The cynical manipulations of Chicago`s politicians were exposed like a mouth full of bad teeth as City Hall smiled upon its schoolchildren last week. Chicago officials couldn`t help but grin when they announced the news. Another tough all-night summit negotiation was over and the public schools would open on time. The politically heavy unions and the politically light Chicago Board of Education, with some elbow twisting from Mayor Richard Daley, had agreed to borrow next year`s money to open schools this year.
And so another late summer political ritual was completed in the city that`s supposed to work, a city that sends its neediest children to an educational system where 50 percent will drop out.
Most who remain are hopelessly unprepared to meet the challenges of the future job market.
”The most telling statistic about the Chicago public schools is that its teachers who are parents do not subject their children to the system in which they work,” said Allan Carlson, president of the conservative Rockford Institute, and a scholar who has studied school- and child-related issues.
”The system has been working for a long time, it just doesn`t serve its children.”
Although the public schools have failed the children, the system has not failed the interest groups that cling to the $2.6 billion school budget.
The teachers and building unions get their pay increases. The bureaucracy lingers. Those political patronage jobs remain, protected by members of the state legislature and City Hall and others who build relationships and garner favors.
Even the new school reformers have been vested in the power game, lobbying to get hundreds of thousands of dollars in teacher training funds, an influx of money that generates more influence for them and more politics.
The mayor has been praised for his role in settling the latest labor dispute. When Daley was first elected, and he cast himself as the
”education” mayor, he promised that opening schools at any price would no longer be tolerated.
He has refused to involve himself in the debate about what goes on in the schools. Perhaps he just doesn`t have the political will to confront his political allies who serve the worst school system in America.
Three years ago, he personally brokered a union contract that the school system couldn`t afford, and it certainly helped smooth his re-election campaign. He pushed through a $70 million raid of the teachers` pension fund to help pay for the contract, and that money has to be made up next year.
Every year or so there are cosmetic changes and new promises to improve the system. Each year a crippling deficit is ballyhooed in the headlines.
And when tax money comes to fill the gap, the funds are always shaped so that politicians can cement their political relationships with the unions and the contractors, the patronage-laden bureaucracy, the state legislators who appropriate the money, all the people at the head of the line.
The school system is in the fourth year of its experiment to reform its schools by decentralizing its bureaucracy and giving more resources to local schools and local school councils.
Some results have been encouraging, but school officials and the reformers predict that dropout rates will remain as high as 50 percent for at least the next seven or eight years. That means that an entire class of children, from kindergarten through high school, will see half their number leave school without a diploma, ready to fill the jails or the welfare rolls. The white-middle class has abandoned the system, having fled to the suburbs or to private schools, horrified at the prospect of sending their children to Chicago public schools. The current status has also frightened the black-middle class, which is now leaving the city in droves and heading for the suburbs.
Those with clout who remain in the public system and could have changed it-including journalists, other opinion makers, politicians and the well-connected-have sent their children to public magnet schools, a quasi-private system supported with tax dollars as a way of isolating their children from the poor.
For years, magnet schools were the dirty secret in Chicago public education, a morally indefensible perk that allowed public dollars to protect the fortunate, at the expense of the poor.
As always, clout was served. Hyde Park and the Near North Side were protected, and the people whose complaints would`ve been heard were quiet because they had their interests well in hand.
The neighborhood schools in the poor and cloutless black and Hispanic inner city deteriorated. Attempts at reforming the system may have come too late to inspire confidence among those who would pay the bills.
Suburbanites who left Chicago already pay high taxes to support their own public schools and complain that they pay more than their fair share of state taxes toward Chicago schools.
They have no sympathy for the city, because their own taxes have been stretched to the limit, and political power is now centering outside Chicago, in the suburbs that run along the Tri-State Tollway and beyond.
Republican legislative leaders, such as State Sen. James ”Pate” Philip
(Wood Dale), have cast Chicago schools as a tax sinkhole where more billions of state dollars have been spent to perpetuate failure.
”Suburbanites can`t afford any more taxes to support Chicago,” Philip says. ”It`s a shell game down there. Everybody knows that more money won`t fix it. They`ve been getting more money for years and nothing`s happened, and nothing will, until the whole system is radically changed.”
Gov. Jim Edgar, who is winning a reputation as a Chicago-hater, does not see his voter support in the city affected by cuts in state education aid. His city voters are predominately white, from the Northwest and Southwest Sides, and they pay thousands of dollars to send their children to parochial schools. The same holds true for the Chicago Democrats such as Daley and House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago), products of the Catholic schools here. Their constituencies, white and ethnic, perceive themselves to be in competition with minorities on a variety of fronts. The white ethnic voters have no sympathy for blacks, plain and simple.
But perhaps the most cynical are the minority politicians in the state legislature and in the Chicago City Council. Their constituencies are hurt the most by the education system, and yet they remain silent about everything involving education except lobbying for minority set-aside contracts and jobs. Because they have the weakest political organizations, they are more dependent on the school unions and the contractors. The debate about what is taught is ignored.
”You think I`d send my kids to that system?,” said one prominent independent black Chicago alderman. ”I`d have to be crazy.”
The script played out during the marathon negotiations last weekend is so old that it should have been memorized by now by parents, grandparents and Illinois taxpayers. It dates back to the days of the first machine warlords such as Mayor Edward Kelly, who politicized the public schools, and Daley, who recited the lines perfectly.
With the new settlement, the parents of 410,000 schoolchildren wouldn`t be complaining at City Hall about where to warehouse their children. And neither would the connected service vendors, who need the school budget opened so they can collect.
The Chicago Teachers Union, despite its public grumbling, was pleased, because it achieved a 6.1 percent pay raise out of a contract the system could not afford.
Taxes will have to be raised just to cover that cost, let alone the other expenses that have so far ballooned into a projected $300 million deficit for next year. Daley has already talked about increasing state income taxes to help pay for the deficit, but he won`t ask his allies in the teachers and building unions to take any kind of real trims.
So with minor variations, what happened last week has happened for years. A horrible financial deficit. Labor unrest. A brokered deal. School opens.
”It is in many of the players` interests to perpetuate such a crisis, from the politicians to the unions and the bureaucrats,” said Fred Hess, executive director of the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance.
”Crises bring focused attention and appeals for money and that is how the game is played.
”Clearly the connection between the mayor`s interests for labor peace and the system`s financial crisis over the past four years are fairly direct. Of course, he`s the one behind it all. You`d have to be awfully naive to think otherwise,” Hess said.
In Daley`s defense, administration insiders argue that the School Reform Act, in an attempt to decentralize the schools, prohibits him from handpicking his own school board from the beginning. Those lists of candidates presented to him have been juggled, presenting him with difficult choices.
”He doesn`t have full control, but he`ll be blamed about the schools,”
complained one top aide. ”We know that a lot of changes have to be made, but they`re more than difficult. You`ve got a lot of layers and all those layers will scream bloody murder. But we`re just about ready to take it all on. Just wait. You`ll see it happen.”
For starters, the mayor could use his power to force work rule changes for the building and teachers unions that could save money and even improve education.
He could join Supt. Ted Kimbrough and the board in mandating longer classroom periods, from 40 minutes to 50 minutes, cutting down on the number of teachers and increasing the time spent on a subject.
He could press the building unions to relax their demands for huge overtime each time a school is opened late in the evening, and do away with antiquated rules that prohibit a janitor from repairing a pane of glass.
He could also press the union to stop protecting hundreds of the so-called ”supernumeraries,” highly paid teachers who aren`t wanted at any school and who serve their time shuffling papers in the central office or acting as hall monitors. Removing them would save tens of millions of dollars. He could also refrain from pushing for teachers contracts the system can`t afford. And the bureaucracy could make real cuts, including privatizing its payroll operations, its warehouses, and its truck fleets, but that would cost politically sensitive jobs.
Each time Daley is asked his opinion about these possible changes, the mayor stonewalls.
”The teachers in the classroom are the key,” Daley says over and over, repeating that one phrase that has become an irritating recording, absolutely refusing to even discuss thorny education issues facing his city.
Because of the political vacuum in Chicago, Daley has real power in this town. He has support of the business community, has co-opted his political opponents and received well-earned marks for running his city.
Through his efforts, the ugly and raw racial rhetoric politics of Chicago has been toned down.
But can anything make him change his tune about the education of the children who need him?
