That’s Right Nate

Hello and welcome to the future.   I am making my annual set of predictions for the new year.   It is really easy for people to scoff at things to come, but remember people ignored my prediction last year that Tiger Woods would get caught cheating on his wife with 11 different women.  Now without further adieu, here are the predictions:

• Tim Tebow’s NFL draft stock will take a huge hit at the scouting combine when he is inexplicably raptured up to Heaven.
• While politicians and world leaders are worried about a variety of crises, it will be a celebrity scandal that has the country strangely glued to their television sets.
• An entrepreneur will come along with a great idea to save public education while simultaneously making himself a great deal of money.
• A major scandal will befall Chicago’s Daley administration, but the mayor will be exonerated when it turns out that it was a rogue underling who was responsible as in previous Chicago political scandals.
• Tensions will escalate in the Middle East
• A new hip hop hit will reach number one on the charts because of an attractive singer and a good beat, despite unintelligible lyrics.
• Tea party activists will make up with enthusiasm for what they lack in spelling.
• Despite the republic already being destroyed by the Senate vote on health care, it will be destroyed another two dozen times this year.
• Charter Schools will demonstrate that you get better teachers when you lower their pay, worsen their working conditions, and increase their hours.  Meanwhile, the same people funding these charters will be aghast at efforts to curb their bonuses at $500 million per year.
• A Hollywood actress will generate a lot of buzz when she makes herself appear uglier for a part.
• The recession will finally end when the American public discovers they can make a large amount of money in their free time by raising chinchillas.
• Dick Cheney will have a major disagreement with something the Obama administration does this year.
• New technology will make it easier for us to stay connected with the people in our lives despite having less and less to tell these people creating a new market for people who are able to text interesting things.
• Impressed with the financial success of giving Jay Leno the 10:00 hour weekdays, NBC experiments will putting infomercials from 9:00 to 10:00 and reruns of the Andy Griffith Show from 8:00 – 9:00.   Their ratings continue to drop from the 9PM to 10PM hours.
• Two words – Monkey Butlers.

You can be sure if any of these predictions come true, I’ll be back at the beginning of 2011 to rub it in.

Arne Duncan and Mayor Daley designed many of the policies responsible for increased violence at Fenger High School

[First, I'd like to let my regular readers know that this will be a very different type of post from me. This is a serious issue that any real reporter should have been able to unravel in about 5 minutes.  Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of journalism in many places in Chicago.  I felt compelled to write about it and I can't see how to make this pithy or humorous.   Somethings do need to be serious I guess.  It's taken me 880+ posts to get to a serious story and I really hope it is at least 10 times that many before I get to another one.]

Last week a 16 year old high school student named Derrion Alberts was brutally killed during a violent battle between rival students from Fenger High School.   Nothing can possibly absolve his attackers from their responsibility in this tragic death.   However, there are explanations for what happened and how a public became a war zone that I think deserve a second look.

Fenger High School is located on Chicago’s Far South Side at 116th and Michigan.  The neighborhood has been a pretty tough neighborhood for a long time, but it was in the early 1980s when a lot of area’s jobs went away never to return.   At one time Fenger had been a pretty solid school.  It had outstanding shop programs that were designed to help students make their way into the work force, but of c0urse those classes eventually got phased out in favor of a 100% college preparatory curriculum.  This one size fits all education has been a mainstay of high school in Chicago since the 1990s.

Located at 131st and Doty, Carver High School was a neighbor and rival of Fenger.   The children of Altgeld Gardens Housing Project went to Carver High while the children of a neighborhood nicknamed “The Ville” went to Fenger.   Five years ago, as part of Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 program, Carver High School became Carver Military Academy and the students from Carver High School were displaced to Fenger.   Immediately, trouble began between the kids from Altgeld and the kids from “The Ville”.   This unfortunately has become an all too common problem with education reform as practiced by Mayor Daley and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan.  In one of the most gang ridden cities in the United States, the constant closing of schools has frequently forced kids to cross into different gang territories to go to high school.   The result has been a skyrocketing youth homicide rate.

Fenger High School was a powder keg, but the one thing that seemed to keep the situation under control was a dedicated faculty.    One by  one the schools around Fenger were replaced by charter schools.  Calumet became a campus of Perspectives charter school and Englewood became the Urban Prep charter school and a small school with admission by lottery.  Fenger sadly received all the students that the other schools wouldn’t take.   Then the inevitable happened.   Because of poor test scores, the Chicago Public Schools announced that they would make Fenger a turnaround school for the 2009 school year.

There is an excellent writeup of the hearings by Kristine Mayle at Substancenews.net. The community came out to argue against doing so, but the board went ahead with their plans.  If you aren’t familiar with the term turnaround school-it is being pushed by President Obama and Secretary of Education Duncan nationwide.  In a turnaround school, the faculty and principal of a school are removed and replaced by new teachers.   Sometimes, the schools close for a year and a lot of money is spent of rehabbing the school.  Unfortunately, by doing this, the CPS got rid of almost everybody in Fenger High School who knew the students and new the neighborhood.  The result was a dramatic increase in gang related violence both inside and outside the school.

On the day of the shooting, shots were reportedly fired at Fenger High School and a call was made to the police, but apparently nothing was done to deal with the trouble bubbling just below the surface of a normal Thursday at the high school.  Would a more experienced faculty and administration who were familiar with the students and the neighborhood have been able to act to stop the violence from escalating?  It’s impossible to say.   However, it is schools just like Fenger nationwide that are targeted for these kind of changes as part of education reform.  Parents, faculty, and community leaders warned of escalating violence that could happen, but they were ignored.   A 16 year old honor student was killed.   Sadly, he was not the first victim of school reform and he probably will not be the last.

An ungrateful community resident complains about UNO

I hate to write about local stories because I know that I am shrinking my audience.   Why would anybody care about what’s going on in Chicago if they lived in New Jersey.   I’m happy to say that with Arne Duncan as our Secretary of Education, this Chicago miracle may well be exported to a school district near you.   I’ve talked about charter schools before and raved about them.  They’re a great way to crush the teacher unions and at the same time use the free market to make some good money educating children.

The UNO Charter School Network has been around Chicago since the early 90s and  now has 9 schools in the Chicago area named after important Hispanic figures like Bartolome de las Casas who was an important figuring in bringing African slaves to the Americas.  The United Neighborhood Organization began as a grassroots movement on the Southside of Chicago, but has since moved way beyond that.   Their charter schools are now nationwide and they are very close allies with Chicago’s Mayor Daley.   In fact, they had a back to school celebration this week that doubled as a rally for Mayor Daley’s pet project bringing the 2016 Olympics to Chicago.   They just took $100,000,000 in stimulus money to build new charter schools, but now let’s get to the educational miracle.

Up until June, De la Cruz middle school was a top performer.  It had won the Spotlight Award from the state board of education for 2008 and despite being in a neighborhood with a lot of students still learning English and a serious gang problem, De la Cruz had managed to be a rare educational success story in the city of Chicago.   Unfortunately, when the city cut bus service to the school attendance dropped and while small classes are a selling point for charter schools, in public schools it is called “under utilization.” At an emotional meeting last year in front of Arne Duncan it was announced that the school would be closed and the building demolished.

At that point, most urban school districts would have given up the building for dead as it closed out the year, but Chicago is the city of broad shoulders.  A new phone system was put in, a perpetually leaking basement was plugged, installing new windows, and  repair and renovation was taking place all the way up until the last day of school.  Yesterday, at the Chicago Board of Education meeting all that repair paid off.  It seems that UNO needed a building for its Octavio Paz school and now with all the repairs the former De La Cruz building is now inhabitable.   The city was able to lease that building to UNO for $1.  Now everybody’s happy, right?

Unfortunately, we still have the ungrateful parents of the neighborhood aren’t thrilled to have a UNO moving into the building.   They can’t understand why their school was too small, but UNO would be able to cap their enrollment at 480 students for the year.   UNO continues to build an amazing power base.  Big-time national players have taken notice. Former President Bill Clinton once courted UNO. The group has promoted the interests of North America’s largest waste hauler, Waste Management Inc., utility giant ComEd and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.  However, it was yesterday’s educational miracle that makes me think they have friends in even higher places.  They are truly blessed.

Wow! Two stories in two days about public transportation must be some sort of record. Chicago continues to break the mold when it comes to education reform under the expert tutelage of Mayor Daley. Arne Duncan became the head of the Chicago Public Schools 8 years ago with a resume that most featured playing professional basketball in Australia. Now our mayor has outdone himself by replacing the basketball playing Duncan with CTA chief Ron Huberman.

What makes Huberman such an exceptional pick is that while he has been in charge of the buses that take many students to school as head of Chicago’s buses and elevated trains, Huberman has absolutely no experience with education. The Mayor then chose a former school principal to replace Huberman as head of the CTA. I love this out of the box type thinking and I hope that the Mayor will apply it to the Police and Fire Departments as well. Too often education has been left to educators in the past. That is no way to reform anything. Educators are poisoned by their experience in the classroom which makes them incapable of pushing through the kind of reform our students need to learn. On the other hand, this experience would in now way hinder their ability to drive a bus or run a public transportation authority. There is very little in my mind about education that can’t be learned by a viewing of To Sir With Love followed by Mr. Holland’s Opus.

Huberman immediately began rolling up his shirt sleeves by announcing his first two priorities were to make basketball games safer and to close over 20 schools. This is the kind of progress I believe we can all get behind for our children and their future. Who knows, in 5 or 6 years when you step on a bus in Chicago you just might see them.

First, allow me to wish everybody a Merry Christmas.  Regardless of your religious beliefs, there is no greater sign of God’s love than to send his only son down to Earth as a sort of trickle down grace.   God is the ultimate supply sider.  I had my traditional Christmas of a Taxi Driver marathon and I learned that you can actually fry pizza rolls though it doesn’t mention it on the box.  They are quite delicious I might add fried.

Today’s article is about the city of broad shoulders–my hometown of Chicago.  In the past Mayor Daley has been heralded as a green mayor because of his love for parks and flower baskets.  However, the man is singlehandedly going to save Detroit this year and he’s saving Chicago money at the same time.  Daley is a forward thinking man who knows that the key to saving Detroit’s economy is to sell the unwanted trucks in an inventory.  To do that, Daley has refused to plow Chicago side streets.  As a result, the constant melting and refreezing has Chicago’s streets looking like a third world country and rapidly moving into war zone territory.  I dare anybody to drive around here without a truck.  Broken axels and worse abound and stuck cars are as regular as Italian Beef places on Chicago’s streets.  I’m no big fan of the Detroit Red Wings, but I have to give it to our mayor.  Since he made driving the city streets of Chicago without a truck a dangerous idea, we’re going to see a lot of those Detroit’s trucks being sold to Chicagoans who need the 4 wheel drive and elevated cab just to get around.

Millenium Park remains a triumph of the Daley administration despite coming in $350,000,000 over budget.

GQ Magazine has just named Chicago as its city of the year. Its been a banner year for the windy city which was highlighted in the Dark Knight movie this summer.  Though I thought that particular movie was a piece of left wing propaganda it definitely showcased what a fun and livable city Chicago is. A lot of the credit goes to our mayor.

Mayor Daley is about as forward thinking an individual as you will find. When Barrack Obama was elected President, Nelson Mandela said, “Your victory has demonstrated that no person anywhere in the world should not dare to dream of wanting to change the world for a better place.” France’s Nicholas Sarkozy said, “At a time when we must face huge challenges together, your election has raised enormous hope in France, in Europe and beyond.” Chicago’s Mayor Daley said, ““You can bring your Olympics…[only] so far. Your prime minister [or] your president has to then carry the football…It helps us tremendously, but you can’t take it for granted. That would hurt us…in the eyes of the International Olympic Committee.”

Mayor Daley has Chicago on a firm financial footing. By privatizing Midway Airport, The Indiana Skyway, our parking meters, and many of our schools, Chicago has managed to bring in much needed revenue to keep our sales tax at a rate of only a bit over 10% and still afford to pay for many of our streets to be plowed in winter. The parking meter thing is a new innovation where parking rates will quadruple under a program by the city to lease the meters for the next 75 years. I suppose some would say that getting rid of every revenue generator in the city for a one time cash payment is fiscally irresponsible. Fortunately, Mayor Daley isn’t one of these people.

Daley has not been afraid to make unions toe the line either. When it comes to police protection, Mayor Daley found a kindred spirit in Jody Weis–the kind of cop who isn’t afraid of public relations work and put him in charge of the whole department. With murder up nearly 20% since he took over, that PR background will serve Weis well. For school chief, Daley chose a basketball player from Australia named Arne Duncan as his top man. Together they have worked to dismantle the public school system by using charters to privatize. Despite limp ISAT scores and increasing violence in the schools, Duncan has been the kind of man to work for change. He hasn’t been afraid to fire all the teachers at a failing school and replace them with the best teachers he could find repeatedly in some cases.  Daley longs for a days when Chicago will have schools like the Chinese where students will raise chickens to supplement the cost of their schooling.

There have been some investigations into the Chicago mayor’s office, but fortunately most of the problems no matter how large have been the fault of one faceless middle manager or another. Our mayor is above reproach.  Daley may be a Democrat, but that is more a matter of the party that controls the city.  In principles, our mayor is the type of free enterprise Republican that any city should be envious of.  Through him Chicago remains a dynamic 20th century city.