SUBSCRIPT: Huberman, Board create OOPS — The Office Of Pornography Suppression
A quick read of the lengthy report by the Chicago Board of Education’s Inspector General reveals that Chicago has created a new job, which we might call OOPS — the “Office of Pornography Suppression.” The Chicago Board of Education may have had to lay off teachers again in October and November 2009, but the ironically named "Office of Performance Management" continued to expand through unchecked patronage hiring by CEO Ron Huberman. Additionally, the report of the Inspector General released the week before Christmas demonstrates that CPS also has a new job, although it's not officially called what it is: "The Office of Pornography Elimination." How else can anyone explain how the OIG located and collected so many dirty pictures form the Internet activities of the teachers, assistant principals and principals who were disciplined, according to the OIG, for "pornography."
To read the report of the Office of the Inspector General for FY 2009 (July 1, 2008 through June 30, 2009), a casual reader would learn that one of the biggest problems facing Chicago's public schools is that some substitute teachers, teachers, assistant principals, and principals sometimes go to "pornography" when using CPS computers.
During the fiscal year that Ron Huberman began rewriting Board Reports after each Board meeting, stalling the publication of the Board's Agenda of Action until he had scrutinized the wording on every document the Board had supposedly voted on, created the $20 million "Office of Performance Management" without public review or approval, and appointed dozens of individuals to jobs paying upwards of $90,000 per year in the "Office of Performance Management" the Inspector General of CPS found pornography -- not "Performance Management" -- to be a main example of unethical or illegal misconduct in CPS.
Were it not so serious, it would be laughable. But a close reading of the recently released OIC report shows an obsession with "pornography" and a complete lack of interest in the activities of the Chief Executive Officer, the Chief Financial Officer, the Chief Education Officer, and a number of other chiefs who have been allocating hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to controversial programs, usually without any public discussion or even presentations to the Chicago Board of Education.
If someone were to trace the cultural roots of CPS's obsession with "pornography" — but not with the wasting of hundreds of millions of dollars on crony contracts and patronage hiring — it would provide interesting reading. More than one PhD in psychology or other subjects would probably result.
No where in the OIG report is "pornography" defined, and it seems, now that CPS is constantly monitoring the on-line behavior of principals and teachers, that the answer from the members of the Chicago Board of Education to the question "What is it" will be the classic from the Victorian era (and all earlier eras when the Catholic Church was chasing it down and archiving it at the Vatican):
"I know it when I see it..."
Just what was it you were seeing when you disciplined those teachers, assistant principals, and principals -- and firing that substitute teacher?
