If Willie Wilson chartered a yacht like on Below Deck he could easily spend more than $200K in a week. Even more if he chartered a private Jet to fly him to and from the ship.
Regarding Paul Vallas’s residence, I do not live in Chicago, but I love Chicago politics. I DO care about his residence. Why? Because I believe in following the rules. You consider his lie to be no big deal. I’m afraid that letting people cheat like that just emboldens them to cut corners and otherwise fudge things at an increasingly greater degree.
I doubt that it's safe for a man to live in the same house where his wife takes care of their THREE elderly parents while he runs for mayor of Chicago.
You're going to hate this BUT I read the Douglas Fraser article and found it immersive but kept going back to the photo and wondering "How did he get that car into the back yard?"
Good points. Ben Joravsky loves to point out the stupidity of the Chicago voter and I tend to agree with his assessment, with Baby Daily and all selling off city assets and he still got support. What an idiot. Chicago has 50 or so aldermen. Why? That seems like a too high a number to run well and as they haven't been able to actually solve any problems that I can see, that should change, just as an experiment.
Also, privatization never has worked as argued. Fix the public schools already you 50 aldermen and CPS. Eric, what do you see as the CPS problem? Parents? Union? Teachers? Kids?
Eric, for you or anyone to be against Paul Vallas just because some Republicans and even some Maga jerks support him is so decisive and unfair. Vallas has not espoused one policy that is not Centrist Democrat and if you remember correctly charter schools were originally a bipartisan idea supported by Obama and Arnie Duncan. While Vallas’s time as Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia head of schools has not completely turned them around, he certainly did not privatize them. Your points about Lightfoots’ personality flaws are spot on ( although I think she has tried to navigate the minefield of this city in a measured way) and Garcia has offered absolutely no solutions except his clout in the Hispanic community. Sofia King seems very capable but I don’t think she can make it to the top two. Wilson and Johnson are very scary options for our future!
I agree that lumping in magnets, selective enrollment, and specialty public schools with charters, as the Sun-Times did, is a loaded move. Then again, the respondent was free to make that distinction in their response, and to pivot to the unasked voucher question too. More broadly, though, I do think that the common view that the former is okay (Yay CPS!) while the latter is not (Boo privates/charters!) elides the sense in which they really are similar.
Don't we have to square up to the fact that school choice of either variety really is a zero-sum game? It necessarily entails losers -- the neighborhood schools. After all, the chief predictor of "badness" of a school is, sorry Mayor Lightfoot, the makeup of its student body. Choice results in poaching of the motivated and talented. It incentivizes abandonment of the local school. What could be a better example of, to use a popular word these days, "disinvestment"? I've come to the view that neighborhood schools should be seen as the rule, not the exception. I'm not sure how you can have any hope of revitalizing distressed communities if you rob them of their institutions. I don't say eliminate all selective enrollment or specialty schools. But I would limit their reach to the especially gifted -- in STEM, performing arts, leadership and policy, what-have-you -- and insist on vibrant local schools capable of serving the varying academic and social needs of the local population. Or, at least, that would be the sort of world I'd want to move toward.
Meanwhile, on the other end, I would insist on the removal of anti-social students to boot-camp-like environments with intensive psychological support -- for the safety of the far larger population, for the discipline-oriented reform of kids who have demonstrated that they cannot conform their conduct to ordinary behavioral expectations, and for the efficacy and functionality of the neighborhood school. I don't know what happens now. I fear that too few are expelled and that those who are face, if they show up, soul-crushing rooms where they work on computers to minimally fulfill the state's education obligation at the lowest possible cost.
The privatizers' mantras about business-like competition is all well and good -- in markets for, say, candy bars or some such, where failure (the crappy candy bar company goes out of business or changes its offerings or whatever) entails virtually no social costs, only consumer benefit. The same cannot be said for schools and community institutions generally. We have an obligation, do we not, to leave no child behind, to coin a phrase.
The most recent metrics reflect that only about 1 in 5 CPS students is reading or doing math at grade level, despite among the highest in the nation funding of $29,000 per student. The inescapable conclusion is that tens of thousands of students are coming out of CPS schools semi-literate and with a huge disadvantage at having a good life.
(My wife and I fostered a black girl through her junior year at Senn High School several years ago. We were horrified to discover that she read at a 3rd grade level, could not even do her 2's multiplication table and said she had never done homework in her life - yet was getting all A's and B's from her teachers! I worked with her every night at the kitchen table after dinner and made some progress, but not anywhere nearly enough to get her up to grade level.)
My point is that this youngster, and tens of thousands of other inner city kids like her, are shackled to educational failure factories that leave them with lifelong impairment. I would very much like to see people put the interests of these kids ahead of the CTU and allow parents to use our taxpayer education funding to send their kids to schools of their choice to give them a better chance in life.
If Willie Wilson chartered a yacht like on Below Deck he could easily spend more than $200K in a week. Even more if he chartered a private Jet to fly him to and from the ship.
Regarding Paul Vallas’s residence, I do not live in Chicago, but I love Chicago politics. I DO care about his residence. Why? Because I believe in following the rules. You consider his lie to be no big deal. I’m afraid that letting people cheat like that just emboldens them to cut corners and otherwise fudge things at an increasingly greater degree.
I doubt that it's safe for a man to live in the same house where his wife takes care of their THREE elderly parents while he runs for mayor of Chicago.
You're going to hate this BUT I read the Douglas Fraser article and found it immersive but kept going back to the photo and wondering "How did he get that car into the back yard?"
Good points. Ben Joravsky loves to point out the stupidity of the Chicago voter and I tend to agree with his assessment, with Baby Daily and all selling off city assets and he still got support. What an idiot. Chicago has 50 or so aldermen. Why? That seems like a too high a number to run well and as they haven't been able to actually solve any problems that I can see, that should change, just as an experiment.
Also, privatization never has worked as argued. Fix the public schools already you 50 aldermen and CPS. Eric, what do you see as the CPS problem? Parents? Union? Teachers? Kids?
Eric, for you or anyone to be against Paul Vallas just because some Republicans and even some Maga jerks support him is so decisive and unfair. Vallas has not espoused one policy that is not Centrist Democrat and if you remember correctly charter schools were originally a bipartisan idea supported by Obama and Arnie Duncan. While Vallas’s time as Chicago, New Orleans, and Philadelphia head of schools has not completely turned them around, he certainly did not privatize them. Your points about Lightfoots’ personality flaws are spot on ( although I think she has tried to navigate the minefield of this city in a measured way) and Garcia has offered absolutely no solutions except his clout in the Hispanic community. Sofia King seems very capable but I don’t think she can make it to the top two. Wilson and Johnson are very scary options for our future!
I agree that lumping in magnets, selective enrollment, and specialty public schools with charters, as the Sun-Times did, is a loaded move. Then again, the respondent was free to make that distinction in their response, and to pivot to the unasked voucher question too. More broadly, though, I do think that the common view that the former is okay (Yay CPS!) while the latter is not (Boo privates/charters!) elides the sense in which they really are similar.
Don't we have to square up to the fact that school choice of either variety really is a zero-sum game? It necessarily entails losers -- the neighborhood schools. After all, the chief predictor of "badness" of a school is, sorry Mayor Lightfoot, the makeup of its student body. Choice results in poaching of the motivated and talented. It incentivizes abandonment of the local school. What could be a better example of, to use a popular word these days, "disinvestment"? I've come to the view that neighborhood schools should be seen as the rule, not the exception. I'm not sure how you can have any hope of revitalizing distressed communities if you rob them of their institutions. I don't say eliminate all selective enrollment or specialty schools. But I would limit their reach to the especially gifted -- in STEM, performing arts, leadership and policy, what-have-you -- and insist on vibrant local schools capable of serving the varying academic and social needs of the local population. Or, at least, that would be the sort of world I'd want to move toward.
Meanwhile, on the other end, I would insist on the removal of anti-social students to boot-camp-like environments with intensive psychological support -- for the safety of the far larger population, for the discipline-oriented reform of kids who have demonstrated that they cannot conform their conduct to ordinary behavioral expectations, and for the efficacy and functionality of the neighborhood school. I don't know what happens now. I fear that too few are expelled and that those who are face, if they show up, soul-crushing rooms where they work on computers to minimally fulfill the state's education obligation at the lowest possible cost.
The privatizers' mantras about business-like competition is all well and good -- in markets for, say, candy bars or some such, where failure (the crappy candy bar company goes out of business or changes its offerings or whatever) entails virtually no social costs, only consumer benefit. The same cannot be said for schools and community institutions generally. We have an obligation, do we not, to leave no child behind, to coin a phrase.
The most recent metrics reflect that only about 1 in 5 CPS students is reading or doing math at grade level, despite among the highest in the nation funding of $29,000 per student. The inescapable conclusion is that tens of thousands of students are coming out of CPS schools semi-literate and with a huge disadvantage at having a good life.
(My wife and I fostered a black girl through her junior year at Senn High School several years ago. We were horrified to discover that she read at a 3rd grade level, could not even do her 2's multiplication table and said she had never done homework in her life - yet was getting all A's and B's from her teachers! I worked with her every night at the kitchen table after dinner and made some progress, but not anywhere nearly enough to get her up to grade level.)
My point is that this youngster, and tens of thousands of other inner city kids like her, are shackled to educational failure factories that leave them with lifelong impairment. I would very much like to see people put the interests of these kids ahead of the CTU and allow parents to use our taxpayer education funding to send their kids to schools of their choice to give them a better chance in life.
I've remembered my drivers license since college because I had to write it on every check then.