Cunningham's response to the devastation of black communities? Bring in 'new people'.

Just when you think we've heard the last from the disastrous duo of Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, they become media go-to guys on (of all things) gun violence and community development.

Remember, this was the pair that ran the Chicago Public Schools and the U.S. Dept. of Education for years, promoting austerity, mass school closings, privatization and uncapped expansion of privately-run charter schools in black communities. Their policies helped lead to the devastation of urban school districts and contributed to school re-segregation and the push-out of thousands of black and poor families from cities like Chicago.

Why media would turn to them for meaningful solutions to the problems they helped create is beyond me. But here we are.

Cunningham's Sun-Times commentary yesterday (To revive declining South and West Side neighborhoods, import people) was the most egregious. The headline says it all. Now that 300,000 African-Americans have been pushed out of Chicago over the past few decades, Cunningham sees their replacement with thousands of "new, middle-class people" as the city's salvation.

How unoriginal. I have referred to it as the whitenization of the cities. But it's deeper than that.

CUNNINGHAM QUOTES VITO...

Cunningham asks, just how do you attract the gentrifiers into formerly segregated, disinvested and isolated neighborhoods like Englewood? He turns to Godfather mobster character Vito Corleone for an answer. "Make them an offer they can't refuse."

So, what would it take to get 4,000 young middle-class families to move into these neighborhoods? The answer, or at least part of it, is affordable, high-quality housing. Sell the houses at cost.

If that’s too high, help cover the down-payment. Still no takers? Help pay their college debt or give them a 10-year property tax exemption, something Philadelphia has done.

Welp, where has that been? Why wasn't that offer made to the families who lived there before, the ones who built those neighborhoods and went to the now-closed neighborhood schools? The ones whose homes were foreclosed upon during the subprime crisis?

As for Duncan, who now runs Chicago CRED—a counseling and job placement service (not exactly what he was primed for by the Emerson Collective), he's cited as an expert on neighborhood gun violence in a Crain's column by Joe Warren. 

There, he carefully avoids any mention of gun control. Instead, Duncan appeals directly to his corporate pals, asking them to hire some gun offenders.

"My selfish interest is that the business community own this and see this as an economic problem, not a crime problem," Duncan says. "We have to hire our way out of this, not arrest our way out of this."

Yes, hire more and arrest less. But this doesn't even begin to deal with the enormous scope of the problem, as Mayor Lightfoot has pointed out in her recent jousting with Ted Cruz. 

But how do we stop the flow of guns and drugs into the city? What do we do about mass youth unemployment, disinvestment, and under-resourcing of public schools? The notion that the answer to Chicago's gun violence epidemic rests simply with more counseling and job placement is absurd on its face.

To quote the mayor:

“There’s a great need across this country for federal leadership in particular to step up and come forward with a real plan to deal with the gun violence that we’re seeing not only in cities like Chicago but really across the country.”

Duncan hasn't a clue.

Education not an issue for Dem debaters until the Harris/Biden clash over deseg

Demand for School Integration Leads to Massive 1964 New York City School Boycott

"Forcing integration upon us is not a nimble concept."  -- Alabama Police Chief Eugene "Bull" Connor, 1956

For most of the 20 Democratic Party candidates onstage Wednesday and Thursday nights, or for the debate moderators, education wasn't an important enough campaign issue to deserve a mention. Not a word was spoken about the hottest ed issues like charter schools, vouchers, pensions or testing. Common Core Standards, ESSA, it seems, were yesterday's news. There was not even a poke at Trump's ed secretary, Betsy DeVos or at Trump himself.

That's nothing new for party presidential campaigns. I remember the 2015 debates when education issues never came up. At the time, Prof. Julian Vasquez Heilig wrote in the Progressive,

Perhaps the silence is due to the fact that the Democrats have basically adopted the Republican approach to education from the 1990s.

If anything has changed in the past four years, that hasn't. This week, hardly an ed word was spoken. Not a word, that is, until Sen. Kamala Harris stole night two with her devastating "That little girl was me," confrontation with Joe Biden. After prefacing her obviously well-planned punch to Biden's mid-section with "I do not believe you are a racist," Harris laid bare his role in the busing battles of the '70s.

Biden seemed totally unprepared or ill-prepped. He sputtered and lashed out at Harris personally.

I was a public defender. I didn’t become a prosecutor. I came out and I left a good law firm to become a public defender, when, in fact — when, in fact, my city was in flames because of the assassination of Dr. King, number one.

What the hell all that has to do with anything is beyond me. Was this whiter-than-white, male, former vice-president of the United States really throwing shade at an African-American woman for becoming a successful lawyer and prosecutor? Yup.

Then after invoking Dr. King's name and recounting his long history of civil-rights advocacy and his relationship with Pres. Obama, Biden actually doubled down on his opposition to the Dept. of Education's role in enforcing the Supreme Court's Brown decision. The argument went like this:

HARRIS: But, Vice President Biden, do you agree today — do you agree today that you were wrong to oppose busing in America then? Do you agree?

BIDEN: I did not oppose busing in America. What I opposed is busing ordered by the Department of Education. That’s what I opposed. 

HARRIS: Well, there was a failure of states to integrate public schools in America. I was part of the second class to integrate Berkeley, California, public schools almost two decades after Brown v. Board of Education.

BIDEN: Because your city council made that decision. It was a local decision.

HARRIS: So that’s where the federal government must step in.

BIDEN: The federal government ——

HARRIS: That’s why we have the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. That’s why we need to pass the Equality Act. That’s why we need to pass the E.R.A., because there are moments in history where states fail to preserve the civil rights of all people.

This exchange brought back nightmarish memories of  Obama's former Ed. Sec. Arne Duncan claiming that he was for school integration but not "forced integration." Then there was his assistant, Peter Cunningham's apologia for school segregation in U.S. News & World Report, which claimed that "integration is expensive and takes money away from other necessary improvements."

In other words. Biden, while ill prepared, wasn't speaking out of school. He was simply repeating, in his own stumbling, bumbling way, the party line going back decades. It's just that his timing was off.

And it's not like any of the other candidates had Harris's back when push came to shove. The silence on their part (including on Bernie Sanders's part) was deafening.

How can they all be running against Biden, yet be so afraid to take him on?

Peter Cunningham's empty advice to Lori Lightfoot

Lightfoot's landslide victory represented a clean break from the politics of Daley and Cunningham

Peter Cunningham should save his advice to Mayor-elect Lori Lightfoot. In fact, after his miserable performance running Bill Daley's disastrous law-and-order campaign for mayor, one would think that he would show some contrition and either disappear for a while or maybe start asking the mayor-elect for some advice.

You may recall that despite Daley's heavily-favored (by big business) and heavily-financed ($9M) campaign, he could only muster 14% of the vote. For those who keep track of such things, that came out to a whopping $111.21 per vote.

Yet here is Cunningham with a full page in today's Sun-Times offering a package of five cliche-ridden suggestions that Lightfoot would do well to flush or stash in her circular file.

They begin with admonitions to think small and forget all those highfalutin ideas and social-justice and equality and stick to things like garbage collection. 

• No matter how bold your vision, it won’t get done if you don’t first pick up the garbage, fix the potholes and deliver basic city services.
• You can’t reach for the sky unless you first meet the floor of expectations.
• You don’t begin dinner with dessert.

Here's the worst:

...the black, gay, female agenda did not get Lori Lightfoot elected and won’t address Chicago’s broader needs.

Yes, he really said that. Did you even know there was a "black, gay, female agenda"? Perhaps Cunningham can produce it for us.

Lightfoot won the election with 74% of the vote, winning every ward and every demographic in the city. She did it mainly by distinguishing herself from the old, corrupt, racist machine politics of the Daleys, Burkes and Emanuels -- all Cunningham clients.

So what does Cunningham have to offer in the way of advice for dealing with corruption in this, the most corrupt city in the nation? Fugget about it.

According to Cunningham:

...reducing corruption won’t do much to enhance the quality of life for people. It won’t bring jobs to struggling communities on the South and West Sides. It won’t improve the public schools. It won’t make our neighborhoods any safer.

Here's some advice from me. Whenever you hear someone like Cunningham telling you to minimize the fight against political corruption, check your wallet and check out the newspapers for upcoming stories about upcoming indictments.

It's exactly the struggling communities on the South and West Sides that have been hit the hardest by the "corruption tax," police malpractice and school scandals. As for improving public schools, think about Rahm's two previous school chiefs, one who is currently doing time in prison for corruption, and the other forced to resign over conflicts of interest.

Asking Lightfoot to soft pedal her anti-corruption stance is curious indeed, coming as it does on the eve of the Burke trial, the Solis wire-wearing scandal and the fallout that could reach all the way up the city hall ladder.

The last time I had to respond to Peter Cunningham's wrong-headed advice was back in 2016 when he warned us all that the fight against poverty and racial segregation was just "too politically difficult and financially expensive." His current advice to the mayor-elect has that same hollow ring to it and sounds to me like a plea to return to the old patronage politics of his previous clients.

Cunningham may have a point about the importance getting the garbage collected and the potholes fixed. But even the delivery of city services, especially community policing, is conditioned upon the mayor having a larger vision of equity and justice. Just think about Rahm's mass closing of public schools, libraries, and health clinics mainly in the black community. Think about the Laquan McDonald shooting. They were some the very things that led to his political downfall. Let that be a warning to the new mayor.

Lori Lightfoot's landslide election victory along with those of so many new progressives in the city council signifies a much larger mandate for change from the old patronage politics that Cunningham and his clients represent. He should save his advice. 

Eli Broad's L.A. school board puppet Rodriguez resigns. Pleas guilty to felony charge. Avoids prison.

Ref Rodriguez has finally resigned from the L.A. school board, but only after pleading guilty to a felony count of conspiracy and several misdemeanor charges involving election fraud. In doing so, he admitted that he was part of a scheme to conceal that he was the true source of early donations to his campaign.

He had already stepped down from his position as board president, but had refused to give up his seat on the board for the past year.

Rodriguez was seen by many school and community school activists as a puppet of billionaire school power player Eli Broad, whose goal has been nothing less than turning LAUSD into a total charter school district, like post-Katrina New Orleans. Broad along with a PAC of billionaire charter patrons spent millions and virtually bought the school board election. They bankrolled Rodriguez' election campaign as well as the rest of the pro-charter majority that took over the board 3 years ago after the nation’s most expensive school board elections ever.

Contributors to PACs that took part in the campaigns on behalf of charter operators included Netflix founder Reed Hastings, $1.5million (to the charter group only); former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, $550,000; Walmart heir Jim Walton, $375,000; and philanthropist Eli Broad, $205,000.

Even after Rodriguez had been indicted on three felony counts and 25 misdemeanors, charter advocates like Peter Cunningham still tried to cover for him, calling his long list of crimes, "a rookie mistake".  In a sense, they succeeded.

Under the deal with prosecutors, Rodriguez will get a slap on the wrist and avoid jail time. This work, he said, will continue: “I will just pursue that work from a different position.”

Unfortunately, with Broad's money propping him up, he's probably right.

The wheels of justice turn slowly.

KIPP and KOPP join Duncan in telling parents to boycott schools until gun law is passed

CHICAGO (WLS) -- It's been another violent weekend in Chicago, with at least 6 people killed and 32 others hurt in shootings across the city. [None shot in school.]

KIPP leaders and other corporate school "reformers" like Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, are telling public school parents to "pull their kids out of school until we have better gun laws."

The boycott proposition received momentum online, including support from parents and the founder of Teach for America, Wendy Kopp... 

...“I’m in — let’s pick a date and start a movement no politician can ignore,” replied Jim Manly, the superintendent of KIPP Public Charter Schools in New York City.

After taking 14 years before firing their co-founder for sexual misconduct, it's no wonder that KIPP charter network is now forced to offer cash and prizes to parents as recruiting gimmicks. But their call for parents to boycott public schools, even in the wake of the Santa Fe school shootings, smacks of opportunism.

As brother Fred Klonsky points out in this morning's blog post:

For many Chicago young people, their public school is among the safest places Chicago parents can send their children each day. But more to the point, those like Cunningham and Duncan have a dismal history in proposing ideas for public school parents and  as public policy for others to follow.

 Yes, we need strong gun control laws passed. No, that's not likely to happen with Trump in the White House and Republicans (many on the take from the NRA) controlling both houses of Congress without pressure from mass protests in the streets. Telling parents to keep their children home until that happens may be provocative, but it's hairbrained. Not serious. Poor leadership as usual.

In the same breath they propose it, they are already walking it back. 

“It’s wildly impractical and difficult,” Duncan said. “But I think it’s wildly impractical and difficult that kids are shot when they are sent to school.”

 “We will see whether this gains traction, or something does, but we have to think radically.”

Yes, r-r-r-radically indeed. But there's nothing radical about punishing public schools for the sins of the politicians.

I'm recalling how Duncan and Cunningham blasted the tens of thousands of activist parents who actually won some important victories for their children by opting-out of school testing madness.

But Duncan claimed the opt-outers were simply...

"white suburban moms who—all of a sudden, their child isn't as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn't quite as good as they thought they were."

I also recall how, when Democrats had even a slim chance to pass gun-control legislation during Obama's first term, Atty. General Eric Holder was told to "shut the f**k up" by none other than Obama's Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Oh, and speaking of guns, remember how Duncan tried to militarize the D.O.E. back in 2010? His purchase of 27 assault rifles had me wondering back then, if we needed an assault weapons ban on Arne?

I think Duncan's and the reformers' credibility as advisors to public school parents has been used up. Maybe it's time for them to to hold that thought. 

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

Police Chief Art Acevedo of Houston, center, walking with demonstrators during a “March for Our Lives” protest in March. After a school shooting in Santa Fe, Tex., on Friday, he wrote on Facebook that he had hit “rock bottom” about inaction on gun control.CreditDavid J. Phillip/Associated Press

Profs Joshua Dubler and Vincent Lloyd 

Locking any human being in a cage is a moral abomination -- Guardian

Carol Burris, executive director of the Network for Public Education

Peter Cunningham tells us not to blame any of the reforms he and his team of bloggers espouse.  In 2016, he told us what we need is “more rigor” and higher standards when twelfth-grade NAEP scores came out. On April 20, 2018, like Duncan, Cunningham blamed politics — specifically unions and local boards of education — for the lackluster NAEP scores.  --Washington Post

Sally Yates

 "There should be consequences when leaders feel they are not even loosely tethered to the truth. But when we normalize this..." -- CBS News

 Houston Police Chief Art Acevedo 

“I know some have strong feelings about gun rights but I want you to know I’ve hit rock bottom and I am not interested in your views as it pertains to this issue." -- Facebook post

Rep. Mo Brooks, R-Ala.

Rocks falling into oceans, not climate, causing seas to rise. "And every time you have that soil or rock whatever it is that is deposited into the seas, that forces the sea levels to rise. Because now you’ve got less space in those oceans because the bottom is moving up." -- USA Today

All these shootings because we have too many doors, sea levels are rising because of rocks falling into the ocean, hurricanes devasting cities because of gay sex. Maybe we shouldn’t put complete fucking morons in charge of anything anymore.

— J.D. Evermore (@jd_evermore) May 18, 2018

And then there's this from the school "reformers"...

This is brilliant, and tragically necessary.
What if no children went to school until gun laws changed to keep them safe?
My family is all in if we can do this at scale.
Parents, will you please join us? https://t.co/Yo4wsFuJI5

— Arne Duncan (@arneduncan) May 18, 2018

I should remind Mr. Duncan that his family is already "boycotting" Chicago Public Schools.

WEEKEND QUOTABLES

"Nothing about this White House communications department was ever about communicating. On the contrary, it has always been about deception, concealment and equivocation." -- Charles Blow, NYT 

Hap Bryant, National Teachers Academy parent

“We are fighting over scraps." -- WBEZ

Cory McCartan, president of the Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers.

Unions aren’t just for factory workers or truck drivers; they are for anyone who wants to have a voice in his workplace. The sooner we accept this, the sooner we can transform the labor movement from an ossified relic of the last century into a powerful engine for the social and economic change that this country desperately needs. -- Letter to NYT

AFT Pres. Randi Weingarten 

 “Make no mistake: This use of privatization, coupled with disinvestment, are only slightly more polite cousins of segregation." -- AP Wire

LA Kauffman

Why have so many articles, blog posts, and tweets invoked the resistance without acknowledging who is doing most of the day-to-day work of resisting? -- Guardian

Natalie Moore 

Don’t let OJ Simpson blind us to black victims of injustice. -- Guardian 

Steven W. Thrasher

For the past decade, leading Democrats like Obama, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel, and Senator Cory Booker have trumpeted charter schools (and their disdain for unions, regulation and government enforcement of civil rights protections). They paved the way for the Devos-Trump education nightmare. -- Guardian

Peter Cunningham @PCunningham57 Replying to @mikeklonsky

I have yet to hear any ideas from you about anything. -- Twitter

Mike Klonsky

Listen up -- http://hittingleft.libsyn.com/

Full Transparency

Full transparency: I'm deleting old tweets. Past views evolved & shouldn't be a distraction. I serve @POTUS agenda & that's all that matters

— Anthony Scaramucci (@Scaramucci) July 22, 2017

Above the Law

While all agree the U. S. President has the complete power to pardon, why think of that when only crime so far is LEAKS against us.FAKE NEWS

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 22, 2017

DeVos has turned her Office of Civil Rights into its opposite

Under the direction of Betsy DeVos, the DOE has become little more than an engine for driving school privatization, religious fundamentalism, racism and gender discrimination. Trump's appointment of DeVos to oversee this country's public education system threatens a roll-back of every hard-won gain by the Civil Rights Movement in the past 70 years.

DeVos in turn, has named Candice Jackson to head the Office of Civil Rights and turned that office into its opposite. It should be renamed, the Office of Maintaining White Male Supremacy. Jackson's recent comments normalizing campus rape are but the latest indicators of the direction the DOE has taken in regards to civil rights enforcement. DeVos has also slashed OCR budget, basically neutering the office when it comes to enforcement.

DeVos claims she wants to focus on civil rights claims "individually" rather than on institutional racism and discrimination, thereby ignoring this country's legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial segregation and their impact on public education.

What this means in practice is often giving equal weight to or favoring the complaints of individual white men who feel discriminated against by race-based affirmative actions; to Christian fundamentalists who feel that civil rights laws impinge on their religious practices; and to men's rights groups who feel oppressed by feminists or by women who have accused them of rape.

All has brought DeVos into direct conflict with Sen. Patty Murray, ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee. who's among 34 Democratic senators who signed a letter which read:  "You claim to support civil rights and oppose discrimination, but your actions belie your assurances."

They gave DeVos a deadline of July 11 to provide a list of all open Office for Civil Rights cases involving a transgender student, open cases involving sexual assault or sexual harassment, and cases that have been closed or dismissed since Jan. 1. DeVos ignored the deadline.

DeVos is also being sued by IL Atty. General Lisa Madigan and 18 other state attorneys general who want the DOE to hold for-profit schools (like Trump Univ.)  accountable for unscrupulous practices/ These include lying about accreditation and job placement, and luring millions of Americans to enroll in programs that ultimately leave them trapped in a lifetime of paralyzing student loan debt.

The problem with the Dems' is that the Department under Obama's appointee, Arne Duncan, was also weak on civil rights enforcement, especially in the area of school desegregation. Duncan proclaimed that he was opposed to "forced integration" recalling memories of 1950s southern segregationists. Other appointees, like former Asst. Sec. Peter Cunningham, have been outspoken in opposition to school desegregation being a front-burner issue.

It's telling that Sen. Murray and her Democratic colleagues never mention race or racism, English language learners, or students with disabilities in any of their polemics with DeVos and confine their criticisms almost entirely to issues of gender and transgender discrimination.

A serious blind spot.

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.

Dems leave teacher unions hanging on DeVos

IEA graphic.

Hillary has her picture on milk cartons since she went missing after election day.  SNL even picked up on it. Seems like the entire old-guard leadership must be out in the Chappaqua woods with her, especially when it comes to resisting the Trump juggernaut.

Most notably, at least from this educator's perspective, is their deafening silence around Trump's nomination of Betsy ("Make America Christian Again") DeVos for Ed Secretary. While NEA and AFT leaders, Eskelsen-Garcia and Weingarten, have been outspoken in the opposition to DeVos, they have been left dangling in the wind by the very Clinton wing of the party they risked their reputations for with their premature endorsements of Hillary.  

As you might expect, this rift is reflective of much broader post-election inner-party conflicts over who will lead the Dems forward towards the mid-term congressional elections. Of note is Weingarten's defense of Keith Ellison who represents the Sanders/Warren progressives against the Podesta old-guard faction, for party chairman. That seems like a big shift to me. But time will tell. 

For the unions, it's not just a matter of the mid-term elections. DeVos represents an existential threat to public education itself as well as to the entire teaching profession. Her history in Detroit as an active supporter of privatization, Christianization, and vouchers has even garnered support from supposedly anti-Trump reformers and think-tankers like Fordham Institute's Michael Petrilli and former Arne Duncan aide, Peter Cunningham who calls DeVos the "champion of choice".  

Thankfully, the teacher unions aren't alone in their defense of public ed from the Trump/DeVos assault. The NAACP and other civil rights groups like Black Lives Matter and the Journey for Justice Alliance, have also been clear in their opposition to the DeVos program of vouchers and un-capped charter expansion.


Think-tankers go thumbs up on DeVos

While there are many unknowns about Betsy DeVos I'm going w/ 2 thumbs up, especially considering the alternatives @PoliticsK12 @caitlinzemma pic.twitter.com/bRtaUFWxFV

— Michael Petrilli (@MichaelPetrilli) November 23, 2016

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

Rahm Emanuel's bizarre Trump-like assault on Chicago teachers

Rahm, an embarrassment to the Clinton campaign. 

Mayor 1% is back at it.

He has the power to avoid next week's teachers strike with a reasonable contract offer. There's TIF money within reach to solve the immediate problems.

Instead, he's gone off on the city's teachers in bizarre, Trump-like fashion, claiming that if teachers strike, they chose disrupting children's education over pay raises. He goes on to call it a "strike of choice, not necessity".

The implication is that teachers -- who've been hit by mass firings of 1,000 teachers and staff, who are being threatened with an end to the pension pick-up, which amounts to a 7% pay cut and who've working without a contract for more than a year -- are just walking out for the hell of it.

If this is "a strike of choice", it's the mayor's choice and I predict, he will pay dearly for it as he did four years ago.

Jesse Sharkey, the CTU's vice president, says the union is taking its stand due to the contract status but also to cuts—to pay, school staffing and services like librarians and special education professionals.

“This is in the mayor's power to solve,” Sharkey said. “This is the mayor's problem."

As you may recall, Rahm used those same strike of choice words (see Chicago teacher Greg Michie's 2012 piece in Huffington) in the weeks leading up to the 2012 strike. His strategy backfired, only increasing citywide parent support for the ultimately victorious teachers. 

For Rahm, that strike, along with his massive school closings, marked the beginning of his slide to the bottom. Remember, he was forced to bring Barbara Byrd-Bennett in through the back door to replace his incompetent CEO J.C. Brizard, at the bargaining table. That led to her ascendancy to the top of the system and to the great SUPES corruption scandal that followed. The school system has never recovered.

Four years later, Rahm's ratings are in the toilet, especially in the black community and parent support for the teachers is building once more. The CTU, on the other hand is unified, as this week's 95% strike vote showed.

Rahm's faithful anti-union flack, Peter Cunningham has also been echoing the mayor's line on Twitter. It's what he does. Here he complains about those greedy Chicago teachers:

Chicago has among the highest teacher pay in the country and @ChiPubSchools is offering a pay raise but @CTULocal1 still votes to strike.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) September 29, 2016

Brother Fred responds: 

First, to be clear, having the highest paid teachers in the country means nothing when you look at the data. Being the highest paid in a profession that notoriously is non-competitive with those in comparable professions hardly earns a smiley face. 

The difference between the salaries of teachers in major urban districts like Chicago, LA and NY is negligible. Being first means nothing. Teacher salaries in major urban districts are way below what someone with similar college degrees, certification and years of experience earn in the private sector. 

With what we know about the current CPS offer on the table is that a third of the teachers in Chicago are not eligible to receive any step or lane movement, meaning without a fair salary increase, they will earn even less in the future.

Not to be outdone, Tribune editors (preceding their endorsement of Gary "Where's Aleppo?" Johnson for president, blamed CTU teachers for causing the "chaos and exodus" from Chicago public schools.

Again, Cunningham picks up this ludicrous charge and runs with it.

Any connection btw enrollment declines at @ChiPubSchools and strike threats from @CTULocal1? @SSKedreporter @bylaurenfitz @alexanderrusso

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) September 29, 2016

Does Rahm really want another strike in the weeks leading up to the election, while Gov. Rauner sits on the mountain laughing as the tigers fight below? Isn't the mayor already an embarrassment to his patrons, the Clintons, who won't get within a mile of him and who need a big-city teachers strike right now like Republicans need another Trump?

SAVE THE CHICAGO READER! -- “Help us win the fight for the Reader: its bold writing must be saved,” writes Ben Joravsky on Medium:

“If you like the Reader — if you appreciate its voice of independence in politics and the arts — help us out. Please put pressure on Wrapports. Let them know they should invest the money to build the paper and pay its workers a fair wage. To continue down this path means a great Chicago newspaper will slowly die.”

Training time

Lori Lightfoot, head of the Police Board and the Police Accountability Task Force at yesterday's city council meeting.

More Training?... I'm having a hard time following this city council debate. How many training and sensitivity sessions do you need to attend before you stop shooting an unarmed black kid 16X or gunning down an alleged teenage car thief with a bullet in the back?

Cunningham responds... Be sure and read Peter Cunningham's lengthy response in the comments section of last Thursday's blog post. Peter begins by conceding that "concentrated poverty and segregation are part of the problem." But then admits he's lost when it comes to a political strategy to solve either one.

That's a strange admission coming from someone who spent the past seven years as a policy maker at the highest levels of government. It seems to me that should have been one of the first questions Obama's people asked when interviewing him for the Asst. Sec. of Ed post. It shows that deseg and anti-poverty were not very high of the current D.O.E.'s list of priorities.

But since Cunningham is frank about being strategically clueless, I will respond to his comment more fully in the next few days. Readers are, of course, welcome to join in.


Best Tweet of the day.

Woke up this morning and found out that @realDonaldTrump has turned into @JebBush. Kafka's Metamorphosis in reverse. Cockroach into man.

— John Warner (@biblioracle) August 25, 2016

The voice of corporate-style school reform

Peter Cunningham (right) flack for corporate reformers like Arne Duncan & Eli Broad

Last week, I got into a twitter spat with former Asst. Sec. of Education Peter Cunningham over the issue of school desegregation. He claims that in his heart he's for it, but that it's a lost cause. Better to stop wasting money and energy on fighting segregation and poverty and just focus on creating new "good schools", argues Cunningham.

He accuses me of fighting "yesterday's battles". I'll cop to that, I suppose. Then claims that I'm an agent of the status quo. That's funny.

Forever fighting yesterday's battles @mikeklonsky. You want integration? improve schools. You want segregation? Keep protecting status quo.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 16, 2016

He's a teachers union basher and part of the "no excuses" crowd who claims we're just using issues of racism and poverty as excuses to keep from working hard on school reform.

@NickKilstein My point: some folks use poverty as an excuse to avoid hard work of improving schools. Some now using segregation.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 18, 2016

He even wrote a major piece on the topic, "Is School Integration Necessary?, published in U.S. News & World Report.

I maintain that concentrated poverty and racial segregation are at the very root of our country's school problems and that it's impossible to build "good schools", charter or public, apart from the ongoing community-based struggles for equity and against segregation.

Cunningham thinks I'm picking on him. He even claims that I and his many critics are "obsessed" with him. That's a little weird.

Give it time @ryangarza89. Soon you will be obsessed with me like @mikeklonsky. Not so much @KatieOsgood_.

— Peter Cunningham (@PCunningham57) August 18, 2016

The reason so many progressives are taking aim at Cunningham is not that they're obsessed. Rather it's because he's become the main flack for corporate-style school reform.

I'll say one thing for him, he's prolific on Twitter (like me) and likes to engage with lefties. Sees that as his role.

He was the public voice and often the script-writer at the DOE for Arne Duncan's Race To The Top and his efforts are now totally underwritten by anti-public-school power philanthropists like Eli Broad and the Waltons. 

Now that Duncan has virtually disappeared from the education policy debate and the words Race To The Top are taboo for any politician hoping to win an election, Cunningham has become the most visible national target for public education advocates and social-justice activists.

He shouldn't be complaining about all the heat he's taking. That's why they pay him the big bucks.