" Hey,Hey! Ho,Ho! Spell Czecher Haz Gotta Go! ( repeat as obnoxiously often as if Andy Thayer were Thay-er"
The CPS Strike may be history. Maybe. I don't believe so,
I do not believe that the leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis and her ISO guru Jesse Sharkey, have had anywhere near enough face-time on camera to work their gums.
National labor activists who embarassed themselves in Madison Wisconsin last year are trucking to Chicago tomorrow for an MSNBC flavored bongo and gong sing-along in Union Park near Pilsen.
CTU members and CPS teachers are frustrated and rightly so. I know many excellent CPS teachers who are burdened by the clowns from both CTU and CPS. Policies and practices get heaped on them like taxes showered on Chicago citizens and they are expected to not only teach, care for, keep-track of and love their students, but also change the social order and tuck-point the dysfunctional families who send their children to spend hours of the day in their charge.
God love them! Rahm is playing to cash-cows and public relations at the expense of common sense, whether that means tossing a million dollars to the gang-banger pensioners of CeaseFire, turning Gresham, Englewood and Grand Crossing neighborhoods into the care of Calypso Louis' Bow-tie Precision Marching Teams, or Draconianly changing the schedules of some schools, while appeasing the Mommies and Daddies of Magnet School kiddies, or TIFing more schools into Charters. He wants to be President.
Then there is Karen Lewis. Ms. Lewis is a face of CTU, the heart of CORE and soul of ISO. CORE is the Caucus of Rank and File Educators. ISO is the International Socialist Organization*. The VP of CTU is Jesse Sharkey an ISO wheel and one time teacher at Senn High School - not listed on staff these days.
Karen Lewis and Jesse Sharkey have "Hey,hey'd and Ho, Ho'd" everyone else in CTU to an Occupy TV moment. They are not about the money, they are about ending the capitalist-running-dog 1% patriarchal hegemony. Got that? T'aint too hard. Bill Ayers understands it and Carol Marin and Eric Zorn eat it up.
So do the loud-mouths and layabouts. This week John Kass praised Leo High School that Karen Lewis had smeared as not a real school, as this Catholic college prep school for inner city men was open on Monday. It was a very nice and accurate contrast to the Karen & Jesse Show.
A web-paper that publishes my stuff, Chicago Daily Observer linked John Kass' article: Here is one comment from an anonymous goof -DMLawyer:
DMLawyer said:The school will be closed in a couple of years.
White flight to the burbs (Br. Rice, Marist, etc.) was the start of its demise.
I have heard that Leo was on its last legs from guys- in-the- know since 1966. White flight? How about that Viking ship in Lincoln Park? So, I responded.
Pat Hickey said:Where have you been genius?
White flight occurred in the late 1960′s.
Too piquant? Sorry, that's how I roll when confronted with a spitting bi-ped purported to have been educated somewhere.
Not to be outdone, the pettigogger rose to his full height and rejoined -
DMLAwyer said:
And the effects are still being felt.
At least you finally acknowledge its occurence and have stopped making excuses for racism.
At Least I did that. Yes, yes, and a chastened Honkey-ass bigot I be there, DM. Lord, forgive my bull-whipping of colored folks. Old habits, I guess.
Sorry. There I go again. Now, I am just as bad as DMLawyer and would not deem to take a back-seat to any man when an old-timey micturating party is afoot and I responded, thus -
Pat Hickey said:Write check to Leo, DML. All them folks you like to tag as racist do. Nothing kills racism like involvement. Step up; the sidelines are way to thick with talkers. Leo is all about doing -Facta Non Verba. Or do you just like to talk?
I am a pretty nice guy. Unless someone insults people I love. Why would anyone publicly ridicule people who do good, without any prompting and
also do it so very badly. Imagine pushing your shopping cart down the aisle and catching the eye of a stranger, give the wink and smile and salute him or her with a cheery greeting of " 'Morning!" only to be acknowledged with a "#$% You and all you White Flight #$%^-ers!" -
( that actually happens to me all the time, but only with family and close friends -never total strangers in my neighborhood) Why would one do such a thing? Because they feel that they can and, in my experience, these people happen to be educated, wealthy and Progressive.
That is when, I wear my guts on my sleeve and can be singularly unpleasant and even, God forgive me, sarcastic.
Now, I talk . . .in my sleep, Y'all! My mouth goes like duck's ass when given have the mereest chance . . .No, really. I do chat some.
I also do. I do what I can and often a bit more. I teach black kids, white kids, Mexican kids and, when the moon sits just right, my very own kids. I can work a mop, turn on the boilers at Leo, fix the sump pump, chauffer the Canaryvillains, raise money, write grants, write articles, ask for help, make friends, fix bridges and buy lunches. So does Dan McGrath, Mike Holmes, Mike Joyce, Aurora Latiffi, Mrs. Townsend, Gunny Frank Wilson and most everyone who draws a modest pay check at Leo every two weeks.
Most importantly, I can ask for money. When I make a phone call, the person on the other side of the line knows I am about to lift his wallet, or rummage her purse. Most people are willing to step in and help the mission. We have millionaires, but mostly working stiffs. Some of our most loyal givers are on a fixed income. All participate. They mentor the kids, come to assemblies and games and love our lads. I value their gifts.
Karen Lewis has the luxury to slap people who have volunteered to help the public schools. Today in the Tribune. Karen Lewis insults CPS donor Bruce Rauner. Mr. Rauner is what we at Leo call a "Big Hitter" - someone with oodles of the long-green-difference. If my Rauner were giving to Leo and he told me that rotting dead alewife made a great deoderant, I'd be smelling like the dumpster behind DiCola's Fish on a hot August afternoon and happy about my new found scent.
Karen has her own distinctive air - here is some of her gut-wind in today's Tribune
Rauner's solution to all these problems is to increase the number of Teach for America interns in CPS schools, to expand charter schools and to increase standardized testing. Obviously he knows absolutely nothing about education. If he even subscribed to any of the numerous education newspapers, like Education Week, he would know studies are showing Teach for America is not improving educational outcomes at low-income schools, that charter school performance nationwide is only on par with public school counterparts and that excessive standardized testing can have an adverse effect on students.
How much money has Bruce Rauner personally invested in all of these "solutions"?
Well, Bruce???? Tongue got your cat?
Mr. Bruce Rauner is being impugned as a fat-cat capitalist opportunist by the ethically challenged leadership of CTU in preparation for the Big Labor Pay-Back for Walker Thru Rahm Rally tomorrow. Money, marbles or chalk ? Jesse Sharkey, a practiced Commie scribe with many articles on his belt for ISO, wrote this piece for the svelt-talented Ms. Lewis.
Karen Lewis does not get direct dough for CTU from Mr. Rauner. Mr. Rauner is about improving public education. He is a doer. I disagree that Mr. Rauner's money is well-spent and that it is certainly misdirected. Bruce Rauner should pop his dough into The Big Shoulders Fund and support Catholic Schools. I'm just sayin'!
Karen Lewis is educated, wealthier than most people I live near, and very Progressive.
* Now a strike by the CTU over issues that are murky and confusing to the average citizen threatens to distract the electorate just as the Obama campaign picks up lost momentum.How could this have happened?
The ironic answer is that President Obama himself deserves some of the blame. At the top of the CTU leadership is a group of political activists for whom the health and well being of students is not the top priority much less the bread and butter concerns of their fellow union teachers. Instead, they are the hard core of a highly ideological milieu that has over the last decade or more burrowed their way into the teachers’ union.
Now they have their hands on the levers of power of a large urban union and are doing what no sane union leader would do, namely striking at a point where they are least likely to gain allies among Democrats and others on the left whom they normally could, and should, count on in a battle of this magnitude.
Only a group with a different agenda than that of the genuine labor movement would take such a huge risk. Actually, from their standpoint – one which advocates “r-r-radical” change – it makes a peculiar kind of sense because it appears to demonstrate their intransigence. While stalwart militancy can be a valuable trait in a labor leader, mindless militancy of the sort on display among the top leaders of the CTU is dangerous. For too long the democratic left inside the AFT and elsewhere hasignored these risks.
What animates this “mindless militancy”? It is the so-called “social justice” ideology propagated by a sectarian element in American schools of education and among their teacher graduates by individuals like Linda Darling-Hammond, Bill Ayers, Mike Klonsky, Gloria Ladson-Billings, Peter MacLaren and others. Thus, Karen Lewis, the new “fist in the air” fire brand president of the CTU in the words of her ally the Maoist education activist Mike Klonsky. Lewis recently traveled to Seattle not to discuss the tragedy of poor student outcomes in our nation’s schools but to rally the “Shock Doctrine” troops among the social justice crowd to take over the teachers’ union.
Keep in mind that I put quotes around “social justice” because this crowd’s “social justice” ideology has nothing to do with the social justice agenda of the genuine labor movement or the civil rights movement. This is, instead, an agenda about gaining political power, not for the students and teachers of our blighted urban schools, but for the advocates of “social justice” and its allied ideas such as multiculturalism and identity politics.
While proposed as something radical it is important to keep in mind how conservative and reactionary this ideology is, in fact. It represents a retreat from the genuinely progressive and radical agenda of the civil rights movement and the labor movement. And it is therefore not a surprise to realize that this new “social justice” agenda emerged in the wake of the defeat of those earlier democratic movements in the late 70s and early 80s.
The ideology actually leads the labor movement backwards into the divisive morass of politically correct identity politics. In the world of education, for example, it actually helped support the pro-corporate school “choice” movement by the formation of politically correct small schools like the “Social Justice” high school in Chicago. Not a surprise that figures like Ayers and Klonsky back the same idea as one supported by the Gates Foundation.
Thus, instead of creating democratic, transparent institutions that can lead us out of the crisis in our schools, this “social justice” crowd functions like a mirror image of the corporate education reform crowd they so loudly denounce. This faux radical milieu has, in fact, given up, sometimes explicitly, on wider social solutions, such as integration, to the problems of city schools. They promote absurd arguments that the schools are the moral equivalent of apartheid and promote a form of reparations for slavery in the name of repaying what they call the “education debt” that allegedly has accumulated over 400 years. Professor Stephen Diamond: Santa Clara University School of Law
http://stephen-diamond.com/
http://www.cdobs.com/archive/featured/what-teachers-strike-chicago-leo-is-going-great/#comments
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-perspec-0914-lewis-20120914,0,7374511.story
