One “mission” is led by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who is working hard to provide fresh opportunities for kids stuck in failing city schools.

The other is led by Karen Lewis, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, who is determined to kill the expansion of school choice in the city, so her union can keep students (and the tax money attached to them) trapped in subpar neighborhood schools.

And now, just as the documentary is released to the public, Emanuel, Lewis and their respective teams have started negotiating a new labor contract that will go a long way toward determining the future of Chicago Public Schools.

The current teachers union contract expires June 30. Negotiations on a new pact are expected to take months, perhaps even beyond the expiration date of the current contract.

Lewis had made it clear that teachers want higher salaries and more expensive benefits, despite the district’s estimated $720 million budget deficit and the continued threat of layoffs for young teachers and cancellation of student programs.

Emanuel is dedicated to holding down costs and using limited resources to provide better school options for underserved students.

In short, the mayor of Chicago is on a mission to improve education in Chicago. The union is on selfish mission to preserve a failed system that provides a guaranteed income for thousands of teachers and a steady flow of dues money to the CTU.
A better future for one of the nation’s worst public school systems is hanging in the balance.

Documentary sets the scene in Chicago

To gain a good understanding of the state of affairs in Chicago Public Schools, take a few minutes and watch ” A Tale of Two Missions,” narrated by former National Public Radio and current Fox News analyst Juan Williams.

Williams talks about a city that has invested heavily in charter schools in recent years, due to the persistent failure of union-dominated traditional public schools.

“Some argue that the solution is simple – just spend more money (on traditional schools),” Williams says in the film. “But others are convinced that continuing to chase good money after bad cannot continue.

“When parents are allowed to choose, schools will have the incentive to compete. And competition breeds flexibility, adaptability and innovation. But school choice also poses a significant threat to the status quo, and no single entity profits more from the status quo than teachers unions.

“They fight and resist education reform however and whenever it is found.”

Williams focuses on the success of one charter school, Noble Street College Prep, which spends less per student than CPS and boasts a graduation rate of 99 percent, compared to CPS’s woeful 56 percent.

The Noble Street school has a non-union workforce, which allows it to control labor costs and pursue groundbreaking education strategies without the permission of union bosses.

The school’s environment is focused on success. It has a much longer school day than traditional Chicago schools. It has a strict dress and conduct code. It’s curriculum is focused on college preparation and acceptance.

The school is currently at full capacity with 6,500 students, and has a long waiting list of parents who want their children enrolled.

“Noble has the most successful high school I have ever seen,” Mayor Emanuel tells Williams in the film. “They’re not just doing their job. They’re on a mission.”

The documentary addresses the teacher union’s effort to fight the mayor’s plan to add 10 new quality charter schools like Noble. Williams points to a massive rally last October in the streets of Chicago, where Lewis and her cronies tried to paint education reformers as profiteers intent on ripping off the state education budget.

The true source of their anger is greed. The more students who attend charter schools, the less state aid for traditional schools. The less state aid for traditional schools, the less money that’s available for teachers and their unions.

They are the defenders of the failed status quo, because it works to their financial advantage.
How well it works for the children of the city is not their concern.

“This is a tale of two cultures,” Williams says in the film. “One is interested in maintaining its power and influence, while the other is intent on preparing children for life. One is interested in maintaining the mechanics of collective bargaining and union contracts, while the other is intent on graduating every single student.

“This is the story of a Chicago miracle and the people who would kill it.”

CTU, mayor on a contract collision course

Contract negotiations between the city and the teachers union are scheduled to begin this week.
Lewis tipped her hand about her negotiation objectives at a recent press conference.

“We can share with you the fact that we will be advocating for the practices, support and resources which all of our schools, including our neighborhood schools, need and which our students deserve.”

Translation – more money for teachers. Lewis’ press conference resulted in a very honest headline posted on the CBS Chicago website: “CPS Teachers Want Pay Hikes, More Benefits.”

How that would somehow benefit students, we have no idea.

We were encouraged by a response from CPS spokeswoman Becky Carroll, who issued a statement saying, “Our students have been shortchanged by this system for too long, and their academic needs must come first. Our goal is to negotiate a contact that treats our teachers fairly and as professionals, but also one that is negotiated in the best interest of our students, parents and taxpayers during these difficult financial times.”

If the mayor’s short track record is any indication, he will stand his ground at the bargaining table. In less than a year in office, he has cancelled a scheduled 4 percent raise for teachers, called for a merit pay system that would funnel more money to the most effective teachers, and announced the implementation of a longer academic day for all schools starting next fall.

He has called for the closing of several failing schools, a turnaround program for other schools that includes the replacement of staff, and the opening of 10 new charter schools to give students an escape route from failing schools.

We believe Mayor Emanuel is ready to fight the union on behalf of the city’s children.
Unfortunately the public will not be able to watch the negotiations unfold. Lewis has made it clear that the union plans to make its demands during closed negotiations, keeping citizens in the dark until a new agreement is hammered out.

By that time it will be too late for the people to have any useful input.

We admonish the mayor to let taxpayers know what the union wants and how much it would cost, both in terms of money and quality education.

Such a tactic may anger the union, and result in a charge of “bargaining in bad faith.” But it’s more important for Emanuel to keep faith with the taxpayers who fund the schools than the union bosses who bleed them dry.

See the internet-only abridged version here:

While the fight for school choice rages across the nation, perhaps no better example exists than that of the Windy City.  Traditional alliances are breaking down.  Both political parties are pushing for education reform and expanded school choice.  The status quo is under attack, because most reasonable people understand that thousands of Chicago students are trapped in failing schools.

But the education establishment, led by the radical Chicago Teachers Union, is not willing to give an inch to allow better choices for underserved students. And the union still has enough money, influence and legal standing to make reform efforts difficult to implement.

The film features the Noble Street College Prep charter school and the amazing results its teachers and leaders are delivering for students and parents of Chicago.  It also exposes the entrenched educational establishment bent on stifling school choice options and preserving its monopoly on state education dollars.

Being released during National School Choice Week, the film runs approximately 35 minutes and is geared towards generating discussion about the role of our schools and what obstacles can be overcome when school culture is focused on student success rather than adult demands.

DVDs of the film will be available exclusively at http://www.schoolchoiceweek.com/event_centerpieces.

An internet-only abridged version can be seen here at twomissionsmovie.com.

Juan’s voice cuts through the daily back-and-forth and issues a searing indictment of a system that is largely focused on the needs of adults.

It is our hope that this will provide the public with an unvarnished analysis of the state of our schools, as well as a glimpse into what could be, if the teachers unions would drop their consistent opposition to reform.

The Washington Post’s Jena McGregor brings the bad news.

The revolving door at the White House is swinging again, and this time, Chief of Staff William Daley is on his way out. Many seemed to be taken off guard: Obama says it wasn’t easy news to hear. Others said official Washington was surprised by the news.

They shouldn’t have been. It seems painfully obvious that Daley was wrong in the role….

His departure calls into question Obama’s judgment when picking one of the key posts for his administration. While addressing the relationship with the business community and Republicans may have been an important task in late 2010, it wasn’t necessarily the right one for the president’s chief of staff. That post is, in effect, the White House’s chief operating officer—the person responsible for being the president’s most senior adviser and the person in charge of all West Wing administrative and operational matters.

Daley, considered of the moderate, Clinton-wing of the Democrat Party, was heralded as the right man for the job by Obama and the Democrats when he brought him in. Or, perhaps he felt he needed him to curry favor with Wall Street to raise cash for his coming re-election campaign. Whatever the reason, Daley never caught on and, for his job of governing America, Obama simply picked the wrong man. He couldn’t even get along with Harry Reid, let alone Republicans.

Critics of the appointment worry that it means Obama will favor business over consumers in the days ahead.

“Daley would act as a stovepipe for the interests of Wall Street, as if bankers didn’t have enough influence already,” says Paul Blumenthal of the Sunlight Foundation, a government watchdog group. The appointment “would plant an official emissary from Wall Street into one of the most important jobs in Washington.”

“It would be nice if one of these appointments didn’t have a Wall Street connection,” says Roger Hickey of the liberal group Campaign for America’s Future.

Daley’s background makes it clear that he’s squarely in the moderate wing of the Democratic Party. His appointment comes as the White House works to respond to voters who turned scores of Democrats out of Congress last fall and gave control of the House to Republicans.

One can read more about his replacement, Jack Lew, here. Unlike the moderate Daley, Lew cut his political teeth supporting McCarthy as a kid and is from the more liberal wing of the party. However, that didn’t prevent him from functioning as COO of a hedge fund that bet on the housing market collapse. As Obama’s revolving door for staff keeps swinging, perhaps he’ll get it right, eventually.

Lew grew up in New York City. As a 12-year-old, he campaigned for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential election. “It was also my introduction to seeing that you could make a difference in people’s lives through politics,” he told the New York Times in 1999.

Lew’s faculty adviser at Carleton College was Paul Wellstone, an outspoken liberal who eventually represented Minnesota in the U.S. Senate until dying in a 2002 plane crash. Lew graduated from Harvard and earned a law degree from Georgetown.

He worked as an aide to Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Mass.) from 1974 to 1975. He then was a senior policy adviser to House Speaker Thomas (Tip) P. O’Neill Jr. (D-Mass.) from 1979 to 1987. “I grew up in many ways on the Hill in Mr. O’Neill’s office,” Lew told the Times.

Lew worked at Citigroup from 2006 to 2009. The Huffington Post reported that in 2008, he served as chief operating officer of Citigroup Alternative Investments, investing in a hedge fund that bet on the housing market to collapse….

In 2009, another RockPort investment, Satcon technologies, partnered with SunPower Corporation and Exelon Energy to build a 41-acre solar array in Chicago. SunPower, recently covered here, is the recipient of a controversial $1.2 billion DOE loan guarantee. SunPower also worked with Satcon on another government-funded solar project in Hawai’i.

Meanwhile, the DOE has doubled down on their loan program with a $646 million loan guarantee to Exelon Energy (who own the SunPower/Satcon project in Chicago). Exelon bought out the Antelope Valley Project from First Solar Energy after First Solar missed the DOE’s loan guarantee deadline and was denied an extension. In another interesting appearance, Jeffrey Immelt’s GE Energy Financial just bought out First Solar’s Desert Sunlight project after receiving a DOE guarantee for a portion of their $1.46 billion loan. It’s probably more than a matter of coincidence Exelon arose out of an $8.2 billion merger advised by Rahm Emanuel in 1999 and that White House political strategist David Axelrod is a former consultant for Exelon. Furthermore, Exelon executives were major contributors to Obama’s 2008 campaign, bundling several hundred thousand dollars in campaign contributions.

Beacon Power, who just filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy after receiving $67 million in stimulus loans and grants, was a major recipient of investment funding from “The Beacon Group”. The Beacon Group, a division of bank bailout recipient JP Morgan Chase, has also invested in RockPort Capital’s PowerSpan Energy. PowerSpan CEO Frank Alix was a White House guest for a December 2009 Jobs Summit, in addition to testifying in favor of carbon sequestration regulations in his March 2009 Congressional Testimony. In return for their government lobbying, PowerSpan enjoyed $50 million worth of financial backing from George Soros for their carbon sequestration technology five days after an EPA ruling established CO₂ as a regulated environmental pollutant.

In total, we have found more than $4.2 billion in preferential grants and loans to companies that either lobbied for or had conflicts of interest with the White House. The incestuous relationship between the Obama White House, RockPort Capital investments, and companies such as GE, Beacon Energy, and Exelon Energy suggest unethical, if not illegal, dispersion of taxpayer funds. Meanwhile, the White House is claiming executive privilege on Solyndra while dishing out more DOE loan guarantees to major supporters and donors.

The evidence presented coupled with the Obama Administration’s response to these scandals eliminate any doubt whether there was wrongdoing. Rather, it’s a question of whether Congressional Republicans and the MSM will let this administration slide out from yet another scandal, especially one as far-reaching as this.

On Monday, it emerged the Cook County Board endorsed Preckwinkle’s tobacco tax proposal by a 10-7 vote.  The Cook County Board is set to take a final vote on the proposed budget on Friday.

Now, it is being reported that separate to this proposed tax hike, Chicago aldermen are looking at their own tobacco tax hike. From the Chicago Trubune:

Two aldermen looking for last-minute ways to head off painful budget cuts proposed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel floated the idea Wednesday of extending the city’s cigarette tax to other tobacco products.

Ald. Matthew O’Shea, 19th, and Leslie Hairston, 5th, brought up that option at a City Council meeting in an effort to soften spending cuts at city libraries, mental health clinics and the 911 center.

[...]

Aldermen and administration officials weren’t sure how much new money could be raised by broadening the tobacco tax — as Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle plans to do so she can raise $12 million for the county next year.

One bright spot for Chicago tobacco users: Members of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s administration say that the proposal could not be pursued without changes in state law also being made.

When that strategy didn’t work, the union complained to its friends at the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board. In a quick decision, the board ruled 5-0 that the city was violating labor law by “luring teachers with inducements and hampering the efforts of union representatives… Because of this irreparable harm, it is necessary to immediately restore the status quo,” the board wrote in its ruling. The board will not seek to have the longer days cancelled in the 13 schools, but it has asked the Illinois attorney general to go to court to seek an injunction to prevent more schools from extending the school day.

So, the bureaucrats on this silly board are more interested in the “irreparable harm” done to the collective bargaining process than the immeasurable harm being done to students receiving a subpar education. This is a staggering illustration of the power of teachers’ unions and how they use collective bargaining to benefit themselves, regardless of how their actions affect children. Luckily, Illinois state law mandates longer school days for all public schools beginning next fall. The mayor felt an urgency to get started this year, but Lewis and company just wouldn’t hear of it.

If this all-too-true story doesn’t convince everyone that organized labor is bad for education, nothing will.

President Barack Obama’s friends in Occupy are clashing with Obama’s former White House chief of staff, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, in an ongoing protest at Chicago’s City Hall.

Activists are staging a sit-in outside Mayor Emanuel’s office, demanding to speak with him about dropping charges against Occupy activists who have been arrested for various offenses, including battery against a police officer.

Occupy organizers are calling their demonstration a defense of First Amendment rights.

Developing…