SUBSCRIPT: When the mayor and his minions are playing a Kazoo, only in Chicago would reporters swear they were hearing a symphony! Rahm's symphony orchestra had only one instrument -- an annoying kazoo -- as another school year is wasted playing over and over Rahm's neoliberal 'austerity shriek'
Who told Chicago's media that the best way to educate 400,000 public school children in the third largest city in the USA was to repeat after the mayor's press flacks and agenda that has had nothing to do with the education of those children in the city's real public schools. By March 2013, everyone who was paying attention knew that the Emanuel administration was planning on one term in Chicago, followed by a run for the presidency of the United States. As a result, the focus of Rahm Emanuel's public education agenda has been the dictates of the neoliberal elite who fund him and their script writers, from Hollywood and New York mostly, who fill the pages of the press with RAHMSPEAK, a new version of the 1984 NEWSPEAK.
By the time the most recent iteration of Rahm's public schools "Chief Executive Officers" (Barbara Byrd Bennett) got around on March 21, 2013 to announcing the long-awaited 2013 Hit List, Chicago (and some of the nation, via the propaganda published in national magazines like The Atlantic) had been treated to the Rahm Emanuel propaganda version of reality for almost two full years.
During the first year of Rahm Emanuel's reign as Chicago's mayor, the tune being played over and over for the media was "Longer School Day." As the facts came out that most of Rahm's talking points were lies (Chicago never had the "shortest school days in America" as Rahm had claimed, leaving out the high schools and ignoring "Closed Campus"), the tune continued playing. After the attempt by the mayor and (then) the Schools Chief Executive Officer Jean-Claude Brizard failed to bribe schools and teachers into doing that "Longer School Day" in September 2011, the rewards were significant for the 13 "Pioneer" schools that did take the mayor's bribes.
But most of the 2011 - 2012 school year was spent ignoring the real needs of the city's massive public school system and focusing on Rahm's simple minded script:
CHICAGO WILL BE SAVED WITH A LONGER SCHOOL DAY!!! PLAYED OVER AND OVER.
The tune for the second year required a new band leader. Jean-Claude Brizard (who had been run out of Rochester New York) was replaced by another out-of-town mercenary, Barbara Byrd Bennett (most recently from a hatchet job on the Detroit public schools). Their lines were slightly different but as front people for the mayor's racist agenda of closing schools in the Black Community and decimating the city's real public schools, they had the one qualification necessary: they would sing the song Rahm put in front of them, over and over and over...
So the second year of the Reign of Rahm saw, blaring every day, the single agenda item:
CHICAGO HAS AN UNDERUTILIZATION CRISIS!!!!
And because Chicago's corporate press corps has been relegated to taking dictation from the mayor's office and its satellites and then recycling it as "news", the blaring worked again.
But only in Chicago could a Kazoo be mistaken for an orchestra, and only then because the city's corporate media are so far down in the mayor's back pocket that every time he farts they swear it's Chanel No. 5.
There are easily a hundred things that Chicago could have done, carefully, to improve the education of the children in the city's public schools.
But that's not the agenda for Rahm Emanuel's "team," whether the leader is Jean-Claude Brizard (for the first season), Barbara Byrd Bennett (for the second), or FILL IN THE BLANKS after Byrd-Bennett is recycled to another Broad Foundation camp next year.
