With Chicago’s public schools so broke that Mayor Rahm Emanuel decided to close 50 of them last year, you’d think the City Council would have more on its agenda than Eliot Ness, a crime fighter during Prohibition in the 1920s and 30s.
Yet I can think of a million reasons the expansion should be put on hold. For starters, the more money the mayor spends building new charters, the less money he has for existing schools that are already so broke they’re worried about paying for toilet paper.
Plus, they’re privately run operations. That means they don’t abide by the same standards of transparency as regular public schools.
The more charters he creates, the less power the Chicago Teachers Union has—and the more power Mayor Emanuel can amass, as if he needs more.
After all, people usually bitch to their alderman when something goes wrong with the schools. That’s how Sposato wound up holding a toilet paper drive for the cash-starved schools in his northwest-side ward.
Within a few minutes, he got another call, this time from the mayor’s legislative liaison asking him to hold off on the resolution.
