Reports from Chicago sound like reports from the front lines (as they do when they come from Detroit).
Mike Klonsky tells us that the new CEO, Forrest Claypool, was brought in to lay off employees. He has surrounded himself with administrators from his previous position at the Chicago Transit Authority. And now he begins the cuts. Here is more about Claypool.
Rahm Emanuel knew what he was doing when he brought educational know-nothing, Forrest Claypool over from the CTA to run the schools. Claypool, who like Rahm, sends his kids to private school, didn’t come to CPS to lead an educational transformation. With apologies to Shakespeare, he came to bury public ed, not to praise it.
While stalling contract negotiations with the CTU, he’s contracted (no-bid of course) with his old firing squad from CTA to help him engineer the mass firings of thousands of teachers and staff.
Carol Rubin was chief administrative officer at the CTA and the Park District while Claypool ran those entities for Daley and Rahm. Rubin has been working with Sally Csontos, another former CTA and Parks staffer who’s married to John Filan, once a budget director for former Gov. Rob Blagojevich and another longtime Claypool associate.
This is the same way Claypool ran the CTA. Readers may remember back in 2014 when he hired Jimmy D’Amico to help “manage the CTA’s rail maintenance” even though D’Amico has no railroad experience.
I’m anticipating that one day, Claypool may even share a cell with Blago.
This week’s layoffs of 227 central office staffers was billed by Claypool as a way of avoiding classroom cuts. But most of those laid-off were the very staffers (lower-paid) who deliver direct services to schools, many in the area of special education. His central office is stocked with high-paid patronage hires or former CTA cronies. They were untouched by the lay-offs.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
These guys love their disaster capitalism. They engineer their own crises or make them far worse so they ram through politically unpopular things then do even worse things with the “savings”.
They take what most of us consider common sense and use it against us. The grossest violation is the incentive to create harm so they have reasons to have power to stop it and then use it against the same people they claimed they were trying to stop from being hurt in the first place.
There has to be a better way.
From overseeing planes, trains and automobiles to overseeing teachers and students?
What could be a more natural progression than that?
I’m sure Forrest Claypool probably makes Del Griffith look competent
It doesn’t take a lot of expertise to wield a hatchet. Practice, yes. Expertise? No.
When Chicago closed 50 schools, there were lots of desks, chairs, tables, books and computers in those shuttered buildings. But no one seems to know where they went – lots of blame is attached to the disgraced Barbara Byrd-Bennett who is now awaiting sentencing in her kickback scheme:
http://www.bettergov.org/news/rahms-school-closings-–-what-happened-to-the-desks-laptops-books
Far, far, far more egregious though, is that no one seems to know what happened to many of the kids who were displaced, either. “The combined population of the closed and ‘welcoming’ schools in 2012-2013 was about 32,000 students. Today, fewer than 25,000 students go to the ‘welcoming” schools.’ ” (In New Orleans, they’ve lost track of many kids as well. They call them “opportunity youth”.)
http://www.bettergov.org/news/cps-withholds-report-on-kids-from-50-closed-schools
Rahm should be sharing a cell with Snyder and Earley.