Backers of the recently passed bill that will result in Chicago having an elected school board are promising to refine the legislation to install guardrails on campaign contributions to prevent outside interest groups from pumping millions of dollars into the races, as they do in Los Angeles.
Their earnest naivete is charming.
Big money easily finds its way around the puny roadblocks reformers attempt to erect. Independent political action committees and advocacy organizations aren’t bound by limits placed on candidate spending and fundraising. So the city’s first contest for a fully-elected school board in 2026 will inevitably become a high-dollar proxy fight between supporters of teachers’ unions and backers of vouchers and other privatization efforts.
And speaking of money, it strikes me as a mistake by proponents to make the 21 positions on the school board unpaid. Yes it’s nice to think that noble, selfless volunteers will be crafting policy for the Chicago Public Schools, but that bit of budgetary thrift stands to discourage participation by those without the financial means to donate their time to the daunting effort such a position will require.
The additional promise to allow noncitizen adults to vote in school board elections is noble but problematic. Sure, a lot of noncitizens have students at CPS and have a stake in how the system is run. But using similar logic, noncitizens ought to be able to vote in all other elections, too, since they also have a stake in how the city, county, state and country are governed and how their tax money is spent. Is that the fight we want to have right now?
Illinois’ COVID-19 vaccination lottery should be open only to those who got their second shots between June 17, the date the lottery was announced and, say, the end of July. The state has allocated $10 million in pandemic relief funds for prizes, but, curiously, has made everyone who has been or soon will be vaccinated eligible for the drawing.
A waste! The money shouldn’t be used to reward those of us already blessed with the freedom and peace of mind afforded by the vaccine. We already have the prize of a return to nearly normal life. Fairness doesn’t demand we get a shot at in money meant solely to incentivize the ignorant, the selfish and the churlish to get their vaccines already. Shrinking the pool of those eligible to win will increase the odds of winning for the vax-averse, and therefore the chances that they will participate.
Monday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing colleges and universities to offer more generous benefits to the scholarship athletes was hailed as a step toward financial justice for the jocks who generate substantial income for their schools. And that’s great. But the truth is that nearly every team in college sports loses money. Football and basketball tend to be the only exceptions, and even then at a minority of schools.
Tuition, ticket prices and all sort of other costs are so high in part because of the weird idea we have that universities should fund intercollegiate golf, volleyball, wrestling, rowing, soccer, baseball, fencing and so many other revenue negative sports, as though they have any connection to the mission of higher education. If it’s fairness we’re after as we move toward paying football and basketball stars something close to their market value, then, in fairness, let’s ask these lesser sports to figure out how to pay their own way.
Rehire Inspector General Joe Ferguson!. Mayor Lori Lightfoot has signaled her intention to give Ferguson the sack at the end of his term Oct. 15. But his fearlessness and his experience makes him a bracing check on excess and waste in city government, and the very fact that the thin-skinned Lightfoot evidently can’t stand him is reason enough for the public to demand that he remain on the job.
The now needless deference we still must pay to small-population states — giving them the same number of votes in the U.S. Senate as states with more than 60 times their number of residents in some cases and an outsize role in the contrivance we call the Electoral College — is an outrage.
Those now griping about partisan political maps should instead be calling for a consolidation of the Dakotas (even combined with neighboring Montana and Wyoming they would only be our 30th largest state by population). The disproportional power of small states has given us a Senate, a Supreme Court and presidential election system that skews far more to the right than the American public. That along with the endurance of the sclerotic filibuster rule in the Senate and the relentless, state-by-state effort by Republicans to suppress minority voting is posing a frightening threat to the future of a meaningful democracy.
Take a bite out of street crime. The tech firm that figures out how to make stolen smartphones as instantly worthless as a slab of metal and glass will deserve the Nobel Peace Prize. Since so few of us carry cash anymore, the only things of value we have for thieves are our smartphones.
The chilly zephyr of truth. David Wilton’s book “Word Myths” (Oxford University Press) explodes the legend that our civic nickname, “the windy city,” refers to Chicago’s boastful, bloviating politicians. The false story has it that Charles Dana, editor of the New York Sun, used the term as an insult in 1890 when Chicago was beating out New York City in a bid to host the Columbian Exposition of 1893.
But Wilton cites research showing an 1875 reference in the Cincinnati Enquirer to Chicago as the “municipality of wind” due to the strong breezes off Lake Michigan along with similar other allusions. He also notes that there is not a single “traceable citation” to Dana’s alleged slur.
Spitting into the wind from off the lake and elsewhere. I pretty much gave up writing about gun control after a heavily armed gunman with severe mental health problems killed 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012 and lawmakers did virtually nothing in response. I’m fine with the private ownership of guns, honestly I am, but until we can agree to strict licensing and registration and to limits on the number of guns people can own, the carnage will continue and probably even spread.
And since we’re not even close to such an agreement, I’m completely resigned to the carnage continuing and spreading.
On that cheery note …
Twitter @EricZorn
