chicago public schools rigs its board meetings to undermine democracy

[Hannah Bell]

After telling hundreds of people who came out for what was supposed to be a public meeting that they would be admitted to the Board chambers on the fifth floor of Board headquarters at 125 S. Clark St. at 10:00 a.m., Huberman’s staff then double crossed and confused people by ordering CPS security staff to block everyone from getting into the meeting until after 10:15 a.m.

The result was a dangerous and uncomfortable traffic jam in the cramped hallway, while less than 50 feet away the meeting room where the public was supposed to be was slowly being filled by bureaucrats who earn, on average, more than $90,000 per year and who are placed carefully in "reserved" seating in the public chamber each month to make certain that only the faces of smiling people — all of whom carefully trained and highly paid bureaucrats — are seen, month after month, on the televised version of the Board of Education meetings.

One day earlier, on May 25, 2010, the Chicago Board of Education's media spin team...had successfully deflected one of the biggest protest stories in recent Chicago history out of the pages of the daily newspapers as part of the full-court-press that included the mayor's office and corporate Chicago's control of the city's corporate newsrooms. After more than 5,000 teachers (part of a protest march and rallies that included an estimated 10,000 teachers, parents, and students) filled Clark St. in front of the Board of Education building and held a sit-in in the street... the objective of both the mayor's media people, the CPS media people, and the current leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union coincided: tell the story without reporting what was really happening. A sit in during evening rush hour in front of the Board of Education of the third largest school system in the USA? Well, if it didn't get on television, then maybe Chicago could claim it didn't happen...

http://www.substancenews.net/articles.php?page=1435§ion=Article




This website's hits have jumped to >500,000/d since the protest: things are changing.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

1. This surprises you in Chicago? Home of the Daley Dynasty

[madfloridian]

2. Mayoral control is a dictatorship.

"The seven members of the Chicago Board of Education and the school system's Chief Executive Officer, Ron Huberman, make it clear once a month that they despise the public, denigrate the public's input, and ignore the public's complaint. Why? Because they only have to be accountable to one man — Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley — and to one set of people, the tiny minority of very wealthy people, many of them millionaires like themselves, who try to operate the city to increase their wealth, power and privilege at the expense of everyone else. The result was a packed hallway outside the elevators on the fifth floor and increasingly unpleasant confrontations between the two groups caught in the middle of what many are now calling the Huberman - Richardson Lowry fascist team. By 10:10 a.m., when everyone could have been comfortably seated in the Board chambers, instead a handful of security people were telling citizens that they could not go beyond a rope line set up in the corridor at a bottleneck deliberately created by CPS since March (a recent innovation of Richardson Lowry’s administration; one that never existed before Mayor Richard M. Daley appointed her)."