This is Why There is No Money for Neighborhood Schools: The Chicago School Board Votes on Charter School Expansion Today

So,  the mayor has money for 17 new charter schools while we wait for more additions for overcrowded 41st Ward Schools

Start asking questions about charter schools, and today's charter school expansion vote by the Chicago School Board.   Why do new schools have to be charter schools? How do charter schools impact neighborhood schools?  Where is the investment in local neighborhood schools?  Why is it taking so long to add additions to overcrowded northwest side schools?  Why does the appointed school board have all the decision making power?


http://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/council-mayors-allies-kill-charter-school-hearing/Content?oid=12196607

Even the Untouchables would have a hard time slowing the mayor's charter push. The Chicago Board of Education is set to approve up to 21 new charter schools this week.

Yet I can think of a million reasons the expansion should be put on hold. For starters, the more money the mayor spends building new charters, the less money he has for existing schools that are already so broke they're worried about paying for toilet paper.

As a city, we've never had a debate on this wider issue: Should we be building new schools of any kind when we can't afford to adequately fund the ones we have?

Moreover, if Mayor Emanuel's so determined to build new schools, why do they have to be charters?
The mayor says we need to bring in private operators to give parents more choices.

Sounds great! But in reality, charters do no better than other local schools on standardized tests—which is how we judge schools these days. In many cases, they do worse.
Plus, they're privately run operations. That means they don't abide by the same standards of transparency as regular public schools.

If you don't believe me, ask Dan Mihalopoulos. He's the ace investigative reporter for the Sun-Times who went to court to try to force UNO—one of the biggest charter operators in the state—to turn over records of how they spent millions of public dollars.
Another charter operator—the Chicago Math and Science Academy—has argued in court that it's not even a public school, though it's largely funded with public money. That's part of the school's legal fight against an effort by its teachers to unionize.
Yes, that's right: teachers who want to unionize. And now we've run into the elephant in the room.
Charter operators tend to be militantly nonunion, which is why I suspect power-hungry politicians like Mayor Emanuel love them so much.
The more charters he creates, the less power the Chicago Teachers Union has—and the more power Mayor Emanuel can amass, as if he needs more.

In fairness to the Chicago Public Schools—an operation that needs all the defending it can get—the district did create local advisory councils to review the latest charter school proposals, which are supposed to alleviate overcrowding on the northwest and southwest sides.

But CPS officials told the members of these councils that discussions should be limited to the specifics of the new charter proposals. They were not—let me repeat, not—permitted to talk about the larger issue of whether we should create any charters at all.