Daley & Huberman trying to divert media coverage of Chicago's next BOE meeting amid growing protests

[Hannah Bell]

Why would the Miracle Mayor who pioneered mayoral control and gave the USA Arne Duncan, now the U.S. Secretary of Education, want to distract the media from a meeting of his own hand-picked and carefully scripted Board of Education on June 23, 2010? The last place Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley wants to be — or wants the media to be — on the day his hand-picked Board of Education meets amid growing outrage over the latest round of budget lies and teacher cuts is at the downtown building that houses the Chicago Public Schools executive offices. So what does Daley do? He and his media handles schedule a media event several miles from the Board of Education, to announce another set of dubious test score "gains".

In what seems to be another desperate attempt to draw media away from the growing protests at meetings of the Chicago Board of Education, Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley and Chicago Public Schools Chief Executive Officer Ron Huberman have scheduled a last-minute media event on the morning of June 23, 2010, to announce the "preliminary" scores on the Illinois Standards Achievement Tests (ISAT) for Chicago's elementary schools.

For the umpteenth time in as many years, Daley and the school system will desperately ignore the high school test scores (on the Prairie State Achievement Exams, or PSAEs) while trumpeting the numbers for some of the ISATs...

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1497§ion=Article

[Hannah Bell]

1. core is actually going to *organize* -- something some union leadership hasn't done for years.

business unionism has ended in the destruction of unions as a political force and the stranglehold of finance capital.

time for a change.

[Hannah Bell]

2. Chicago Sun Times: Karen Lewis Is For Real

The career trajectory of Karen Lewis proves that the route to the top does not always reflect the shortest distance between two points.

The president-elect of the Chicago Teachers Union left Kenwood High School in 1970 without a diploma, skipping right from her last day of junior year to a prestigious university, and eventually graduated — “thank-you laude,” as she puts it — from Dartmouth College.

http://media1.suntimes.com/multimedia/062010lewis2_cst_feed_20100619_22_17_09_34625-116-165.imageContent

Karen Jennings Lewis (back row, second from left) is pictured in the 1970 Kenwood High School yearbook.


A pianist and opera buff, she began college with the dream of becoming a symphony conductor because, she says, “I liked being in charge.” A trip to Barbados changed her life, and she entered medical school intent on becoming a physician on the island paradise. She dropped out instead, turned to substitute teaching to support herself, and found her calling.