WTF?! (and WTF??!) is Bob Boik — and where did those crazy ideas come from? Brizard's Longest School Day edicts for high schools aimed at destroying the city's remaining sports and extra-curricular programs
"What the f*** is this?" and "Who is Bob Boik?" were two questions echoing across Chicago on May 2, 2012, as teachers and principals, especially at the city's remaining real general public high schools — tried to figure out what kind of "LSD" top offiicials at Chicago's public schools were using when they sent out their plans for the LSD (which is what many teachers and even principals are calling the "Longer School Day") being touted in the abstract by Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his dwindling number of acolytes and sycophants at CPS and across the city. So it was probably fitting that the Chicago Public Schools administrator who unleashed the news on the city's high school teachers and principals regarding the absurd Longest School Day edicts from the top had been in Chicago less than two months and in office the same amount of time. But that's what's happening as the era of Rahm Emanuel enters its second year at Chicago's Public Schools. The orders from the "top" at CPS were issued by a guy named Bob Boik, who is the most recent "Chief of Staff" at CPS.
Robert Boik's appointment as "Chief of Staff" to Jean-Claude Brizard continues the replacement of veteran Chicago educators with commissars from the Broad Foundation and its outlets and training centers. Boik's most recent job has been to help facilitate the destruction of the Detroit public schools and the elimination of Detroit's public schools unions, including the once formidable Detroit Federation of Teachers. Above, the Board Report appointing Boik to Chicago, which makes his position effective April 16, 2012. Boik's predecessor, Andrea Saenz, had been in office less than one year. Boik is one of at least four "chiefs of staff" currently working at six-figure salaries in CPS central offices, during the year when CPS officials, including Brizard and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have been swearing in public that bureaucracy was cut. In fact, it has been expanding at an unprecedented rate since Rahm Emanuel appointed Jean-Clause Brizard as CEO of CPS in May 2011.So as principals and teachers tore their hair and an enormous "WTF" echoed across Chicago, it was worth noting, for the record at least, that Bob Boik is almost the most FNG of all the FNGs of the Brizard administration. Boik was appointed by Jean-Claude Brizard (approved by the Chicago Board of Education on March 28, 2012, effective April 16, 2012) in the scramble to fill the vacancies left as more and more central office administrators (even those who were part of Brizard's original "team" bailed out on CPS in the past four months).
