By: kugler

corruption at its worst

huberman needs to go to jail for misuse of government funds and complicity in the deaths and harm of minors in his charge

By: Bob

Wrong Key ?

Wrong Key? This is a perfect example of the payroll mess we see every day. I hope nobody thinks that the people listed are getting paid that kind of money. This stuff is right out of the movies. I am surprised the names Larry , Curley, and Moe are not on the list.

By: Eric Skalinder

Date of Hire

I'm fascinated. Does your budget analysis team have any information or thoughts on why nearly 70% of these individuals were hired from 2006 on? (And about 80% if you expand to 2005 on?)

By: George N. Schmidt

Date of Hire isn't the only problem here...

Eric (and others) I hope this helps on the question of individuals hired since 2006 getting on the millionaires' list. Sorry this is so lengthy, but in the context you can understand. We're dealing with a budget that at its furthest (operations plus capital) is just under $7 billion. But the central reality is teacher salaries, since the whole work of the 'system' is the teaching of kids in the schools every day.

Before I go into an explanation for this strange "Date of Hire" phenomenon, consider this. Someone has radically changed the very nature of the "Position File" budget. That change took places during the years Arne Duncan was in charge of CPS, and is now ongoing under Ron Huberman. The "Position File" for generations was the reliable way in which CPS tracked every employee's pay on a daily basis. So...

The most frightening thing about the "Millionaires' List" isn't any one aspect, but the overall fact that it renders meaningless one of the most important pieces of financial information compiled and utilized on a daily basis by the largest public employer in Illinois. The past few years have seen other examples of this kind of passing-the-buck fantasy finances, from Wall Street "derivatives" to the fact that about half the mortgage foreclosures across the USA right now are now identifying clearly the actual owner of the property (bear with me; this factors into CPS finances). It seems like a generation of geniuses in "finance" has been allowed to get away with keeping the books based on the end line of "Whatever..."

As in, "It's more or less $6 million or Whatever..."

Sort of the Ivy League version of "My bad..." from the kids.

Now back to your question...

The entire Position File Budget that I got under the Freedom of Information Act last Friday (October 2, 2009) includes the "Date of Hire" for everyone on it. I asked that that be included in the compilation. And I decided to leave it in when I ran those lines after I sorted the entire list (more than 51,000 entries) by Salary and noticed that enormous number at a "salary" above that of the CEO.

True, most of those listed have been hired during the past five years.

But some go back 40 or 50 years.

How the heck did any of them get on a list that's supposed to have integrity and be utilized for important personal, state and federal financial records. (Imagine for a minute what would happen if the IRS computers thought you had "income" of a million dollars last year...).

But at CPS, everyone is afraid to talk on the record about anything. Since Huberman took over, it's been a literal reign of terror down there. Fear. More Fear. Most fear. And since Huberman and his people don't know anything about CPS, they just babble based on whatever "data" they can corner and spew (or by screwball analogies to past lives; see yesterday's New York Times article about the Huberviolence project, where with a straight face they quote him making an analogy to his days as a "police officer").

So nobody is putting anything reliable on the public record, and crazy "data" claims are being substituted for raw realities at every step in these processes. Of course, "data" of the kind the Huberteam is using to lie about everything crashes into reality every day, from the realty of one child crying in the back of your classroom to the life oozing out of Derrion Albert's body and soul outside the Agape Center on September 24, 2009. That's why training and experience -- not an MBA, Huberman/Daley loyalty, and vicious clout -- should be in charge at CPS.

It's actually dangerous at CPS (and in many other Chicago city agencies right now) to be competent and to have integrity. Think about the fate of the person who suggested that the parking meter privatization was a stupid idea, and the rationales a bunch of lies. That sludge has spread across the entire City of Chicago public information network.

Which finally gets to your question about date of hire.

Answer: Who knows? They just dropped names into the Position File. Some of them have been retired for years. Many are former principals. Some have been on leave for more than a decade (Molly Carroll at CTU). How these people won this strange lottery is anyone's guess. But someone had to put those names and those amounts into that bit of public record (some of which is under federal law, by the way) and now it's like

"Whatever..."

I've been unable to even ask my questions about how the data entry took place to create this small percentage of the larger list. There are 540 names on the list we compiled of individuals listed at a "salary" above that of the CEO. Most of those (not all) are in the millions, as you can see. But that group of 540 people is scattered randomly throughout the larger list, and the data were clearly entered by human beings. Several of the names, as you can see, are probably in reverse alphabetical order (First Name, then Last Name), indicating someone actually had to make a mistake that wasn't caught by data entry proofreaders.

We'll (Substance staff; budget study team) be trying to get to the bottom of these stories, including the "date of hire" question, as we look into how each of these names became part of each of these budget lines.

For the past nine months, CPS executives have been in a state of terror because of the Hubercentralized control over commenting to the media. In addition to the Friday morning follies with the "Performance Management Maniacs" (sigh; not my coinage, but I like it), the purge of top people under the Huberclones has left those surviving with a sense of foreboding about their own futures.

Sort of like George Orwell's Animal Farm:

"MBA good; EdD bad."

"CTA good; CPS bad."

"Daley good; teachers bad!"

The result of all this is that a reporter has to ask a question through Monique Bond, Huberman's 'communications' chief.

Then she centralizes ignoring the question or trying to figure out how to spin the issue (like they've been trying to do with the recent insanity on September 23 and September 24): On September 23, Huberman wows that Board with that truly manic Power Point presentation on his so-called "violence" program. It's all about "data" and nothing about "drug gangs" (which are whited out of one slide even where they are obviously the basis of a "safe passage" thingy). And, of course, if we mention the huge gangs, or talk about "People" and "Folks", we'd have to talk the real world of Chicago politics, and economics, and the largest and most violent drug gangs north of the Rio Grande, etc.

Then, literally 24 hours after Huberman's whiz bang Power Point on "violence" (always an abstraction among servants of The Daley) and "violent youth", Derrion Albert gets beat to death on his way to the church where his grandfather awaits (according to one version of the stories out there). Literally a dozen feet from the door of that fortress church (the Agape Center has Sunday services, etc.). And Derrion Albert isn't likely to be on Huberman's Power Point.

So the trick is to spin like a dervish to cover all the political posteriors who did "turnaround" and exicted most of the high school age kids from Altgeld Gardens from that pretty high school at the east side of the Gardens etc. etc.

Which isn't as hard as it might seem, given that Chicago only has a handful of reporters left, and half of them are writing for Substance. The rest sit dutifully in their chairs awaiting the next Power Point from People in Power. Or -- even better -- a handout they can slap a by-line on and call it a day.

So Monique Bond is pretty good at controlling on-the-record information flow. Choking it off is actually a better term.

And as a result, nobody can ask the people who create and maintain the Position File Budget how the heck these 540 lines go in there. Including those "start dates."

To say the last, the "data" don''t speak for themselves in this "data driven" system (of sorts).

But everybody's afraid to talk on the record about what the "data" are doing. Including, by the way, Ron Huberman once the questions are out of his control.

I'm compiling a file I call "in BONDage" which we may begin presenting to the Board of Education meetings courtesy of Substance. The file is getting thick.

On "start date" as well as so much else, "transparency" is not what CPS under Huberman and Daley is about.

By: Diana Lauber

citizen

Over the years, I've come to expect the budget to be inaccurate, misleading and not a real picture of district financial plans. There have been positions budgeted at a dollar--as place holders--and at the other extreme, huge and numerous "buckets" of funds and staff that weren't allocated out into line items before the budgets were published. That's why position files have been so important to get a hold of--they were suppose to be the real picture of district personnel spending as of the day the file was run. This position file is just as dishonest as those budgets. With millions of dollars allocated to individual positions, there's no accountability as to how these funds are to be spent. Thanks George, for this important story.

By: Retired Principal

Retired Principal

George, these are not annual salaries, they are budget lines or bucket lines.

By: George N. Schmidt

Position File has become corrupted

To 'retired principal' -- yes and no.

I made a FOIA request in August for the Position File.

On October 2, I called CPS and was told it was ready in CD form, as I had requested. My youngest son and I got downtown to CPS headquarters just after Chicago had been voted down for the Olympics, went upstairs to the Law Department (which is where the "Freedom of Information Office" now is), were given the CD with the 'Position File' on it, and left the Loop.

I came back to the office, left the child with something to do, decided to postpone some other work, and reformatted the material on the CD so that I could sort and locate the information more readily. CPS locks these Excel spreadsheets. They claimed that 'People Soft' requires it. I had to copy and paste all 51,000 lines into a new spreadsheet before I could do any analysis. After that was done and checked (the simplest way is to do a SUM and make sure you have the same number of lines) I did what it usually my first SORT (salaries, descending). That usually gives us the list of highest paid people in CPS, with the CEO (once upon a time, the general supt.) at the top.

I was blown away when 540 positions showed up higher than Ron Huberan's $230,000, as I'm reporting.

Now about this claim that the Position File is no longer the Position File (which CPS officials have been peddling since people began talking about the first story I posted here)...

I have been getting the CPS 'Position File' for 20 years, since I first learned of its existence during my work on the 1989 'Budget Transition Team' during the first "school reform school board" appointed by Richard M. Daley. (I worked under Bill Singer and Diana Lauber on that summer job, which revised the entire $2 billion budget in time for the School Finance Authority to receive it by August 1, 1989).

What does this have to do with your observation, which is accurate and not accurate?

What CPS gave me was what I was told was the 'Position File.' What I analyzed came directly from that document. Now some CPS officials (off the record to date to me, although I'm tempted to quote them on the record, but we honor that) are claiming the 'Position File' I was given is not really the 'Position File' in the sense that CPS has historically created and updated the 'Position File.'

Ditto, the 'bucket' stuff, which needs a lot more explanation than your one-liner.

So, for the first time in history (I was told the 'Position File' has always existed, and became computerized during the 1970s) we have a 'Position File' that is not a 'Position File.'

Sorry, doubletalk doesn't clarify anything, and adding to the doubleltak by talking about 'buckets' only adds to reader confusion.

I have asked to interview CPS officials about this budget document — whatever its name is this week.

I have also asked foe the real Position File, now that they are claiming that the 'Position File' they provided to me in response to my very precise FOIA request for a Position File is not really a Position File.

I've also suggested that CPS post the true and complete Position File every three months on the CPS Website (redacting only Social Security numbers). It would clarify a lot.

It would also help CPS achieve transparency (like just about every other school district in Illinois, and like New York, which published all public employee salaries on the Web), which CPS claims it wants.

We'll see what happens.

As it now stands, what I wrote above is based on the Position File budget document.

CP"S damage control since I published this story a week ago has been interesting. That silliness about 'buckets' helped sink a Sun-Times report based on my reporting, for example, but what's new; the Sun-Times is in the tank with Ron Huberman and has been since the days of Duncan and before that Vallas. (Who can forget how we were treated to quotes from Paul Vallas's mother in the Sun-Times to prove he was qualified to run the city's public schools.

That's another story for another time.

Meanwhile, I stand by the story published here, await CPS interviews with top budget officials, and expect to be publishing many more stories based on that document.

And finally, I expect to get a 'real' Position File from CPS in response to my FOIA (which was nearly two months ago) so that my collection going back two decades is not polluted by a 'Position File' that isn't really a Position File even though it was called a Position File by law when CPS complied with the Freedom of Information Act (better late than never) by providing me with what I had asked for:

A Position File.

By: principal

These aren't higher paid cps employees

These are citywide bucket numbers. Most of these people are parents that coach elementary sports teams and are paid a $400-$500 stipend at the end of a coaching season. These are not salaried employees. These millon dollar buckets pay thousands of people each year. You should say something positive about sports and security expenditures once in a while. It is money well spent.

By: George N. Schmidt

Why anonymous doesn't help here...

Back to 'retired principal.'

The simplest fact is, you can't say these aren't 'higher paid CPS employees' any more than I can say that each of them received a check for the amount on their budget lines this schhol year. And I called two of them as soon as I saw this list and asked whether they had received notification that their names were on this list next to dollar amounts in the millions.

Both were surprised to hear about these data entries.

And neither of those two (or the dozens of others my friends are calling) was asked if their names could be utilized by CPS on a 'Position File' 'bucket' list that may or may not be either. Fact is, as I report here, I requested the Position File and this is what I got from CPS on October 2, 2009, in response to that request. It was from their spreadsheet, not our imagination here at Substance.

I've respected some of the stuff you've shared elsewhere, so you get this much time this morning before I run over to the High School Fair.

But...

This is my 'over and out' response.

If you are a 'retired principal' (as you say both here and in other blogs), you've by now noticed that a large number of the people listed in those Position Numbers you call 'buckets' are neither security people or sports people (i.e., volunteer parents who coach part-time). They are retired principals (like yourself) or teachers on leave (like Molly Carroll at CTU) who work in neither sports nor security.

If you are a 'retired principal' (as you say), you also know that each Position Number is supposed to be unique and auditable. A Position Number (and the entire Position File) that is used as a 'place holder' corrupts the entire purpose and function of the Position File and makes the budget an impossibility.

If you are a 'retired principal' (as you say), you also know that getting or losing a Position Number is (or should be) a major event — not something to utilize as a place holder.

As to your suggestion that Substance talk positively about safety and security or sports administration, what's the point of that. In every job category at CPS, there are hundreds (or thousands) of positive stories every day (except maybe at the CEO level — both CEOs — and 'Performance Management'). Heck, most of us on staff here could even find something decent to say about a few of the new 'Chief Area Officers,' even though a growing number of them have no business supervising principals (like you say you once were) let along being in some of the most important executive positions in the third largest school system in the USA.

Or now you're going to suggest that Pedro Martinez's shake-and-bake Broad Fellowship or Rick Mills's years in the U.S. Army suddenly qualify them to be, in effect, district superintendents.

Sorry, we'll leave the Happy Talk to others.

What we're discussing here is very very serious business.

CPS has finally been sued because they screwed up the payroll and position reconciliations so badly that they can't give the CTPF an accurate accounting of what people (retired, like you) since 2007 are entitled to. That case is still pending, and it wasn't even filed until July 2009 although the problems first became evident in June or July 2007.

CPS has also been sued because the financial geniuses who ran the system after Arne Duncan took over decided (in our opinion, in violation of Illinois law and Board policy) to invest their extra dollars lying around in derivatives. As we've reported, CPS lost their legal case on that one in bankruptcy court in New York City on September 15, when the judge ruled against CPS in the Lehman bankruptcy.

Sorry.

Stop quibbling and think about it.

If the 'Position File' has been undermined, everyone who has ever drawn a paycheck from CPS is facing potential problems and has to be his or her own bookkeeper for a long time to come. If, for example, that check Molly Carroll received from CPS in August (and which we reported from the August Board meeting when Marilyn Stewart raised it to the Board) is reported to the IRS as 'income,' Molly has to explain it to the feds, not at a meeting of Chicago's Miracle Management Team and Miracle School Reform Board of Education.

And if our suspicions are right about how the reorganization of CPS payroll and financial records are even a hundredth true down from our worst case scenarios, the outsourcing of these functions, under the orgy of privatization that CPS has been doing since 1995, will be costing hundreds of millions of dollars for decades to come — and bedeviling tens of thousands of teachers today, and into their retirement.

If I were you, and If you are a 'retired principal' (as you say), you know that last week a bunch of principals faced massive reorganizations in their school because of the way CPS tightly restricts Position Numbers -- at least for the schools. To defend the practice (if that's what it is) of loading fictional names into position numbers for purposes of creating "buckets" deserves a second look. And a third. And not just from me.

That's enough for one morning.

By: Retired Principal

Citywide Bucket Numbers

George, these are citywide bucket numbers! I understand your point, you want the real position files so you embarrassed CPS with this article. Good for you! But, these are citywide bucket numbers.CITYWIDE PRINCIPAL PREPARATION & DEVELOPMENT & MISCELLANEOUS BUCKET- ($1,483,001.00): John Butterfield, Position# 298302, Unit# 13815, Title Position-Citywide Principal Preparation & Development & Miscellaneous, Amount Spent-$29,055.00; Melver Scott, #298302, #13815, Citywide Principal Preparation & Development & Miscellaneous, Amount Spent- $19,887.50; Arthur Slater, #298302, #13815, Citywide Principal Preparation & Development & Miscellaneous, Amount Spent- $45,743.75. SPORTS CITYWIDE HOURLY BUCKET- ($2,225,000.00): Glenn Johnson, #298360, #13737, Sports Citywide Hourly, Amount Spent- $10,241.80; George Stanton, #298360, #13737, Sports Citywide Hourly, Amount Spent- $0.00. George, I'm certain that you know this. Why are you writing this article this way?

By: Retired Principal

George's Response To Position Files

George, I do see your response. CPS does need to correct its budget practices!

By: 20th day closings

This list

This still makes me sick retired principal--we are laying off teachers and APs and princials--ans all these newer retireees are making ALL of this money besides the pension--this is wrong and good for George for pointng this out. This should make those of us who are hard and dedicated workers, begging for jobs, fighting mad!

Thank you George! Really--who else is out there even telling half of the story?

By: George N. Schmidt

Charter schools as 'pushout factories'. Call Substance.

A year ago, Johns Hopkins University did a study calling urban general high schools 'dropout factories.' For their reward, they became partners with the Chicago Teachers Union in a new high school the union is doing.

Charter schools are the real factories, only we should call them "Pushout Factories." They push out students who don't conform, while the city's general high schools have to take those students, no questions asked, with fewer resources.

So after you call Patrick Rocks and get the usual CPS Law Dept, runaround, call Substance or e-mail us with the details of the pushouts. As Jim Vail is reporting, UNO and CICS alone pushed out more than 500 children last year -- while claiming they are better than real public schools.

We need to talk with everyone who has been screwed this way -- families and children -- and then publish their stories. It may not change things overnight, but at least the truth will have a little more chance of surviving against the Big Lie, the Bigger Lie, and the Biggest Lie.

Substance: 773-725-7502

Csubstance @ aol.com

Don't call if you are not willing to tell us who your are. We may report without naming people, but we don't talk with people who are not honest with us.

By: Retired Principal

I Post Only As Retired Principal

George, I only post as Retired Principal, here and anywhere else! The post from "principal" is not me. I am fighting the fight against CPS for all of their wrong practices. I'm also "rubbing shoulders with the big boys" CPS, that's why I don't blog in my real name. Over the years you have published many letters and articles that I have written in Substance, UNDER MY REAL NAME! We are both on the same side! Tell Sharon I said hello.

By: Margaret Wilson

Retired teacher

I was listening to the Board meeting on TV today and their new violence prevention program sounds pretty good. They are using stimulus funds from the feds to target 27 schools (all high school). One of the things that hit my ear is that they promised not to recommend any more school closings or reorganizations without seeing what the impact would be on gang violence. If they keep the promise, it should help. George, what do you think of the new program?

By: kugler

$100,000.00 - Part Time Security

Mosqueda, Raoul

271967

53101

Marie Sklodowska Curie Metro H

Part Time Security

Start Date

2009-01-05

Budgeted Salary

$100,000.00

Salary to Date

$4,773.95

must be nice

By: Zeta

The issue is trust and knowledge!

Dear Retired Teacher,

I am no as versed as George on this issue but would like to comment on your question to him.

The program sounds good just as REN 2010 sounded good. The question is whether they can be trusted or even if they have the knowledge to actually implement their programs. I was there in 2002 and was willing to leave my job if it was going to make life better for children. However, that is not what happened and the children were used as pawns in the game to gentrify their neighborhoods.

When CPS announces a program usually there is a sinister plot or under current behind every program they have. It's always self serving and about them acquiring power and money. They see CPS as the new CASH COW for them since they have exhausted all the money from the private sector. The mind set of the individuals in charge is the question.

Also, Why bring programs into the community and develop them for children when they are unwilling to get input from the parents and community where these children

Live.

It is so disrespectful to the community and parents when programs designed to "help" your children end up hurting them. This is what happened with the Derion Albert situation. Derion's life had to be sacrificed to bring light to an every day occurrence of violence endured on a daily basis by children. Nothing was done to help the children until that video of the murder went out and embarrassed the mayor.

Even after Derion's death with out cries from the community, the mayor still wanted to keep students out of Carver which is five minutes from their home. He didn't care about the horrible conditions the children had to endure; he just wanted to make his point.

The attitude that prevails at CPS is one where they think they know our children, have solutions for our lives and make plans without consulting us, plans that we have to live with. We have to live in the mess they create, they don't.

Mayor Daley and Huberman have never taught a

day in their lives. They don't have a child who has ever had to attend some of these "Nut Factories" they have created. Those of us who have taught in these communities, live in the community and have raised children who are CPS graduates can tell them what is wrong. Do you think they will listen? They want to hire some high paid consultant from who knows where to come in and get paid $5,000,000 to tell our story. Of course these people have a biased view point and don't even like or respect the community they are studying. Then after spending millions, the children's lives are messed up. The community is more violent and they have made millions of dollars and left the mess behind.

How insulting!

By: Richard

Spreadsheet Please?

Since I am a numbers guy (I've taught a few thousand people to use Excel) I'd appreciate your emailing me the spreadsheet where the data came from.

As it is, I'm trying to parse the 500 "millionaires" into an Excel spreadsheet so I can analyze the data with a pivot table.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thank you so much for the fine article.

By: Richard

Budgeted but not Paid???

Worse than I realized...

Budgeted salaries are immense, greater than Ron Huberman's.

But there is little data on the amount spent.

Does that mean these 500 or so employees had huge salaries budgeted but haven't been paid? Why isn't paid data on this file?

Or have employees been paid but no one bothered to include that data?

When I taught spreadsheets years ago, I taught classes to put their name on a spreadsheet. Did anyone at the CPS put their name on this data?

Thanks.

By: George N. Schmidt

Spreadsheet requests

November 19, 2009

Blogger ("Richard"):

We generally share information with our subscribers, and have regularly published letters from subscribers who agree to sign their names.

We generally follow the conventions of Blognation in our comments section, which functions like a blog.

However, any request for the information being discussed here is best discussed after you file a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with CPS for the "position file" budget. We just received a second version of that document, much shorter than the first. (More than 6,000 lines shorter, to be precise). The reason I'm asking others to utilize FOIA is not only that the law becomes much more tight in January 2010, but I want other people to be trying to get these documents to review the same information we are seeing here.

This is a huge story, and the fact that the Chicago Sun-Times decided to avoid it after being told a fairy tale by Monique Bond when they began inquiring into the data on that "Position File" just shows the trouble we're in. If you ever meet Mary Mitchell, ask her what year she was ordered never to write nasty stories about the people who had taken over CPS; it dates the beginning of the rise of her star, which continues on those terms to this day. Instead of writing and running the story on the "Position File" that I'm keeping up on this thread, Rosalind Rossi simply took the first puerile explanation offered by CPS from an official source and then ducked off the story complete. Nothing new there, either.

What follows is on a first pass...

I have asked to interview the Board's "acting" chief financial officer. It would be a joke for Ron Huberman to even try to answer any questions about the Board's budget at this point in history. He's programmed to do that coy smile and repeat his talking points about the "$475 million deficit" this year and the "$900 million deficit for next year." As long as Chicago's corporate media continues to function as a conduit for those lies, little else will be forthcoming, at least from CPS this side of a major criminal investigation, with serious investigative budgets and powers and ultimately grand juries all around.

Why can't an "acting" head of such and such do much in 2009. In the past six month, dozens of people with decades' long records and actual education training have been purged ruthlessly by the Huberman team (which has neither expertise, experience, or credentials; they are gauleiters for City Hall, nothing more).

It seems just about everyone downtown is "acting" nowadays; another Huberman ploy to keep people afraid in Bullydom, I suspect. That, by the way, is one of the names being passed around about the central office; 27-year-old bullies prancing around bullying veteran teachers and administrators, etc., etc. that kind of juvenile frat house kind of stuff. Well, most "acting" guys and gals are literally afraid of their next paycheck.

Not all of them have Broad Foundation clout to land them big paying jobs elsewhere (like Pedro Martinez, the former CFO). Pedro is one of those who should be brought back here to go under oath and explain how all this stuff happened -- from the investments in derivatives to these crazy "position files" -- but who will probably live happily ever after under Broad and Obama patronage 1,000 miles away from Chicago.

Anyway, the second "Position File" we've received under FOIA (dated November 12, 1009) raises as many questions as the first one, perhaps more. But no one is available to answer those questions in detail, based on actual budget realities and experience. (There is none of that among the top ten people now running CPS, by the way; the Huberteam is all about a very corrupt version of "data driven management" which we've already characterized as "data driven drivel...").

And as I've been reporting, in the more than 20 years I've been studying these budget documents (basically, the position files; the W-2 files; the Proposed Budget, the Final Budget, and the CAFR), I've never seen such a mess. The CAFR began warning about these problems, mostly in footnotes, but as long as the major reporting on CPS is done by people who are both numerically challenged and ethically compromised, little will change.

That should frighten everyone both in and outside the system.

Basically, it seems that 15 years of patronage and crony capitalism under mayoral control has finally compromises every major document CPS needs to operate. The hints were everywhere, from the illegal derivatives investments done during the Duncan years by CPS to the burgeoning "reserve" (now diced into at least two pieces to hide it) that grew during the latter Duncan years because of the real estate bubble.

If CPS has completely compromised its central financial systems, as it now seems more and more likely, with all the outsourcing and insane patronage and privatization schemes, it will take ten years to straighten out these messes. And that ten years will only begin from the day someone seriously takes over to straighten out the messes.

But it will continue to get worse as we speak, because of one word: Daley.

For now, everything is subordinate to the Daley administration's patronage whims and worse (outright corruption of the old fashioned kind, only now made easier because of what can be buried using computers).

Nothing will begin to get cleaned up until after Daley is removed as Chief Education Officer and Patronage Czar over public education in Chicago. And even after that happens, there will still be the lingering fear of talking about what was really going on among those who actually have first hand knowledge, so it will take some time beyond the end of the Daley years for the people who are still alive to talk truthfully about what the years 1995 through 2010 were really about during the "mayoral control" years at CPS.

At least by this point it's so tragically obvious to most people that the attempt by the Obama and Duncan administrations to export the "model" across the country is finding stiff resistance, even from places desperate for those "stimulus" dollars. What we saw on October 7 (and I reported from that City Hall press conference) was Washington, D.C. damage control. They were even making sure that Daley himself didn't rattle on too long with the TV cameras on. With this week's events, the national focus is becoming even more intense. It's one thing for CPS policies to keep adding to the teenage body count that Chicago made infamous, but quite another to lose the top school official without any reasonable explanation in a murky corner of Chicago in the dead of night. It one of us had proposed that script to HBO, we'd have been thrown out and told to go back to the days of the 1970s, Kolchak the Night Stalker and that stuff. Chicago -- with Renaissance 2010 and all that cool stuff -- is so Global City and all that. Why bring us back to the place on the river where Daley's ineptitude opened up the tunnels to the Great Flood?

Right. Municipal amnesia and fiction. Hand in hand. But the rest of the USA can't afford to follow these scripts, and most people can smell rats even before they begin gnawing on the expensive shoes of deceased public officials on dark November nights.

For students of history, this is now worse than it was during the Great Depression.

I say this knowing the history and having written as much of it as anyone the past quarter century or more. Despite the official version.

I did the last interview with Mary Herrick, who wrote the definitive book (The Chicago Schools, A Social and Political History) on Chicago public education corruption, racism, and class prejudices, before she died.

Today under mayoral control, it's crony capitalism, unbridled patronage, and completely corrupt privatization at its worst. And it's getting worse each year, as these budget documents and recent tragic events show.

Call us if you want the information. We're easy to find and talk to.

But nothing goes out to bloggers who don't use their own names.

By: Non board Employee

This article is so stupid and amounts are wrong

I dont know how something like this gets published. I know 5 people on this list and they are non board employees coaches that get only 1K - 4K to coach per season. No where near the 2M that they are posting. People are going to see this garbage and think people are making this much $$. I would like to know who over at the B of E released this garbage information. Some of this information should be considered private and not released to the public.

Get your information straight before publishing crap on the net.

Sincerely,

N B E

By: xian barrett

Missing the point

The board employees and journalists are not the same person. The story is not that people are making that much money. The story is that a member of the press used the freedom of information act to get public information and the Chicago Board of Education either is so deceitful or so neglectful that they just threw a bunch of false numbers on a spreadsheet and sent it out.\r\rIf you loaned your brother $100,000 for back mortgage payments, would you be satisfied if he came home with casino fixings and when you asked where the money went, he just handed you a nonsensical spreadsheet?\r\rWell, that\'s essentially what\'s happened here, but with a $6 billion operation. How is that not news?

By: Constantine Dactelides

Proud Educator!

Mr. Schmidt, sir..your story is a joke and I am insulted that you have me as a part of your lynch mob target... I was an Athletic Academic Counselor with the CPS Sports Department. I was actually employed by the National Football Foundation where I ran a program called Play It Smart. The NFF gave our grant money to the Sports Department (which they screwed with).....They actually still owe me almost $3,000 because they finagled with my payroll. If you want a story, look into that one...I will be addressing this issue soon through legal channels because you were not professional enough to get your facts straight before you put my name on this blacklist... I am a proud educator who would pay a teacher out of my own salary if I could...I have actually paid coaches to coach with me out of my pocket...Good Day and we will be in touch C. Dactelides

By: George N. Schmidt

CPS budget corruption and lies

March 6, 2011

We recently received a telephone call from an on line reader who came across our story about the "Millionaires List" (based on a CPS "Position File" provided to Substance under the Freedom of Information Act). Below is the e-mail we sent to him.

3/6/11

Dear Reader:

As you know from reading the "Millionaires List" (a story published in Substance and at www.substancenews.net more than a year and a half ago), your problem is not with us, but with Chicago Public Schools for having created that list and then provided it, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, to us as a "Position File."

Before we published that information, we doublechecked with CPS and they assured us that that was a current "Position File" (as we report). I also called several of the people listed to confirm that none of them had received that "salary" during the time in question. CPS not only refused to respond, prior to our publication, but continued to refuse to explain how they had concocted that budget file, which had traditionally been 100 percent accurate (as I note in a subsequent comment in response to the comments) and corrupted it so much.

We checked out that information prior to publication. Your legal problem is not with Substance, but with CPS for having tampered with one of its basic computer finance documents, as I reported.

The story remains, but the story, as was made clear in the story and subsequently as the "Comments" unfolded, is a story of how the Ron Huberman administration at CPS corrupted the school system's Position File in ways that had been thought unlikely (actually, impossible) prior to when they did it.

As you can learn, the accuracy of CPS budget documents for the past several years is in question. We have been the only people reporting those facts, as they unfold and come to our attention. In fact, it was my concern at the time that the people on the list know that they had been listed as such by their employer (not by Substance; we only reported what a governmental body provided under FOIA). One concern was that the data in the Position File would be misinterpreted by the IRS, as you worry. Later in the same school year, the Board of Education provided the "W-2 File" (the document listing all salaries paid subject to income taxes for that year) and the problem did not recur, so what they reported to the IRS was considerably different from how they managed their finances within their fiscal year. That, I suspect, is between CPS and the IRS.

Your legal issues, thus, are also with CPS. Should you get some resolution from them after making such inquiries as you see fit, we will be glad to follow up with another story on how they misreport their financial documents, even in response to FOIA requests such as the one I submitted that gave rise to that story.

Thank you for your interest in Substance and for your concern. We share it.

George N. Schmidt,

Substance

By: C.D

Thanks for the quick response

Thanks for the quick response to my inquiry this morning, I appreciate your recent posting...it helped me see this in a clearer light. I am proceeding to discuss this situation with the Chicago Public Schools. They actually still owe me money from my work. I worked tirelessly reaching out to the kids, parents and community building communnity programs and after-school programs for the CPS student-athletes only to be short-changed my last paycheck.

By: M. Qaiyim

2009 budget article was inaccurate

My name is listed in this article, and trust me I do not make the money listed in the article. I'm a cheerleading coach and receive a stipend twice each year.

By: George N. Schmidt

We reported that 2009 CPS budget numbers were inaccurate

It's nice to know that people are still finding interesting articles that Substance published several years ago, but as you can see reading the comments from back then, we knew that the figures (which were from CPS, not us) were inaccurate from the beginning. What we reported was what they were saying in their own documents, as an example of how they have been lying in their budget documents, without any kind of accountability.

What was true three CEOs ago (Ron Huberman) and under a previous mayor is still true today. And when CPS tries to push its Proposed Budget on the public next month, we will see those lies again.

Thanks, reader, for bringing this wonderful article back to life, but if you read both the article and the comments from then closely, you can see that we were showing how CPS corrupts its budget numbers, cynically assuming that the public won't care.

The same is true today, with other reporters (not Substance) simply repeating the mindless (and mind-numbing) claim that CPS is facing a "deficit" of $600 to $700 million." Like the listing of your million dollar salary back when Ron Huberman was Chicago's chief educator, this year's "deficit" claim is another of those big lies, only this year the chief educator is that guy who keeps repeating "College and career readiness" and "Common Core" like a programmed furry thingy from Toys R Us.

By: Wendy LoBurgio

rights to use my name!!!!

To the person who wrote this article.....What gives you the right to publish my name and untrue info without my permission!!!! yes, I work for C.P.S, yes, it's in the sports department, but give me a break, a seasonal part time coach does not make anywhere near the amount that almost everyone on your list is stated to earn. I am guessing that you're trying to embarrass C.P.S because they sent you the wrong format of what you needed, but give it a break and admit that you know that those are the bucket list numbers and retract what you've said about our salaries and remove our names from your list....I WISH I WOULD HAVE FOUND THIS ARTICLE SOONER, YOU HAVE NO RIGHT TO PUBLISH MY NAME WITHOUT MY PERMISSION!!!!

VERY TICKED OFF IN CHICAGO!!!!!

By: George N. Schmidt

Public information is public...

Had you read the article and the comments completely, you would know that your name appeared in a public document produced by CPS. Your argument is with the administration that put those lies into that document, not with Substance for publishing the lies. Sorry, but that list was what CPS provided -- not something we made up. Therefore, TICKED OFF or not, you are screaming at the wrong people.

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