effective) Hooked on Phonics products the union was helping hype. Or, for that matter, whether CTU cares about how many poor and working class families, desperate for their young children to learn to “read”, buy into the Hooked on Phonics hype, only to discover that there is more hype than hope in much of what corporate America is marketing in our schools nowadays…
…With “Friends” like these you can lie to thousands of people to win the CTU retiree election. Just in case anyone might have thought that the “Chicago Union Teacher” and the Marilyn Stewart group (the United Progressive Caucus, UPC for short) currently in charge of the Chicago Teachers Union would change their praxis and stop disrespecting retired members of the union, think again. First, the September issue of the Chicago Union Teacher (the union’s monthly newspaper) once again insulted the union’s retired members by arriving in October. Second, despite a promise the CTUPC still had not mailed the annual union calendar date book to retirees by the second week of October (everybody else got theirs first week of September). Third was the biggest insult of all from Stewart and her “United Progressive Caucus” (UPC) — CTU officials also rigged the recent election for retiree functional vice president. So in many cases from now on, we’ll talk about the predations of the “CTUPC”, which is what the union really is at this point. One of the many ways Stewart’s people lies cheat and steal was by mailing a letter on behalf of their candidate after forging the signatures of some of Reilly’s supposed supporters. Yes, they even went so far as to forge the names of some people on the letter they mailed to all the voters endorsing the candidacy of Mary Sharon Reilly, their “winner.” Not everyone who signed the letter they sent from “Committee to Elect Mary Sharon Reilly” actually signed the letter from “Committee to Elect Mary Sharon Reilly.” According to our sources, the deed was done by CTU staffer Diana Scheffer. Not that it mattered who actually put ink to paper, since nobody could check out the facts in time for the election anyway. That was assured by CTUPC Financial Secretary Mark Ochoa and his loyal henchperson Barbara Filas (who, by the way, is paid more than the average Chicago teacher). Besides, there was no way to call and ask the “Committee to elect Mary Sharon Reilly” about those unique “signatures.” The Reilly letter [which we reprinted on Page Thirty-One of the September 2007 Substance and which is now available at www.substancenews.net] contained no address, phone number, e-mail or other way to contact the Mary Sharon Reilly’s supposed friends and supporters. It was sort of a faith-based thing, like electing Marilyn Stewart and the CTUPC after she promised seven percent raises, restoration of teacher seniority, etc…
Above photo: CTU Retiree Vice President Mary Sharon Reilly at the October 4, 2007, RTAC luncheon. Substance photo by George Schmidt.
Above photo: CTU Retiree Vice President Mary Sharon Reilly at the October 4, 2007, RTAC luncheon. Substance photo by George Schmidt.…One of the most touching things about the general con job published about school violence in Chicago in the October Catalyst is the SMART con job. Catalyst, like most proponents of corporate school reform, is desperately seeking an explanation of how things that are going so wrong are really going really really right (and not just right wing). So part of the explanation for why statistical reports on crime in and around Chicago’s roughest ghetto elementary and high schools don’t jive with reality brings us to SMART, the Saturday program that supposedly provides miscreants with an alternative to harsher punishments under the “Student Code of Conduct.” Without checking out even one SMART site or asking for any details (financial; audit; other) about SMART, Catalyst just reports it. Success by definition (like so much else in Daleyland)? Well, a little checking will show otherwise. For the historical record, it was a close audit of the Philadelphia SMART program (brought in from Chicago by Paul Vallas) that first raised questions about all the other lies Vallas had been telling reporters there. But it wasn’t reporters who did the Philadelphia double-check of the SMART con job. A closer look at Chicago’s SMART program will show that it’s mostly preacher patronage and that hard core gang bangers laugh at it. Of course, to do that story, a reporter has to go back several years, check all the financials, then double-check all the kids who supposedly went to SMART, and actually do some reporting. In Chicago? In 2007? When everyone is in the second decade of The Rapture that began when Chicago got Mayor Daley’s School Reform Miracle? And the major beneficiaries are the preachers who line up to praise Daley and his works based on a phone call? Right…
…By the third week of Chicago’s school year, everyone who was paying attention knew that Arne Duncan’s brainchild, IMPACT, has screwed many of the city’s general high schools. Although every teacher and principal in the massive school system was forced to work overtime because of the IMPACT mess, the most terrifying impact of IMPACT hit in those general high schools which are forced to take the largest number of kids well into the school year. As a result, at places like Amundsen, Clemente, Wells, and Kelvyn Park high schools, things got progressively worse with each passing day. At some schools, classes remained overcrowded, while substitute teachers were “teaching” full programs that would be reorganized well into October. More and more kids were arriving, but there was no way to create programs or get them into the right classes. By September 25, Kelvyn Park staff knew that the reason for that massive gang fight on Fullerton Ave. after school was because of the scheduling messes. The walkout and protest about programs at Wells High School on October 4 was also part of IMPACT’s impact. Yet there was a blackout on the real news in Chicago’s daily newspapers, which more and more read like the “Daley News.” More attention paid to public relations puffery and privatization piffle than to how the Daley people are sabotaging the city’s remaining public schools. Although they claim to follow “business models”, Daley people are CPS are actually as incompetent as any other group of kleptoid crony capitalists. Their job is to waste public dollars, undermine public services, as privatize as much as possible as quickly as possible. From that nefarious point of view, IMPACT is a complete success. But only in a city that no longer has a truly free press is such hypocrisy possible…
…According to the Chicago Teachers Union website, CTU is posting the “Delegates’ Packet” for meetings of the 800-member House of Delegates. As usual, the credibility of the claims of the Marilyn Stewart group (the United Progressive Caucus and the patronage army they currently have running CTU, which is why it should be called the “CTUPC”) should be double-checked. For example, the October “Delegates Packet” on line at www.ctunet.com contains ten pages of materials, most of which deals with how to get National Board certification (as if the CTU were a branch of that privatized National Board thingy Mayor Daley loves). The actual packet distributed to the delegates by the CTUPC patronage people giving the stuff out (patronage as in $100 stipend a month — plus paid for parking for going to union meetings — for the “district supervisors”) contained 48 pages of material. Missing included information on scholarships for the children of CTU members (is this only for delegates and the brass?), committee meeting dates, and even the union’s membership report (by Financial Secretary Mark Ochoa)…
…Word came at press time that the CTU was filing an “Unfair Labor Practice” charge against the Chicago Board of Education for not (a) putting the new pay raise on paychecks and (b) for not paying the retroactive pay to all union members. It was only a couple of months ago that CTU’s leaders were negotiating with the CPS negotiating team. Seems like CTU could have specified, in writing, when both of those things were in place. This wouldn’t be the first time a judge reminded the UPC that they had gone along with something they later disliked...
