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Richard Helppie
Hello, welcome to The Common Bridge. I'm your host Rich Helppie. Today our guest is Matt Rosenberg. We're going to be talking about Chicago, we're going to be talking about Chicago politics, we're going to especially be talking about the impact on minorities within the community as it pertains to crime, policing, and K through 12 education. With that introduction, Matt, welcome to The Common Bridge. Thank you so much for joining us.
Matt Rosenberg
Thank you, Rich, I'm real pleased to be with you and your audience.
Richard Helppie
Well, thank you. I know they're going to be very interested in what you have to say. But let's tell our audience a little bit about you. Where'd you spend your early days and maybe take us through any significant education events and what your career has been like.
Matt Rosenberg
Sure. I was the son of a professor of social psychology; the only child of a social psychologist and a psychotherapist. I like to joke that I turned out remarkably normal in spite of that.
Richard Helppie
So does that mean that you give really long answers when someone says how are you?
Matt Rosenberg
I try not to, but you know, I think sometimes I do. I was six when we moved to Chicago in the early/mid 60s. And so I grew up here and came of age here, began my career, got married here, spent 30 years in Chicago. I started out in journalism. One significant event was working on an undercover investigation to root out Chicago corruption and shakedowns by city inspectors. It was called the Mirage Tavern Investigation. It was nominated for a Pulitzer; didn't win one because Ben Bradley thought it was entrapment - we set a honey trap for bribe-seeking city inspectors. So I was just a wet behind the ears punk then I was working with real reporters in the undercover team and learned a lot. Maybe it helped tilt my cap [in the] long run toward issues of public policy, governance, and these days - unavoidably - crime courts and policing and K through 12 education. But from there, I went on a few years at Northwestern, graduated from Brandeis, got accepted into some journalism schools for master's programs, but I got a job in journalism. So I figured that I would get paid to learn rather than paying for it and I never looked back; series of great opportunities in old school print journalism, online journalism, think tank work. In '21, I published my first book, "What Next Chicago: Notes of a Pissed-off Native Son," working with a fantastic editor named Adam Bellow, who happens to be the son of another guy named Bellow from Chicago, and came back to Chicago to promote my book and ended up landing a full time journalism job - which I'm very pleased about - with a great news non-profit called Wirepoints that had already been at it for a number of years. So I work with some great people there. Our job is to shine a light on stuff that people don't like to talk about too much but we come at it from a data driven orientation. We certainly have some strong opinions that we develop based on the data, as you've seen in that recent piece of mine that we'll be talking more about today.
Richard Helppie
Well, great, because that is what I would like to talk about; I was attracted to it because of the data. I thought you made some bold, and frankly, some really aggressive conclusions. I know that it's easy from some quarters to take shots at those that are elected, so I do want to dive into that as you framed it. The progressive agenda for Chicago says they're going to focus on crime but you've raised some very interesting questions about how seeking social justice, managed outcomes and performative politics has just produced really horrible results. And you talk about black on black crime as well. What kind of budget is Chicago working with and what kind of results are they getting?
Matt Rosenberg
The city budget is in the neighborhood of $16 billion a year; the results aren't good. Two key areas upon which to focus are crime and K through 12 public education. There are other things worth looking at too, such as corruption, rules of governance, taxation and fiscal policy - public employee pension debt being a very significant part of that fiscal management piece. But on K through 12 education in the 2022 state report card results, basic academic achievement tests across all grades K through 12, Chicago public schools students, only 20% were proficient in reading. So only one out of five can basically read, yet we have an 87% or 88%, high school graduation rate. That's troubling right there. So we have a social promotion scheme. When you break it down by race, it's even worse. Only 11% of black students in 2022 were proficient in math. Before COVID, it wasn't a lot better. 17% Hispanics are marginally better - it's actually...those numbers I just gave you were for reading and the numbers for math are 13% of black students were proficient before COVID in 2019, and only 6% proficient in math. Now district wide, just 16% of all students are proficient in math. The world has become a very competitive place so we need school choice here. We need vouchers, and probably education savings accounts; we always like to turn to policy solutions. So that's a snapshot of some of the education data.
Richard Helppie
Let me ask you about that. Those tests are measuring academic failure - what one side of the spectrum would say - among black and Latino students. And then the progressive side might argue, well, that proves that either the test is racist or the educational environment itself is racist. Is this a factor at all in Chicago politics? If you pull that layer back, what's beneath those abysmal statistics?
Matt Rosenberg
I think lack of competition, in my view, and I know that others will not agree with that. Some will say that we need to spend more, however the per pupil spending slice one way is $16-17,000 a year. When you factor in capital expenditures, debt service - basically the entire school district budget - and then divide by the number of current students, there's an astounding per pupil expenditure level of $28-29,000 a year, depending which recent year you're looking at. That's mind boggling. So if spending were the answer, we would have already seen results.
Richard Helppie
Look, $29,000 would buy a very fine education year at some of the most prestigious prep schools all across the country, perhaps not right on the coast, but just about every place else. So that is a big spend. And yet when you think about that student body, we're talking about those left behind. If a family has the means and the motivation, they're probably going to pull up stakes and go outside of the Chicago Public School System. So is it a fair analysis to say that the abysmal scores for reading and math, coupled with that high spend, is really reflective of the job they're doing, given the challenges of that specific population?
Matt Rosenberg
I think that, again, competition is really the key here. Charter schools have a mixed record. I don't see charter schools as a silver bullet. I will tell you, Rich, there's something notable in Illinois, it's a tax credit scholarship program that helps to fund private school tuition for minority students. It's called Invest in Kids. And because black and Latino parents and students have lobbied the state legislature to keep alive and did not reduce the fiscal scope of this legislatively created program, they've been able to enroll a fair number of kids in mainly Catholic schools. It's really interesting to see the lobbying that goes on to keep the pilot alive and now to extend the five year pilot. The way it works - super quickly, Rich - is on your state income tax in Illinois if you give, say $1,000 to a private scholarship granting organization - and it's all under state regulation - then you will get a $750 tax credit. And so this is, you might say, vouchers "lite;" it's a start, it's a pathway out. However, it's badly oversubscribed, they have to turn away many students. So if we can expand opportunity and expand competition at the same time, I think that would be brilliant. But we really need to go to full on encouraging school vouchers, which are now legal in basically every state thanks to US Supreme Court rulings. From there, you go to something called education savings accounts, which are even more flexible than just a large chunk of money in a voucher; you can break it up and parse it out. Your kid can get arts education over here in this program with say, $1000 a year out of your $10,000 voucher - and I'm making these numbers up - and then spend $8,000 at your main private school and another $1,000 for, say athletics, somewhere else. And that's a brilliant way to do it. Some states are starting to pioneer the so called ESAs - education savings account. So I say there are sharp debates and sharp differences of opinion, we have to hear the other side but then let's come together around real solutions. And where you will see so-called conservatives digging a line in the sand is against the idea of simply spend more money. I'm sorry to say - and if I'm being unfair here, then I hope someone will call me out - too often, though, it seems that progressives simply say we don't have enough taxpayer money; give us more.
Richard Helppie
We've heard that argument, but the case you're making for school choice, Baltimore has been very successful with that with charter schools and the demand far outstrips the supply. Detroit has been very successful with that. I'm personally involved with a school system where we've put an incentive program in that actually pays the students for doing their work and achieving grade point. I think it's a tragedy that we leave children without an education; we need to equip all of our students with the basics. And I know our readers, listeners, and viewers can get the piece you just wrote on Wirepoint.
Matt Rosenberg
At Wirepoints with an "s" - Wirepoints.org.
Richard Helppie
Wirepoints.org or look up Matt Rosenberg. So you talk a lot about Mayor Lightfoot. And the thing that's curious is that she's only been in office, I believe, one term. There are aldermen that are supposed to represent and then ultimately, the voters put folks in. Are they voting for these policies or how does this happen in Chicago? We can see this kind of horrible performance with those people that are ultimately going to be running the economy that's going to pay the retirement for the Gen-Xers.
Matt Rosenberg
This didn't come out of nowhere, the city's problems didn't start with our latest mayor, Lori Lightfoot. However, there's a feeling of urgency in the air, particularly after COVID and the way that it's set back economic activity, particularly after the disturbances of 2020, after the death of George Floyd and a just a horrible kind of spiraling violence, which has tapered off a little bit compared to 2020 and 2021. But it's still dramatically higher than in 2019, the last prior years. So how is it that these problems continue when we have elected officials who are supposed to be basically taking care of business? I think, a couple of reasons. One, I believe enough government is not entirely the solution to either these problems: low performance in schools, kids not ready to learn, or crime. And there's an elephant in the room, and particularly in the African American community in Chicago and other major cities, one of births to unmarried mothers and absent fathers. The CEO of McDonald's last year - after two children were killed in, I would say, gang related street shooting incidents - he texted the mayor. It was eventually revealed in the newspapers that, of course, parents are largely responsible. But you can't say that out loud. While he was called a racist and about twelve other things for saying that in a private text to the mayor, he was right. You have kids that just aren't prepared to make their way in the world. They have no code, as one interviewee that I spoke to said to me, and there's a mentality in lower income, black neighborhoods in Chicago - and this has been described to me by many black residents of Chicago, including when I did field work on the south side where I grew up for my book that came out last year - there's professional sports, the thought is, there's rapping, and there's the gang life. And when you put that together with the horridly low math and reading proficiency that we're seeing in the public schools, you have to say, yes, we cannot lay this all on the current mayor, or not even on politicians as class. But at the same time, the long term fix of stable two parent families - even in low income, black communities - reading to their children, building their vocabulary, all of those building blocks; that change is not happening soon. So in the meantime, how can we kind of goose a better outcome? And I don't think it's through the rhetoric of progressivism.
Richard Helppie
Well look, to that, in that the out of wedlock births or born to single parents is increasing across all demographic groups, it is not a new phenomenon. We've seen this creep in beginning in the 60s. And it goes across white, black, Hispanic - and I don't know where the Asian population is at this point - but it is a phenomenon. We have writers and speakers like Adam Coleman, talking about the absence of fathers in the home, and having that stability. We don't seem to be getting policies that promote two parent families or families that provide stability. I think anybody would agree that all families, whether they're black, white, Latino, Asian, whatever, they all want the same thing for their kids; they want a better future, they want an opportunity, and want a chance. And when you're coming in from a lower income area, it's difficult to articulate how do you get from that neighborhood to a middle class standard of living, given that the numbers don't work when you look at the price of a house in Chicago and what a starting wage might be. And then you put the additional weight on, as you're talking about, in the failure of the schools. The other topic that you write eloquently about, with a lot of data, is crime and law and order. One of the things that I think our readers and viewers and listeners would like to know about [is] your articulating of six signposts of Chicago's progressive law and order breakdown. You talked about if one of the policies is that police can no longer do stop and frisk, then they can't do foot chases or car chases. So if they witness a crime, they can't chase the perpetrator. Is that what the current policy is?
Matt Rosenberg
Effectively, yes, there's a little wiggle room around the margins where under certain very stringent circumstances a foot chase is allowed, or a car chase is allowed, but in most cases now cops do not even bother to pursue in a car or on foot because the regulations are so tight and they could be disciplined. So there's that. Other signposts of the breakdown are that the streets have been confiscated by miscreants. We've had, through August, 1,800 so-called "takeovers" of our streets. That's a thing now that gets organized on social media often for the purposes of stunt driving gatherings. They'll take over an intersection and often hundreds of people will gather to watch something called drifting, which is - that's a whole other subject - but it involves spinning around and doing sort of high risk stunt driving. Well, people can't use the public infrastructure, number one, when that occurs [and] number two, there was a triple homicide at one of these gatherings. They're a magnet for gang rivalries. One person was killed during one of these events; an onlooker. But then worst of all, Rich, when police come, their windshields get smashed. All too often it's now open season on police, with attacks on police. We have a popping out of stolen cars - armed robbery crews making eight to ten hits of three to five victims each, in the course of 90 minutes - it's like an organized enterprise, again, the taking of our streets for crime. We've got catalytic converter theft - crews with armed gunman standing guard - and carjacking has been an epidemic here. Now we see, this year, we're on track for 20,000 motor vehicle thefts, about 55 per day. We're at 17.7 right now and we've done a run rate through the rest of the year. You've got this thing now called the Kia Boys- search that on YouTube - with a USB plug and instructional videos, these kids are able to steal Kias and Hundis - with just a USB plug - after they strip the steering column. And the cars are used for shootings in the hood and for armed robbery sweeps in the richer, whiter neighborhoods. I'm telling you, it's Mad Max, it's dystopian, and most of the victims are black. And as you saw, we've got some data on that. There are other signposts that I wrote about, but those are a couple of the highlights.
Richard Helppie
Matt, this can't be all across the city in every ward, because Chicago has been a vibrant area for business. It's got a great financial district. It's got good transportation coming in from safe suburbs. It is well known for its athletic events: the Bears and the Bulls and the White Sox and the Cubs and such. So when I hear this description - and I haven't been to Chicago for some time, but I did a lot of business there, visited often - it's not visible to me. Is this kind of thing you're describing, if I went to the aldermen, would they said no, no, no, no Matt's got it all wrong? Would Mayor Lightfoot say, oh, that's an exaggeration because look at all these other good things we're doing. What's the flip side of that?
Matt Rosenberg
Your aldermen would not deny it. More of them have chosen not to run for re-election than in any prior year. They're getting away from a very difficult situation. The murders and shootings are still predominantly concentrated in the lower income black and Latino communities for sure. So to that extent, what you say is true. What is changing, however, is that the armed robberies, the carjackings and the motor vehicle thefts are creeping strongly into formerly untouched neighborhoods and it's a real conundrum for white progressives. I'll be honest, they had previously been able to say, oh, well, yes. What are you going to do, it's tied to poverty. And all of the crime is confined to black and Latino, lower income neighborhoods, but they were never touched by it so there was never a sense of urgency. There's a little bit of irony, and frankly, hypocrisy, because now white people on the north side - which is the predominantly white area of Chicago, around Wrigley Field, leading up to that and then north of there, along the lakeshore and so forth - they're now experiencing significant crime. So now all of a sudden crime is an issue, is a problem for white Chicago.
Richard Helppie
My experience tells me that it is more divided around economic strata than around racial strata, but we can come back to that a bit. It seems to me if you're a person - a middle class, upper middle class, or even a wealthy person in Chicago - couldn't you just pick up the phone and call 911 and get a police response?
Matt Rosenberg
Funny, you mentioned 911. We did a poll. They don't come anymore, but it's not their fault. They're stretched thin. The video cameras come out right away. We did a public records request early this year and we found that in 2021, there were more than 400,000 high priority 911 calls which went into so-called backlog status. Bottom line, that means no cops come for anywhere from 30 minutes to three hours. We dug deep into the data, and again, just high priority 911 calls, not oh, there's a dog barking - not that kind of stuff - stuff like a guy has been shot and is bleeding on the sidewalk, or a domestic battery, a report of a husband beating up a wife, stabbing victim. Police needed 400,000 times - which by the way, was 52% of all of the high priority 911 calls - nobody showed up. And we've learned now, Rich, that this is continuing in 2022 and there's even been reporting from an outstanding crime news site called CWB Chicago; they have audio of a police department supervisor ordering dispatchers to quote "code down" some of the 911 calls, which means put them in a lower priority category for the record keeping. Because if no one has been physically injured, you could still have a high priority call, like burglar on a property or someone robbed, someone robbed even at gunpoint, but if they weren't shot or knifed or harmed or hit, then the police won't come. So you have repeated instances now, and [if you] talk to crime victims, they'll tell you they call 911, no one shows up after 40 minutes or an hour or 90 minutes. They just go home and the next time they may not report the crime because their feeling is, what's the point. So voila, "crime is down," quote/unquote. Except it's not.
Richard Helppie
Doesn't that open up an opportunity, though, for a mayoral candidate or a candidate to be alderman to run on a platform of assisting the police or fixing the schools or running on school choice? That's the thing that that I'm trying to understand, is that...where does this start? Why do people accept this if they've got the ability to vote? These are two fundamental functions of government. We have K through 12 education. And we have...there are a lot of conservatives that would debate whether that's a proper function, but post-World War II, that's the way it's been. And certainly public safety is a common good that we all believe in. We want the fire put out, we want the EMS to be there and we certainly want the police department there. How is it that the city can continually get away with not being responsive?
Matt Rosenberg
We have only about 35% turnout of registered voters in local elections. So public employee labor unions tend to predominate because they always turn out their people to vote. That's one quick answer. But to backtrack, you were correct when you said that this presents an opportunity for political challengers to the mayor and to the aldermen. We're going to see very shortly a very lively campaign season in Chicago where some candidates will be accenting these issues quite strongly. And in the mayoral race, particularly - and I have to check - there are a large number of candidates, it's in the vicinity, I think, of about 11 candidates. Although nominating petition signatures may be challenged and the field may narrow down a tiny bit, there are a great number of challengers to Mayor Lightfoot. Several of them have a good chance of making it through the initial run-off. The top two vote getters will emerge from a February 28 vote - I think it's the 28th, late February - two, technically, nonpartisan primaries. So the top two vote getters advance to the final contest in very early April. One of the more serious contenders - certainly not the only one - is a gentleman named Paul Vallas. He ran the Chicago public schools under Mayor Richard Daley - that's Daley the second, not the first. He also ran the budget office. He's a wonky technocrat who cares. Some people would really like to see Paul get in there. He knows policy upside down and inside out, he has an extensive and intelligent playbook of solutions. The way things work here though, good ideas often don't matter, facts don't matter, logic doesn't matter - there is voting by pigment - there are a lot of people who have just swallowed the blue pill. Our statewide elections hardened the political partisan polarization that was, in large part - at least in some part - the fault of Republicans. They fielded a gubernatorial candidate who was an associate of Trump, who took a hard line against abortion. So Republicans are identified as sort of a troglodyte party, and that perception, with the help of the mainstream media, bleeds over to the way that conservatives and reformers are now looked upon. If you're not part of the mainstream, hard blue progressive Gestalt here, you're going to be looked upon as some sort of nefarious, cold-hearted Republican type, and the R word is like the scarlet letter here. So it's very hard for anyone who's not a standard issue progressive to get any political traction. We have now six members of the Democratic Socialists of America on our city council - five came in in the last election cycle and the business community has been totally asleep at the switch. They're scared to get in the crosshairs of mainstream Democrats here. But they - just yesterday - announced the formation of a new independent political committee, Rich, which was a very interesting development. They're going to try and fund moderate Democrats for city council and mayor so that we don't end up with 12 or 16 socialists on our city council and a mayor who's more in line with them than with old fashioned Democratic values. What people say here, Rich, is if only we could get back even to the days of Rahm Emanuel. He's starting to look awfully good. And Mayor Daley the second, even Mayor Daley the first, with all his flaws, and prejudices, is starting to look pretty good to some of the old timers. Because we had troubles with our schools, but it wasn't a Mad Max world and it is now; it's a failing city. And it's a great city, you see the vibrancy everywhere. I walk sometimes 10 or 14 miles in a day, across Chicago, many of my Facebook friends think I'm insane. They're all asking me, are you carrying? I love this place. I love the music, the architecture, the intellectual firepower, the neighborhoods; it's still a fantastic city. So that's why many of us still fight to try and get better policies enacted.
Richard Helppie
It's fascinating to listen to this from an insider's view, that there's been a fail of progressive policies. And it seems to be, let's get more progressive, because we can't go back to that more business-like approach, because that looks too much like a Republican. And by the way, the Republican's last president was Trump and he's crazy and the Republicans are behind broad abortion bans, so it's quite a conundrum. I just wonder if politics based on ancestral heritage is going to reach a breaking point where we start looking at more solutions. But I think the difficulty there is that it's hard to put in policies, or appeal on a policy level, if people don't understand mathematics and aren't able to read about the pros and cons; if they're just inflamed based on identity politics. And then it has also occurred to me that how much of this is cultural from a base? If you go back to the early days of the country - I just watched the show Hamilton - and Alexander Hamilton was killed in a duel, as it was his son, and basically, it's because you insulted me, so we have to go shoot it out. That's been around for several hundred years now; we've got to get that out of the fabric of the society. Matt, as we think about wrapping up here I want to make sure that people have an opportunity to get to your writing. It's hard hitting, it is fact based, and clearly something that you have an opinion behind. It's again, Wirepoints.org, look up Matt Rosenberg. I think you really do have a compassionate heart, trying to fix the issues with education and with public safety and I share that passion around education. You quote Teddy Roosevelt a bit, any traction with that?
Matt Rosenberg
Yes, some I mean, we'll have to see. I'm not expecting people will say, Matt, brilliant use of the Teddy Roosevelt quote, but if the idea that he is espousing - of facing up to the real problems and not running away from them and not hiding behind toxic rhetoric - if that idea gains traction, then I will feel like maybe things are moving in the right direction.
Richard Helppie
The other thing that I wonder about; are there examples of better run cities of any size that could be pointed to? Like, here's a major city that's working? By way of example - I don't know how it turned out - Kansas City, several years ago said, we're going to put the most modern student computers into all our public schools. As you think about what could be done with Chicago, are there any working cities that you think that's a better way to do it?
Matt Rosenberg
I think anyone who wants to take a crack at answering that question needs to go gather a lot of data on crime rates, even on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis, on academic achievement levels in the public schools, on existing school choice, on net fiscal position and their report cards that; try and do that. I don't have that in front of me, but a more impressionistic answer is yes, look where people are moving, look where the out migration is from high tax, highly problematic, high crime states like New York, New Jersey and Illinois. Where are people moving to? They are moving exceptionally to places like Florida, Texas, and Arizona. In Chicago, since 1980 up through 2020, both the black and white populations are each down a third, the Latino population has nearly doubled, the Asian population has grown a bit. It has been remarkably instructive for me to do casual observations in the field, walking Chicago streets, and see all the Latino owned businesses everywhere, to walk through residential Latino neighborhoods and see two parent families, grandmas letting the kids out from the car shouting, I love you, I love you - that actually happened - just to look at all the commerce, all the entrepreneurialism going on in Latino neighborhoods of Chicago, there is not a culture of complaint; they basically have no time for the progressive agenda. They may vote for some of those candidates, certainly, but they're too busy making a living and taking care of their families. There are some gang issues in the Latino community. It's not a 100% success story but it really is remarkable. And one of the things you hear from people in the local public school system is that soft skills are crucial too, it's not just academic. It's how you dress, whether you show up on time, your demeanor, and they lament that many of those skills are just not not held or absorbed by many of the students who are being given diplomas so easily now. And Rich, I would be remiss not to just quickly mention some key crime data that supports my thesis. Blacks are 29% of Chicago's population [yet] they are 79% of all murder victims. From 2018 through most of 2022, when it comes to other violent crimes, like non-fatal shootings, criminal sexual assault, aggravated assault, aggravated battery, vehicular hijacking - they are a majority, often a vast majority, of the victims; anywhere from 50 to 75%. Yet again, they're only 29% of the population. So if this is progressive...
Richard Helppie
The question I would ask though would be this; if a black family living on the north side, middle class, upper middle class, professional - physician, attorney, investment banker, CPA - in any profession like that, my sense is that it wouldn't matter what your ancestral heritage would be if you're in a certain ward. Would those statistics really reflect the area that people are in, more so than their ancestral heritage?
Matt Rosenberg
Yes, in a nutshell. I think though the nub of the issue then is how do you transform communities from lower income, low opportunity, empty lots everywhere where there is no there there, literally. Literally, how do you transform those communities into ones where positive change is occurring? And there's been no shortage of government driven Neighborhood Economic Development programs, but it doesn't lead to much. It's workforce driven and this is the hard part. Human capital development is the key that unlocks everything here which includes all kinds of stuff like, even parents; introducing vocabulary, reading to their children, taking them new places, stimulating their minds and curiosities and modeling successful adult legal behavior.
Richard Helppie
That's one that I wanted to ask about, about modeling behavior. We had a president elected in 2008, with connections to Chicago, in Barack Obama and I always thought that was a grand opportunity for him to start turning around those that you've talked about in terms of soft skills. Because here's a guy that's been clearly highly successful, became the most powerful person on the planet. What should Barack Obama have done in terms of helping youth of Chicago to have a better future?
Matt Rosenberg
I think he did a few things early on, and I guess, maybe in the end; and I'll be contrarian, hopefully not in a disrespectful way. I'm not sure it's up to so-called black leaders, even a Barack Obama. It comes down to the grassroots. I mean, it might start with a preacher who's doing great work, not just in the pulpit either, and there are several of those. But in the end, it comes down to the home environment. But Obama did a few things. On Father's Day 2008, he gave a famous speech about the importance of black fathers being present and married and fully engaged in the black community. He said that it was widely reported on and he went into details about why it matters, and he was absolutely on point. I'm not sure he stuck with that strongly over the course of his eight years as president. He also put his imprint avatar, if you will, on a program called, Becoming a Man, run through the University of Chicago Crime Lab, which basically was one of several that are still out there, which teach young black men, teenagers to control their temper. You alluded to that challenge before, in Hamilton - people fighting a duel to the death over a perceived slight or just respect - that is a huge issue here. Anger management is huge. These programs draw on the stoic philosophers, believe it or not, who have written about this very thing. They say how you react when somebody disrespects you is very important. You need to learn the internal mechanisms to let it slide, let it pass, and don't get distracted from your broader course in life. That's still a huge problem.
Richard Helppie
You can also see that, in a life of despair, is that the message needs to be...like, I grew up in a blue collar area, and if you could show up for work, if you could get your high school diploma - which there were standards - that there was a middle class standard of living waiting for you at a couple of the Ford plants, GM hydromatic plant and so forth. And this is where I think some of the issues are born from despair. What can we tell that youth in some of these troubled areas - particularly if you're a minority - with the vestiges of racism that still exist in our country? What can we tell them that that should give them hope versus despair and set them on a different course? It's not like we say get a great job, you can buy a house; the numbers just don't work based on a high school diploma, even one with the standards to it. The Chicago public school system [cross talk]
Matt Rosenberg
You tell them: learn to operate drones. That's just one example, but technical education and jobs in that sort of gray space between the hardcore six figure white collar and the old working class jobs in factories - that were good jobs that largely don't exist anymore - there's a new gray space, which some call it vocational education. That's the old school phrase; career and technical education - CTE. So there's a great deal of emphasis on that, make that stick; realize this is my prescription, but realize it's still built on mastery of basic academic skills, most especially reading and math. They say now to be an auto mechanic, which is a great job, you need a second year college reading level, because those manuals are fierce. And there's going to be some computer technology too, with the diagnostics and using spreadsheets and software. So what do you tell them? I think, what's the vision that needs to be marketed - it starts with attainable jobs. Attainable jobs...if you can tell a kid, you know what, you can start out at 48k the year you complete, the month you complete, your drone training course and by year three, you could be up at 60k. If you could tell them that their eyes will light up. But then there's got to be people to help them stay the course because it's not easy. And if public schools and if the state legislature is closing off competition in K through 12 education because, sadly, the teachers union is all about control and dominance and has a broad right to strike in order to quash reforms - which the Chicago Teachers Union does have - if the public school system puts incendiary racialized videos on its website, saying that black people have no chance to succeed, that looting is a legitimate response...and yes, that happened and I wrote it [cross talk]
Richard Helppie
The Chicago Public School system...[cross talk].
Matt Rosenberg
On the Chicago Public Schools website. Such a video still stands. It was filmed by an activist right after George Floyd. It was full of rage, it said looting is an appropriate response. She was basically saying burn that s**t down, it's good, you're right, let's burn stuff, let's loot, there is no hope for us...and for that to be...then she went on to say the police are killing us - a blanket statement that police are killing black people. We went and researched that using the Washington Post database and essentially debunked that claim, contextualized it with the real data. So this kind of stuff is on the Chicago Public Schools website, while at the same time the teachers union is extremely powerful, and blocking the advent of real school choice. They're blocking the closure of schools that are half to two-thirds empty. We dug up the data on that too, from the school system, and found that more than half of Chicago's traditional public schools - non-charter, non-contract - were below the 70% threshold of seats filled; meaning they should be eligible for closure. We found that a third of them were even more empty. And then there was a slice that we're about 5 to 25% full only, yet the teachers union won a moratorium from the state legislature on Chicago's school closures because we hear rhetoric, when there's discussion of consolidating empty schools, that it's a hate crime. That was actually said and reported. So it's beyond the pale, Rich.
Richard Helppie
Well, Matt, this has been very, very informative and provocative. I'm sure we're going to get a lot of commentary on this program. I want to tell my readers, listeners, and viewers that there's a lot more content; we've barely covered a third of what's in this most recent piece in Wirepoints, Wirepoints.org, Matt Rosenberg. He's also cited a website for crime statistics in the city of Chicago, and it kind of fits with the theme of what The Common Bridge is about: that we have an unresponsive political system whose only job is to defeat the other side. We've heard that in Chicago they've achieved that. Then the third element is that we don't have a media system that is actually reporting out what the problems are and holding people accountable. It sounds to me like perhaps Wirepoints.org might be part of that new media model, bringing that to the attention of people. Matt, it's been a great conversation, any closing thoughts? In particular, if there's anything we haven't covered that you'd like to bring this home with?
Matt Rosenberg
Absolutely. First of all, a lot of this is laid out in depth and with all the pieces connected at my book, which I will shamelessly plug, it's available on Amazon. It's called ìWhat Next Chicago: Notes of a Pissed-off Native Sonî by Matt Rosenberg, ONLY at Amazon. It's got 348 footnotes. It's a combination of data, reportage, and field reportage. I went into black and Latino Chicago, as well as dug up a lot of wisdom from academics and so forth and from government sources. The other piece of this is - and it's reflected at the end of the book - a lot of this solution lies with us; it is utterly crucial to push for more responsive and effective governance. You and I, and many people, would agree on that. That is a primary fight. We are taxed heavily, government should work for us. Your question about the size of the city budget reflected that reality, but in the end, too, a lot falls upon us, as students, as mothers, as fathers, as members of metropolitan regions and as members of society. So it's not ever going to be all government. Where your government is dysfunctional the importance of non-government alternatives - from family to NGOs - becomes ever greater. So I would close with that thought as well.
Richard Helppie
Wonderful, get involved. That's been my experience, too. It's making a difference where you can. We only get one shot to educate each child, let's make sure that we give them the best opportunity. We only have one sense of peace and security, let's do our best to ensure that we get that. This has been The Common Bridge today, with our guest from Chicago, Matt Rosenberg. He's got a great book out. I bet if you scanned Amazon with the words "pissed-off" you're going to find this and rightly so. I love the traditional hard work of the journalist that you are and I do appreciate your being on The Common Bridge. Perhaps we'll have you back, maybe talk with some other guests in a panel, because this is a problem that needs to be addressed. With our guest, Matt Rosenberg, this is your host, Rich Helppie, signing off on The Common Bridge.
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