Just a few hours after Mayor Rahm officially apologized for the sex predator scandal that’s hit Chicago Public Schools, three of the city’s leading school beat reporters joined for the monthly talk show Mick Dumke and I host at the Hideout.
Karp is the reporter who broke the troubling story late last year about how CPS under Rahm had been shortchanging its special education program with a double-cross that was devious even for Chicago.
After talking to janitors, FitzPatrick discovered that after Rahm privatized the cleaning contracts, schools were passing the inspections largely because they were getting tipped when the inspections were about to happen. So they could do a fast cleanup and keep the schools clean long enough to pass the test. Then it was back to mouse droppings again.
CPS officials responded by telling the parents that they had everything wrong and there was no problem and the matter got buried until reporters started asking questions. At which point, school officials stonewalled the reporters by stalling on public record requests. In short, doing everything they could not to correct the problem but to prevent anyone from knowing about it probably in the hopes that the reporters would get discouraged and go away.
In the case of special education, he hasn’t apologized or expressed outrage.
If anything points to the need for a school board that’s independent of the mayor, this is it.
