CHICAGO'S BUDGET BIG LIE III: Reader article only outlines tip of the iceberg in Daley, Huberman patronage binge... The four most important 'degrees' needed for an executive job at CPS in 2010 are: the CTA, the CPD, the CCH, and the MBA. Educators need not apply
The recent article by Ben Joravsky in the Chicago Reader began the long search by Chicagoans for the latest examples of patronage and politics in the city's school budget. But beyond the examples used in the Reader article, any close student of the actions of the Chicago Board of Education during the past 15 months (from roughly January 1, 2009, when Arne Duncan became U.S. Secretary of Education and Ron Huberman was plucked from the Chicago Transit Authority by Mayor Daley to become the third Daley-selected non-educator white guy to save the school system) would have noticed that the Chicago public schools has been on the greatest patronage hiring binge in its history, while the pouring of dollars out the door for crony contracts was continuing to increase, as it has since Daley took control of the city's schools in 1995.
Most of the Chicago press has been ignoring the actual workings of the Board of Education's executive staffs for more than a decade, content to repeat, as nauseum, the carefully crafted Salvation Narrative that says, in what at any other time would be seen as a racist way, that before 1995, when Richard M. Daley was given dictatorial control over the Chicago Public Schools, the school system was "America's Worst" (as the Tribune called the system following the lead of former U.S. Secretary of Education Williams Bennett 22 years ago) and that Daley and his miracle management team saved the school