George Schmidt was a high school teacher in Chicago who was fired by Paul Vallas for releasing the contents of a standardized test that he was required to administer to his students. Here he responds to a post called “In Defense of Paul Vallas,” written by Diane Fager, who was on Vallas’ staff in Chicago.

Schmidt writes:

By the middle of the 20th Century, reporters were trained to check for accuracy, not to simplify reality into “two sides to every story” stuff.

“If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” was a motto of reporting that came out of Chicago.

It’s a compliment to Diane Ravitch’s blog that Paul Vallas dispatches one of his former minions to blow smoke into the eyes of people taking a closer look at the actual Vallas record.

Diane Fager’s versions of the wonders of the Paul Vallas record typifies the way in which Vallas has always tried to manipulate the media. He does it by working directly himself or through surrogates, often former subordinates like Fager. When I read the original anonymous testimonial, I thought it came from Cozette Buckney; Phil Hansen is no longer available to sing Vallas’s praises because he’s dead… The Vallas fan club has been around (and usually well compensated) for a long long time.

One of the wonderful things about the educational leadership career of Paul Vallas was how intensely he worked the press.

From the day he was announced as the mayor’s choice (because of his “business acumen” ????) to head Chicago’s schools (Vallas’s actual private sector business experience had been at his family’s suburban restaurant; his other work was overseeing patronage as Chicago’s Mayor’s Budget Director, the job he had before he became the Business Roundtable’s choice for the first CPS CEO), Vallas was intense about his publicity stuff.

Reporters who wrote (or spoke) even a line that wasn’t to Vallas’s liking would either hear from him directly (often in late night phone calls) or from a well-paid surrogate (as in the present case). Those who asked him impertinent questions (or who laughed at the absurdity of his claims and hypeactive posings) usually got the “I’ll get back to you on that…” stumper that was patented here in Chicago. Those of us who actually published the facts about Vallas’s regime (most famously for me, the actual content of the CASE tests Vallas had spent millions of dollars on in Chicago) could expect enormous pressure (in my case, a million dollar “copyright infringement” lawsuit and termination for “copyright infringement…”) and usually (as in the case of Grady Jordan, who wrote about Vallas’s racism) slanders or worse.

One day, the Paul Vallas event will become a case study for reporters to study in school, just as the Harvard Business School uses case studies. But for now the whole spin cycle is still spinning, so we’ll have to continue adding to the portfolio now that the Connecticut courts have added a new chapter.

For the rest of the USA, Paul Vallas is the first reason to quarantine anything or anyone emerging from Chicago as a “school reformer.”

But there is a fine history to all this…

And since Diane Ravitch is a historian first, it’s fun to do the history here in the present tense.

Paul Vallas became “Chief Executive Officer” of Chicago’s public schools in 1995, as soon as the (Republican majority) Illinois General Assembly had passed the “Amendatory Act of 1995” beginning “Mayoral Control” of large, largely minority urban school systems. The Amendatory Act was the beginning of it all, and Paul Vallas was the first of the non-educators to get the top job of reforming public education.

Even before Vallas took over the public schools of Chicago, he was spinning his narrative with the help of certain reporters who had opted for good storytelling over accuracy and boringly checked-out facts.

I remember the Chicago Sun-Times, in an early “Who is Paul Vallas?” story, quoting Vallas’s Mom — yes, his mother — about how hard he worked at high school football because our humble hero was not very talented but always substituted hard work and grit for whatever… That motherly endorsement came as if that, for some reason, was why he should, with no education experience (but with a long record as a Democratic Party and City Hall hack), become the head of the nation’s third largest school system.

This episode is just the latest in one version of the Vallas Spin. Testimonials.

The other (which has probably happened, but Our Pal Paul is too humble — and/or too busy busy busy — to go directly to Diane Ravitch…) is to call the person making the original report.

By the time Vallas’s star was rising in Chicago, the media were in decline. Chicago’s City New Bureau (for decades the training ground for reporters in Chicago) was terminated. No longer would reporters (from famous ones like Mike Royko and Kurt Vonnegut to the average street reporter) be taught that reporting began and ended with accuracy under the famous motto: “If your mother says she loves you, Check it Out!” No, by the time Vallas was creating his clip files, a reporter could quote Vallas’s mother with a straight face and not have an editor send her back to basic training! By the time Vallas was finally dumped by Mayor Daley in May – June 2001, even the Vallas media manipulation machine had worn out its welcome and Vallas’s frenetic phone calls to favored reporters weren’t taken as a good thing any longer. Also, some of the reporters who had done Vallas’s dirty work (based on “inside” dirt against Vallas’s enemies) were also leaving the business. (I go once a year to spit on the monument to one of those guys, a reporter who turned pundit and ended his career disgraced by the number of times he ran Vallas’s slanders as his own words in the Sun-Times…).

Vallas was out in Chicago in July 2001. He told the press he was going to relax and spend some time with the kids, maybe play a little baseball blah blah blah. At the time, I told people it was really sad for Vallas to pull that one on his own kids, since it was clear he was already looking to make a political bed for himself in Illinois or Chicago. Sure enough, within a few months, Paul Vallas was running for the Democratic Party nomination for Governor of Illinois. During that time, we published an extensive refutation of just about every claim Vallas was making, including a resume padding (he claimed “teaching” experience he never had and that stuff about eye glasses) and some typical tall tales (nobody ever saw that “600 page…” thingy Vallas supposedly authored, for example, just as nobody has ever seen evidence of this claim by Vallas’s person here that Paul was a “historian”)…

Anyway, we’ve reprinted some of those old articles at http://www.substancenews.net this week just so readers in 2013 could note that had people been paying attention to the accuracy of the facts in 2002 (and before, as we published them in Substance) maybe Philadelphia, New Orleans, and now Bridgeport would not have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars (or more) on the Vallas Hoax. But the method hasn’t changed, as we can see here. A humble saint Paul Vallas is, whose entire life has been dedicated to the children, Paul Vallas’s has. Often in history these kinds of versions of reality get treated unkindly in fiction. I’m thinking of Gradgrind in “Hard Times” or so many of the others satirized by Charles Dickens. But Paul Vallas and his Vallasizations of reality (as well as the “Vallas Method”, most recently exemplified here) are still costing public school districts dollars and time. So it’s worth returning to a story about which the facts have long been clear.

“If your mother says she loves you, check it out!” still holds.

Many who post and comment on this blog have been critical of Paul Vallas. All have their own reasons, but much criticism has focused on the tales of “saving” Chicago, Philadelphia, and Néw Orleans. The latter two turned privatization into a “reform” strategy.

But there is another side to Vallas, which came as a comment by a reader:

She writes:

As we know, nothing in life is black or white which is how I view Paul Vallas. I worked for Paul at the Chicago Public Schools as the Director of Policy and Program Development. Specifically my role was to identify and obtain non-traditional, sustainable funding for school based social and health services. Why? Because Paul Vallas felt that unless you addressed the holistic needs of children, you weren’t serious about students’ reaching their full academic potential.

I realize it is extremely simplistic to frame education policy in short phrases but for purposes of making a point, I will take that liberty. One of the most critical debates of our time is how do we effectively educate children/youth- especially those in large urban school districts. On the one hand, there are those that believe that it is all about the “effectiveness of the teachers” as measured by the outcomes of standardized tests taken by their students in one day. On the other hand, there are those of us who believe that unless you address the impact of poverty, the most incredible teachers imaginable will be compromised in their efforts to enable their students to reach their full academic potential.

Since I judge leaders by their actions and not their words, Paul Vallas exemplified the position that educators must address the impact of poverty on students lives. Since Paul knew that some kids were failing because they literally couldn’t read the blackboard due to not having eye glasses, he started CPS’ Vision Program in which students who failed their vision screenings were bused in a school that had been set up as Vision Center in which students received full exams and eye glasses on site- all for free. The Vision program continues to serve thousands of students at CPS-95% of whom needed glasses. But since Paul knew that students couldn’t attend school regularly if they didn’t have access to a doctor, he funded the KidCare Program- a school based enrollment program for free and low cost health insurance. School based enrollment in public benefit programs continues at CPS by the Children and Family Benefits Unit who enrolled over 13,000 students in food stamps/SNAP and Medicaid/SCHIP Insurance last year.

Paul was also the first superintendent to fund a school based teen pregnancy program, “Cradle to the Classroom”, that was in over 70 high schools. Why did he do that when needless to say, it was not a popular idea in Chicago at the time? Because when advocates showed him the impact of school based programs on attendance and graduation rates as well as the long term outcomes of the teens’ babies, he never hesitated. Cradle to the Classroom went on to become a nationally recognized program. Paul also understood the impact of violence on students’ ability to thrive and learn.

As a historian, Paul understood the risk of people becoming desensitized to children and youth being murdered or struck down by a stray bullet. So he funded the Youth Outreach Workers to not only mitigate the potential for violence by having school patrols before and after an incident of school based violence but also to address the psychological and economic needs of the victims’ families and their peers. Specifically, Paul ensured that students were buried with dignity which meant that when needed, CPS paid for the whole funeral- first with Paul’s personal funds and then later with the Childrens’ First Fund created for that purpose. To try and help with the grief of the victims’ friends and teachers, crisis workers were immediately deployed to the victims’ schools and grief counseling was provided. He even funded buses to transport students from their schools to the funeral home.

There are many more examples that I could give but hopefully these few illustrate my point. Paul never wavered in his support for these programs even when others said that with strains on school funding, why should CPS fund social and health service programs? They also criticized him for his prioritization of early childhood education but Paul did not waver since he saw early childhood education as the cornerstone of learning and one of the most effective anti-poverty strategies available to educators.

As some would say- Paul marched to his own drum. In my opinion, as well as the majority of my colleagues then working under Paul at the time, we admired Paul’s priorities and guts. Did I agree with all of his initiatives- of course not. But who is perfect which is my very point!! In my opinion, it is not helpful to view Paul Vallas and his legacy through one lens because that is too simplistic and counter-productive in our attempts to learn from history. Compounding that complexity is Paul’s willingness when it really counts to admit to his mistakes such as when Paul stated that the messaging of modern day education wan NOT the problem,but rather it’s the product that is the problem including a reference to the “testing industrial complex”. He even made fun of himself by saying that this might sound like Nixon going to China hearing this from him. Do some of us wish that he had realized and admitted this sooner- of course. But its better late than never and its only one part of the story.