Daley gets heat on pick for CPS education post :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Education

Daley gets heat on pick for CPS education post :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Education

Daley gets heat on pick for CPS education post

Touts top aide, daughter's former principal, for job

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July 10, 2010

BY FRAN SPIELMAN AND ROSALIND ROSSI Staff Reporters

Mayor Daley is encountering some resistance in his effort to make the founder and former principal of his daughter's Catholic elementary school the new chief education officer for the Chicago Public Schools, City Hall sources say.
If Mary Ellen Caron is tapped as chief education officer, she would be the first white and non-CPS educator to assume that post since Daley won control of the city's public schools in 1995.

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Mary Ellen Caron during a press conference with Mayor Daley in 2009.
(Richard A. Chapman/Sun-Times)

Over the last 15 years, the top CPS education post has been held by three successive African-American women, all former CPS principals in a system that is 45 percent black, 41 percent Latino and 9 percent white.
Caron is the $147,060-a-year commissioner of the city's new mega-Department of Family and Support Services. Although she worked briefly in CPS as special assistant to then-schools CEO Arne Duncan, one CPS source said "the ideal candidate'' for chief ed officer under schools CEO Ron Huberman would be "a highly respected minority educator from within.''
To resolve the situation, sources said, one scenario is that the chief ed