Tim Furman at School Tech Connect also wonders why we’re not heading for Springfield in May for Lobby Day.

But he has a suggestion:

It all seems like a golden opportunity to move forward with the suggestion I keep making about “back-home lobbying.” If it’s such a good strategy, then it should be supported.

My colleagues in the IFT and the IEA will soon be electing delegates to their respective annual meetings. I would humbly suggest that someone in these organization organize a new business item that calls for the creation of a state-wide, opt-in database that lets members see who else lives in their legislative and senate districts. Such a database would make it so much easier to organize a Back Home Lobby Day any time during the year.

I probably live within one mile of dozens of IEA, IFT, and CTU members, but the only way I could determine that would be by starting a Meetup or going on Craigslist and placing a personal ad, or walking around the neighborhood in a sandwich sign with a megaphone.  But our organizations have this information. I could design the database architecture in about an hour.

Most people won’t go sit one-to-one with their representative; however, if they know twenty other people are going, they’ll join in. That’s the beauty of Lobby Day.  A little data would go a long, long way toward people taking responsibility for organized “back-home lobbying.” I live in Heather Steans’ district, and I’m sure I could get a hundred people to meet me at her office to express our dismay about the corrupt-by-design state charter authority that she dreamed up.  But how will I organize that? On my blog? With SPITBALLS?

Well, Tim. Delegates to the IEA RA have already been elected. I’m one of them.

I will be proposing the data-base idea. We’ll see if they’re serious.

Meanwhile, Tim’s suspicions that a deal is in the works?

Yep. Sounds like it to me.

Thursday, Feb. 2 from 6:00 to 7:30 pm

Mt. Greenwood Library

110th & Kedzie

You are invited to a townhall meeting on the controversial plan to lengthen the CPS school day.

Jesse Sharkey from the CTU will answer your questions on the proposed longer day and longer year, and how it compares with the current school day.

CPS will not confirm this, but there is talk that the school year will begin mid-August, and there is talk that Chicago Park District programs will be rescheduled to start later as a result of the longer day.

Petitions will be available to sign.

The Chicago Reader’s Ben Joravsky on Mary Dempsey’s departure as Library Commissioner.

 Mary Dempsey…apparently told the boss what he didn’t want to hear—namely, that firing employees and cutting hours will destroy the library system she spent so many years trying to build up.

Thus, at his introductory press conference, Bannon dutifully nodded along as Mayor Emanuel explained his library cuts this way: “The debate is not just about library hours—[it's] what will our neighborhood branch libraries be like in this information age. We need to define that next mission, write that next chapter and adapt to the changes.”

In other words, let’s pretend that the recent spasm of library cutbacks, firings and closings is part of some larger, well-thought-out strategy.

As opposed to some half-baked budget-cutting idea that popped out of Mayor Rahm’s head in between lunches with members of the millionaire’s club.

Look on the bright side, people—if you need to visit a well-funded library with convenient, seven-days-a-week service, you can always go to Wilmette, the mayor’s hometown.

Somehow or other the library functions in Wilmette without people having to redefine its mission.

I don’t know why the leaders of the IEA decided not to mobilize teachers for Lobby Day in Springfield this year.

I know that their stated reason, that the Capitol building is under renovation, doesn’t make any sense. We have met with Park Ridge State Senator Dan Kotowski in his Capitol building office, in his office when it was in some other building and on the lawn by the statue of pro-slavery Illinois politician, Stephen Douglas.

Contacting our Springfield representatives is a year-long operation. Members write emails. We make phone calls. We visit them in their home office. And we mobilize for Lobby Day and go down to Springfield each Spring.

Now we find out that it’s not about Capitol renovation, but that Lobby Day doesn’t make any difference.

When it comes to lobbying state legislators, where the contact occurs doesn’t matter as long as the member is well prepared for the meeting and will encourage support from the representative or senator.

It doesn’t matter?

Of course it matters. It all matters.

For Government Relations to tell our PREA local that all these past years of money spent, lesson plans written and 8 hours on buses every Spring didn’t matter –  pretty harsh.

Don’t you think?

And his hand-picked board of education seems to have skipped a step. They’re budgeting for turnarounds before all the public hearings and before actually taking a vote. Very Chicago.

The Sun-Times:

The mayor was not concerned.

“The ministers have a right — who have been long involved in school reform, longer school day, turnaround schools, who don’t accept the status quo — to speak up,” Emanuel said Wednesday. “And I’m proud that people are having a discussion about the school system.”

Pressed repeatedly if he had a problem with what critics have called “rent-a-protesters,” Emanuel said “I’m not speaking [about that]. I’m speaking about the fact that ministers care about their schools and care about their community.”

Regarding the turnaround vote:

Jackson Potter, chief of staff to Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis, questioned why the board was scheduled Wednesday to approve millions in renovation funds promised as part of the fresh start of targeted schools, even though those schools’ shakeups aren’t up for a vote for a month. “It gives the appearance they already made up their minds’’ about school shakeups, Potter said.

It was the old Chicago columnist Mike Royko who back in the day called California Governor Jerry Brown, “Governor Moonbeam.” That was when Brown was serving his first terms as governor, sleeping on a mattress on the floor, doing yoga and dating Linda Ronstadt.

Of course, I was doing those things too. Except for the yoga and Linda Ronstadt.

These days Brown’s statements about schools and testing make him sound positively grounded compared to Newt Gingrich and Willard Mitt Romney.

Frankly, it makes Brown seem positively grounded compared to Education Secretary Arne Duncan and President Obama.

Although Obama paid lip service to having less emphasis on testing, there’s nothing coming out of the Department of Education that would lead you to believe that the administration has plans to change much other than the names of things. For example, there was no mention of Race to the Top in the State of the Union address.

But when it comes to Obama, the Man was born with good electoral karma.

When Obama ran  for Senate in Illinois, he had opponents who were discovered to have had sordid secret sex lives or were so far to the right that they would make Michelle Bachmann seem reasonable. He won in a landslide.

When Obama ran for President the first time he had the good fortune to have as an opponent a guy who acted like an old geezer chasing kids off his lawn and who had a running mate named Sarah Palin.

And now he has “No tax” Willard and The Grandiose One.

While Obama doesn’t have a lock on November, the Republicans are sure making it easier.

Yesterday The Grandiose One proposed establishing a colony on the moon and Willard hinted at invading Cuba.

How does Obama manage to get guys like this as opponents?

A CBS poll done after the State of the Union found that 91% of those responding liked Obama’s speech.  91% of the American people don’t like much of anything at the moment. Such is the power of the Republican Party to unite people.

Against them.

I can only wonder what Mike Royko might have said about those two moonbeams.

Mary Dempsey was the patron of Chicago’s libraries.

So naturally Rahm forced her out as the City’s Library Commissioner. She just wouldn’t go along with his plans to close libraries, reduce hours and services.

Mary Dempsey loved the City’s libraries. Rahm didn’t give a shit.

Sources said Dempsey is livid that libraries were singled out for cuts that affect library services at all hours and not at all placated that a City Council rebellion forced the mayor to soften the cuts twice — once by reducing the number of layoffs and again with an end-run around the union representing library employees that will reopen libraries on Monday afternoons.

Sources said Dempsey was equally furious that, in an attempt to justify the cuts, Emanuel insisted that Dempsey initially proposed closing a handful of libraries altogether. Dempsey denied ever making that suggestion.

Emanuel blames Dempsey for the never-ending stream of protests about his library cuts. Sources said he lashed out at Dempsey for daring to talk to aldermen about the cuts and barred her from talking to the news media.

Dempsey, who is married to millionaire personal injury attorney Phil Corboy, apparently decided she no longer wanted to work for a mayor who she felt had treated her and the library system with contempt.

Obama’s State of the Union on education: Same old same old.