New Chief Of Staff Bashed On Illinoize

Incoming CPS chief of staff Bryan Samuels gets bashed in this post from Illinoize (Show Bryan the Money, Arne, and Watch His Bodycount!) for having been something of a hatchet man over DCFS's Maryille Facility: 

"Mr. Samuels did his level best to smear a dedicated guardian of Illinois children and to dismantle the work of Father John Smyth at Maryville, in DesPlaines, Illinois."

Comments

I urge any competent journalist in Chicago to research this man. AD did not do so. He is apparently doing a favor to someone (Blago?) by appointing him. Do some homework, Roz or any of the other complacent "journalists".

Another political figure placed in CPS, who does not have a degree in education!! Sheeesh!!!

Arne's new Chief of Staff doesn't need to have a degree in education. He needs to be an effective manager. Don't forget, the days when the school district was managed entirely by former union teachers and principals are over (thankfully).

[1.04]

Dear 11.56

You are correct now any scumbag democrat will serve
the purpose

11:56 Who would EVER want a school system managed by the people who dedicated their lives and career and their own personal educations to the cause? So glad that insurance companies now run hospitals and a failed businessman runs the country. I should have seen your logic years ago!
Brilliant.

Who was your favorite former educator who became superintendent?

3:24 Ruth B. Love

Since we've had some educators since Love's time (early 80's, right?), it seems they have not necessarily been better. Would anyone argue for M. Byrd instead of Vallas or Duncan?

The key is not necessarily having an educator as superintendent, but having some educators in key positions at the central office, positions that enable them to advise the superintendent and develop policies. The best formula is a good mix of experienced educators and non educators with successful track records.

The key word "SUCCESSFUL". There are too many people placed in CPS based on who they now, which is, supposely against the board's ethical
rules. If these type of people are going to be employed for that reason, at least let the person have some type of knowledge and experience in the position. When are the powers that be going to realize that these type of hiring decisions, may indirectly have negative affects to our children?

Why don't we just put attorneys in operating rooms?

11:40 In many ways, attorneys are present in operating rooms. Doctors are so afraid of malpractice that they do all kinds of tests and other procedures to cover their butts--most of it not helpful to the patient, but helpful in case of a law suit. A similar kind of situation exists now with non-educators (many of whom are attorneys) at the board. Analyze, criticize, argue...but never get around to educating.

[George Schmidt]

The question is whether any educators could have done a better job than Paul Vallas and Arne Duncan.

To even ask that question (even anonymously) is to reveal some depths of ignorance about local history (and municipal finances) that will be hard to discourse with. A huge white blindspot (the kind discussed by DuBois) will also help people to continue braying about the "miracle" since 1995. Ignorance is bliss.

Could trained and credentialed educators could have done a better job organizing Chicago's schools to educate the children of Chicago? The answer of course is "Yes" -- just about anyone with educational credentials and experience would have done a better job educating Chicago's children in its public schools since 1995.

But in order to see how easily that answer is true, you have to be unbrainwashed, and that's the real challenge.

I'll argue for Manford Byrd (and Richard Stephenson) over Vallas and Duncan any day.

And I'll argue for Angie Caruso (who was interim before they dug up Love) over anyone since 1991.

And I'll argue that Margaret Harrigan would have done a very good job, too, had she ever gotten that "far" up the career ladder.

And beyond those four, there are about a dozen others, contemporary and historical, who would and could have done a much better job of running a public school system for the children of Chicago between 1995 and 2006. But if you really look back on corporate "school reform", that wasn't what was on the agenda.

And as the next ten years unfold, I'll argue that it's hard to have done worse, more corruptly and at greater damage to the largest number of children, than Daley (Vallas; Duncan) and all those patronage critters in the upper ranks at CPS have done.

The cover ups are still in place, but the covers are being pulled off pretty fast, as people even here are noting.

In order to have the discussion, however, we'd have to make the arguments based on some facts. Those would include a serious understanding of the CPS budgets, and that's not likely here. It would be neat to do it on a panel, but I was blacklisted from punditing in the early 1990s after making Martin Koldyke look like the right wing nut case he is on Chicago Tonight -- a few years before I was blacklisted from teaching. So I doubt we'll ever have a panel that will discuss those things based on facts, even though they are very important to this town.

Manford Byrd and Richard Stephenson were forced to work under budgetary restraints from the School Finance Authority. Those restraints made even the simplest things prohibitive. Nobody in those days had six "chief of staffs" (or is it "chiefs of staff"?) and a dozen Hosannahs, Brandis, Jeanies, Nancys, Beatrizes, Davids, and Josephs -- without a clue about classroom and school realities -- pulling down $100,000 a year and lording over people.

Had just one of those dozens of bureaucrats been hired during the Byrd years, the Sun-Times would have been screaming off page one. Had CPS put its legal work in the hands of a corporate lawyer from Exelon (Ruth) or City Hall (Marilyn, Patrick) the press would have screamed.

Since the miracle began a decade ago, the reporting has been theological, not factual, and continues so to this day. Heck, on a night when the air is populated by reindeer and angels, anything is possible. Right?

Byrd? Stephenson? Caruso? Harrigan?

And there was a great deal to disagree with regarding the policies of each of those superintendents. But at least they knew their job was to educate all of the kids in Chicago's public schools, not to privatize the schools, spend billions on patronage and corrupt contracts, and deliver the dwindling services to a sliver of the population at the expense of everyone else.

And they would not have embarked on a decade-long orgy of teacher bashing -- like Arne and Paul have done -- because they knew things were more complext than the fatuous cliches.

People had disagreements with them, but at least they shared a commitment to public schools and knew what it took to run classrooms and schools with real Chicago children in them. These people since have been anti-public school.

The question has another wrinkle.

Why is it that every school district in Illinois has to be run by someone who has come up through the ranks and gotten all the credentials (including the Type 75), but Chicago "reformed" itself out of that as soon as most of the top people (up through the ranks, credentialed, experienced) in the public school system were African Americans? Why would it be a scandal to be paying tens of millions of dollars to the chiefs and managers swarming around Clark St. (and the outposts) in any district but Chicago?

History is necessary.

In 1979, CPS was declared "bankrupt" by the credit agencies (banks) because the inflationary spiral of the 1970s had caught up with the spread between tax collections and bills. That's what really happened (unless you want to believe the Tribune version, which is as short on facts as its Iraq War rationales were four years ago). By 1980, CPS had been forced to borrow more than a half billion dollars (real money back in those days) at usurous rates and lay off more than 8,000 staff.

That reality (enshrined in the history of the Chicago School Finance Authority) lasted into the 1990s.

Along came 1995. It was part of the Gingrich Revolution, but not recognized as such locally here in Illinois.

As part of the deal the Republicans cut to give Daley control over the schools (and deregulate and privatize much), the SFA lost it budgetary and "school reform" oversight powers.

Corporate "school reform" required privatization and deregulation. It required that Chicago feed into the "CEO" myth. It required a steady steam of propaganda (continuing to this day) about how the "CEO" always knows best and how you're not supposed to question either the qualifications of the policies of the "CEO." Once Chicago's CEO nonsense was being exported, things became even nastier. After all, every time we sold our local snake oil to another city, we had to expand the size of the cover up. (Philadelphia and St. Louis have finally caught up with their Chicago exports; Detroit has backed away from "CEO" reform; but New York City still has some life in it...).

Corporate "school reform" also required Great White Hope thinking. CEO type stuff.

You know: a Harvard MBA in the White House to send us to war and a U of C lab school basketball player running the city's public schools.

"...a low dishonest decade..." Auden talked about in that chillingly titled poem "September 1, 1939".

Others still wait to be written about the past ten years here, and about the people who enabled all those white supremacist behaviors in high places.

Suddenly in 1995, for the first time in 15 years, Chicago's public schools could borrow money for capital projects. And luckily atop that, the economy boomed (so property tax revenues to Chicago increased enormously, even with the great TIF ripoffs), so it was easier to spend on some other things (like union contracts). Like chiefs of staff with no qualifications in education (or anyplace else, actually). Like doubling the number of lawyers (to keep everyone on edge) and tripling the number of dollars going to outside lawyers. And creating bureacratic asylums like "New Schools" and staffing them with people who combined the right levels of ignorance, arrogance, and cliche to do the job of privatizing as much public property and service as possible, before the roof collapses...

With a blank check and an unlimited credit card, Vallas and Daley were able to make themselves look good and buyy off a lot of potential critics. Another piece was creating a propaganda department of more than a dozen very well paid staff to pour out propaganda into the media just at a time when the number of reporters covering education was being cut to the bone by the same corporate bean counters. In 1995, Chicago had a one-person communications department. Today, that department (sixth floor; visit it) has at least a dozen, with others stashed elsewhere.

Arne Duncan has had the same luxuries Vallas had, most notably a blank check from the rest of Chicago's media.

Add to this the strange mystical stuff about how Chicago's "CEO" guys had business experience (neither Duncan nor Vallas had any) and you get some really strange contortions of reality. As anyone who has ever had an affair knows, you start with a lie and you have to elaborate the narrative on and on and on. We're still in the middle of that ongoing lie.

Payback is coming with the debt balloons looming between now and 2010. Despite the Civic Committee and the Sun-Times, it's not the pensions that are the real problem with CPS. It's all the money Daley blew via CPS on crooked contracts from Tru Link and hundreds of others. (The worst are buried in all the "Oracle" stuff the Board approves each month, but nobody has dared trying to untangle that) and overpaid and undercompetent administrative patronage staff.

A whole generation crooks large and small were helped along by Tim Martin (Vallas), Sean Murphy (Duncan) and now Kris Rule (Duncan).

If it weren't for the fact that both Holden and Lincoln Park now have serious roof problems, I'd say the roof was about to fall in. (While CPS was wrapping every public building in "wrought iron" fencing-- in homage to Cristo?-- to make Levine richer, the roofs were leaking and becoming more and more dangerous; not a joke).

The threads are beginning to unravel. There is still not any real effort from the rest of the media to look deeply into this stuff. Or the racist underpinnings of it all.

Otherwise, the "American College of Education's" $10 million scam (we went over that last month) would already be page one news in this town.

Almost any educator could have done a better job than Vallas and Duncan. Several did. And we didn't have to import them from California (Love, Kimbrough) for that to happen.

Vallas, Duncan and Daley were the great white hopes. They also presided over an era of corruption in public schools unprecedented since the 1930s. The media and other cover ups that have protected them are wearing a little thin. Even the ugliest lies (Jim Crow; the Noble Cause come to mind in this context, because they are based on similar thinking) lasts forever. Lies get exposed, even in this town, even when most citizens are still staring at this month's "miracles" blindly while waiting to be told what the next ones are.

The next couple of years should be a hoot, but only if people begin to share what they already know.

And this will not involve waiting for someone else to notice that Tru Link Fence is not run by minority persons and that it really has no record in snow removal.

Merry Christmas.

The argument on Duncan/Vallas vs. Byrd/Love/Harrigan seems specious at best.
We have no way of knowing whether B/L/H would have opted for privitization, charters and the like; they did not have the options. The 1995 changes in Springfield lead not only to a change in whom could be Superintendent/CEO, but also the rules they were working under.
Did M. Byrd, who told teachers to take a pay cut without looking to alter the bureacracy have any more concern for children that our most recent CEO's? I doubt it.

Maybe we could go back to the criminal D. Sharon Grant as president of the Board, too.

George--an excellent and cohesive argument that is very close to the truth! My only addition would be the racist dimension--i.e., the school system was turned over to African-Americans after it had been run into the ground financially. They were set up and that set up allowed the right-wing mayoral takeover you describe so well.

The good news is that Bryan Samuels will meet Fr. John Smyth one day at the pearlie gates. I can hear big John now, saying "Go to ...."

[George Schmidt]

Since my colleagues and I helped begin the exposes on D. Sharon Grant, we'd at least like the kudos that go with having rid all of us of her. By 1987, Byrd was in a corner, having to defend his budget (and Mayor Washington's) against the strike preparations of the Chicago Teachers Union (and Jackie Vaughn). Part of the tragedy of all that was that everyone knew in 1987 that Chicago was being manipulated, on the one hand, by Springfield, and on the other by the School Finance Authority (run that year by Jerome Van Gorkom, who was followed by Martin Koldyke).

One other historical footnote: Koldyke was also given the "school reform authority" powers after 1989. In case people have forgotten who became the (very highly paid) Chicago school reform chief, it was Checker Finn, most recently of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation.

Byrd had a bureuacracy. I was one of the people hired to reorganize the budget to shrink it in the summer of 1989 (I worked as part of "the budget transition team" paid for with MacArthur Foundation money). Everything Byrd could do or not do about the "bureaucracy" was spit in the ocean compared with the billions (yes, billions) that were slowly being bled out of the schools under the SFA guidelines.

As the SFA ripoff drew to a close, TIF tipoffs replaced it.

You're right. CPS has always been starved of funds (by comparison with, say, the northern and western suburban high school districts I visited last year). At the same time, CPS is rolling in dollars (by comparison with the south suburbs and rural Illinois districts that now have just about no local tax bases left).

And I'll wait here for someone to offer an analysis of the Duncan (Daley) bureaucracy and its costs.

"New Schools" alone is a joke that deserves a week of Page One stories.

"Law Department" deserves another week (especially when the politics of pinstripe patronage is factored in; Dykema Gosset is only a small piece of that; Earl Neal was the grossest example, and now his successors are at the trough).

All those top positions that require no qualifications (from the chiefs of staff to those City Hall elves in every department and area office) need to be included, too.

The Duncan (Daley) bureaucracy is the most grotesque in the history of public education in Chicago, beginning with Duncan himself.

Manford Byrd and everyone I listed (and could list, down to many current principals working today) knew what the lives of teachers and principals were like. There have been a handful of people who greased their way up the pole before "school reform" began in 1995, but nothing like what we're looking at today.

That's why CPS denies my FOIA requests for the work histories and resumes of the top people at 125 S. Clark St. The resume would show that hundreds of them have no education qualifications (yes, I said hundreds) and the job history would show that they call came "down from the hall" and when (just like Chico and Vallas, the pioneers of that stuff).

So CPS denies the request under the Freedom of Information Act, Attorney General Lisa Madigan's FOIA office simply sends me the letter from the (patronage lawyer) in the Law Department denying the request, and I get a form letter saying I can appeal to (of all people) Hosannah Mahaley Johnson!

In any other state or town in the USA, including the rural counties of the old Confederacy, those facts would be a scandal. Only in Chicago is this whole structure of hypocrisy and corruption hailed.

Merry Christmas.

[teachingmyassoff]

As a teacher who began his career in CPS the same year Vallas started his as CPS CEO, I have often been amazed at the lack of experience in education the people leading the "reform" have had.

When I read about Hosannah and her short trek from office temp to power broker in that Under 40 article a few months ago, it only confirmed my absolute disgust in this system. It's getting harder and harder to keep telling myself that I'm doing it for the kids.

12:47 pm The pre-Vallas folks were, at least, educators. Still, at that time as now, it's best to concentrate on the local school and your classroom. The system (whether run by educators or mayoral stooges) is always going to be a bit too far removed from kids and from reality. It's one of the tests of being in education. If it starts to really bother you, join the administration and have some fun trying to center it on kids. Don't give up. Good luck!

[George Schmidt]

Trust me, teachingmyassoff, it's worth it in the long run.

Even on their worst days, the kids are what this job is all about. When I realized I was not only in exile for a short time, but blacklisted so I could never teach in public high schools in this area again, it really got me down. But every one of the 28 years I was in the classrooms across Chicago was filled with memories I'd never have earned if I had finished those last couple of DePaul Law School classes and gone that way in 1973.

Public school teaching still rocks, even if punks have been teacher bashing from the sidelines for the past decade. Truth comes back around eventually.

Chicago's basically had a news blackout the past decade, with things getting worse since the Turn of the Century.

When the exotic pedigrees of the Hosannahs (she's one of hundreds of clout heavy incompetents at this point, an amazing feat at the public trough -- so consider her a metaphor, not anything special) of the CPS world finally come out, you will be glad to be able to point to all those years of classroom work. It's how you can look your kids in the eye when they ask the hard questions about "What did you do..." Mommy and Daddy.

One of the things that enabled all this was that during the past ten years, Chicago's newspapers stopped paying reporters to report on the public schools. More than ever, propaganda was substituted for fact.

Many reporters were always propagandists anyway, but lately things have gotten much worse. Like Wall St. before the "Dot Con" bubble burst, they just want a "good story" -- true or not. They spend ten times more time laboring over a clever metaphor than fussing over whether their facts are straight. Miracle stuff and all that nonsense.

The Tribune used to have a guy on staff (Jerry Crimmins) whose whole job was to fact check obscure stuff. He was one of many, just one of the more interesting one. Style was not his thing; substance was. One missed fact and the story was dead. Who cared about a clever spin if the stuff wasn't true?

He was one of the best copy editors in the business. Once, he called me late at night to try and learn if a certain person had been a member of the Board of Education about a dozen years earlier-- in a particular month! For more than five years, the dailies haven't had anyone doing jobs like that. Instead, with word processing, they streamlined the copy processing and lots of stuff simply steams through. And cutsy stuff with cool verbiage passes through instead of getting fact checked.

But that's just the tip of the corporate iceberg in local media.

Basically, in order to maintain their 25 percent profit margins (Tribune Corporation) or to pay the luxury bills for their (now indicted former) owners (Sun-Times), the dailies stopped covering news. They wait for it to be fed to them in digital form, then do a bit of rewrite and slap a by-line on it.

Instead or reporting, copy editing, and fact checking, they relied more and more on the "editorial board briefing" and similar nonsense. Once those ego trips became the norm, they then placed the public at the mercy of the PR departments of Daleyland (and the corporations).

With more than 50 full-time propagandists in all the Daley PR outposts (City Hall with Jacqueline Heard is just the biggest; followed by CPS under Peter Cunningham, er., no he's just a "consultant"), Daley's PR brigades outnumber the actual reporters by about ten to one. And if you think CPS is a problem for citizens, how much coverage is going on at the Park District, Port of Chicago, or (even) Cook County?

Ironically, one of the best places to get raw facts is at Police Headquarters. There it's harder to spin stuff, and everyone knows what it feels like to be under cross examination. When you walk into Police Headquaters, you pass an information room. When you walk into City Hall and CPS, you pass the spin rooms.

The Police usually give the facts according to what they have. The rest of the departments of Daleyland just spin, spin, spin, and much of the result comes out the civic rectum a bit later as "news" on the TV stations and in the print media.

On top of the noxious editorial board briefings, all of the newspapers have cut back on their coverage of the Board of Education meetings.

It's been four months since an actual reporter from the Sun-Times (Kate Grossman or Roz Rossi) attended a Chicago Board of Education meeting gavel to gavel. Now and then they have one of those nice kids from "Medill News Service" (Northwestern Journalism School) scribbling notes. But without much insight, since next week it will be someplace else.

The Tribune has had three different reporters covering parts of the Board of Education meetings over the past six months. At least all of them knew how to read Board Reports, although none was given the time to do so thoroughly, let alone pick up any of the dozen stories that come up each month during publc participation.

(Example among dozens: The unsavory connection between alderman Beale and two major schools in his South Side Ward -- Brooks and Curtis -- has been an open secret for months. Read anything about it in the print media? No. You get fluffy "unschooling" nonsense instead, sandwiched between hype about charter schools and propaganda from Eden Martin's Civic Committee).

The Defender and Southtown no longer spend the money to have a reporter at the biggest public board in the Midwest. Ten years ago, both of them had a reporter who knew the difference between a Board Report and the budget.

Crain's Chicago Business already knows the "news" from CPS: they just ask Eden Martin or one of the CEOs at the Civic Committee. Or they take a handout from the charter schools people and pitch another spin on privatization.

TV and radio only show up if there is some big protest brewing, then leave almost as soon as it's over. Or they come when Arne Duncan stages a dog-and-pony show in that 6th floor theater they have for press conferences at 125 S. Clark St.

The result?

"News" is actually a rewrite job based on the PR handouts of the various wings of the Daley thingy.

Nobody has even tried to figure out how much money has been wasted on all the incompetent ($100,000 a year, executive) staff with a "good story".

Nor is anyone else looking at how much additional money has been wasted on incompetent contracting -- to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

A fun story would be to count the number of miles of "wrought iron" fencing wrapped around CPS schools during the Tru Link years, Then we could survey how many public school roofs are in danger of collapsing because "wrought iron" -- not structural inegrity (or any other kind of integrity) -- was the Daley administration's priority capital spending priority.

The only school that had enough clout to say "No!" to a demand from Daleyland that its perimeter be wrapped in "wrought iron" was Lane Tech.

As some have recently noted, the "Tru Link" sign on Touhy Ave. is losing its letters, one by one, almost as if it was in shame about what it's done. Good graphic, that would have been.

Thirty years ago in Bucharest, the royal family was always in the front pages of the "news" paper, doing some social thingy or dedicating a new power plant. Half the papers were filled with sports, which was the only thing in the papers that had any accuracy. Everyone knew not to ask about where the power was actually going, and so it was much safer to be a soccer fanatic. But then, bizango!, eighteen years ago this week, two dictators got zapped, and at least Romania didn't have that kind of nonsense anymore.

Dictatorships work that way.

Daley has parked so many leftovers from City Hall into CPS there wasn't enough space inside 125 S Clark St. So they also were stuffed into places like Sports Administration, the Areas, and the other outposts. And if you think you'll get anywhere going to the Inspector General's Office, check out the backgrounds of the people who do the investigating there.

I remember a Christmas night like this one back in 1989. I was on the computer when the Associated Press wires began updating the story about what had just happened to Nicolai and Elena Ceausescu. If memory serves right, it took about six hours for the entire story to chug out. (In those days, a 2400 BPS modem was hot stuff).

Justice takes time.

Teaching is a noble profession, and the kids are always worth it.

Merry Christmas.

The Deputy Inspector General, John Gasirowski came to us from the City Hall Law Department. Anybody try to get personnel records from CPS and even though the state statute says these records are to be turned over in 7 days, CPS just takes their sweet time with a total disregard to the law

Did you try filing an FOIA appeal?

[Alexander]

knowing nothing of the substance, i have to say that some of these comments remind me of the comments from jose torres' arrival in area 14 last summer -- second-hand criticism and fear of outsiders. remember that if we bash everyone who comes into education but doesn't have what we consider the appropriate background, rather than measuring them on their intent, good will and their performance, then we'll get little help and new talent in the field. in life, the classroom, or wherever, none of us has always succeeded, or been entirely understood, or even always done right.

2:26 I do have an attorney that is handling my case and who is going to log a complaint against CPS. Thank you for your response.

[Red]

Thanks for your comments Alexander. The level of negativism scares me sometimes. I do not always agree with what goes on at CPS but to look back on Byrd, Caruso and Stephenson as the good old days is disturbing. As I recall, those were the days of constant teacher strikes, no options for kids, stagnant test scores, and no innovation. It may have been a better time for some teachers who just wanted to be left alone. But by any measure, it surely was not a good time for kids. Let's get real here. Those were bad times for children enrolled in the public schools.