An amazing thing happened last Wednesday: the mayor’s hand-picked school board momentarily put aside its union-busting agenda to extend an olive branch to Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis.
“This is an area where you and I can walk hand in hand to Springfield,” Lewis said at the meeting. “I will sit on that table with you, begging and screaming to get rid of that law. I bet you if we worked on that together, Springfield would respond.”
The charter school commission is a nine-member board appointed by the state board of education from a list of nominees sent by Governor Pat Quinn.
It’s not as though the state was doing a whiz-bang job of regulating charters to begin with. It took Sun-Times investigative reporter Dan Mihalopoulos to break the news that UNO, one of Illinois’s largest charter operators, was handing out state construction money to companies owned by brothers of a top UNO executive.
I called Senator Steans for comment, but she didn’t respond.
In addition to the question of why such charter schools don’t have to follow the same rules as everyone else, there’s another critical issue here. The more money CPS is compelled to dole out to charters, the less it will have for its dead-broke regular schools.
