It’s a bit premature for Douglas Whitley and Gerald Roper to crow about “wholehearted support of education reform” by the Chicago business community, especially by the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce (“Preparing students for work world,” Voice, July 25).
Their School-to-Work program is a needed effort, but it was too long in coming. For more than 20 years, while Chicago schools and their communities have spiraled downward in social and educational quality, the “business community” has been notably absent from any effort to stem the decline in quality of one of its most important resources, new workers.
Instead, as we know, many companies just tucked in their citizenship tails and ran to the hinterlands. The chamber was not there to protect its precious labor resource when violence and drugs infected the classroom. The chamber was silent when educators seemingly went mad and made social promotion official policy, ensuring undereducated graduates. Oddest of all, the chamber took no real stand as Chicago’s educators rushed like lemmings toward financial ruin.
About five years ago, I called to see what the chamber was doing on some of these issues and was assured that they were being addressed in several committees. So there was talk, but what have they really done all this time when school law and policy have been held in thrall by those who apparently have no interest in quality of education? It was people like the mayor, Martin Koldyke and Paul Vallas who broke the back of that monster and showed us the way. The chamber wasn’t there. Are we to suppose now, with the help of $4.7 million in federal money, that the chamber’s participation in this one program constitutes “wholehearted support”?
Where is the chamber on the other, high-risk, unfunded, gut issues that will determine our real educational future: issues like school financing or teacher certification and quality? Has the chamber made any real local effort like pitching in to help local school councils, which are too new to know, learn how to manage well?
The School-to-Work program is commendable and long overdue. We should wish the chamber nothing but early and long-lived success in it. But the chamber has a long way to go and a great deal to invest in our communities before it can earn its stripes as the good citizen it would like to be.
