It's not hard to see that the so-called education "reformers" are doing little to actually advance schools and are using education as another venue for their boardroom antics.
From Chicago Now:
New Schools for Chicago formerly known as the Renaissance Schools Fund is a non-profit corporation that seeks to advance “school choice” in Chicago, which is a nice way of saying “selling schools to private contractors.” The Board of Directors of New Schools for Chicago is largely comprised of captains of industry, with a few exceptions, namely Chicago Public Schools CEO Barbara Byrd-Bennett, Chicago Board of Education President David Vitale, and newly appointed member of the School Board Deborah Quazzo. Clare Munana, a past member of the Board of Education also sits on the New Schools Board as well as two people who have privatized charter schools named after them, John Rowe, Chairman and CEO of Exelon and Bruce Rauner, gubernatorial hopeful whose sole agenda is busting Unions, specifically teachers unions.
And who is the major obstacle to this trickery? According to historian
Rick Perlstein at The Nation:
The CTU beat Rahm in a historic strike this past September and hasn’t stopped fighting austerity and privatization since.