The Chicago school reform fraud

HOW DID it come to this? How did a man with no professional credentials as an educator, Arne Duncan, come to run the U.S. Department of Education with a mandate to help private capital penetrate public education and wreck decades of collective bargaining with teachers?

...School reform in Chicago actually predates Duncan by more than a decade. It gathered force in 1995 when the Illinois state legislature gave Democratic Mayor Richard Daley direct control of schools. Daley abolished the school board and installed political operatives to run the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), naming his budget chief, Paul Vallas, as CEO. But Vallas' schemes to shake up schools with "probation,' "reconstitution," "intervention" and "re-engineering" didn't work. When he was forced out in 2001, Chicago test scores remained low.

Into the breach stepped Duncan, another education amateur who had given up on an Australian professional basketball career to return to his hometown and work for Vallas. A Harvard grad and the son of a University of Chicago professor, Duncan had political connections to Daley's Chicago Democratic machine and a rising political star, state Sen. Barack Obama, his neighbor in the liberal Hyde Park neighborhood...

In 2004, Duncan and Daley dropped the big one: Renaissance 2010, a plan to close dozens of "failing" schools and replace them new ones or charter schools. The plan was based largely on a blueprint drawn up the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, an institution of wealthy individuals and business executives determined to socially engineer Chicago to suit their interests...

http://socialistworker.org/2010/04/05/chicago-school-reform-fraud

That way they can pay the taxes corporations and the wealthy don't so banks and insurance companies can be bailed out over and over and over again.