CPS has
1) lied
about “savings”—any savings will be long-term and depend on may factors
difficult to properly predict.
They will not be realized now, the sheer chaos that will ensue to
complete the process will more likely cost more in the short-term, which
completely undercuts the claim that so many schools must be closed now.
2) lied about “utilization”—there are many issues with this
line but just to give a few examples when groups such as Raise Your hand
insisted that there were no empty rooms in these underutilized schools there
was no response, special education kids simply weren’t counted, CPS
spokesperson Becky Carroll is on record claiming 40 kids in a classroom is ok.
3) claimed that kids are going better schools, in most cases
they are not.
3) not engaged in any meaningful dialogue with parents or
the CTU.
4) had the nerve to state at the hearing that people who
couldn’t understand that closing schools would save money “did not understand
economics”—this coming from a body that hadn’t release a budget yet for the
next year, and in fact has released very few financial details about anything.
So in one corner we have the CPS knowingly plunging
thousands of families into what appears to a poorly thought-out, haphazard
plan. (It is worth noting for all the national “education reformers” around,
none appeared to have weighed in on the CPS closings. Is that perhaps because
they know a train wreck when they see one and have made sure to stay away?) CPS
has put young kids in real danger, both in terms of gang lines that will be
crossed and the fact that many will have to walk a least a mile to school. Most
significantly, and probably the least covered by the mainstream media, is the destabilization
of vulnerable communities that will occur. Schools provide an important
community anchor, if anything a reporter and a mayor who claim to want to
reduce violence would want increase investment
in these communities. That’s a tall order, and nobody really expects it. But to
deliberately make things worse?
In the other corner we have the CTU, as well as various SEIU
locals, who are working with parents and community members to keep schools
open. Yes, they are fighting for their jobs, for the right to take care of
other people’s children and get paid for it. While everybody insists that the
focus should be on the children-it’s interesting how people are always insisting
that adults’ interests must diverge from the kids they work or live with-the
adults matter too. The adults that use the school as part of
the community, the adults that have these good union jobs to support their
families and communities, especially at the lower end of the income scale, these adults are important.
They are more important then the small groups of executives who the mayor pays
to work downtown in the name of economic development, the money that these people earn will be sent back into the
community, as opposed to overseas bank accounts or tax shelters.
This, this, is worse then CPS? Oh, you might say, that’s all
well and good but . . . we don’t have the money for it.
The idea that we “don’t
have the money for it” is simply not true. Everybody knows that the mayor (any
mayor really) of this city always has money for business interests, and even
while part of the city government was claiming there was no money, another was
ready with a check. In another post Greg Hinz
defends the Mayor’s plan to fund a stadium for DePaul and related development
around McCormick place because of . . . jobs.
These are the jobs Hinz
and the mayor like, low-end retail jobs. The kind that you have to work two
of to make ends meet. The kind of jobs that still require food stamps to feed
your kids. The kind of jobs that even people with college degrees are working; some
sources have estimated there are three applicants for every job opening, even
in such touted areas as STEM jobs.
As explained in this post by
an "underachieving visionary”
the kind of job where you don’t have choice in the hours (you must take what you can get, when you can get it), the kind of job you are expected to
give your heart and sole into, and a random happenstance can cause you to lose it. Looking at the advertisements for jobs at the Tenement Museum,
where this person lost her job, I was struck by the long list of qualifications
for a job that was clearly part-time and probably didn’t pay much more then
minimum wage.
But it doesn’t matter,
they are jobs. These, Hinz is telling us, are the kind of jobs worthy of public
money-not “salaries for members of the teachers and police unions”. So there you go, paying public workers
is not a good use of public dollars, throwing money at private entities for an
economic development plan that will clearly benefit a few much more then the majority, whose planning seems as well thought-out as CPS’s plan to
close schools, that is appropriate.
What is the purpose of
city government? Most people would say to serve its residents, to support
economic security as much as possible. “Economic security" being described here as
having as many residents as possible employed at “good jobs”. “Good jobs” being
those that pay at least $15 dollars an hour, some essential benefits such as
sick time, health care. How to best stimulate employment is a controversial
subject, if it was easy we’d had done it by now. But, up until recently it was
expected that public sector jobs, mostly teachers, firefighters, police
officers, were a significant “leg” of the stool. It appears clear that federal stimulus is not happening any
time soon, so states are very much on their own to create/suppport economic security any
way they can. One could make the argument that in such a time a government
should try to employ as many people as they reasonably can.
The union part here is
important, unionization is what
can make a “bad” job a “good” one. It is accepted across the
political spectrum that the way to improve wages and benefits is through a
union. In a recent opinion piece economist Timothy Noah noted
that:
The
decline of labor unions is what connects the skills-based gap to the 1
percent-based gap. Although conservatives often insist that the 1 percent’s richesse doesn’t come out of the
pockets of the 99 percent, that assertion ignores the fact that labor’s share
of gross domestic product is shrinking while capital’s share is growing. Since
1979, except for a brief period during the tech boom of the late 1990s, labor’s
share of corporate income has fallen According to the left-leaning Economic
Policy Institute, the G.D.P. shift from labor to capital explains fully
one-third of the 1 percent’s run-up in its share of national
income. It couldn’t have happened if private-sector unionism had remained
strong. . . But if economic growth depends on rewarding effort, we should all
worry that the middle classes aren’t getting pay increases commensurate with
the wealth they create for their bosses. Bosses aren’t going to fix this problem.
And apparently the mayor of Chicago isn’t either.
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