I remember how it was -- JR
New Report Details Massive Fraud and Abuse Allegations in Chicago Public Schools
On January 1, 2023, the Chicago Board of Education’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) issued its Fiscal Year 2022 Annual Report, which details allegations of widespread sexual abuse throughout Chicago Public Schools (CPS), rampant corruption, massive fraud, and other troubling findings.
According to the report, CPS received $2.8 billion in federal pandemic relief funds. To date, CPS has spent nearly 50 percent of that amount, with “77% of its $1.49 billion in pandemic relief funding expenditures to date on employee salaries and benefits.”
Much of that money has been allocated to CPS staff in the form of “Extra Pay.” As the report notes, “In 2021, Extra Pay hit nearly $74 million — a 17 percent increase from the most recent pre-pandemic calendar year of 2019. Over five years, Extra Pay jumped 74 percent — far more than the average teacher’s salary rose over a similar five-year period.”
What’s more, “Pre-pandemic versus post-pandemic Stipend expenditures systemwide more than tripled, jumping from $8.5 million in calendar year 2019 to $28.9 million in 2021.”
The report also documents wide-ranging fraud via “buddy punching,” wherein a CPS employee would clock in or out for other employees. In one particular case, a CPS employee earned more than $150,000 over four years in “Extra Pay” even though videos documented the employee was gambling in casinos while being compensated for “Extra Pay.”
CPS has a long history of misspending funds; however, the district has taken this to a whole new level in recent years after it received almost $3 billion in emergency funds that were supposed to be spent on reopening its schools in the wake of the pandemic.
As if engaging in financial fraud is not bad enough, an even more disturbing set of allegations concerning extensive adult-on-student sexual abuse was uncovered throughout CPS. Per the report, over the past four years, the OIG’s Sexual Allegations Unit (SAU) has investigated 1,733 cases of adult-on-student sexual abuse. In 2022 alone, SAU opened 477 cases of potential sexual abuse allegations. Since 2018, the SAU has confirmed more than 300 cases of adult-on-student sexual abuse in CPS. Strangely, only 16 of those cases have resulted in criminal charges.
Another red flag highlighted in the report documents the fact that CPS has a “chronic problem” mislabeling truant students as transfer students. Since 2014, the OIG has launched five probes into this ongoing issue, however, the problem persists. In 2022, the OIG uncovered “extensive evidence” that schools throughout the district have repeatedly marked students who have dropped out as transfers even though this violates state law and CPS policy.
“We have not been able to confirm or see any evidence that CPS is taking adequate corrective actions even when these audits bear out that schools are not in compliance with what they’re supposed to be doing to verify transfers or missing students,” the report notes.
Although the mislabeling accusations pale in comparison to the outright fraud and sexual abuse allegations, it matters because these students are unlikely to re-register after they have been coded as a transfer. In fact, data show that since CPS decided to shut down its schools for in-person learning during the pandemic, there has been an even more significant drop-off in student attendance across the district. As far as we know, hundreds, if not thousands of students have completely fallen off of CPS’ radar because the district has failed to “address the improper use of leave codes and the documentation of transfers and dropouts.”
Interestingly, the problems that have engulfed CPS in recent years have not occurred across the Windy City’s private schools. During the pandemic, the overwhelming majority of private and charter schools throughout Chicago maintained in-person learning, despite not receiving a single penny in federal pandemic relief funds. There have also been no bombshell reports of rampant sexual abuse allegations in Chicago’s many non-public schools. It also should be noted that Chicago’s private and charter schools have not been accused of mislabeling their students as transfers to hide the fact that they have dropped out.
Perhaps this report will convince more Chicago parents that school choice is the ultimate answer to the dysfunctional Chicago Public Schools racket. CPS is responsible for educating more than 350,000 students on an annual basis, yet it has shown itself to be wholly incapable of educating these young people, let alone keeping them safe from sexual assaults by CPS staff.
If this report, with all of its shocking claims, does not move the needle towards a school choice revolution in Chicago, the students will continue to pay the price as the so-called adults in the room plunder and destroy their futures.
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Every parent should fight back vs. the left’s war on merit
It used to be obvious that merit is part of achieving the American dream. But like it’s doing to so many self-evident things, the left is attempting to destroy this idea as it pursues a Sovietesque system of “equity.”
Parents might not see merit’s decline as a more pressing concern than their children being told they can be any gender they choose from day to day. Most kids are academically average. Why fight over merit when there are so many other ideological fights to be had?
Parents have to see merit as part and parcel of the left’s push to impose its ridiculous concepts on our kids.
The idea that everyone can have an equal outcome has been tried again and again in failed socialist countries. When the left succeeds in ending merit in a school, you can be sure the rest of the woke ideas parents abhor have already taken over the curriculum.
Beyond that, our schools’ loss of rigor has dumbed down our country, and the retreat from pursuing merit has slowed success for so many kids.
This isn’t theoretical. Nor is it accidental.
Virginia mom Asra Nomani recently discovered that in September 2020, her son received National Merit recognition, a prestigious honor given to a handful of kids across the country — but her son’s school, Thomas Jefferson HS for Science and Technology, hid it from the family.
The majority-Asian school is neck deep and drowning in leftist ideology, pursuing “equity,” equal outcomes for children based on the color of their skin. Asians are out, as TJ has simply too many successful ones. Nomani’s son was the wrong color, and the school’s racists decided he should not be presented with the award.
Learning this news two years too late, Nomani’s son was denied the ability to note the achievement on his college applications and seek scholarships that stem from this award. The school hurt his chances to succeed, and it did it on purpose.
Lest anyone think this is just one bad principal at one school, state officials are investigating more than a dozen schools in northern Virginia for doing the same thing.
In Sunday’s Post, Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin wrote that he’s proposed a bill “to eliminate the withholding of any recognition, award, or postsecondary scholarship eligibility earned by Virginia students” — “parents and students will be notified immediately about these honors.”
That’s a start. But the schools that harmed so many kids’ futures because they put their political ideology ahead of student success need to be punished, and everyone involved must be fired.
As Youngkin points out, Fairfax County has spent “$455,000 of taxpayer dollars to fund equity training in schools.” This is absurd and akin to setting nearly half a million of our tax dollars on fire. We can’t let this go on.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares has launched an investigation into whether these schools violated the students’ civil rights. It seems obvious they have, and accountability is necessary. Any school found to have withheld merit awards from children, for any reason, should have the choice of a fully new administration or losing its federal funding.
Schools receive this money to support kids’ education and success, not to impose their twisted Communist-like social system. If public schools can’t or won’t do that, they don’t deserve to exist.
The behavior of everyone involved in this scandal is so far beyond the pale, there can be no second chances. They deserve to lose it all.
The left treats our public schools like its personal fiefdom. This has to stop now. Parents should fight for school choice and for a child’s education funding to follow the student, but (particularly in blue states where that’s an uphill battle) they have to simultaneously fight for our public schools.
Parents know how to do it. They successfully beat back critical-race-theory and gender-ideology training in many public schools, even in blue areas. Fighting for merit is the next frontier and one that has to matter to all of us.
https://nypost.com/2023/01/22/every-parent-should-fight-back-vs-the-lefts-war-on-merit/
*************************************************For public school teachers, there can be no right to strike
THE MASSACHUSETTS Teachers Association, the largest teachers union in the state, has unveiled its top priorities for the next two years. Those priorities do not include holding instructors to more rigorous standards or ensuring that students do better on exams. They do, however, include making it lawful for public employees to go on strike — something that has been flatly illegal in Massachusetts for the past century.
"This outright ban on public employee strikes is unjust," declares the state's largest teachers union. It "unfairly restricts the ability of public employees to take collective action in support of themselves and the communities they serve."
In fact, the ban on strikes by government workers is neither unjust nor unfair. It is essential. When public-sector employees refuse to work, they victimize innocent third parties. It isn't corporate managers who feel the pain. Ordinary citizens do. Strikes by public employees are intended to deprive the community of essential services — classroom teaching, public safety, trash collection, mass transit. The widespread distress caused by such strikes is intentional: Their underlying strategy is to make the public miserable, thereby increasing the pressure on government officials to bow to the union's demands.
The president of the teachers union, Max Page, calls it a "fundamental labor and human right" for teachers and other government employees to be able to walk off the job. Page assured the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education that if his members engaged in a work stoppage it would not be for selfish motives but "out of love for their students." Love? Teachers who go on strike hurt their students. They cause academic achievement to suffer. They inflict particular harm on special-needs students, those with disabilities, and those who rely on school for their meals.
When teachers refuse to work, parents are often thrown into turmoil. During one of Chicago's numerous teachers strikes, the Chicago Sun-Times described the "citywide epidemic" of "stressed-out parents" struggling to cope with the chaos unleashed by the Chicago Teachers Union.
"Parents and guardians frantically sought last-minute child care [and] pleaded with their bosses for leniency. . . . . Citywide, for thousands of families, stress was high and consequences were real." The paper quoted Martina Watts, a mother in one of the city's poorer neighborhoods: "I might be losing my job over this. As long as they're on strike, I can't work. I'm not getting paid."
In the private sector, employees who go on strike are subject to market discipline. They know that there are limits to the claims they can make of an employer — after all, private companies must remain profitable or fail. Let unions demand too much and management may respond by closing a facility, increasing automation, or relocating to another state. Private-sector job actions generally turn on economic disputes over how to divide a pie whose size is fixed. Unions claim their members should get more of the profits they help produce; management resists those claims. If a strike is declared, both sides pay a price — the company loses business, the employees lose income, and both are constrained by the hard reality of the bottom line.
But in government, there are no profits to divvy up. Labor disputes in the public sector are about public dollars, which neither employees nor managers produce. When teachers, transit workers, or sanitation workers threaten to strike, it isn't to squeeze more out of management. It is to extract more from taxpayers — yet taxpayers get no seat at the table.
Unlike in the private sector, collective bargaining in the public sector is political. It amounts to the making of public policy through antidemocratic means. Union officials who have no mandate from the voters are empowered to play a direct role in crafting government policy and deciding how public funds will be spent. In a democracy, that should be intolerable.
For a long time, it was. "The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service," President Franklin D. Roosevelt wrote in 1937. In the private workplace, organized employees should have every right to negotiate with employers. But not in the public sector, said FDR, where "the employer is the whole people, who speak by means of laws enacted by their representatives in Congress."
Not only should teachers and other public workers not be permitted to strike, they shouldn't be permitted to engage in collective bargaining. The salaries and benefits paid to government workers, their hours and conditions of employment, the obligations they are expected to meet — these are all matters of public policy and should be decided by public policymakers. Labor unions ought to have no more of a say in the fashioning of those policies than any other interest group. And public employees who go on strike should be treated as the scofflaws they are, not indulged and encouraged and flattered.
It has become normal in recent years for Massachusetts teachers unions to extort more money and other contract concessions by striking or threatening to do so. "Two more illegal strikes have hit Massachusetts!" excitedly reported the union activist project Labor Notes on its website last fall. It was referring to strikes by teachers in Haverhill and Malden; those came in the wake of strikes, strike threats, or work slowdowns in Andover, Brookline, Dedham, and Belmont. Most recently, the teachers union in Melrose authorized a strike and was promptly rewarded with a lucrative new three-year contract.
Massachusetts voters and politicians haven't just gotten used to this extortion, they enable it. Teachers who refuse to work know perfectly well they won't lose their jobs for breaking the law.
The state's education commissioner, Jeff Riley, pronounced himself "shocked" that the Massachusetts Teachers Union is now demanding that public employee strikes not be merely tolerated but legalized.
Really, though, should he be so surprised? By allowing government-employee unions to engage in collective bargaining, Massachusetts strengthened those unions at the expense of the state's voters and taxpayers. Declining to enforce the ban on public-sector strikes strengthened them even more. Abolishing the ban altogether is the logical next step. None of this will lead to better schools, improved education, or higher test grades. But that's OK. The teachers unions "love" their students, and you always hurt the one you love.
https://jeffjacoby.com/26706/for-public-school-teachers-there-can-be-no-right
***********************************My other blogs: Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com/ (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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