catalyst-chicago.org

Jonathan Alter in Atlantic

A typical fawning Jonathan Alter piece. Rahm is so wonderful and tough, but neither he nor Brizard know anything about education in Chicago. How exactly does he plan to identify these "bad teachers" he wants to weed out?

Alter wants Rahm?------Not Mr. Estvan's title

There are some things I agree with in Jonathan Alter's Atlantic essay about Mayor Emanuel. For example I agree that most residents support his apparent attack on the vestiges of the Democratic Party patronage system and I agree that there overall is a lot of support for the Mayor. Mr. Alter is a skilled writer and one could argue propagandist for the more conservative somewhat anti-organized labor wing of the Democratic Party and for President Obama generally. He is of course a supporter of charter school conversions in urban school districts and in this essay Alter calls SB7 a "model school-reform bill."

But there is an odd aspect of the Alter essay where he wants to characterize himself as a real Chicagoan, he writes: "I grew up near Wrigley Field, amused by the lore of machine precinct captains reminding residents to “vote early and often.” I skipped school every Election Day to canvass for earnest reform candidates, but loved the roguish charm of the city’s politics and inhaled books with titles like Clout, Boss, and Don’t Make No Waves, Don’t Back No Losers. Younger generations of Chicagoans are not so enamored."

I don't know where Mr. Alter went to elementary school, but somehow I doubt it was a public elementary school in Lakeview back in the early 1970s. The reason I say this is because in 1975 Alter graduated from Phillips Academy on the east coast and went on as expected to Harvard.

For those of you that don't know about Phillips, lets simply say it's one of the most elite boarding high schools in America. But interestingly it was educationally very liberal and progressive, during the time Alter went there Ted Sizer was head master. Ted went on to found the Coalition of essential schools which I was involved with when I taught a Calumet High School before it was closed and converted to a charter school. I liked Ted Sizer and had immense respect for him, but to be honest he could not wrap his head around the violent reality of 79th and May Street. Ted and his wife went on to create the Francis W. Parker Charter Essential School and unfortunately this school enrolls today very few poor students and is 92.6% white. I guess that is successful school reform.

I think Alter's essay reflects the perspective a social stratum of rich Lakeshore liberals of the IVI/IPO type. Those the regular machine Democrats called Do-goos (do-gooders). Hence this statement in Alter's essay; "Chicagoans like having a rich mayor; it gives them one less thing to worry about." Which, I think also is a covert way of saying the poor are better led and ruled by the wealthy.

The Alter family were such heavy hitters that they even had dinner and party guests, that included Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Senators Stevenson and Paul Simon. His essay is highly reflective of the perspectives of the urban elite in Chicago, an elite that tolerated Mayor Daley and his machine but were disgusted with it simultaneously. The adoring yet somewhat superficially critical portrait he paints of Mayor Emanuel probably evades the darker side of the Mayor's ties to corporate privatization of public functions. Possibly from Alter's perspective corporate privatization is fundamentally rational, so he probably does not consider that to be journalistic evasion in the least.

Rod Estvan