The Advice That Won’t Be Taken

Deplatformed, er, retired Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass has advice for Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot for dealing with the Chicago Teachers Union’s refusal to work in person in the face of the omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2:

Only a small handful of Chicago public school students, most with serious co-morbidities, have died from the pandemic. But about 230 kids have been victims of homicide in Chicago, according to wirepoints.org

Who weeps for that 15-year-old South or West Side boy who was already academically behind, that boy who was cut adrift during last year’s failed remote learning?

Now, after one year already lost and CTU shutting schools again, that boy is again cut loose by a morally indefensible system.

He’s lost out there. A few of his friends may get lucky and find a productive future, perhaps join the Marines or the Army and realize structure in discipline.

But that lost boy? His future is all about fear and prison and pain. He’ll become a statistic floating away in Chicago’s river of violence, where the names of the dead are forgotten by a city already numb.

And who’ll weep for that boy?

CTU leaders won’t weep. Neither will hard left progressives who love their virtue signaling and back the CTU’s illegal work stoppage. Randi Weingarten–president of the American Federation of Teachers that serves as the shock troops for the Democratic Party–won’t weep. And neither will Chicago’s silent, frightened business community.

CTU president Jesse Sharkey, the angry man in red in the photograph above, piles on Lightfoot. As does Weingarten.

And the left continues devouring its own.

As I typed that last sentence, I was reminded of an iconic photo of the George Floyd riots in Chicago. You may remember it. It was in the Sun Times, taken as the left began to devour administrations of liberal black mayors across America, including Lightfoot’s, in those “sometimes fiery but mostly peaceful protests.”

The photo was of an angry white woman facing off against two black Chicago police officers. I didn’t see any identification, she could have been an incognito Republican secretly hell-bent on discrediting the raging neo-Marxists, but I doubt it.

I figured her for a CTU member teaming up with Black Lives Matter rioters out on Michigan Avenue, or one of those angry suburban female leftists, just before all the Boul Mich storefronts were shattered and looted.

The photo shows her masked, her face a foot or so away from two black cops. The veteran officers were calm. She was not calm, with both of her beefy pink arms upraised, giving the officers the finger from each hand. It was an image beyond words:

Angry white woman of the left up in the faces of two unmasked black cops, her two middle fingers up, her political rage boiling through that mask that protected her identity. You could almost hear her screams.

Some 35 years ago, then Secretary of Education William Bennett pronounced Chicago’s Public Schools as the “worst in the nation.” Now, it’s even worse than Bennett could have imagined.

Over the last few years, as more and more parents—black, brown and white—began pulling their children from Chicago Public Schools in droves, the CPS budget kept growing even as the CPS student population shrunk. Yes, the system is morally bankrupt, but flush with cash, spending about $27,000 a year per student only to fail them.

To those of you wise in the Chicago Way, the muscle flexed by militant CTU leaders is clear:

They’re measuring the drapes in the mayor’s office. CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates has been floated as a mayoral contender. Sharkey isn’t the power. He’s the front man. Gates is the one with the real juice and the nerve.

And the 2023 mayoral campaign proceeds in a dying city.

Lightfoot opposes CTU’s move toward remote learning. She has responded by locking CTU teachers out of remote learning platforms. She’s threatened to withhold their pay. She deserves credit for talking tough, but then, she’s talked tough many times before. Each time she’s caved to the CTU.

She hasn’t had a win since her inauguration day, when she shamed the City Council. Now she struggles in her mayoral fundraising efforts, flailing.

The other day she made a speech, trying to reboot on fighting the crime wave. But her rhetoric isn’t nearly enough, especially not after she failed to stand up to rioters and looters that savaged the city during the BLM George Floyd riots, as Chicago began its plunge into lawlessness.

She talks of “positive police interactions” with communities, even as murders in those neighborhoods go uncharged, as crime goes unprosecuted, as violent career criminals charged with more violent crime are released back on the streets through low or no bail, or electronic home monitoring, to victimize others even as they await trial.

Much of the blame for this goes to Cook County State’s Atty. Kim Foxx and Foxx’ patron Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle. Yet Lightfoot dares not mention Toni’s name. And Lightfoot endorsed Foxx for re-election.

As troubled parents flee with their kids–some running to Indiana, Florida, Wisconsin, some to private/parochial schools they can’t afford–we should remember what former Mayor Rahm Emanuel said about crisis.

“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” Emanuel said. “And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not before.”

What is that thing Chicago couldn’t do before?

Real School Choice.

Real School Choice is the only way out for Chicago and the nation. It is the only way to break the militant teacher union leadership’s hold on the most vulnerable families. It is the only way to stop the left’s radicalizing of children in the cities and the suburbs.

Let tax money follow the students. Give families a choice. In Chicago, the money is there. $27,000 a year can pay for private school tuition.

This is called freedom. And not freedom only for those with means, but hope for low-income black and brown and poor whites who’ve been left behind by a corrupt system controlled by corrupt political actors.

which I feel confident she will not take.

I also don’t think that would be quite as effective as Mr. Kass seems to believe. It would require parents who are willing to abandon their local public schools in favor or more distant and less convenient alternatives and I suspect those are a minority in Chicago.

It would, however, be effective in ensuring that Mayor Lightfoot has at least one well-funded primary opponent in her re-election bid.