Vallas and CTU?

Quinn Chooses Vallas to "Fix" Pensions (and Screw the Unions!)
By Jim Vail


Certainly, Gov. Pat Quinn's announcement that former Chicago schools chief and an early leader of corporate education reform Paul Vallas will be his running mate, took many by surprise.

Quinn said he did it to confirm he is serious about fixing the so-called pension problem. That means he wants to prove to Wall Street and those with money to elect him that he can screw the little people out of their pensions to retain his governor post.

More interesting, is what this means in the ongoing saga of the relationship between the democratic party and unions.

The Chicago Teachers Union chose to endorse Quinn when he ran against republic Bill Brady the first time around. Interestingly enough, Brady ran on a similar anti-worker pension platform that Quinn appears to be similarly promoting.

I chose, as a member of the political action committee (my application was recently rejected to continue on this committee), to not endorse the guy, noting he was a big supporter of Race to the Top to screw public education, and that should not warrant an endorsement from a new union leadership elected to fight this.

The CTU leaders argued they had to endorse the guy, who came groveling to CTU president Karen Lewis, and I mean groveling because he supposedly called her many times to get the CTU endorsement.  It apparently helped him to squeak out a close win against Brady.

So here we go again. Only, it keeps getting worse for us teachers, public servants, working class people, poor people, the 99% (I say include people like those in the unions earning six figures cause they like all of us are only a paycheck away from no job).

So Karen and the CTU issued a press statement reported in Substance News that stated the CTU is "concerned" about Paul Vallas as a running mate.  "His choice takes us in the wrong direction for public education in Chicago and Illinois."  

The CTU was rather flattering the machine hack who was always a yes man (but aren't they all!), saying they supported Quinn in the past because of his commitment to grassroots organizing (really?), publicly funded public education (UNO, Aspira supporter?) and collective bargaining.

Well, I guess his true colors came out with the choice of Vallas. But Quinn was always a supporter of Obama's education reform, and Vallas was simply an early architect.

Karen's press release notes the horrible things Mr. Vallas has done, including his big support of charter schools, turnarounds, firing scores of black teachers and administrators and no lover of unions (so is Quinn?).

Now, we need to read this stuff carefully to see if the CTU is really against endorsing Quinn this time around (and you can bet he's spoken to Karen or she would be fuming now in public).

At the end of the press release from Michael Harrington, it states that the CTU "hopes" Vallas will support proposals for an elected Chicago Board (can you get any more cynical on this one - Vallas was put in charge of the city's schools when Daley removed an elected school board and he is battling for his "appointed" job to head the schools in CT because they removed an elected school board!) and also denounce privatization schemes (that's like saying we hope Hitler will this time denounce past anti-semitism).

Really?  Sounds like the CTU is keeping the doors open for an endorsement even though it really looks this bad, and you can't hide from it. Well, they'll think of something I guess.

And here's another interesting twist - Quinn hired the CTU's pr spokesperson Stephanie Gadlin.

You can't get any more intertwined than that!