Mike Klonsky's Blog: Day 9 of Chicago teachers strike. Sun-Times gives a full page to the charter hustlers

Mike Klonsky's Blog: Day 9 of Chicago teachers strike. Sun-Times gives a full page to the charter hustlers

Day 9 of Chicago teachers strike. Sun-Times gives a full page to the charter hustlers

In the wake of horrific Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Univ. of Chicago economist Milton Friedman called the event "an opportunity to radically reform the educational system.”

For all my radical friends out there, by "radically reform," Friedman didn't mean fully democratizing public ed. Rather he meant nothing less than replacing all public schools with privately-run charters. With the help of fellow free-marketeers like Paul Vallas, who became the head of post-Katrina New Orleans schools, that's exactly what happened.

It was Vallas's successor at CPS, Arne Duncan who, as U.S. Secretary of Education, dotted Friedman's i's and crossed his t's by calling Katrina “the best thing that happened to the education system in New Orleans.”

It was then up to Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to sum things up with his 2012 catchphrase, "Never let a serious crisis go to waste."

Naomi Klein would later expose this shock-and-awe strategy of "disaster capitalism" in her best-selling book, The Shock Doctrine.

I'm recalling the shock-doctrine mentality while reading a full-page pitch in this morning's Sun-Times by the far-right Heritage Foundation, proposing to replace Chicago's public schools with privately-run charters in order to avoid the inconvenience of teacher strikes. Ironically, S-T is partially owned by the Chicago Federation of Labor.

The city is currently in the ninth day of a teacher's strike, with little prospect of a settlement in sight, and today's prophets (profiteers) of unregulated free markets are once again trying to CONTINUE READING: Mike Klonsky's Blog: Day 9 of Chicago teachers strike. Sun-Times gives a full page to the charter hustlers