Mike Klonsky writes here about the advice of former Duncan aide Peter Cunningham to Chicago: When trying to revive devastated black communities, bring in “new people.”

Klonsky begins:

Just when you think we’ve heard the last from the disastrous duo of Arne Duncan and Peter Cunningham, they become media go-to guys on (of all things) gun violence and community development.

Remember, this was the pair that ran the Chicago Public Schools and the U.S. Dept. of Education for years, promoting austerity, mass school closings, privatization and uncapped expansion of privately-run charter schools in black communities. Their policies helped lead to the devastation of urban school districts and contributed to school re-segregation and the push-out of thousands of black and poor families from cities like Chicago.

Why media would turn to them for meaningful solutions to the problems they helped create is beyond me. But here we are.

Cunningham’s Sun-Times commentary yesterday (To revive declining South and West Side neighborhoods, import people) was the most egregious. The headline says it all. Now that 300,000 African-Americans have been pushed out of Chicago over the past few decades, Cunningham sees their replacement with thousands of “new, middle-class people” as the city’s salvation.

How unoriginal. I have referred to it as the whitenization of the cities. But it’s deeper than that.

Read on.