Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm's great longer-school-day hoax. Charging students $500 for extra classes.

Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog: Rahm's great longer-school-day hoax. Charging students $500 for extra classes.:

Rahm's great longer-school-day hoax. Charging students $500 for extra classes.

by Mike Klonsky

(Fred Klonsky toon)

The hoax began with a mega-political campaign which tried unsuccessfully to convince CPS parents and teachers that the magic bullet in school reform was more seat time for students. When hardly any schools bought into this bogus, baseless notion, the mayor imposed his will on schools, as usual, from the top down.

It was Karen Lewis and the CTU who, without opposing a longer school day and year, repeatedly asked questions like -- How will it be paid for? What will be done with the added time?

Now schools have to live with the longer school day, even while Rahm is slashing budgets, closing schools and firing hundreds of teachers and staff and cutting art programs from the curriculum.

In response, Joyce Kenner, principal at the city's top selective-enrollment school, Whitney Young, is threatening to charge students $500 each if they take a 7th-period class. If this threat is carried at successfully