The Writing Is On The Wall

Selective Schools First

If you grew up in the suburbs of Chicago like I did in the 1960s and 1970s, you rarely went into the city after the riots of the late 1960s. When I was a little kid, I remember my mother taking me downtown to Sears and Marshall Fields shopping on State Street. That ended.

City public schools used to be pretty good throughout the 1900s. Sure, some poor kids didn’t get an education but on the whole the city schools did a relatively decent job taking kids from all walks of life and turning them into objective-thinking Americans. Then it all changed. I remember meeting kids who attended city schools when I was in college. If they didn’t go Lane Tech they weren’t that smart. This is a generalization because almost certainly there would be one smart kid at a place like Westinghouse but it was rare.

I mean, I played basketball with graduates from Chicago Public Schools who couldn’t read and write. They could barely speak the King’s English. They didn’t know basic facts. Their math and science skills were non-existent. It was beyond sad. They had no future. Doors were already shut and they didn’t understand it. It had nothing to do with their skin color despite what the Marxists say. It had everything to do with their intelligence.

Not one of my pals that I played a lot with made the NBA. No one played in Europe. Sure, there were guys you played with on playgrounds that made the NBA and you know their names but they were one in a million. Out of all the great baseball players I knew, one made the Hall of Fame in baseball. A couple of others played pro baseball. A couple did eek out better lives for themselves. I ran into them later in life.

I had a friend who told me this story. He played at the same place I did only before my time there. They were on a bus trip coming home from a game. My friend explained to his teammate how the earth rotated around the sun, and the earth rotated on its axis. That’s how we have day and night, and seasons. He responded, “Isn’t that something?”

He’d never heard it before. He was a CPS graduate.

It’s not that he was dumb. He wasn’t. He was a hard worker. He grew up poor. It’s the city school system that wasn’t concerned with educating him.

My father who grew up in a far different time in a different place grew up very poor. He went to public school in New Orleans, then a small town in Michigan after his family migrated north. He was educated. His brother was educated. His father had an 8th grade education and his mother had only graduated from high school. Skin color had nothing to do with it because, at the same time, there were Black kids all over the US who also became educated.

What changed in the 1960s was the Teacher’s Unions became more active and radicalism swept across the nation. Bill Ayers and his ilk grabbed control.

When Mayor Daley 2 took over in Chicago, things began to change in the city. Northside Prep was the first selective school and it became one of the best schools in the entire state of Illinois. Daley capitalized on this and created more selective schools. He cleaned up the city and got rid of the petty crime.

Sure, Daley was corrupt. Corrupt as hell. More corrupt than his old man. He did some things that killed the city's finances. He also, like his father, surrounded himself with crony capitalists and favoritism. Of course, prior mayors had screwed the pooch when it came to finances before Daley. He took it to the next level.

But, he cleaned up the city and people started to move back in. In the mid-80s, younger people like myself started buying up the real estate in Lincoln Park and rehabbing. Eventually, that gave way to teardowns. People would buy a 25ft by 100ft city lot for a million or more and tear the house down.

I moved my family into the city from the far western suburbs in 2003. The one condition I had was that my kids attend private school, not public. It was expensive. How expensive? High school was over $20k a year and now it’s over $40k. But, I wasn’t going to do it any other way.

We lived in a building. Even though the carrying costs of the building were high, the opportunity costs of not living in the building were higher.

This past week, the Marxist and popularly elected Mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson announced an end to the public selective school system in Chicago. First, the Democrats killed school vouchers at the state level. Now they are killing what few good schools the city has. But, I have no empathy for citizens. They voted for it over and over and over again.

Charter schools, selective schools, and any other innovation that benefits children and educates them better will be eliminated. Merit is being replaced by equity nationwide. Oregon signed on to eliminate merit and they have done it in San Francisco for a while.

By the way, more “spending on education” doesn’t correlate to better outcomes for children. It does correlate to more bureaucracy and more money for cronies.

This is a centerpiece of today’s Democratic Party nationwide, not just in Illinois. If you vote Democrat, you are voting for the destruction of education innovation. They are truly evil people. I don’t say that lightly but when you advocate for “equity” over merit, and advance policies that are socialistic/communistic, you are evil. Truly the dregs of society.

Illinois manufacturing jobs have been declining for a long time due to policies from the Democrats. People have been leaving the state for years now due to policies from the Democrats. What was a trickle turned into a stream and now is a river. It is too expensive to sustain and build a business in Illinois. This is the same sort of thing that is happening in other blue states.

What will be the result?

What is left of the middle class of Chicago will move out. Gone. They will flee to the suburbs or other states where the streets are safe, and the schools better. No one loves their children more than parents and I haven’t seen a parent yet who doesn’t want a better opportunity for their kid than they had themselves. The middle class that cannot move, like police and firefighters, will twist themselves into knots to send their kids to Catholic schools or figure out ways to homeschool.

The city will be left with very wealthy people who can pay to rise above all the dreck and decay. They will spend some time in the city, but they will spend time in their other places. Chicago will also be left with a permanent underclass of poor people who will have no opportunity to get out. Les Miserables.

There is only one thing stopping Chicago from becoming a much larger and scarier Detroit. If the Democrats are successful and ram a transaction tax on financial transactions through the state legislature, or Chicago city council, it is over. The transaction tax is a centerpiece of the Mayor’s plan for Chicago.

Right now, only one person is standing in the way, hard left-wing Governor JB Pritzker. There is little that separates JB from the Mayor. His backbone is about as strong as an egg yolk. He can be bought. If the political winds blow hard enough, he will change.

I am talking to many Republicans who do not want to see Trump as the nominee. They are sick of the drama. We need action and fast. Watching Milei in Argentina is instructive. It is not just the $33 trillion in debt but it’s plenty of other things. The unelected Executive branch of government has run amok. Given a choice between Trump and any Democrat, they are going to turn out for Trump. I don’t think this is isolated but we will see soon enough.

If you are wavering, button up your chin strap. You might not think it’s the best choice, but it is the best choice given the constraints of the decision.