By Cyril Jakubowski
I’ve been covering news, politics and most things related to the Northwest Side for a long time. As your Northwest Side Press editor and reporter, I’ve seen some salacious stories land on my desk over the years.
Some were worthless, some turned into local feuds that pitted the “Not in My Backyards” group against development in the public domain, corrupt local councilors (perhaps all of them), and anything else you might have read in the Nadej newspapers. “Not enough parking!” “What about the traffic?”
But nothing in my experience caught my attention more than the firing of Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez. It’s not the actual shooting. It’s the way this whole situation has unfolded, from the resignation of the entire Board of Education, to another appointment by the mayor to fire the CEO, to voters choosing part of another school board, to the mayor appointing the remaining members, to all the screaming and name-calling. – Advocacy on social media. It’s a circus, and such a “dirty political” movie plays out in real life. Chicago Road. I get overwhelmed just thinking about all the parts you play here.
I understand the plight of the Chicago Teachers Union and they are doing everything they can to get a good contract. CTU President Stacey Davis Gates says this on TV and on podcast.
“We need a contract!” Unashamedly, the union wants a return on its investment in Mayor Brandon Johnson. The thousands of teachers who would benefit from more money are nothing to argue about. School teachers deserve the means to teach children.
But… maybe they don’t. Not like this. Maybe taxpayers are tired. It’s not like CPS has a clean track record either.
State test results show that CPS is lagging on this and that 4 in 10 teachers were “chronically absent” in the last school year (how does that work for a median salary of $95,000), according to the Chicago Tribune, some schools have dozens of students With a carrying capacity of thousands, and… you know, I don’t even want to look at the stats again, because kids aren’t getting smarter. The CTU is getting richer.
I am a CPS child. She graduated from the Steinmetz Academic Center. That’s how they wrote it.
I love school. This was the late 90s, so they made you take tests, and you had to perform and you were so happy because you got a good grade and so “sad” when you failed your midterm because you were smoking weed with the cool kids or making out with some girl down the stairs From Barry Street.
But the teachers were great. They challenged you.
Anyone familiar with public schools knows that students had to read “The Catcher in the Rye” and discuss why Holden Caulfield was crazy, or read “Lord of the Flies” and watch the movie when Piggy got his head smashed, or some movie. Cases create paper models based on equations to form a square filled with triangular pieces.
In biology, CPS’s budget was so limited that they went from dissecting a pig to dissecting an earthworm.
And at the store, well, no one did anything in the store but thought about what they were going to do on Saturday night.
We read Shakespeare, we went on “Adventure PE,” which was a trip to challenge yourself and climb a very high pole, we did laps around the entire campus for an hour every week in regular PE, and we sang and performed weird stuff during drama class, which Hannibal Buress came out of in Eventually, he launched a weekly school newspaper, The Steinmetz Star, of which I was a part.
I wrote movie reviews at the time. “Fight Club.” “American Psycho.” “American Beauty.” “American Pie.” There were a lot of “Americans” thrown in.
But now, more than two decades later, greed and politics seem to have taken over, or at least that’s how it seems to many Chicagoans. People notice it more.
So don’t give me this stuff about kids. Most Chicagoans now know that “for the children” is just language used by the union to suck more money from parents and taxpayers.
I’m not angry. I’m disappointed that all this political stuff went the way I thought it would.
People come to power, fill their pockets as much as they can… and who else? Well, fuck these people. This happens in every administration. Perhaps that’s why so many, including on the networks and from the Chicago Tribune, Sun-Times, Cran’s Chicago Business, and even the State Comptroller, are talking about the disaster. People don’t like what’s happening. Plain and simple.
By the way, Lord of the Flies by William Golding was a great book. Teachers taught me that at OA Thorp Scholastic Academy. I heard that this is apparently where some of the mayor’s kids go. I hope teachers will continue to discuss this book there.
According to Spark Notes, which is like today’s Cliffs Notes (I went to CPS, remember), it deals with “the struggle between two competing drives that exist within all human beings: the instinct to live by the rules, to behave peacefully, and to follow morality.” Commands, valuing the good of the group against the instinct to satisfy one’s direct desires, acting violently to gain superiority over others, and imposing one’s will.
From Chapter Five:
“Rules!” Ralph shouted: “You’re breaking the rules!”
“Who cares?”
Ralph summoned his wits.
“Because rules are the only thing we have!”
But Jack was yelling against him.
“Against the rules! We are strong, and we hunt! If there is a monster, we will hunt it down!”
