Adrian G. Uribarri of the Chitown Daily News reported yesterday:

 Chicago’s public schools have made little progress in raising student achievement during the last several years, according to a new nonprofit report.

The study, from the Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago, finds that substantial gains on the Illinois State Achievement Test are mainly the result of changes in the test, with only modest improvement in real student performance at elementary and middle schools.

On the Prairie State Achievement Examination, more than 70 percent of high school juniors fail to meet state standards, and fewer achieve scores that indicate college readiness on the national ACT exam in math, reading and science.

That Civic Committee also calls CPS "abysmal," noting that less than 10 percent of all high school students are college ready. That CPS has not improved over the last decade while current Education Sec. Arne Duncan was in charge is territory I covered in my Duncan piece last month.

What’s fascinating here though, is that the Civic Committee trashes the very public school system it’s been funding. The committee is an arm of the Commercial Club of Chicago. The corporate largess of the Commercial Club funded "Renaissance 2010" the plan launched in 2004 by Duncan and Mayor Richard Daley to close under-performing schools and replace them with charters.

The Commercial Club shows its true colors in the report by trumpeting the performance of charter schools as a silver lining in otherwise dismal test score data. And its solutions are almost identical to Duncan’s education reforms ("excellent teachers are the answer" as apparently CPS has been limiting their hiring pool to non-excellent teachers).

But parts of the report come down especially hard at Duncan. For example, the Education Secretary is mocked for penning a letter to the Chicago Tribune that crowed about better 8th grade achievement on math tests. It turns out this better performance was because the 8th graders started taking a different test. It looks like Duncan got out of Chicago at the right time.-MB

The U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003 because Saddam Huseein allegedly had weapons of mass destruction and links to al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. But in 2004 interviews with the FBI — obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Security Archives and reported on by the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler –  a captured Saddam said that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam loathed Osama bin Laden. Saddam told an FBI interviewer that Iraq said it had weapons of mass destruction only as a deterrent against Iran. Indeed, the Iraqi leader saw Iran, not the United States, as the country’s one true enemy and threat. Also, Saddam made clear that he was ideologically opposed to al-Qaeda and its use of religious fundamentalism in politics.

Maybe Saddam, knowing his criminal trial was near, was still concocting dastardly lies to undermine the brave freedom fighters taking on Iraq reconstruction. But Saddam’s words verify the detective work of United Nations weapons inspectors and Middle East experts conducted in the run-up to the Iraq War. How the Whtie House and more than 3/4 of the U.S. Senate grew convinced in late-2002 that America had to declare war on Iraq now is already one of the great examples of disastrous Washington groupthink. It’s no wonder Barack Obama played down the celebrations in Iraq yesterday as U.S. troops left Iraqi cities — our involvement there is — ultimately — an embarrassment.-MB

The New York Times’ Jennifer Medina and Robert Gebeloff have a very good article today that looks at the New York City public schools under the control of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Since 2002, the state and city of New York have let Bloomberg make the New York City education department a free-floating agency, independent of state and city government bureaucracies. Bloomberg in turn has empowered schools chancellor Joel Klein to control a budget that has swelled from $13 billion in 2002 to $22 billion today. State legislators will soon decide whether to keep NYC schools under mayoral control.

Some results of mayoral control include principal and administrators getting large salary increases. There was a big "accountability office" established to monitor student progress. And without having to follow state and city procurement practices, the schools have rewarded no-bid contracts.

What the state of New York decides has national implications. Other big cities, like Chicago, swear by the mayoral control model, which strips power traditionally held by school boards. Former Chicago Public Schools head and current Education Sec. Arne Duncan has become something of a mayoral control evangelist, and preached the gospel recently in Detroit. The idea behind mayoral control is that it cuts through the loathed education bureaucracy and holds two prominent public figures (the mayor and the mayor’s appointed education leader) accountable.

There’s little evidence mayoral control in New York or Chicago has undermined public schools. But there’s also little evidence it’s improved student performance.-MB

I haven’t blogged yet about Barack Obama firing Gerald Walpin, the Geroge W. Bush-appointed inspector general at the Corporation for National and Community Service, even though the story involves Kevin Johnson, the current mayor of Sacramento and one of my favorite childhood basketball players. But Ed O’Keefe of the Washington Post has a useful article on Walpin today that makes it sound like Obama was perhaps justified in his decision.

The suspicion is that Walpin was fired because he wrote a damning report on a Kevin Johnson-run AmeriCorps program and said that Sacramento shouldn’t get federal stimulus money. Johnson is a supporter of Obama.

But Walpin apparently had trouble answering basic questions to administration officials about how his agency, which among other duties runs AmericaCorps, was performing. And he may have produced an uncomfortable work environment with bad racial and sexual jokes. It’s worth it for Congress to keep investigating why Obama fired Walpin without much public explanation. But that doesn’t mean Obama did anything wrong.-MB

The Washington Post’s Spencer Hsu had an interesting article over the weekend on a clash between the Pentagon and Dept. of Homeland Security over who should be patrolling the U.S.-Mexican border to stop Mexican drug violence from spilling over. Basically, DHS Sec. Janet Napolitano and border state governors want the Pentagon to send 1,500 national guard troops to patrol the border. But Defense Sec. Robert Gates argues that is what border agents are for and he fears deploying the national guard will result in a more permanent mission.

I think Gates has a point: isn’t containing the Mexican drug war exactly the kind of domestic security DHS was created in 2003 to do? On the other hand, the Pentagon, since 1989, has set aside money to have national guard troops help states with anti-drug programs. The problem is much different now than the crack cocaine epidemic of the late 80’s, but the point is that it’s not unprecedented for the national guard to wade into drug violence. Washington has spent 35 years talking about a "war on drugs." Now a literal drug war is happening adjacent to America and it probably requires extraordinary action by both the Pentagon and DHS.-MB

Supreme Court cases are off my blogging beat, but a 5-4 ruling yesterday establishes how states will enforce federal financial regulations, which so is on my beat. John Schwartz of the New York Times reports that the court decided that states have the right to enforce federal regulatory laws, which in this case involved the right to enforce fair lending and consumer protection laws. In 2005, Eliot Spitzer, when he still New York state attorney general, suspected that national banks like Wells Fargo were violating fair lending laws by giving bad deals to Latino and black borrowers. But when Spitzer demanded records, the banks replied that only the federal government had a right to see those records.

But just like in March when they said states can enforce federal food and drug safety laws, the normally pro-business court sided here with the states. What this means is that whatever financial regulatory overhauls Obama and Congress agree to, the states have a right to enforce them if, say, the Securities and Exchange Commission doesn’t. This is already happening in the investigation of the subrprime mortgage crisis: While the Justice Dept. is AWOL in their white collar crime investigations, state attorneys general have picked up the slack. The Court decision means banks will have to comply when these AGs demand records or issue subpoenas.-MB

The Wall Street Journal’s David Enrich, Liz Rappaport, and Jenny Strasburg chronicle the rise, fall and unlikely re-birth of the $1 trillion Public Private Investment Program, which, back in March, seemed the key program in the Obama administration’s plan to re-start the economy:

Early this month, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. essentially shelved one arm of PPIP — the government-financed buying of bad bank loans. Mr. Geithner recently said the other part — to facilitate the buying from banks of troubled securities, many backed by real-estate loans — could be scaled back because investors are "reluctant to participate." This week, the government is expected to name investment firms to manage this securities-buying portion

The Bush and Obama administrations announced plans, backed by incomprehensible sums of money, to have banks unload their subprime mortgage securities and other troubled assets. The Journal reminds that this is what the Bush/Henry Paulson $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program was supposed to do (the name kind of gives it away). It was misleading by both Bush/Paulson and Barack Obama/Tim Geithner to announce both programs with such fanfare and then quietly shelve them. And it makes the new Obama administration argument — that unloading troubled assets off bank balance sheets isn’t that important — sound disingenuous.-MB

David Johnston of the New York Times says that the Justice Department is arguing for more somewhat more constitutional-esque military tribunals for terrorist detainees than the Bush administration allowed. Detainees would have the right to contest a military tribunal decision in federal court if coerced statements (i.e. confessions obtained through torture) were used against them in military court.

In other terrorist detainee news, it was reported this weekend that Barack Obama might issue an executive order that would allow him to hold terrorist suspects indefinitely. In other words, the terrorists would be detained just as they are now at Guantanamo Bay, only they’d be detained somewhere else.

One things that’s disconcerting here is that Obama and the Justice Department are making these huge legal decisions absent leadership from Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, the part of government that gives legal advice to the president. Obama nominated Dawn Johnsen to head OLC in 2008. Halfway into 2009, she’s still waiting Senate confirmation, as there’s apparently a question if she has the filibuster-proof 60 votes to get confirmed. Not to be too hard on the world’s greatest deliberative body, but it would be nice if Johnsen could get an up-down vote by, say, next January, at which time Obama promises to shut down Guantanamo’s detention camp.-MB

Jeff Gerth of ProPublica and Brady Dennis of the Washington Post report that GE Capital, the banking arm of General Electric, has issued billions in loans that the Federal Deposit Insurance Coporation guarantees in its Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program. The program started last October and it was strictly intended to guarantee lending for troubled banks but the rules were tweaked to include commerce/banking hybrid GE. Gerth’s and Dennis’s report is particularly relevant since Barack Obama’s proposed financial regulations involve forcing companies to make a choice of whether they want to be in banking or commerce.

Interestingly, though, while it may have been unfair to guarantee GE Capital’s loans and the FDIC was reluctant to do so, the loan guarantees are apparently working:

Despite those misgivings, there have been no defaults in the loan guarantee program. It has helped buoy confidence in the credit markets and enabled vital financial firms to raise capital even during the darkest days of the financial crisis. In addition, the program has raised more than $8 billion in fees.

The real injustice then might be that GE, the largest company in the world according to Forbes, used its power and influence to join the program while its smallest competitors could not:

One of GE’s competitors in business lending markets, CIT Group, a smaller company, has had a harder time raising cash. It has been unable to persuade the FDIC to allow it into the debt-guarantee program, at least in part because of its lower credit ratings. A recent Standard & Poor’s analysis cited CIT’s "inability to access TLGP" as a factor in the company’s declining financial condition.

Obama and Congress have to set new regulations that actually encourage competitive markets instead of enabling the GE’s of the world to become masters at manipulating the regulations.-MB

Hearings in Congress about the Federal Reserve Board and Bank of America (BofA), which received $20 billion in federal aid, are focusing on whether Fed chairman Ben Bernanke threatened BofA’s CEO, Kenneth Lewis, with firing if the bank first refused, and then came back for, federal bail-out monies.   Michael Crittenden and Jon Hilsenrath deliver the story in the Wall Street Journal. The Fed had determined Bank of America needed help, but the bank, apparently, was playing it coy.  According to Bernanke’s aides, the Fed chief made it clear that if BofA said no first, and then later came begging for help, "management [would be] gone." 

It’s hard to see what’s wrong with the Fed playing hardball with a bank that led the industry’s charge toward disaster.  Individual managers at companies like Bank of America and AIG have shown that they’re perfectly comfortable putting their own fortunes ahead of the country’s.  So why shouldn’t these companies’ chief creditor — the federal government — call the shots every now and then?  It’s hard to see why Kenneth Lewis should be able to bandy about $20 billion when, as Crittenden and Hilsenrath report, regulators have been downgrading the bank’s overall ratings and "hand[ing] down a confidential supervisory action that forced the company to improve governance . . . [and] improve risk management."   And here Members of Congress are shocked — shocked! — that people talking about massive sums of taxpayer money would speak frankly with paragons of private industry. -NH