If ever there is an award for the mayor who did the most to disrupt and destroy public education, it will go to Rahm Emanuel. His own children attend the highly resourced University of Chicago Lab School, but he spitefully closes public schools that he controls.
Mike Klonsky points out that the mass school closings have not saved money and have not improved student outcomes. They are part of Mayor Emanuel’s plan for gentrification.
From afar, it looks like spite work on the part of a mayor who doesn’t care about children that are not his own.
Rahm Emanuel is a textbook case in the failure of mayoral control to improve public schools. He is a textbook case in the use of mayoral control to destroy and privatize public education.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Rahm is Bloomberg’s equal. They are both textbook cases of spiteful billionaire takeover. Thanks, God, here in Los Angeles, that Villaraigosa never got mayoral control. Since we still have a school board in L.A., education theoretically can’t take a back seat when we’re voting for public school leadership.
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Bloomberg did the same thing in NY and now we have Fariña and deBlasio following along.
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These policians are in a CLUB with big $$$$$.. They sure don’t act like they much care about our young and the power of public schools.
Or maybe they do know the power of public schools and don’t like that at all. Arkansas and the ZINN Project is just one example.
Sad, they don’t know that $$$$$ does not lead to a fulfilling life. They will get their KARMA. Maybe they are LIVING their KARMA for their bad deeds. Who knows, but this awfulness always catches up to people especially sell outs who do harm to others
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Maybe this isn’t PC to say, but I’m having a hard time finding the sympathy. There was a very good alternative to Rahm available in the last election (Chuy Garcia), but if you look at the election results by ward, the black neighborhoods voted overwhelmingly for Rahm (and this was after he closed 50 schools, predominantly in their neighborhoods). I suspect had Karen Lewis not gotten sick, the black neighborhoods would have voted for her, but the Latino neighbrhoods would have voted for Rahm. Furthermore, unless there is a really strong black candidate on the ballot next time, I suspect the voting patterns will be the same in 2019. I hold no hope that the people most affected by Rahm’s slash and burn will remember and hold him accountable.
I’m not usually one to use the phrase “identity politics”, but if ever there was an example, this would be it. Some day all of us peons, whether black, white, Latino or otherwise, are going to have to realize we’re all in this together and we have to unite against the 1%.
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Rahm’s main interest is in reinventing key neighborhoods near the CBD and public transportation. He is trying to socially re-engineer his city through charter expansion with selective charters for the “haves” and cheap charters on the fringe of the city for the “have nots.” I believe that a contributing factor to the high murder rate is the mayor’s assault on poor neighborhoods. Many other mayors are doing the same thing, but they are using a knife instead of a chainsaw to accomplish their goals.
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When I read the statement that school closures “are part of Mayor Emanuel’s plan for gentrification…” am I right in remembering that Emanuel and Obama worked together on this plan?
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Both of them are part of the Chicago Business Club. Obama’s library is on the south side, an area targeted for gentrification near a new charter school. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obamalibrary/ct-obama-library-woodlawn-met-20160502-story.html
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I think that few people want to see that Emanuel didn’t come up with the “close public schools while pushing charter schools” frenzy alone….
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