How many more reasons do you need?

“Listen. I don't like to preach, but here's some advice. You'll meet a lot of jerks in life. If they hurt you, remember it's because they're stupid. Don't react to their cruelty. There's nothing worse than bitterness and revenge. Keep your dignity and be true to yourself.” ― Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood 

I've met a lot of jerks in my life. Unfortunately several of them were in leadership of our wonderful city and our public school system.

It's for this reason that I've kept a running count of reasons to get rid of mayoral control of the schools. I'm already up in the high 600s. When the public schools are run autocratically as a wing of City Hall, you wind up with an education system run strictly in the political interests of the mayor and his corporate backers, some of the biggest jerks around.

More reasons were added just yesterday:

#667 -- The Big Lie Syndrome
Schools CEO Byrd-Bennett came up with a whopper, obviously cooked up with the aid of CPS Liar-In-Chief  Becky Carroll. BBB claims that the 20,000 people who attended her Walton-funded school-closing hearings all agreed on the need to close schools.

If she had attended any of them, it would have made it 20,001. BBB now claims she is "pouring over the transcripts" from those meetings before she makes her final recommendations to the school board March 31. If she was really basing her decision on the transcripts she would have no choice but  to agree to a moratorium on school closings.

But in the same breath she says that "everyone got it, everyone understood that we needed to close schools." Anyone who actually attended any of those meetings like I did, knows that's a big lie. We didn't "get it."

#668 -- Book Banning
The forced removal of the graphic novel Persepolis from school libraries beginning with Lane Tech, is outrageous. So outrageous, in fact, that it seems unlikely the banning order came directly from Rahm. More likely, it's the inevitable extension of his top-down, bureaucratic network of sub-district managers, each trying to impress superiors and to show school principals (and librarians?) who's the boss.

Fred Klonsky blog

It's interesting to note other places where Persepolis has been banned at one time or another -- Iran, Morocco, Lebanon, and the UAE.

Lane Tech parents and students will protest the book banning today at 3:30 p.m. on the corner of Western and Addison. I hope to join them.

#669 -- Penny Pritzker
Enough said.

If you're still not convinced of the need for an elected school board, stay tuned. I'm sure we will hit the 700 mark shortly.