The Chicago Tribune isn’t going to admit error with their claim that 19,000 students are languishing on charter school waiting lists, “yearning” to be free of CPS. But they may not throw the number around with the same panache after WBEZ’s expose.

As Becky Vevea showed, the 19,000 number counts applications, not students — and students typically apply for multiple schools — and it also includes over 3,0000 students who’ve dropped out and are seeking admission to alternative schools.

The Tribune now cites Andrew Broy of the Illinois Charter Schools for the “estimate” (though as Michael Miner points out, they claimed the number as fact in their editorials) , and Broy has regrouped quite nicely.

Wednesday he was saying the real number was probably “around 65 percent” of 19,000, based on his own “spot checks.” Thursday he insisted that 19,000 is a “conservative estimate” — the real number probably higher than that, he now says — since it excludes non-reporting charters and new charters that are just ramping up.

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Entirely aside from what the school strike has revealed about Mayor Emanuel’s executive incompetence – or how he intends to spin the eventual outcome – and far more important, there are several layers of historic significance to the teachers’ fight.

Here are three:  it’s marshalled broad popular support in a period when public-sector unions are under assault on many fronts; it’s dramatized and exposed the costs and compromises of the corporate school reform agenda; and – particularly going forward, as the outcome unfolds – it represents a signal battle in the fight against the austerity agenda of the world’s elites.

They’re also teaching us about an old-fashioned value that we may hope is not yet out of date: respect.

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Judging from the Tribune’s attack on its co-chair, the Chicago Educational Facilities Task Force must really be raising some hackles among the editorial board’s friends at the Board of Education, in the mayor’s office, and among the coterie of rich folks who are pushing what’s come to be called “school reform.”

Though the task force passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on school closings and other actions, the Trib focuses on Rep. Cynthia Soto.  In their zeal to lash out, the editorialists get a lot wrong.

First of all, of course, it was the task force that issued the call for a moratorium, after a public hearing where – as happens every year – parents and teachers complained about a CPS decision-making process that ignores their input.

Second, the Trib declares that legislators shouldn’t meddle in school closing decisions.  But the task force is mandated by the legislature to monitor compliance with the new school facilities planning requirements, which the legislature passed in 2009.

It includes legislators along with representatives of CPS, teachers, principals, and community groups, and it represents a first step at giving the public a real voice in the process.

Prior to the task force, there was virtually no accountability for CPS decisions — not since mayoral control was established in 1995.  Clearly, some people want to keep it that way.

‘Not in compliance’

“CPS’s historic and continuing lack of transparency and evidence-based criteria for decisions resulted in the pervasive climate of public suspicion about what drives CPS to take school actions and allocate resources, often in ways perceived to be highly inequitable,” as the task force noted in a recent resolution.

The Tribune argues that school closing decisions should be made locally.  Sure they should.  But does that mean they should be made by downtown administrators with no input from the schools and their communities?  The Trib thinks so.  The task force says no.

The Tribune’s argument hinges on ignoring the real reason for the moratorium call.  The editorial cites a quote from Soto about the new administration needing time to get to know communities better.  It ignores the task force resolution, passed this month with only the dissent of the CPS representative, that the school district is “not in compliance” with the requirements of transparency and open process mandated by the law.

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The Chicago Tribune wants to hold Whittier parents to account for the costs of delaying a new library at the Pilsen elementary school.

There’s another way of looking at it.  You could also hold CPS leadership to account for commencing the project in a manner that seemed designed to foment a confrontation.

You might even ask about contracts being let before the Board of Education approved the project.

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UPDATED – “We will have to come together as one” to solve Chicago’s school problems, said mayor-to-be Rahm Emanuel.

Then he announced the selection of a new schools chief who got a 95 percent disapproval vote from teachers at his current post. Catalyst cites sources in Rochester who say schools chief Jean Claude Brizard talks about collaboration but operates as an autocrat.

The rhetoric continues to outpace the reality: Emanuel praised Brizard for raising the graduation rate in Rochester schools. In fact, though, the 12 percent increase claimed by Brizard occurred before he took his post, according to his predecessor.

Chicago News Cooperative reports that Rochester’s graduation rate has actually declined over four years. A Rochester reporter notes that Brizard seems to confuse graduation rates with absolute numbers – not a good sign in a top executive, whether he’s spinning or not. (PURE points out the Tribune seems to have the same problem.)

On Emanuel’s part, his false claim continues a reign of error, with repeated misstatements regarding performance and graduation rates at charter schools.

Brizard is a product of the Broad Foundation’s superintendent training program, which has recently placed trainees at the top of schools systems in Los Angeles, New Orleans, and Denver.  (Eli Broad donated $25,000 to Emanuel’s campaign, Ramsin Canon points out.) Broad trainees have also been run out of several towns, according to a new guide from Parents Across America:

“A hallmark of the Broad-style leadership is closing existing schools rather than attempting to improve them, increasing class size, opening charter schools, imposing high-stakes test-based accountability systems on teachers and students, and implementing of pay-for-performance schemes. The brusque and often punitive management style of Broad-trained leaders has frequently alienated parents and teachers and sparked protests.”

[Eric Zorn offers corroboration from several Rochester parents, who say Brizard "lacks people skills," "didn't listen to parents and doesn't like being challenged," is "arrogant and autocratic."]

“Parents Across America considers Broad’s influence to be inherently undemocratic, as it disenfranchises parents and other stakeholders in an effort to privatize our public schools and imposes corporate-style policies without our consent.”

Broad has published a guide to closing schools; Brizard closed half the city’s high schools without consulting communities. Broad came up with the idea of the “parent trigger,” which Emanuel has praised.  Its philosophy of management is to “invest in disruption,” to promote instability in a system in order to generate “innovation.”

Exciting times ahead.

Brizard clashed not only with teachers and parents but with Rochester’s board of education, which unfortunately for him was elected by Rochester voters. He won’t have that problem in Chicago.

Perhaps Emanuel’s most noteworthy appointment to the board of education is Penny Pritzker, scion of the Hyatt hotel family that’s currently under pressure from religious and community leaders for mistreating its workers.

It’s worth recalling Pritzker’s recent notoriety as a subprime lender, which was probably a factor in her withdrawal from consideration as President Obama’s commerce secretary, after chairing his campaign’s finance committee. After the Pritzkers took over Superior Bank, she headed the board as they plunged into the subprime mortgage market, which eventually swamped the bank.  And under her lead, the bank played signal role in developing the mortage-backed securitization instruments which eventually swamped the nation’s economy.

These securities were call “innovations” at the time.

David Moberg’s 2002 piece has the best overview of Superior’s collapse, which he says was “tainted with all the hallmarks of a mini-Enron scandal.” Accounting tricks were used to turn growing losses into steady profits, allowing dividends to continue to flow to the banks owners.  Maybe Pritzker can help “fix” the CPS budget.

When she was getting bad press a couple years ago, her lawyer said the bank did subprime lending but not the “predatory” kind. According to Moberg, the National Community Reinvestment Coalition accused the bank of “engaging in a variety of predatory practices.”

It’s particularly worth recalling because, as the Tribune recently reported (thanks to PURE for the link), Penny Pritzker is now founding a private equity firm that will focus on buying distressed property.

It’s nice to have money.

In other management feats, Pritzker chaired the Olympic Village subcommittee in the city’s ill-fated bid for the 2016 games.  She bears some responsibility for the $100 million debt incurred in that disaster, which Emanuel is going to have to start paying off in a couple of years.

Pritzker is a major backer of Stand For Children, which pushed union-busting legislation in Springfield. While serving on Obama’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board, she split from the president by opposing card-check labor reform he backed. Add Hyatt to the mix and her anti-union record is complete.

It’s highly unlikely that these people will “bring us together as one.”

The new owners of the Chicago Tribune have revived a media analysis tool pioneered by the paper (and satirized by A.J. Liebling, as noted here) 60 years ago — counting pages and column inches to measure efficiency.

But there’s a more traditional metric that they are violating, as Alan D. Mutter recently pointed out on his blog Reflections of a Newsosaur.  “The unwritten but widely honored rule of thumb in the industry has always been that a newspaper should employ one journalist for every 1,000 in daily circulation.”

The Trib’s layoff of 80 journalists — reducing the staff by 25 percent below 2005 levels — will drop the ratio to 0.88 per thousand.

Eric Alterman takes note of this at the Nation, where he writes of Sam Zell:

“Leaving aside his penchant for potty-mouth rejoinders for those who question his judgment, Zell has done nothing to slow the slide in the company’s fortunes and much to accelerate it.

“Scrambling like mad for cash to service the company’s debt, Zell sold off the profitable Newsday and borrowed $300 million against future earnings, a clear sign of panic.

“To advise him on long-term strategy, he has appointed as ‘chief innovation officer’ Lee Abrams, a man who was apparently surprised to learn that reports datelined ‘Baghdad’ are actually produced by reporters in Baghdad. His suggestion: ‘photos of the reporter with Iraqi kids’ to advertise this fact.”

Mutter has since posted about the Tribune owners’  desperate, costly and “self-defeating” “pay-day loan,” borrowing against future ad revenues; and earlier this summer he wrote a devastating post about Sam Zell’s lack of a plan to revive the Tribune (in sharp contrast to Rupert Murdoch at the Wall Street Journal):

“Mr. Zell has failed to articulate, let alone implement, anything approaching a strategy for growing the company he loaded with debt at the time its primary business, newspaper publishing, has been deteriorating at an unprecedented, incalculable and so far intractable pace. Diversified as Tribune may be in broadcasting and a likely-to-be-sold baseball team, nearly three-quarters of its sales are produced by its newspapers.

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A.J. Liebling came to mind Friday when the new Tribune bosses told Phil Rosenthal of plans to cut the size of the news staffs — and the physical heft of their newspapers.

Liebling set the standard for media criticism with his Wayward Press column in the New Yorker from 1945 to 1963 (collected in two books, “The Press” and “The Wayward Pressman”) — and his concerns remain relevant, from concentration of newspaper ownership by chains to extensive coverage of trivia to biases enforced by owners. (“With the word ‘labor,’ the newspaper association…is ‘stubborn.’To Government, ‘wasteful.’ To the poor ‘pampered’ — or malingering or undeserving.”)

He also had great fun at the expense of the eccentric owner of the Chicago Tribune at the time, the legendary Colonel Robert R. McCormick.

Today’s owners might be pleased to find that their methodology for assessing the value of newspapers was pioneered years ago by McCormick’s Tribune, as celebrated by Liebling.  (Though back then the paper seemed to take more pride in its impressive physical dimensions.)

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A Chicago Tribune series starting in May and subsequent Congressional hearings brought children’s product safety issues to national attention this year — and when Congress passed a 20 percent increase in the budget for the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission this week, it was a huge victory for a small Chicago-based nonprofit which has been hammering away at the issue for years.

“The issue really took off this year,” said Nancy Cowles, executive director of Kids In Danger, citing “a number of factors that came together at the same time.”

There was the Tribune series in May on the hazards of magnetic toys (KID had worked with the Trib on that for a couple of years, Cowles said) with extensive follow-up, and Congressional hearings in Chicago and Washington.  There was a giant recall of toys which had lead paint by Fisher-Price this summer, and subsequent testing revealed a vast array of toys with lead paint.

Suddenly the issue was on the media’s radar.  In fact children’s products have been subject to recall at an average rate of about two a week for years, Cowles said; after the lead hazard became known, the rate doubled, she said.  But several years ago KID surveyed Illinois residents and found that in contrast to the actual two-a-week rate, most guessed that only three or four children’s products were recalled each year.

“It used to be a blip in the media at most,” she said.  “Or if a child died, it might get a little more coverage.”

She thinks the lack of attention reflected media and popular attitudes that industry is overregulated.  “People are shocked to find out that children’s products are not regulated at all.”

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