Thursday, September 3, 2015

Rahm runs for cover. Claypool must be having second thoughts. Hunger strikers in D.C.


Dyett hunger striker April Stogner speaks in front of Education Department in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday. To her right is Jitu Brown (seated), another hunger striker who is national director of the Journey for Justice Alliance. Behind Brown are John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation; Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project; American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten; National Education Association President Lily Garcia; and Martin Blank, director of the Coalition for Community Schools. | Lynn Sweet/Sun-Times


Things fall apart; the center cannot hold -- W.B. Yeats

If Forrest Claypool knew what his first month on the job as Rahm's appointed schools boss would look like, he likely would have stayed hunkered down as chief 'crat at the CTA.

No one's buying Claypool's subtraction-by-addition move, stocking the supposedly broke CPS bureaucracy with expensive CTA political loyalists while he purges the remnants of Byrd-Bennett's crew. It's true, he cut 12 and hired 5. But those five are making double what BBB was paying the 12 and none of them know a damned thing about schools -- or as Arne Duncan likes to call it, the education business.

Ronald DeNard, Claypool’s new $225,000-a-year senior vice president of operations who was chief financial officer with Claypool at CTA doesn't even live in the city.

Rahm runs
Tough guy Rahm, who promised to have Claypool's back while he chopped the school system to smithereens, is having a tough time even showing his face in public after first ignoring and then trying to pacify the Dyett hunger strikers with a 30-minute meeting Wednesday night.

Neither Claypool nor the mayor can offer the community anything substantial after Rahm had painted himself into a corner on Monday by telling the media there would be no new neighborhood public high school in Bronzeville.

Now two of the strikers, along with AFT Pres. Randi Weingarten and NEA Pres. Lily Eskelsen García, are in D.C. trying to appeal to a higher power -- Arne Duncan. But it's not clear that Obama's guy Duncan has any interest in bailing out Clinton's guy Emanuel. The split within the Democratic Party has grown that wide. My god, they're running Biden against Hillary (but I digress).

Now Rahm is set to impose the largest property tax in Chicago history. That should bust the whole thing wide open.

The topper came last night as Rahm had to be hustled out of his own budget hearing by security after protesters rushed the stage.

Things fall apart.

1 comment:

  1. Didn't Karen Lewis warn Claypool? Didn't she say, "Run, Forrest, run"?

    ReplyDelete

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