Let’s be honest: Mayor Emanuel has made it clear he intends to expand charters, even as he cuts the budgets for regular schools. Most charters are nonunion, so the more he creates, the more he diminishes the power of the teachers’ union.
I should note that the mayor and other charter supporters claim new schools are needed to alleviate overcrowding, even though there are no overcrowded high schools in the communities that would get these new charters.
Hey, don’t blame me—I never said the mayor’s policies made sense.
As always, the mayor has to maintain the pretense that the process is open even if the deal is done. So the leaders of the Chicago Public Schools created the advisory process to go through the routine of listening to some views in the community.
But the creation of the advisory council was overseen by New Schools for Chicago—a nonprofit consortium featuring some of the city’s wealthiest charter school backers. And the facilitator of the council itself was Juan Jose Gonzalez, the Chicago director of Stand for Children, another consortium of wealthy charter school backers.
Any northwest-side resident was free to join the advisory council. And for about three months, the group dutifully met to consider whether Intrinsic and Noble met the criteria the board had established to run a charter school.
The council was asked to evaluate how the charters performed in the past. But Intrinsic has only run one school for a year, so the organization doesn’t have an academic record to run on.