Karen Lewis (Twitter)
A Chicago Tribune poll shows that Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s approval rating is fading while that of Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis is ramping up. The election is in February.
In a head-to-head match-up, the Tribune’s survey found Ms Lewis with 43 percent backing to 39 percent for Mr Emanuel, with 14 percent undecided. Ms Lewis’s advantage is just outside the 3.5 percentage-point margin of error for the poll, which consisted of cellphone and landline interviews with 800 registered city voters from Aug 6–12.
The paper attributed the mayor’s decline to disapproval among the city’s voters of his handling of the public schools, especially the 2012 teachers’ strike and the nation’s largest-ever mass closure of public schools.
However, Mr Emanuel said the low approval rating was linked to Chicago’s sluggish economy. “There will be a time to look at and analyze poll numbers,” the paper quoted him as saying. “The numbers that are on my desk are about early childhood education, our community college system, making sure we have more small businesses than we had before. We have another election before mine.
“When the time comes, we’ll deal with all types of different things, and I’ll tell the story of what we’ve done and what more work we have to do and what we have to focus on and what the policies are for the opportunities and challenges that face the people of Chicago.”
The people of Chicago already know what opportunities they have and what challenges they face, I would think. And opportunity doesn’t come from charter schools, the Chicago Sun-Times reported last week, despite the mayor’s well-documented push for an increase in the number of charter schools in the city.
“In 2013, CPS schools had a higher percentage of elementary students who exceeded the standards for state tests for reading and math than the schools that are privately run [mainly charters] with Chicago taxpayer funds,” the Sun-Times observed.
Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Emanuel’s schools chief executive, was quoted as saying that the district is intent on holding “every school, regardless of school type, accountable to rigorous academic standards.
“Our top priority is ensuring our students graduate 100 percent college-ready and 100 percent college-bound,” she said.
Again, test scores, especially those on the ISAT used for this comparison, are invalid and unreliable. It makes no difference whether they show totally public schools outperforming charter schools, which are funded with public dollars but are run without public oversight. Even though that’s an outcome I would love to report, I can’t report it because it’s based on test scores and nothing more.
But the real problem here is Ms Byrd-Bennett’s insistence that all of Chicago’s high school graduates head to college. Give it up. We have reported extensively on the setting of unrealistic goals and the harmful effect this has on students’ long-term success and happiness. Chicago Public Schools need a new CEO, which means Chicago needs a new mayor.
Go Karen!