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Vallas speaks at Awake Illinois fundraisers, takes money from Ron Gidwitz (Trump's Illinois finance chair) and from a top Citadel official, and wants to destroy the public schools. Hard pass.

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I believe that the problem with cops is that they type of person attracted to police work is a bit more toward the authoritarian side than not and politicians have been making that inevitable with their "tough on crime" rhetoric and policies. Read Radley Balko's book "Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police". Departments hire aggressive people, male and female, with little to no patience for dealing with problems and certainly don't put up with insolence.

Witness how Chicago's police beat up anti-war demonstrators in the 1960s, how they protected lynch mobs in the South, etc. We need "Andy Taylors" and we get "Rambos".

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Janny - The high testosterone levels needed for some police actions (and for football and other macho sports) must be hard to turn off when one is in an explosive situation. But what these guys did is unconscionable and can't be excused in any way - ever! So, what's the solution? Maybe we should ask the "good cops" who manage it. Let's acknowledge and learn from the good guys.

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founding

I agree with Eric, but I don't care about Smollet. But Kim Foxx dropping the charges against R Kelly after inviting people to provide info to support charges and spending 4 years of resources on it and now saying it isn't worth continuing seems like a nice demonstration of her judgement.

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Bruce L . — This is why the Right rails against the “woke” left!!!… and yes, they have a point on this one/ Are we still allowed to say “waitress”? Or are they all “waiters” (or “food serving specialists”)?

Maybe unwoke Bruce L should be totally honest and call his waitresses “little lady”.

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The other day when I posted a comment in support of keeping “actress” and other “ess” words, it elicited a couple of replies that seemed to imply that this view was male-centric or chauvinistic, so I decided to quiz a random sampling of women to see what they thought. The results of my completely unscientific poll of about 30 women were decisive, with 0% desiring any notable change from the status quo. Some were receptive to the reasoning behind departing from the actor/actress dichotomy, but when I posited it in actual descriptors like “the actor Meryl Streep” or “the actor Barbara Stanwyck”, they all more or less said that it struck the wrong chord. None of them had any problem with “waitress” (one even cleverly coined “servestress” as a gender specific alternate term), nor did any like the idea that the makers of Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Ho’s should be rechristened as Host. But the biggest pushback came when I informed them of the changes in monarchal titles that this logic would demand: Megan Markle is now the Duke of Sussex, Sarah Ferguson is now the Duke of York, the late and beloved former Diana Spencer must now be referred to as Prince Diana, and Grace Kelly was a famous actor who became Prince of Monaco. The respondents in my survey met these suggestions with replies like “tsk”, “ugh”, and “God!”, with one woman thrusting both hands open palmed toward me and intoning “no, no, NO!”. Again, a completely unscientific poll, but pretty convincing evidence that the driving force behind these ideas is not as much women who feel marginalized as it is progressives who are intent on fixing anything that isn’t broken.

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Watching the debate last night, King and Sawyer emerged as possibilities for my vote. Vallas used that 30 seconds impressively, but agree his positions on education make him vulnerable. If Lourdes Duarte ran for mayor it's not a stretch to say she would get my vote (no slight to Tahman Bradley, he was very good as well). She has an excellent grasp of the issues, knows how to control a room, and the kind of demeanor we could use as mayor.

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That's a sobering link on Vallas and schools. Ouch!

On school policy (I'm a high school teacher, by the way), I find myself to be a man without a country.

The privatizers want more charters, more choice. Sounds nice. But not all charters are created equal. There are some that have strong records. Many don't. In my view, the scalable lessons from the genuine success stories should be applied district-wide, which was the whole point of charters as originally conceived. That purpose has been twisted by the anti-public-education mob. Their market fundamentalist ethos of innovation, competition, dynamism, creative destruction, and so on is well-suited to business enterprises where the social costs of failure are pretty much nil and the product/service is not an essential public good. There's a reason we socialize education (if I may be permitted the s-word among friends). We want to ensure that everybody has access to a good one. Oh, and yeah, that works most of the time in most places, just so we're not confused about that. Meanwhile, free markets are relatively forgiving of scams and trickery, especially where the "product" is largely hidden from view and metrics can be notoriously misleading. (Most parents don't really know what happens in their kids' classrooms.)

On the other side, from, say, the CTU, I see institutionalized hostility to even good-faith metrics, to testing of any kind, and to academic rigor. I don't think that actually describes most teachers. And I understand legitimate concerns about a heavy administrative hand in their craft and unfair high-stakes evaluations based on outcomes that are difficult to attribute to teachers. At the same time, the American progressive education ethos, which most teachers and ed schools I think do basically buy, emphasizes student comfort, validation, relatability, self-starting (teach yourself!), dubious amounts of group work (learn from each other!), and superficial demonstrations of "engagement," which is coin of the realm. Most of those things are good in some measure, but many of them are not well-suited to many students and/or amount to "looking busy" or "looking happy." I'm not saying we have to go full-on France, where it's understood that high school is academic torture, not supposed to be fun, where you basically take notes on what the teacher tells you and get tested on it a lot and that's it. (Or so is my understanding.) While that would make my job easier, it would also make it far drearier. But some of the "no excuses" policies, the whole "work hard, be nice" thing, that characterize the most successful charters sound like a pretty appealing balance to me, especially for students who really need that structure and discipline. The progressives are right that students want to learn, but it's probably more accurate to say that they want to *have learned*, and, especially amid modern distractions, they often don't want to do what's necessary to get from a to b.

There's also from that progressive quarter fantasy-based blank-slate-ism (down with levels, honors for all!) and, on balance I'd say, excessive buy-in to the mental-healthification of student life and the elaborate and expensive system built up around it, where, to be a little simplistic about it, normal anxieties and various typical academic and social challenges are to be accommodated rather than gotten over or conquered, at least so long as a parental wheel squeaks.

The vocational path sounds nice until you realize that the long-term overall trend is away from those jobs and toward those that require more brain work, not to mention the problem that vocational training is by nature limited. You only know how to do the one thing. What happens when the market for that skill diminishes or the supply exceeds demand? You find yourself out of work without the Swiss Army knife of skills a well-rounded primary and secondary education is supposed to provide, grounded in literacy of various sorts, pro-social behavior, personal discipline, cognitive development, and logical thinking, all of which every employer values? I don't imagine that every student will be an academic star. But, generally speaking, community college strikes me as the place to pick up the more specific job skills like nursing, say, which does require academic skill.

Meanwhile, I'm of two minds on the Daley-era transformation of secondary ed to one where you apply to various schools which have varying degrees of overall "quality" as measured by test scores, and/or have other various specialized programs, while at the same time serving a diversity imperative. It seems like the best of all worlds, but it's unstable and of necessity leaves neighborhood schools stripped of their student talent and vulnerable to closure. I don't know how you revitalize neighborhoods by robbing them of their institutions. Ideally, I think high schools should be large (say, about 2K-4K), serve an area around them so that they're part of the communities they serve, and offer curricula appropriate for everyone who comes through the door, supplemented by only a few highly selective institutions for students particularly gifted in various areas as well as basically boot camp for those relatively few students who can't function in a normal environment and indeed endanger that environment and everyone in it.

So, nobody wants to do what I want to do, but at least I can take some comfort in the fact that the impact of school policy is probably greatly exaggerated in the minds of politicians and the wider public. Don't get me wrong. It's important that we have schools. We do much better with them than without them. And we should certainly strive to make them as good as they can be. But the bottom line is that schools tend to mirror complex social ills, or their relative absence, and they simply don't have the capacity to remake society. If you want to do that, it takes economic revitalization, crime reduction, and leadership that instills hope. No idea on how to do any of that.

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EZ, why is smolett in this week's PS? or in any issue of the PS? he and his situation are of 0 importance to a publication that supports 1) high-minded, well-informed public debate and 2) good humor [the tweets, not the ice cream]. smollett is less important than the moron congressmen who say they won't vote for any increase in the federal debt limit, regardless.

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EZ - i know you don't control the tech behind substack. but perhaps you could intervene, petition them to institute a 👍/👎 option in place of the 🤍. sometimes i want to disagree with the writer of an opinion; but don't want to write a diatribe in opposition.

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Eric,

What about this:

https://www.wbez.org/stories/chicago-shooting-survivors-experience-with-police/2b0fdb2f-2670-44a7-a46c-96644f3932ca?subscription=true&DE=WBEZEmail

LOL! Just what is wrong with Chicago's "leadership"? From the mayor to the huge number of aldermen to the CPD and its crappy union to the voters, just what is wrong here?

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