<p>[karen</a> lewis lashes out against corporate leaders - chicagotribune.com](<a href=“http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-ctu-president-speaks-20121121,0,4990069.story]karen”>http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/education/ct-met-ctu-president-speaks-20121121,0,4990069.story)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>^^ that’s not an unusual sentiment. Many organizations chose to reject a donation rather than have it come “with strings attached.”</p>
<p>A key part of reforming CPS seems to be replacing CPS schools with charter schools. While there are some excellent charters in Chicago, it seems to be a mixed bag. And many are upset that these private companies are being given use of public buildings with no strings attached. It is a school system with no easy answers, even though there are plenty of soundbites to go around on both sides. In a city that has a great deal of schools operating at 1/2 capacity it isn’t as simple as combining schools without regard to gang affiliations, neighborhood ethnic tensions and the reasons behind so many failing schools.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>We should indeed worry about the participation of dilettantes. Especially when you look at the performance of the so-called professionals who molded the system in the abject failures it is. Money sent in the direction of circus clowns like Karen Lewis will simply be spent the same way the union-poisoned educational system has done, namely to fuel waste, corruption, and the protection of mediocrity.</p>
<p>Fwiw, charters are not the answer, as they are nothing else than the poisoned “gift” that delayed the real changes that will ultimately have to be implemented. Changes that should make trade unions only responsible for their members and irrelevant to the direction of our education system. </p>
<p>As usual, we can count on our country to do the right thing, but not until we exhausted the alternatives. For the past six to seven decades, we have done about everything wrong that could be invented.</p>
<p>But when the “experts” have failed, maybe they should accept that they may not be the experts that they think they are.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Didn’t Churchill say something to that effect about the US?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I totally agree with this, but I don’t think that we should respond to this failure by allowing whoever has money to control the school district. That sounds like a recipe for disaster.</p>
<p>teachers unions are money making operations and are concerned only about themselves. students are of zero concern to the unions.</p>
<p>Anybody from the Chicago area that viewed the endless posturing by both sides–Emanuel’s & Lewis’–eventually realized that the kids were/are merely pawns in this game. However, this is a step that had to be taken.</p>
<p>Karen Lewis is all about control. When she loses even part of that control, as in businesses donating with caveats, she loses power and inevitably her gig. Rahm Emanuel was really caught between a rock & a hard place on this one. Hard to believe that he played this as badly as he did, but Lewis knew she had ‘hand’. It was capitulate to the union’s demands, or see a bad socioeconomic situation in Chicago’s poor neighborhoods totally explode, worse then what is taking place presently.</p>
<p>Blame is easy to spread around, especially when there is no money on a regular basis to fund solutions.</p>