WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Ald. Maldonado

Ald. Robert Maldonado, new chair of the Latino Caucus

“Some of our communities are being completely gentrified. We need to stop that, we need to slow it down.” -- WBEZ

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

"This awful, untrue line got boo'ed for a full minute. John Delaney, thank you but please sashay away." -- The Hill

Howie Klein

Maybe the tent really is too big. If it's big enough for John Bel Edwards to be stinking it up from the inside, why would a normal Democrat even want to be inside it? -- Crooks & Liars

Elizabeth Warren

 “It’s not just the mass shootings. It’s the ones that never make the headlines. It’s the kids who are shot at the playground, on the sidewalk, in their own homes. Gun violence touches families every day." -- Rolling Stone

Fritz Kaegi after corporate lobbyists kill his reform bill

 “Asking our office to continue using a broken system goes against the reform taxpayers and voters want. Opponents of the bill would prefer we wait longer, knowing that the longer we wait, the less likely the bill is to pass. Delays favor a broken assessment system, however, that prolongs inequality.” -- Tribune

Kevin Durant to rapper Drake

Drake was walking in the tunnel near the Warriors' locker room with his head down when Durant trolled him. "Keep your head up young fella. It's alright, it's ok. We have more games to play." -- ABC 7

Thank god former White House chief of staff and Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel finally has a platform to do something about all this inequality pic.twitter.com/hWWkGFl9lo

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) May 21, 2019

Hard to get a handle on mayor’s race. Some polling please.

Polls show community support growing for striking L.A. teachers.

Why no serious polling on Chicago mayor’s race since the Burke debacle? Before Burke, poll leader, Preckwinkle was at only 18%. Could someone make the runoff with 12-15%. Maybe candidates are embarrassed to learn their numbers are so low.

Yes, interest in the race is waning since Rahm dropped out and current front-runners are all late-comers to the race with strong machine ties.

Progressives have no real horse in it despite early CTU/SEIU endorsements of Preckwinkle. But her team’s campaign stumbles have some lefties moving towards Amara Enyia and Lori Lightfoot. Voters yawning. Am I wrong? I’d like to see some polling, please. Media seems just focused on the money race.

Brother Fred and I will be talking about all this and more on Friday with BLM and Assata’s Daughters organizer, Page May along with Tom Gradel, co-author of Corrupt Illinois: Patronage, Cronyism, and Criminality. Tune in 11–noon at WLPN 105.5 FM in Chicago. Live streaming at www.lumpenradio.com.

Speaking of polling, this one shows strong public support for striking teachers in L.A.. The SurveyUSA poll found that almost two-thirds of people polled support the strike, with 15 percent opposed and about 20 percent unsure.

LAUSD Supt. and corporate shill, Austin Beutner is trying his best to scab-out the strike. That could make things hot on the picket lines and even hotter once the strike is settled.

Top Democrats are split on the strike, with DNC Chair Tom Perez, Sens. Kamala Harris, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren supporting the teachers and corporate-wingers led by Arne Duncan attacking them. Several progressive House members have also declared their support with Congressional Progressive Caucus co-chairs Pramila Jayapal (Wash.) and Mark Pocan (Wis.), as well as Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) and Ro Khanna (Calif.) tweeting their solidarity.

Remember in 2010, when Duncan came out in support of the L.A. district posting pictures of teachers in the LA Times? It was an attempt to "shine a light" on teachers whose students had lower than average standardized test scores. Duncan claimed there were thousands of teachers longing for their scores to be posted in the new media. He even predicted that in the years ahead, hundreds of school districts would be doing the same.

What a crock that was. 

Latest poll: Chicago on the wrong track

This, from Capitol Fax...

* Normington, Petts & Associates poll, taken Sept. 11-13 of 500 registered Chicago voters with a margin of error of plus or minus 4.4 percent…

Would you say things in Chicago are generally headed in the RIGHT DIRECTION or would you say things are pretty seriously off on the WRONG TRACK?

RIGHT DIRECTION 20%
WRONG TRACK 66
DON’T KNOW 14

Most blame Gov. Rauner, followed by Daley, Rahm, Legislature.

* Meanwhile, the poll found that 16 percent of Chicagoans had a favorable opinion of President Trump, while 75 percent had an unfavorable opinion. Gov. Rauner’s numbers were 19 favorable, 59 unfavorable. Mayor Emanuel’s were 33 favorable, 45 unfavorable. JB Pritzker’s were 29 favorable, 21 unfavorable [10 percent very unfavorable]. And Chris Kennedy’s were 19 favorable, 18 unfavorable [8 percent very unfavorable].

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. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES 'Move fast and break things...'

Bannon: "Move fast and break things" 

Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)

“We have got to have the guts to take on the insurance companies and the drug companies and move forward toward a Medicare-for-all, single-payer program, And I’ll be introducing legislation shortly to do that.” -- All In with Chris Hayes

Chicago Ald. Roderick Sawyer

"I just don't know what value he [Paul Vallas] adds to this university, that's my concern. I don't even know what a crisis intervention specialist means." -- Chicago Tribune

 Allyson Moloney, a K-4 special education teacher

“All of our paraprofessionals are tied up with testing. Even our ‘specials’ teachers — gym and tech — are tied up with PARCC testing. We don’t have a lot of extra bodies that can help us out.” -- Sun-Times

Reince Priebus

"I'm not in any trouble." -- Politico

Nicole Jorwic, dir. of rights policy for the Arc, an advocacy organization for people with intellectual disabilities 

We would hope that in his future rulings, Judge Gorsuch would see that the purpose of IDEA is to help students with disabilities achieve more meaningful progress that can ultimately lead to their success and full life in their communities." -- New York Times

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE)

“By appointing Mr. Severino to enforce the life-saving protections that he has made his personal mission to dismantle, the Trump administration has once again put the fox in charge of the hen house." -- LGBTQ Nation

Gwenda Blair, Trump biographer 

...said of Trump’s supporters: “They voted for a guy who could fix it, the CEO, on The Apprentice for 10 years, who could make a deal with anybody.”  -- Guardian

Trump election has reformers reconsidering 'groupthink'.

Credit: Creative Commons/AFGE

"Ed reformers are just waiting for their turn to talk. They only want to talk about themselves. Anything you say, they just want to tell you, 'Charter schools are great.' A parent can tell them, 'I broke my foot.' And a reformer will say, 'You know what's good for that? Charter schools!'" -- Education Post's Chris Stewart 

For most of the past three decades, school reformers have been focused on dismantling traditional, mainly urban public school systems, replacing traditional public schools with a hodgepodge of market-oriented, tech-driven, resegregated and union-free "choice" options -- mainly, privately-run charter schools and school vouchers.

The unintended, or sometimes intended, consequence of these reforms is a steady rollback of the genuine reforms won by the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 60s (the second Reconstruction period in our history). It was those reforms, limited and fleeting as they may have been, which, from 1968-88, generated the greatest educational gains for poor children this nation has ever seen.

But what we're seeing now is an increasingly racially re-segregated, two-tiered system made up of unregulated selective, heavily-resourced, high-performing schools for the few, and a collapsing infrastructure of resource-starved public schools for the many, especially in areas of concentrated urban and rural poverty.

Market-driven reform crosses traditional party lines and is based within a handful of conservative think tanks and policy groups like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Fordham Institute, and underwritten by high-powered philanthropists like billionaires Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Bloomberg,  the Walton Family, the New Schools Venture Fund, Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), and others.

It's actually difficult for me to call them "reformers" since, for the past 16 years, they have captured (or been captured by) the U.S. Dept. of Education bureaucracy, which under a string of ed secretaries (Paige, Spellings, Duncan, and King),has become a bulwark of standardization, privatization and failed top-down initiatives. In other words, the status quo.

But the election of Donald Trump and his appointment of choice supporter Betsy DeVos as the next secretary of education, have ironically thrown the current corporate and choice reformers into a state of panic and confusion. Why? Because even though they and Trump/DeVos share a common view of choice, charters and vouchers (a sticking point for some), throwing in with Trump's confederacy of alt-right white nationalists and educational know-nothings would widen the chasm between themselves and their potential customer base. A no-no for anyone working in the corporate world.

That potential base is mainly the sea of dissatisfied, largely black and Latino public school parents, many of whom have looked to charters and vouchers as potential escape routes from their faltering, underfunded and shuttered neighborhood schools.

The election of Trump has also thrown a monkey wrench into their efforts to organize, co-opt, or at least engage with that base as well as with union teachers, young progressive educators and policy people (ie. Teach for America alums) and school/community activists who are repulsed by Trump and the Republicans.

This hoped-for dialogue with progressives was a task assigned to former Duncan assistant Peter Cunningham and his on-line Eli Broad-funded journal Education Post.

So far, Cunningham's "let's find common ground" approach to the progressives has been little more than a veil. A trap set to draw them in without budging on any important issues. And the real problem is that it hasn't produced the hoped-for results. That's because the reformers are self-critical about style, but so far, not about content.

Sensing this failure, Cunningham has dropped all pretenses and sharpened his attacks on teacher unions, opt-out parents, and polemicising against school integration efforts. He's really sharpened his polemical knife for any and all who want caps on charter school expansion. Since the campaign began, national civil rights groups like the NAACP and Black Lives Matter have actually hardened their stance against charters and vouchers.

So much for "common ground"...

More proof that forced integration didn't work. @mikeklonsky Lamenting segregation is just an excuse to avoid improving schools.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 16, 2016

@leoniehaimson Recruiting a small percentage of POC doesn't change the fact that opt out is largely driven by middle class whites.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) April 24, 2016

At a recent AEI conference, choice reformers appeared to taking a self-critical approach and re-evaluating their strategies. Among the hottest topics was, what they called, "race-based" reform.

AEI's Rick Hess, who hosted the conference, writes: 

There was a willingness to talk frankly but in measured tones about disagreements. Robert Pondiscio of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute pointed out that, for more than a decade, education reform has been approached as a race-based endeavor and questioned the wisdom and the desirability of this shift...

 There was a recognition that groupthink is a problem for all of us. AEI's Andy Smarick observed, "We all tend to surround ourselves with people who agree with our views. Then we wind up with an echo chamber. 

It's nice to know that some reformers are reconsidering groupthink, at least for now, in the face of Trumpism. Maybe others will follow. As for civil discourse about race and reform...I'm not holding my breath.

But the Trump/DeVos assault on public education should push choice, charter and voucher proponents to reconsider, not only their style, but substance as well.

Not buying the Pritzker library union bashing story

Pritzker School Loses Librarian And Union Blocks Parents From Helping Out -- DNAinfo headline

From the headline, one might think that Pritzker school librarian was lost, maybe wandering the library archives somewhere or buried under a pile of books. One might also think that the CTU, weapons in hand, were somehow fighting off parent volunteers who wanted to help out in the school. Both assumptions would be wrong.

The story gained national attention after Pritzker parent, Michael Hendershot, who is also a lawyer (I'm guessing with little time to work pro-bono in the school library), wrote an angry, and a little more ideological op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal with the headline: The Library Lockout at Our Elementary School. 

Actually, the school's newly-hired librarian wasn't lost. Like hundreds of other Chicago teachers and educational professionals and para-professionals, she was fired after the 20th day of school because Pritzker's enrollment was lower than projected. In a city that was once the center of the national small-schools movement,  schools are now being punished, closed or consolidated for being small. In 2012, the Mayor and his criminal sidekick, CEO Byrd-Bennett, closed 50 neighborhood schools, nearly all in the black community, for "underutilization".

The state's schools have been operating without a school budget for the past two years. Gov. Rauner has been holding the budget hostage, hoping to leverage his signature for a pound of flesh, meaning a cut in retiree pensions, the elimination of teacher collective-bargaining rights, and more privatization of school services.

There are currently hundreds of Chicago public schools operating without properly-staffed libraries, school nurses, special-ed paras or school social workers. Librarians are vital to the functioning of any school. If wealthy, mainly-whte suburban schools did away with librarians, replacing them with untrained, unpaid volunteers, there would be a parent revolt.

From DNAinfo:

Rachel Lessem, a member of the local school council at Pritzker, said each student used to have an hour of library a week, where they learned how to research, how to use databases and how to access other sources of information. The students had homework and grades in library as well

In Chicago's two-tier, racially re-segregated school system, libraries and librarians are considered fluff, wasteful add-ons that are the first to go in times of crisis.

School principals, like Pritzker's Joenile Albert-Reese are increasingly being forced to choose between cutting classroom teachers (increasing class size) or librarians, school nurses or field trips. Hopefully, now with Troy LaRaviere leading the Chicago Principals Assoc., more principals will find the courage to stand up to the cuts and defend their schools against these assaults. In this case it was the librarian.

In the meantime, all the teachers and staff have going for them is the CTU. When Pritzker union rep, Kevin Hough filed a grievance after Albert-Reese tried to run the library with unpaid parent volunteers, a clear violation of the district's collective bargaining agreement, the shit hit the fan. Now the union is being blamed for "locking out" students and parents from the library.

Ronnie Reese, a union spokesman, issued the following statement:

“Sadly, budget cuts and the lack of revenue for Chicago’s public schools continue to affect basic services for our students, but per the Agreement between the Chicago Teachers Union and the Chicago Board of Education, bargaining unit work cannot be delegated to non-bargaining unit volunteers. The [union] has offered and continues to offer its full support to the Pritzker Elementary Local School Council in organizing and advocating for restoration of lost funding and its librarian position."

The notion of a library run by unpaid volunteers or a teacherless classroom is a wet dream for corporate "reformers" and efficiency mongers like former Asst. Ed Secretary Peter Cunningham who has spent most of the past two days bashing the union over the supposed lock-out of Pritzker parents.

Cunningham, like Hendershot, puts the blame for the crisis on greedy teachers who won a small pay increase and are trying to protect their pensions "at the expense of students".

@mikeklonsky @KarenLewisCTU @WSJ We all do MIke. It's a money decision--a tradeoff for protecting pensions and raising pay.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) January 10, 2017

He tries to come off as a parent advocate while playing off Pritzker's parents against the teachers. But those who have followed Cunningham since he left Arne Duncan's D.O.E., remember how hard he  and Duncan  bashed the tens of thousands of parents who dared opt-out of the nation's testing madness. His posturing as an advocate for parents is laughable.

Another bit of irony... The school is named after the late Chicago billionaire A.N. Pritzker. The Pritzker family, owners of the Hyatt Hotel chain, is one of the city's most powerful families and notoriously anti-union. Penny Pritzker, now Obama's Commerce Secretary, was previously hand-picked by Rahm to sit on the school board. She voted for the mass school closings.

The irony is that if the Pritzkers and the other city oligarchs paid their fair share of taxes, Pritzker Elementary would still have its librarian and then some.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Victory celebrations at Standing Rock. Struggle continues. 

Tom Goldtooth

“This isn’t our first rodeo with the forces of genocide,” said Goldtooth, a great-grandfather with long black braids sticking out from under the hooded sweatshirt ...Capitalism feeds on unlimited growth. It’s like this monster that’s always hungry and thirsty and devouring the earth. That’s what our message is here: We have to live in balance; otherwise we’re going to perish.” -- Voices from Standing Rock

Jim Peterson, leader of a delegation of more than 120 WA veterans

“There is a lot of praying, singing, dancing, fireworks; the camp right now is kind of a madhouse. There are so many people showing up, busloads, it’s mass confusion. But there is so much love.” -- Seattle Times

Energy Transfer Partners & Sunoco Statement

"Nothing this Administration has done today changes that in any way." -- Business Wire

Bonnie Glaser, senior adviser Center for Strategic and International Studies

 “My guess is that Trump himself doesn’t have clue...Having this mishap occur before he is president is better than having it occur after he is president. I expect Beijing to find a way to give him an education on Taiwan.”  -- China blasts 'petty' Taiwan call

Peter Cunningham, former aide to Arne Duncan

DeVos "has a lot of influence in the reform community. She is unequivocally a champion for choice."  - The Case for Betsy DeVos 

Great statement from David Archambault, inspiring eader of Standing Rock Sioux. "Historic decision" "We look forward to celebrating" #NoDAPL pic.twitter.com/Nz131xOjr5

— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) December 4, 2016

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Hawking

Stephen Hawking on Trump

“He is a demagogue, who seems to appeal to the lowest common denominator.” -- The Daily Good

White supremacist leader Matthew Heimbach

 “… Hail, Emperor Trump and hail victory.” -- Think Progress

SNCC veteran Charlie Cobb

“No U.S. president will ever fully embrace their concerns. If you want a president to even be interested in your concerns, however, you have to organize to generate the pressure. That begins with the vote, in my view, although obviously it does not end with voting.” -- Washington Post

Troy LaRaviere

 "I get no satisfaction from Rahm's diminished role nationally," said LaRaviere, a Sanders delegate. "Except for the message that it sends to the people who have been behind him: They're wrong." -- Tribune

That's a quarter-million #RahmResign sigs with a Q

A coalition of activists demanding Mayor Rahm Emanuel's resignation marched to City Hall Monday, carrying 250,000 petition signatures. That's a quarter million with a capital Q. 

With Rahm off with the family, vacationing in Cuba ("Never let a crisis happen while I'm in town"), his over-sized spin team is left to make happy face. They're downplaying the significance of the petitions, claiming that most of the #RahmResign signers were from out of state. That's all true. But if it were me, I wouldn't feel good about a quarter-million sigs calling for my head on a plate, no matter where they came from. 

Writes Natasha Korecki at Politico:

I took it as a sign that the storm over McDonald's death and the wider issue of police abuse has a long, long way to run before it abates ... The signatures were obtained by a coalition of local and national groups, including ... SEIU Healthcare Illinois ... a big backer of Cook County Commissioner Jesus 'Chuy' Garcia in his race against Emanuel for mayor earlier this year."

I agree. It's actually more an indication of the national implications of the Chicago events. The mayor's cover-up role in the aftermath of the Laquan McDonald murder is now part of the national consciousness, and might even impact a national election campaign, considering Rahm's strong ties to the Clintons. That is if he's still mayor by then.

A quarter million is an appropriate number. It's the same as the number of black community stop-and-frisks without an arrest by Chicago's finest, in a three-month period last year. It's also the number of African-Americans who have been part of the great exodus from Chicago in the past two decades. 

More pressure on Rahm to resign comes from the Latino Coalition for Change. That group is expected to announce that they're joining the "Black Christmas" march downtown on Dec. 24. They've taken up "Fuera Rahm!" as their rallying cry.