Weak local media coverage of the protests

Thousands march in Brooklyn

Why has there been so little press coverage in Chicago media, aside from the small obligatory news reports, on the large, downtown protests, calling for an end to the Israeli attack on Gaza? Could it be because the marchers were overwhelmingly Palestinian and Arab? Or that the large protests, while militant, were mainly peaceful and disciplined? 

It seems that unless there are violent confrontations with police or rioting at protests, editors are relegating coverage of anti-war demonstrations to small stories on back pages with little or no in-depth reporting. 

I was also dumbstruck by the national timid media response to Israel's missile attack which leveled the building that housed AP/Al Jazeera/BBC offices in Gaza. 

A fake news story in Business Insider and elsewhere, claimed that former Associated Press editor, Matt Friedman, had backed Israel’s claim that the Hamas did, in fact, have offices inside the building.  

The Israel Defense Forces claimed the building contained military-intelligence assets for Hamas, including "intel for attacks against Israel." But they offered no proof or hard evidence. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was all over the Sunday news shows calling the building a "perfectly legitimate target," and "a tower of terror." 

The Insider reports:

But Matti Friedman, who worked as a reporter and editor at the AP's Jerusalem bureau from 2006 to 2011, contradicted his former employer on Sunday, tweeting: "A conversation with a friend who is intimately familiar with military decision-making right now suggests there were indeed Hamas offices there."

But then, Friedman tweets in response:

In my two essays from 2014, I gave multiple examples of the way news organizations like the AP had been compromised by Hamas in Gaza. Contrary to what I’ve seen attributed to me today, I didn’t write that Hamas operated out of the same building, and don’t know if that’s true.

— Matti Friedman (@MattiFriedman) May 16, 2021 

I have no idea as to whether or not Hamas really had an office in the building. But even if they did, given the fact that Hamas is part of the existing government coalition supported by most Palestinian citizens of Gaza and the West Bank, Israel's rationale for its missile strike against the foreign press offices has rightfully drawn international condemnation. 

The fall of Chancellor Wise

 Asked if she was taking the fall for the Board of Trustees, Wise said, “no,” she was sharing the responsibility. -- Illinois Public Media, September 04, 2014

Phyllis Wise has been forced to resign from her $549,069/yr. job as University of Illinois Chancellor. I say, good riddance to you Chancellor Wise and may the rest of the Board of Trustees go with you. You have helped disgrace the name of a once-great state university system and made me ashamed to call it my alma mater. I received both my masters and Ph.D. from UIC.

Wise takes the fall but it was the Board of Trustees that violated the basic principles of academic freedom and the First Amendment when they rescinded their job offer to professor Steven Salaita over his controversial posts (critical of Israel's attack on Gaza) on Twitter. Rather than stick up for principle, the cowardly chancellor and trustees caved under pressure from a handful of wealthy and powerful donors who threatened to withhold their contributions if Salaita was hired.

This of course, is not the first time the U of I trustees have violated the rights of faculty members and the principles of academic freedom. I'm thinking back to 2010 when my friend and UIC colleague Bill Ayers was denied emeritus status by Board Chairman Christopher Kennedy who was bitter about an obscure controversial passage referring to the Kennedy assassination in a book Bill co-authored back in 1974.

Phyyllis Wise

But now the publicly-funded state university faces even greater losses of credibility and money with a barrage of suits being filed by Salaita, the ACLU and others.The Salaita firing has also led to boycotts by academics, who refused to visit the campus for conferences and criticism from some brave souls who are members of the university’s own faculty and student body. A letter protesting Salaita's firing, signed by dozens of Jewish U of I students and faculty members, was ignored by Wise and the trustees last September.

The American Association of University Professors voted earlier this year to censure the university.

All this not to mention the university's mistreatment of its athletes and its racist Chief Illiniwek mascot.

According to the Sun-Times:

The university also faces financial uncertainty due to the state’s budget crisis. The state has no spending plan for the current fiscal year, leaving public universities uncertain how much money they’ll receive. Gov. Bruce Rauner has proposed cuts as steep as 31 percent. State funding covers about 11 percent of the university’s operating budget.

A judge on Thursday denied most of the university’s request to dismiss the Salaita case.

Steven Salaita not "civil" enough to teach at U of I. But Chief Illiniwek OK. #Civility pic.twitter.com/qDBV0j7mMi

— Mike Klonsky (@mikeklonsky) September 3, 2014

A color-coded visual of Chicago's reform failure

Blaine Principal Troy LaRaviere

Thanks to Blaine Principal Troy LaRaviere for sharing this excellent color-coded visual on Reading Growth in Chicago's Public & Charter Schools. @TroyLaraviere on Twitter calls it a "visual of Chicago's Charter Reform Failure." He's right.

On one side, the chart shows the 45 CPS schools with the highest growth in reading scores. They are all public, with no charters, contract schools or turnarounds in the mix. On the other side are 45 schools showing the lowest growth, with 22 of them being charters, contracts or turnarounds.

This after more than a decade of test-based reform strategies under Daley/Duncan and now under Emanuel/Byrd-Bennett, leading to the closing of dozens of traditional public schools and the uncapped expansion of charters, contracts and turnarounds.

Given this data, how can Rahm and BBB possibly take credit for the slight overall bump in test scores reported last week? They can't, writes LaRaviere in this op-ed Sun-Times piece.

When mayor Rahm Emanuel recently heralded a small gain on the average Chicago Public Schools elementary “MAP” test results, I knew something wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t what he said; it was what he didn’t say. You see, this is the first year the MAP scores can provide a more decisive apples-to-apples comparison of charter schools and traditional public schools.

Author Nye and family

Good Read in WaPo by Naomi Shihab Nye, a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. Growing up in both Ferguson, MO and Gaza has given her some insights few others share. I will definitely find a way to use this in my course this quarter. Thinking #FergusonSyllabus.

Ferguson was a leafy green historic suburb with a gracious red brick elementary school called Central. I loved that school, attending kindergarten through sixth grade there. All my classmates were white, of various derivations – Italians, French-Canadians, etc. My father was the only Arab in Ferguson. But he ran for the school board and won. 

Speaking of Charters...Feds from various agencies are bumping into each other investigating UNO's charter hustlers. This time around it's the IRS, according to the Sun-Times. Their audit involves nearly $37 million in bonds issued in 2011 for the UNO Charter School Network Inc., whose 16 campuses across the city receive a total of about $50 million a year in funding from the Chicago Public Schools.

In a letter to the Illinois Finance Authority, IRS officials said the 2011 bonds were "selected for examination because of information received from external sources or developed internally that caused a concern that the debt issuance may fail one or more provisions" of the federal Internal Revenue Code.

In June, UNO and its charter-school network settled a civil case filed by the federal Securities and Exchange Commission that accused them of defrauding investors who bought the bonds.

S-T's Dan Mihalopoulos reports:

UNO began in the 1980s as a Hispanic community activist group. Under Rangel, it moved into the lucrative charter-school business in 1998, expanding quickly with support from political figures including Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago), former Mayor Richard M. Daley and Emanuel.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Ferguson Protester Lisha Williams. 

"It was no fight, it was no shots fired. The only ones who fired was police. All we did was march to the command center to fall to our knees and say, 'Don't shoot.' And they started shooting." --CNN

Malcolm London

Chicago poet, Malcolm London

"They don't talk about white-on-white crime in the news." -- Huffington 

Attorney Benjamin Crump

"What we're really asking for is simple justice. We're not asking for anything extraordinary. They just want what anybody else would want if their children were shot down in broad daylight." -- CNN

Justice Taney

Melissa Harris-Perry

 In 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney declared that [Dred] Scott had no right to sue because as a black man he was never intended to be an American. Speaking of the clause in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal,” Taney wrote:
“It is too clear for dispute, that the enslaved African race were not intended to be included, and formed no part of the people who framed and adopted this declaration.” Taney went on to say that black men “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” -- MSNBC

 U.C. Prof. David Kirp

While technology can be put to good use by talented teachers, they, and not the futurists, must take the lead. The process of teaching and learning is an intimate act that neither computers nor markets can hope to replicate. Small wonder, then, that the business model hasn’t worked in reforming the schools — there is simply no substitute for the personal element. -- Sunday NYT, "Teaching is not a business"

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

NEA Pres.-Elect Lily Eskelsen García

As educators, we believe in good testing. Almost every student in America will confirm that most teachers are neither strangers to, nor enemies of, tests. But great teachers know the difference between tests that help students and tests that harm students. -- AJC

President Obama

The United States is not going to be the air force of Iraqi Shiites or any other faction... And because Israel is so capable militarily, I don’t worry about Israel’s survival... I think the question really is how does Israel survive. And how can you create a State of Israel that maintains its democratic and civic traditions... And, in order to do that, it has consistently been my belief that you have to find a way to live side by side in peace with Palestinians. ... You have to recognize that they have legitimate claims, and this is their land and neighborhood as well.” -- Interview with Thomas Friedman

Helen Gym

Helen Gym, Philadelphia parent leader

But choice is just a sorry substitute when government gives up on equity. -- Interview in The Notebook

Bruce Rauner on indictment of his top execs

“You know what? Behavior inside large organizations unfortunately is not always perfect, and nobody can control every element and every behavior,” said Rauner at his digs at 212 E. 79th St., seeking to woo voters in the mostly African-American neighborhood. -- Early & Often

Sarah Palin responds to Elizabeth Warren [Video]

 "We believe”? Wait, I thought fast food joints, hurh. Don’t you guys think that they’re like of the Devil or somethin’ I was.  -- Daily Banter

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

"We tortured some folks." -- Pres. Obama

Columnist Gene Lyons

This is less a war than an uprising in a concentration camp... -- Chicago Sun-Times

Bill Clinton 

“I nearly got him [bin Laden]. And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him.” -- MSNBC

Police Supt. Garry McCarthy on Chicago shooting numbers

"We're pleased with it..." -- 5NBC 

Michelle Gunderson

Chicago teacher Michelle Gunderson

What does this mean? We will no longer blindly open up our checkbooks to the Democratic Party. That was the old way of doing business. -- Living in Dialogue

Cuomo associate

“Now he [Cuomo] is crazed with anger, and he’s taking it out on a lot of people around him.’’ -- NY Post

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

"I am the decider, and you have nothing to do with it.” -- Christie to Mayor Baraka

Kristen Crowell

“Certainly, it is our opinion that the current leadership is not doing enough to take care of our folks." United Working Families will focus on “finding, recruiting and supporting candidates who are going to be with us.” -- Chicago Teachers Union, progressives form new Chicago coalition

Inquirer Editorial

No wonder 13 percent of the nation's 3.4 million public school teachers either change schools or quit the profession every year. Understanding the difficulties urban teachers face, many believe those educators in particular aren't paid enough for all they do. That sympathy has helped dampen criticism of Philadelphia teachers' refusal to agree to contract concessions. The estimated teacher attrition rate in U.S. schools has doubled in 15 years. In some urban districts, teacher and student dropout rates are almost identical. -- Teachers drop out, too

David Callahan (Inside Philanthropy)

Yup, we’re fascinated by the big money. And we’re especially focused on tracking the emerging billionaire philanthropists who’ll be creating foundations bigger than Ford and Rockefeller. Already you can see the philanthropic pecking order getting turned upside down by new money. That’s just a hint at things to come. --WSJ

Eugene Robinson

“Israel is acting as if it is free of moral responsibilities." The onslaught on a tiny enclave people can’t escape is “wrong by any reasonable moral standard.” -- Washington Post