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'ACCOUNTABILITY IS FOR SUCKERS...' could be CPS motto... Board's 'Agenda of Action' again delayed as Ron Huberman sets records for ignoring or breaking laws... When did the Chicago Board of Education approve Huberman's $20 million 'Performance Management' plan?

George N. Schmidt - December 30, 2009

December 30, 2009, arrived, and the Chicago Board of Education still was refusing to publish the actions it had voted to take legally during its meeting of December 16, 2009. And the reason for the every-growing delay — that the school system's "Chief Executive Officer" had the right to "edit" legal documents after they had been voted upon, was still spinning in the strange world of Chicago's corporate "school reform."

By the time Ron Huberman had been 'Chief Executive Officer' of the Chicago Public Schools for six months, at the time of the June 2009 Board of Education meeting (above), he had created a $20 million department ("Performance Management") to oversee every department and school in the 600-school system without presenting any information about the Performance Management program to the Board of Education or the public. At the same time, Huberman had begun appointing dozens of his former cronies from the Chicago Transit Authority and other stops during his career to executive positions paying between $90,000 and $130,000 per year without reporting the appointments to the Board on its public agenda. By the summer of 2009, central office and school administrators were being bullied by Huberman's "Performance Management" people without the public even knowing what "Performance Management" was, how much it was costing, or what it was supposed to do to improve schools. By June 2009, Huberman had also begun editing the agendas of the Board of Education after the Board had voted and before the official records of the Board's actions were released to the public. For the first time in more than two decades, the Board's proceedings and action agendas were being delayed, and by December 2009, the delay had gone from five or six days following the Board meeting to two weeks and longer. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.If there were a spot in the Guiness Book of World Records for school district chiefs who have broken the most laws and violated the most ethical guidelines in one year, it would probably be filled with citations for the third so-called "Chief Executive Officer" in the history of Chicago's public schools, ex-cop and supposed "Numbers Man" Ron Huberman. Although Huberman's two predecessors (Paul Vallas, 1995 - 2001; Arne Duncan, 2001-2008) had cut many corners during their careers, Huberman's special relationship with Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley apparently left him with the impression that he could do anything he wanted at the Chicago Public Schools once he became the chief. In addition to changing parts of the public agendas of the Board of Education after they were published and after the Board members voted on them, Huberman has created departments (one at a cost of more than $5 million per year) without seeking Board approval or subjecting them to public debate and hired dozens of cronies (most from his previous work at the Chicago Transit Authority) to the highest paying executive jobs in the school system without informing the Board or public that he was doing so.

While December 30, 2009, was just another pre-New Year's Day news day for most of Chicago, it marked another milestone in the history of Chicago's public schools. What was the event? As the final full day of business for CPS dawned, Huberman had managed to delay another legally required report on the actions of the Chicago Board of Education while he continued editing the official history after it had supposedly been created.

Huh?

On December 30, 2009, the Chicago Board of Education failed, for another day, to post the "Agenda of Action" for the meeting it had held on December 16, 2009 — a full two weeks earlier.

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