Filling out D97 questionaire about what’s important in schools, I run into “providing adequate support” for kids moving to higher level.  What is this adequate support?  Anyhow, I rated it very important on general principles.

Why do I call it not important to teach cultural etc. differences?  Because this multiculturalism is at best a distraction from teaching how to read, write, and express oneself, at worst a blurring of distinction between right and wrong and of universal standards.  (Clitoridectomy ok some places because we can’t condemn anyone?  Defended here in 1996, condemned here in 1867!)

Same for rating multicultural ed programs: big distractions, blurring of norms.  It’s inculcation of highly suspect mentality, over-the-top substitute for old-fashioned mutual respect, color-blind, etc. 

“School control” over staffing, etc.?  Apparently vs. district and board?  Maybe good idea, maybe prescription for chaos.

Open enrollment a good idea: parents, etc. choose.  Schools get vote of confidence or not.  I like the idea.

Fill it out yourself here.

OP is past the point of no return as to development.  Even OP Ave. has vacancies, as its modestly position tenants leave for Forest Park or go out of business.  Lake Street problems are old news.  Question is, will OP upgrade its exclusivity — without which we are nothing — for the two thousands or not?  It has moved past the village of old, like it or not, and faces decline or growth.  The new Lane Bryant and gym-&-swim club on Lake Street — and this is no bicycling-in-the-window as at the long-gone Chi Health Club on Madison or the soon-to-be-gone OP Y on Marion, but pool, basketball arena, climbing wall and lots more, according to its brochure.  Condos are atop it all. 

But it’s the building that tolls the knell of parting village.  It’s a Loop or Mich. Ave.-style building, looming big and imposing.  Heritage-preservers can’t be happy about it, even Lane B. shoppers or gym rats.  It’s like 70 years ago, when the elegant Austin house was moved to what’s now Austin Gardens — from Lake Street, where commercial purposes were winning out.  History matters, as the historical society says, and it tells us this is no time to go wobbly with the OP future.

Whether T. Stroger’s campaign is “descend[ing] into chaos,” with his declining to appear with Peraica on various shows, one thing is clear in OP: his signs are popping up all over — but not on private property!  Few citizens want them, but someone is planting them on various parkways and stretches of publicly tended grass.  Yes.  Soon there will be a sea of them on the village green of Scoville Park, where frisbee is played, but not this year.  The public-minded citizens who plant signs on public property may be county employees or they may not be.  Readers are asked to decide.

Getting wise to scandals (sent off by Peraica campaign)

… Federal prosecutors are no longer playing along with the perverse joke that illicit patronage hiring and contracting are “just politics.” FBI agents are unraveling scandals that stretch from the Capitol in Springfield to the Cook County Building to the adjacent Chicago City Hall.

And those probes may be having effects:

A few weeks ago, Democratic insiders were sure that Todd Stroger, their candidate for the presidency of the Cook County Board, could ride out the serial deceits that had put him on the ballot. Now some of those insiders are worried. Their polling shows that many Democrats have stubbornly negative opinions of Stroger.

The surmise: Those Democrats, thousands of whom voted for board member Forrest Claypool in their party’s primary [as in Oak Park], want a steely reformer–the only option left is Republican Tony Peraica–who’ll work with the feds to clean up Cook County. What’s more, those Democrats are still angry at party bosses who repeatedly told them lies about former Board President John Stroger’s medical prognosis in order to steer the previously pliable Todd Stroger onto the ticket. … [on mark!]  [Italics and color added]

-– Editorial, Chicago Tribune, October 5, 2006

Regina Robinson spends “one fine day” in the neighborhood of my boyhood, Austin & Madison, which is not far from where I’m still living. She finds a nail shop, an eatery (on Chicago Ave.), and Laurys Bakery, the last of which was Schallenmuller’s in the ‘40s. At Laurys — why isn’t it Laury’s? — she finds

sweet potato squares, cake by the slice, fruit-filled pastries, muffins and whole cakes . . . special-occasion cakes [and] sugar cookies

like her mother used to make. At Schallenmuller’s — it’s on Madison just east of Austin, north side of street, a block from St. Catherine’s — it was coffee cakes that this guy remembers, thin ones with gooey melted sugar and pecans, the cakes themselves almost brittle. Bismarcks too, with jelly inside.

Robinson has gone down Austin for 20–plus years, she says. Assuming she’s black, that’s easy to believe. Racial change was near-ancient history by then. We (white) moved a few blocks north and one block west of Austin & Madison in 1971, when it was in full swing.

Hugh, my student at Ignatius in the mid-60s, told me his father and uncles, all Pullman car porters with a taste for Danish, drove many blocks west of their South Side neighborhood to find a bakery that suited them. Hugh watched me like a hawk, he told me, as I discussed race relations in class, and later caught bricks thrown in Martin Luther King’s direction on a march in Marquette Park — thrown maybe by white students of mine also from Ignatius, who were part of the taunting crowd and gave me a wave as I walked by.

That’s a little bit of Chicago history for you, ripped partly from the pages of Saturday Tempo Metromix Planner’s Weekend, Chicagoland’s Best Guide to Leisure and Entertainment.

Jon Hale’s “One View” in the Wed. Journal could hardly have been said better. 

Desman Associates [planning consultant, leading the meeting]; Ross, Barney & Jankowski, the architects designing the parking garage; The Lakota Group, which is responsible for area planning and streetscape; and Metro Transportation Group, working on transportation and parking issues.

Davis . . . said neither he nor anyone on his staff were aware that any money from a terrorist organization was used to pay for his trip until the story broke in the Chicago Tribune. [He] said he first learned of the charges when a Tribune reporter called his West Side office before the paper’s Aug. 24 story. The Tribune followed up with another story four days later on Aug. 28. On Aug. 25, the paper wrote a scathing editorial concerning the trip and politicians, such as Davis, who take “junkets,” or trips taken by government officials and paid for with public funds.

 

Davis said the trip was public and that “there was nothing secretive about the trip.”

 

He said some of his Sri Lankan constituents urged him to visit the country. As reported by the Chicago Tribune, the U.S. Census shows 44 people in the 7th Congressional District who identify themselves as Sri Lankan or part Sri Lankan.