Question for the Mayor

CPAA Pres. Troy LaRaviere on Hitting Left says Rahm forced CPS principals to lobby for school funding/vouchers bill. 

If public schools aren't "failing", why are you pushing vouchers?

Let's accept for a moment, the mayor's latest claim that CPS' graduation rate jumped 4 percentage points from 2015-16 to 2016-17. I know it's not an easy thing to do, given CPS' propensity for juking the stats.

And let's accept as fact for a moment, that this bump wasn't mainly the result of the district switching metrics to measure dropouts or the result of the CPS steadily losing thousands of its poorest, underserved, and most dropout-prone students over the past two decades.

And let's for a moment at least, give all the credit for this bump to the administration and to current CPS leaders.

If we can accept all this, then one obvious question remains. Why in the hell did Rahm and fellow Democratic Party leaders push so hard to drive the inclusion of Betsy DeVos' vouchers (tax-credit "scholarships), meant to allow students to escape the city's  "failing schools", into the school funding bill?

And when I say, "push so hard", I refer to the illegal forcing of CPS principals, on school time, to lobby pols for the bill's passage.

For more on this last point, listen to our interview with Chicago Principals and Administrators Assoc. President Troy LaRaviere on this week's Hitting Left.