• Lauren FitzPatrick/Sun-Times
  • Troy LaRaviere

The mystery of Blaine Elementary is how it became what every neighborhood school is supposed to be—an anchor of its neighborhood. Years ago I noticed that it had been freshly tuckpointed; no longer a weary 19th-century brick fortress, it looked alert and inviting. Then I became aware of the large number of kids with backpacks, many escorted by young parents, converging on the school each morning along the sidewalks of Greenview and Jannsen and Grace; this was the rare neighborhood school in a white, wealthy part of Chicago that actually drew from the neighborhood around it. When the schoolyard was converted from an after-hours neighborhood parking lot into a turf-covered soccer field, dads began showing up to kick the ball around with their kids and give them pointers. A local congregation holds church in the auditorium every Sunday, and you can never tell what might be going on outside: cutting through Blaine’s schoolyard last summer on my way home from breakfast on Southport Avenue, I came across a traveling miniature golf course that had set up shop there.

LaRaviere quoted himself addressing a meeting of unhappy principals. “Finally, I spoke,” La Raviere wrote. “‘This administration gets away with this because we let them. We are the professionals. Yet, we allow political interests to dominate the public conversation about what’s good for the children in our schools. Every time these officials misinform the public about the impact of their policies, we need to follow them with a press conference of our own to set the record straight.’”

“Tenure doesn’t mean you work forever,” he said. “Tenure means you get due process rights. I would not want to work in a system in which teachers’ due process rights are not protected.” If CPS backed up principals who want to weed out their faculties, he said, more of them would be willing to engage in due process and see it through. But there’s no backing. “Our mayor,” LaRaviere told me, “is more interested in helping his wealthy allies capitalize and loot the public school coffers by privatizing education through charters and others. I don’t think he has any interest in closing the achievement gap or raising achievement in general.”