SUBSCRIPT: How many CTAs will it take before the rest of Chicago screams, too? Why is Chicago paying a former CTA underling of Ron Huberman $165,000 this year while teachers and others are facing massive cuts?
The question is not, any longer, whether Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley will expand the patronage for Ron Huberman, but how far he will let Huberman go — and why. Every week, while Huberman cynically tells the schools of massive cuts, he is still hiring old cronies and new from his old days at City Hall, Emergency Management, or the CTA. The list of incompetents now drawing six-figure salaries from the Chicago Public Schools while trained educators are laid off grows.
Thirteen months ago, Chicago Schools Chief Executive Officer Ron Huberman brought in dozens of his former friends from the Chicago Transit Authority to help him run the Chicago public schools. Among the many whose pay was set at more than $140,000 per year was Pat Taylor (above, at the April 28 Board of Education meeting) who now holds the title of "Chief Operations Officer" at a budgeted salary of $165,000 per year ($20,000 per year more than her predecessor). Taylor, who has become legendary for sharing several traits with her patron and boss (including a Blackbuerry fetish and a very very nasty short temper) reportedly has no academic background and no experience in the complex work of managing the facilities of the Chicago Public Schools. As a result, like most of Huberman's executive staff, she has quietly hired more competent people (at a lower salary, of course) to serve as consultants to her and her department. In 2009, while most Chicago teachers were earning a taxable income of less than $70,000 per year, Taylor's W-2 form for the Internal Revenue Service read $75,793 (despite the fact that she was only at CPS three-quarters of the year). According to the current CPS Position File (which lists all CPS employees), she is supposed to be paid $165,000 this year. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt. Substance appreciates the calls we've been getting from educators who are surviving in their jobs at 125 S. Clark St. as Huberman continues to bring in his cronies and those assigned to his patronage ranks by Mayor Richard M. Daley. We are also looking forward to hearing about the expansion of the "Department of Operations" and "Performance Management's" tardy problems in the coming months, as teachers and administrators with valid credentials in education have more time while collecting unemployment to meditate on the incompetence, venality, and corruption that cost them their jobs while they, for the most part, remained silent in the fact of evil....
