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Leo High School won their latest track and field state title last May by one point. This marked the school’s sixth state championship. When Leo won its first state title in 1981, it became the first Catholic school to take the top trophy in track and field, and no other Catholic school in Illinois has done that since then.

But the biggest number for the Leo track team may well be zero. That is the number of indoor and outdoor practice facilities the team has–none at all–meaning one of the state’s top track teams trains by running laps and hurdles in the school’s hallways after class.

Leo is hardly the only school dealing with sub-par practice facilities: In fact, no Chicago public school has an indoor track. But Leo is the only Chicago school to win a state title in track and field in the last 15 years, a championship no Chicago Public Schools team has claimed since 1974.

“I think it would be easy to get a case of the poor-me’s based on a lack of facilities,” said Jim Prunty, president of the Chicago Catholic League. “But the fact of the matter is that in Chicago, you would be hard pressed to find a school with really great facilities. It’s a reality we’re all dealing with.”

The Illinois High School Association surveys high schools every year on its website regarding  track and field facilities at state schools in order to determine postseason sites. However, many schools do not complete the survey, making it difficult to determine how many of the 777 IHSA schools have their own tracks.

“It’s not uncommon for teams all over the state to be running the halls or the stairs if they want to get started on conditioning early. Most schools in Illinois don’t have an indoor facility,” said Ron McGraw, an assistant executive director with the IHSA.

“Having facilities doesn’t make you a state champion and not having them obviously doesn’t keep you from succeeding.”

Track and field hit its peak in the U.S. almost three decades ago when American athletes consistently brought home Olympic medals for the sport. Its low visibility since then has been one of the reasons why fewer young athletes get involved with the sport. Funding for track and field programs also has dropped, said a spokesperson for USA Track and Field.

In 2010 CPS cut pay for assistant high school track coaches in an effort to save money in the district’s budget. According to information provided by CPS, there about 70 high schools with track and field teams. Eighteen schools have outdoor facilities on school property or at a nearby park, and four schools have stadiums with surrounding tracks that can be used for track meets.

At Leo–a Catholic school that is not part of CPS–the track and field team works on technique and conditioning in the school’s weight room, hallways and stairwell landings beginning in January. Any day that weather permits, they move practice outdoors to the sidewalks or nearby woods because almost any other surface, said head coach Ed Adams, is better on the athletes’ bodies than the hallway floors that have no give.

Adams has worked at Leo 17 years. Under his leadership, the Lions have won five of their six state trophies. He has done so despite a steep decline in school enrollment that finally leveled off in the last couple years.

Today, there are 148 students at the all-boys Catholic school that in its heyday enrolled more than 1,000. Chicago News Cooperative sports columnist Dan McGrath since the summer of 2010 has served as president of the school, which continues to face enrollment and financial challenges.

Adams, who has received a combined eight coach-of-the-year plaudits from the National Federation of State High School Associations and the Illinois Track and Cross Country Coaches Association, leads a team of 30–or about 20 percent of the school’s student body.

“Track and field relies heavily on individual talent available in your school,” Adams said. “It’s not easy to build, say, a powerhouse.”

Of the six students who represented Leo at the state track meet last year, five graduated and the other is now a sophomore. That athlete, Theo Hopkins, remembers spraying his teammates with water to celebrate the state championship.

“You know how teams in the pros do that with champagne? Well, we did it with water,” said Hopkins, 15. “Then we remembered we’re supposed to always be polite so we just got on the buses quietly and came home.”

The team is in a rebuilding year in a sport where success can be fleeting. Leo’s prior state win was in 2003.

“It doesn’t matter that we don’t have tracks or anywhere but the halls to practice on,” said Hopkins. “I want people to know that at Leo we don’t need a track because we work hard and that’s why we can win.”

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An industrial psychologist with expertise in such matters once told me that Walsh’s “emotional intelligence” was the leadership trait that set him apart. While he went against type as a football coach — scholarly demeanor, scientific methods, sophisticated vocabulary — Walsh instinctively seemed to know what his players needed from him, collectively and individually. The unwavering self-assurance with which he provided it motivated them to perform as a team, at peak effort and efficiency, resulting in Super Bowl rings all around.

Bruce Weber was unmistakably emotional as the collapse of the University of Illinois basketball season continued with a dreadful home loss to Purdue last week, but the tortured soliloquy he delivered probably wasn’t the most intelligent way to address the matter. Three days later, his players performed as if hopelessly stuck beneath the bus their frustrated coach had thrown them under, taking a 23-point pounding at Nebraska that featured a 36-4 run by what was the Big Ten’s 11th-place team.

Jim Mora’s screechy, incredulous dismissal of his Indianapolis Colts’ playoff chances back in 2001 came to mind as a beleaguered Weber assessed the damage. The prospect of Illinois playing in the N.C.A.A. tournament next month is as unlikely as Weber’s coaching the team next season.

One could not have imagined it ending this badly back in 2005, when the talented, tough-minded Illini were recognized as the best team in the country for most of a season that ended with a loss to North Carolina in the N.C.A.A. tournament title game. Though they were Bill Self’s players, Weber’s charismatic predecessor could not have done any better with them.

But that level of success proved impossible to sustain over seven subsequent seasons. Ozzie Guillen can identify — he has moved on after looking like the White Sox’ manager for life when he led a World Series victory parade in 2005. Weber is blaming himself, suggesting he “mollycoddled” (great word) players and failed to instill in them the toughness required for consistent success in high-level hoops.

I’m not sure toughness can be instilled in college players — by their late teens, they either have it or they don’t — but the mollycoddling begins long before they arrive on campus. Amateur Athletic Union teams start fighting over the top prospects while they are still in grammar school, assuring them that N.B.A. riches are in their future while enticing them with trips, shoes and enough gear to clothe a third world country.

A sense of entitlement is an inevitable byproduct of such fawning, and an inclination to coast can be another one. Throw in ridiculously overhyped accolades like Mr. Basketball — isn’t Player of the Year prestigious enough? — and it’s no wonder a deluded kid like Jereme Richmond shows up in Champaign believing his mere presence will guarantee greatness as he uses college to tune up for the pros. It did not.

That’s the bed Bruce Weber made for himself. It hasn’t been very comfortable.

Weber has been under heavy pressure to keep the best Illinois-bred players home, which means embracing the A.A.U. culture, recruiting the baggage-toting Jereme Richmond types and propagating the myth that Illinois should be a Final Four contender most every season. If that were true, wouldn’t it have happened more than twice in nearly 60 years?

Illinois isn’t Duke, and it isn’t North Carolina. It isn’t even Kansas — if it were, Bill Self might still be coaching in Champaign. It is a basketball school, in a state that produces basketball talent, and we’re hearing that the right guy can meld the two characteristics into one powerful entity.

Problem is, the best players aren’t always the right players for a certain coach’s style and sensibilities. Weber built his reputation and a Missouri Valley Conference powerhouse at Southern Illinois with overachievers who were grateful for a scholarship, unencumbered by delusions of N.B.A. grandeur and happy to exchange floor burns for victories.

Would that hard-hat approach have worked in the higher-end Big Ten? Weber never gave himself a chance to find out.

Weber shook off his “Dead Man Walking” demeanor the day after his diatribe and said he had no intention of resigning, but his team’s futility at Nebraska and another dispiriting loss at Ohio State probably removed the decision from his hands. Mike Thomas, the new Illinois athletic director, had no qualms about dismissing the ineffectual football coach Ron Zook after rare back-to-back bowl seasons. Thomas has been conspicuously reticent about his support for Weber, and neither loyalty nor a substantial buyout obligation binds him to a coach he didn’t hire.

One name certain to pop up on wish lists and short lists — and in the speculation of informed sources — in the weeks ahead is Shaka Smart, who has Chicago ties and who wowed us last year when his Virginia Commonwealth squad blew through town on its unlikely Final Four run, pausing long enough to whack Georgetown and Purdue in second- and third-round games at the United Center.

Great name for a dynamic, 34-year-old coach with intriguing potential.

You wonder if he’d look as good as a resident as he did while a guest.

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It’s almost how I felt last week as a very attractive woman, attired in a tight and very short gray dress, attempted a passionate but amateur rendition of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from “Show Boat” in a packed and darkened space.

Imagine Heidi Klum at age 64, fluent in five languages and singing while leading a heavyweight national conference on “Manhood in American Law and Literature,” complete with a jaunty late-afternoon “musical interlude.”

I might normally have ordered a Jack Daniel’s and sought a corner table. But this was the Weymouth Kirkland Courtroom at the University of Chicago Law School, and the singer was Martha Nussbaum, a prominent and fearless philosopher who is a member of the law, philosophy and divinity departments.

If the university has a reputation as a place where fun goes to die, the admissions department might send a video of the two-day gathering to brainy high school seniors. It could give applications a boost and maybe break the university’s fifth-place tie in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.

But that was an interlude, and the unabashed Ms. Nussbaum was soon overseeing a notable, if far less playful, confrontation between two creative and cantankerous forces of renown.

The creative star was Joyce Carol Oates, the brilliant author who teaches at Princeton University. She began with a whispery and riveting reading of her Ernest Hemingway chapter in “Wild Nights!,” the fun, macabre and distinctly imagined tales of the final days or hours of five famous writers.

That kicked off a panel with Ms. Oates, Ms. Nussbaum, Judges Richard A. Posner and Diane P. Wood of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and Alison LaCroix, a law school professor whose interests include medieval times and literature.

Mr. Posner is arguably America’s most influential judge outside the Supreme Court and is provocative for most, maddening to some, his candor often unrestrained. He was the skunk at this intellectual party, especially vis-à-vis the love of boxing shared by Ms. Oates and Hemingway.

She has been fascinated with “the spectacle” since her father took her to matches in Buffalo as a child. In her novel “You Must Remember This,” she defines boxing as “just like life, only speeded up,” while an essay on Mike Tyson helped make the sport a legitimate subject for intellectual scrutiny.

But Mr. Posner finds boxing unspeakably boring and distasteful, and merely a means for participants to attain dementia. He made that clear.

He also does not like to read about dying people, finds Hemingway a sick and crazy wreck of a person, and disdains biographies of writers and artists since he sees them as unhelpful invasions of privacy.

“We haven’t lost anything in that we don’t know the first thing about Homer,” he said, referring to the Greek poet and author of the “Iliad” and “Odyssey.”

The more we know about a great artist, the more we bring to his work, said Ms. Oates with her reflexively understated, almost spectral air.

As for boxing being boring, Ms. Oates responded, “Muhammad Ali boring?”

And as for the judge not liking to read about dying people, Ms. Oates, whose genteel and even fragile manner belies the ferocity of her intellect, responded, “Like King Lear?”

Mr. Posner said three death scenes in Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” satisfy his interest in death and literature.

Well, he won’t be a fan of “Wild Nights!” The terror Ms. Oates conceded she felt in writing it is apparent. Her revulsion for Hemingway as a person, but admiration for his art, comes forth.

That is especially so as she imagines his thinking just before he committed suicide. As she told the gathering, she was sympathetic to him as a person, even if he projected his self-loathing onto others, and she finds “the truest man of action” to sometimes be one who takes his own life.

I was moved to read “Wild Nights!” a few days later and found it alternately timely, painful and heartening, since it is about big change.

“Mornings when work does not come are long mornings,” she has Hemingway thinking.

This is my final effort in this space, so a few upcoming mornings may be long.

But, as Ms. Oates’s own prolific ways personify, one story, one ending, can just be a new beginning. And that’s reassuring.

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After traveling thousands of miles by bus, train and on foot, the two young men met in a homeless shelter on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

Oscar was a shy 15-year-old when his parents hired a local “coyote” in July 2008 to help him leave Veracruz, Mexico, and cross the border to seek work in the United States. Jorge, gregarious, bright-eyed and also 15, gathered up his 6-year-old cousin six months later and left Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in the middle of the night, to escape abuse that he said had escalated into fistfights with his father. He also planned to work and send money back to his mother.

Without knowing it, both were headed toward homelessness. In that, they joined thousands of other immigrant children who have left their native country — for work, family reunification or refuge — crossed into the United States and wound up alone.

Last year, the Office of Refugee Resettlement reported that 8,244 children entered the United States unaccompanied and without immigration documents and eventually ended up in its custody. Illinois received 627 of them.

One of a dozen states with federal centers for unaccompanied immigrant youths taken into custody by the Department of Homeland Security, Illinois is home to 4 of the nation’s 53 facilities.

The state offers 147 beds to unaccompanied immigrant youths.

When young people turn 18, they are released from the facilities, some into adult detention centers, others to family members. In some cases, homeless shelters become their only refuge as they apply for asylum or special visas.

Today, Jorge and Oscar are both 18, with no family to house them and no criminal histories that would warrant a transfer to a detention facility.

They arrived in June at Solid Ground, a nonprofit youth homeless shelter in Humboldt Park, where they will most likely remain until a decision is made on their applications for immigration relief. The process can take years.

With the help of local advocates and lawyers working pro bono, Jorge is seeking asylum, citing family abuse and the pressure and influence of gang recruitment in Honduras. Oscar applied for a visa for victims of human trafficking, claiming eligibility because he was exploited as a migrant farm worker.

While they wait, Oscar and Jorge must stay close for court-ordered interviews and proceedings that they hope will allow them to remain in this country. Both asked to be identified only by their first names for fear of jeopardizing their cases.

The handful of people in Chicago who work with young homeless immigrants — who come mainly from Central America, Mexico, Africa, India and China — say such young people are often neglected.

“It’s been very challenging to find spaces for these kids,” said Jennifer Nagda, the associate director of Chicago’s Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights. “There is not exactly a wealth of beds to begin with for the domestic population, let alone unaccompanied youth.”

Sol Flores, executive director of La Casa Norte, the nonprofit organization that operates Solid Ground, said she was surprised by the increasing number of undocumented youths at the shelter. “We never thought we would have a young person who was brought to this country from Sudan and abandoned by his caretaker,” she said.

Advocates say young, homeless immigrants typically come to the United States to seek work, reconnect with family or flee persecution, abuse or violence.

Susan Trudeau, the executive director of child welfare programs at Heartland Human Care Services, operator of the four Illinois facilities for unaccompanied immigrant youths, said she had seen an increase in the number of young people fleeing Central American gangs.

“They are being recruited; their families are being threatened,” she said. “They are being threatened. So it is just easier to run away.”

Fleeing such gangs one night in the winter of 2009, Jorge took along his 6-year-old cousin, Eric, who longed to reunite with his mother, who was working in the United States. The cousins began a monthlong, nearly 4,000-mile journey from Honduras — first by bus, then by freight train and finally on foot.

When Jorge left, his backpack held a change of clothes for him and his cousin and enough money for bus fare and some food, he said. After taking the bus to Guatemala, they began the most treacherous part of the trek: illegally riding on the tops and sides of freight trains that snaked through Guatemala and into Mexico.

For five days they walked along the tracks, following them to the station where the train originated. When it finally came, he and hundreds of other would-be migrants sprang from the tall grass that hid them and clambered aboard. To keep Eric safe, Jorge carried his cousin on his back and placed his backpack over the boy, effectively strapping him in as they jumped on and off the moving trains, he said.

After two weeks, they arrived in Mexico and found a man willing to take them across the border into the United States.

They walked for seven days, barely sleeping and sharing food among the other migrants.

“We would stop to rest,” Jorge said. “But not for too long because it was so cold out and we knew we had to keep moving to stay warm. When we did stop and sit for a while, no one slept. We just sat quietly near each other.”

When he arrived in the United States, Eric went to live with his mother nearby in Arizona. Jorge, with limited English, no visa and no family, said he began supporting himself by dealing drugs — cocaine and heroin.

He was eventually arrested in Colorado, taken into federal custody and sent to the Illinois Children’s Center, one of the four Illinois detention facilities for immigrant youths. Jorge remained at the low-security center for seven months. When he turned 18, he was required to wear a GPS monitoring anklet as a condition of his release to Solid Ground.

Oscar’s sojourn began on the evening of July 28, 2008. After hugging his family goodbye, he left alongside his 16-year-old cousin, Victor.

The coyote his family enlisted to enable his journey cost them 18,000 pesos, roughly $1,700 at the time, money his father borrowed from a family friend, Oscar said.

“Take care of yourself and call us when you get to the border,” he recalled his mother saying apprehensively as he left, with a few hundred pesos in his pocket, to board a bus bound for Sonora, Mexico, a border state. From there, he walked for seven days and six nights through Mexico toward Arizona.

By the third day in the desert under the August sun, Oscar’s backpack, once heavy with canned vegetables, water, Gatorade and fresh tortillas, was empty except for water. His iPod, filled with music by Intocable, a popular Norteño band, had no charge for its battery. He walked three more days with no food before crossing, penniless, into Arizona.

Oscar soon found migrant farm work, traveling with two friends to wherever the crops were: watermelons in Delaware and Georgia, apples in Pennsylvania, oranges in Florida.

But the conditions were exploitative, he said. According to an affidavit filed with his relief application, Oscar was not paid regularly and not allowed to leave the work camps. His employers said immigration authorities would find him if he fled. Oscar was not fed adequately and was forced to sleep on the floor without blankets, his social worker said.

“When I came here, my only objective was to work,” Oscar said. “I wasn’t thinking about finishing school or learning English. I came to work.”

In May 2010, after an altercation with an employer over unpaid wages, Oscar said, he was arrested and taken into federal custody in Georgia. After detention at a youth facility in Miami, he was released that fall to an uncle in Champaign, Ill. But soon after Oscar arrived, his uncle returned to Mexico because he feared that Oscar’s presence might draw attention to his illegal status, Oscar said.

Last May the Office of Refugee Resettlement confirmed Oscar’s eligibility as a victim of labor trafficking. This status should help Oscar obtain his visa, his lawyer said. According to the department’s annual report, 91 youths received such letters in 2010, up from 50 the previous year.

Since arriving at La Casa Norte, Oscar and Jorge fill their days with G.E.D. and English classes.

Over the winter Oscar received a work visa and is employed part time at a Mexican restaurant on Chicago’s Northwest Side.

Jorge, still awaiting work papers, spends his time drawing, painting murals and playing soccer. But if the ball hits his ankle, it sets off the monitoring device, forcing him report to immigration officials.

Despite his arrest, detention and homelessness, Jorge said he would make the journey to the United States again. The country has fewer gangs and less violence than his homeland.

Oscar, though, said he regretted coming to the United States He is thankful for the opportunities, but if he knew then what he knows now, he said, he would still call Mexico home.

They phone home every few weeks. Yet neither Oscar nor Jorge has seen his family since walking away.

Idalmy Carrera contributed reporting.

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“There is lead in the tip,” warned Butler, a 60-year-old grandmother who has walked gingerly since doctors replaced both of her knees at the same time a couple years ago.

Butler has never needed to use the heavy billy club to maintain order at council meetings, relying mostly on a booming voice and the moxie that she says comes naturally to a half-Sicilian, half-Puerto Rican veteran of the Northwest Side’s political battles.

After dealing with a particularly rowdy crowd for a council session last month, Butler also asked for some help from the aldermen whose meetings she is tasked with keeping in order. The council resolution introduced last week would ban signs from the chamber and also would forbid “cheering, yelling, clapping, foot stomping, whistling, booing or jeering” during public meetings.

The legislative initiative, first reported by the Chicago News Cooperative, provoked immediate and widespread scorn from free-speech advocates. The chief sponsor, powerful Ald. Edward Burke (14th), shied from defending the measure. Burke has declined to be interviewed and issued a statement saying he acted at the request of the sergeant at arms, who is a political appointee, and would leave the plan’s fate to the will of his fellow aldermen.

But in a rare interview this week, Butler said the measure went much further than she had asked of Burke. She said her initial intent was to prevent audience members from potentially hurling projectiles at the aldermen or Mayor Rahm Emanuel, not to silence the chamber’s public gallery.

As proof of her motives, Butler gave the CNC a copy of a letter that she sent Burke last month. In the hand-written note, she told Burke she would welcome a new rule prohibiting spectators from bringing “signs or items that can become projectiles” into council meetings.

She added that, “Other untoward behavior is not allowed, but this issue is not addressed. Right now, I use my discretion. [The ban] may also include beverages and food.”

In her office this week, Butler noted that her letter said “nothing about booing and cheering” and said she hoped the measure would be revised to narrow its scope.

She said she did not see the legislation and did not know that it was broader than she had suggested until after it was introduced — and after it angered critics already wary of Mayor Emanuel’s efforts to clamp down on protesters ahead of the NATO and G8 summits that Chicago will host in May.

“I have nothing in writing to tell people they can’t bring things into the chamber,” Butler said. “I’m trying to do all I can to protect the [aldermen] who sit with their backs showing to the gallery. Could you imagine getting hit with a full bottle of water?”

Butler said she had no conversations about what she was proposing with Emanuel or his aides. The mayor took no position on the proposal from Burke and three other influential aldermen. Emanuel also said last week that the city’s Law Department was reviewing it.

The letter from Butler to Burke was written on Jan. 18, the day when aldermen approved two mayoral initiatives that tightened protest rules. During council debate over the proposed ordinance, one activist was arrested for allegedly striking a police commander.

Butler said the officer “got head-butted and almost knocked down the stairs” outside the meeting room on the 2nd floor of City Hall.

She said she feared even greater problems with Occupy Chicago activists and other protesters drawn by the international summits. The new breed of protesters, she said, were not the same people who historically have attended council meetings to express their viewpoints.

“We don’t know who’s who,” she said. “I told the people from the Sierra Club, ‘Stay away from the other ones. You will get painted with the same brush.”

Butler signed the letter to Burke using the nickname that politicians and City Hall bureaucrats alike commonly use to address her: “Respectfully, ‘Sarge.’”

Her appointment to the $91,980-a-year post was approved by the council in 2003 and she received a third four-year term last year. She owes the job to her longtime political boss, Ald. Richard Mell (33rd), who has the power to choose the sergeant at arms as chairman of the council’s Rules Committee. Since the 1970s, Butler has been a member of Mell’s Democratic ward organization, which helped elect his son-in-law, Rod Blagojevich, as governor.

The sergeant at arms leads a group of city officials who arrange the logistics of council meetings. They regulate who has access to the antechamber, work with a handful of police officers on crowd control and administer the City Hall press room.

When council meetings are not in session, Butler greets visitors to her office with pieces of candy, questions about their families and stories about Jesse Santiago, the grandson she raised after his mother — her daughter — was killed in an accident caused by a drunk driver 13 years ago. Her voice becomes a whisper when she talks of her grandson. But people in the press room down the hall can hear her Caribbean-accented Spanish when she might yell admonitions such as “Jesus, no me mientes!” (“Jesse, don’t lie to me!”) over the phone during his high-school years.

Butler made a brief appearance recently in the cable TV show “Boss,” which was filmed in the council chamber. In one episode, the fictional mayor of Chicago, played by Kelsey Grammer, orders the “Sarge” to lock the public out from a contentious council meeting (a flight of artistic fancy that, in real life, is forbidden by the state’s “Sunshine Law.”)

Like any good old-school precinct captain, Butler shuns most publicity, however, and insists that reporters who enter her office promise never to quote her. She made an exception to talk publicly about the pending legislation because, she said, “This has gotten out of control.”

“Everything I’ve ever done was to make the council look good and to make [Mell] look good,” Butler said. “I’m trying to be proactive rather than reactive when it comes to the safety of the mayor and the 50 aldermen in that room. I never imagined it would go this far.”

© DAN MIHALOPOULOS for Chicago News Cooperative, 2012. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Christina Pacheco Butler, City Council, Dick Mell, G8 Summit, NATO Summit

So it was good to have a cameo appearance Wednesday by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, at age 70 still America’s most venerable voice for the disenfranchised. Paying no heed to a two-minute speaking limit for public participants, he unintentionally reminded us of the Sisyphean task of improving urban public education.

Only days after surfacing at the funeral for Whitney Houston, Mr. Jackson was back home in a three-piece gray suit urging the board to delay action on closing or turning around 17 schools. He did so with a sense of context that was notable, if strained.

“This is Little Rock, 1957,” he declared. The allusion was surely and sadly lost on many, whatever their academic pedigree. He referred to the historic segregationist protests that blocked black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, with Gov. Orval Faubus brazenly using the state National Guard to support the protesters.

Ultimately, it took the 101st Airborne Division — a force even greater than Mayor Rahm Emanuel, the hyperkinetic Missile intimately involved with executing Chicago school policy — to enforce integration at the order of President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

For Mr. Jackson, Chicago’s public schools represent apartheid, a racial separation manifested in unequal allocation of resources to impoverished communities.

But this isn’t really Little Rock, 1957, even if the South and West Sides have long been victimized by inequities in city services and even if Mr. Jackson touched on the underlying challenge by exhibiting a firm grasp of the obvious that others often miss.

“Poverty matters, homelessness matters, unequal distribution of resources matters,” he said.

These meetings are as orchestrated as a road show of “Jersey Boys.” That meant that Karen Lewis, the teachers union president, served as Mr. Jackson’s warm-up act. She often discards subtlety in public discourse and thus spoke of the “fiscal starvation” faced by poor students and how the board’s plans would destabilize, even destroy, poor neighborhoods.

In seeming praise of her members, she quoted John F. Kennedy: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of the deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena.”

Let’s hope that at least a few teachers, if not Ms. Lewis, realize the statement comes from Theodore Roosevelt. But perhaps her imprecision stands as a metaphor for the state of a Chicago public education.

So for several hours, parents, teachers and others vented over the preordained board vote that will convulse some neighborhoods that lose their schools. There are no really good solutions as years of stumbling come home to roost.

They begged for reconsideration but didn’t acknowledge poor performance by their local school. They criticized how arts and music are often dropped during budget cuts. Some questioned moving students from one mediocre high school on the South Side through gang territory to another mediocre school two miles away. One chagrined parent labeled the predictably stoic board members as “pure evil.”

Later, I called Paul Vallas, the former Chicago superintendent who could have spared us Rod Blagojevich if he hadn’t barely lost a 2002 primary for governor to Blago. Mr. Vallas, who still lives in Palos Heights, later ran the schools in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina and in Philadelphia, and is temporarily overseeing a mess in Bridgeport, Conn., at the state’s behest.

We do indeed have too many schools, he said, and the central office needs overhaul. School leaders must educate the community on the criteria by which a school is assessed and the implications of declining enrollments.

A game changer, he said, would be early childhood education: aggressive early literacy, numeracy and vocabulary programs, with continuing parent training. Otherwise, it’s probably too late for many in the system.

It would be good if the board and the mayor remember larger realities broached by Mr. Vallas and Mr. Jackson, like poverty, early education, stronger support for families and insisting on more social responsibility from all, be they poor, middle class or wealthy.

Education reform alone can’t solve the problems that adults, acting like children, tend to sweep under the rug.

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Post tags: Chicago Board of Education, CPS, Karen Lewis, Rev. Jesse Jackson, School Reform, School Turnarounds

The House paid members who serve as committee chairmen and spokesmen (Springfield’s term for ranking minority members) $10,326 each in addition to their $67,836 salaries. The House operated 46 committees last year with more than a dozen subcommittees, a structure that allows more than half of House members to earn the stipend. Even the state House in New York, which has nearly twice the population of Illinois, operates fewer committees, with 37. The Illinois Senate has 28 committees.

The House committee system reveals one way in which Speaker Michael Madigan, Democrat of Chicago, builds loyalty among his members, who control the House by 64 to 54. Madigan not only chooses committee leaders, but he approves the creation of new committees, his office sets committee schedules, and he can steer the agenda by controlling which committees hear which bills.

Like many speakers around the country, Madigan makes committee assignments based on seniority, lawmakers said. House Democrats starting their third terms are routinely given chairmanships. The large number of committees is partly a result of that practice. A big freshman class requires the need for more committees four years later.

House committees averaged eight meetings annually during the last three years. Some met regularly, but others convened only once or twice, according to thousands of pages of committee schedules and cancellations from 2009, 2010 and 2011 obtained under the Freedom of Information Act and examined by the Chicago News Cooperative.

“I don’t know that there’s a hard and fast rule about committee workloads,” Madigan’s spokesman, Steve Brown, said. “If you only meet once, I’m not sure why that would be viewed as wrong. Committees meet as bills are introduced and assigned.”

Records show that five House committees met three times or fewer last year: adoption reform, headed by Representative Sara Feigenholtz; international trade and commerce, headed by Representative Jack Franks; biotechnology, overseen by Representative Edward Acevedo; armed forces and military affairs, led by Representative Eddie Lee Jackson; and tourism and conventions, overseen by Representative Kenneth Dunkin. Feigenholtz, Franks and Dunkin also headed second committees with heavier workloads. They were not paid two stipends.

In 2009 and 2010, more than 20 committees met three times or fewer. The busiest committee in 2011, revenue and finance, headed by Representative John Bradley, met 25 times.

Dunkin said his tourism committee did not require many meetings last year, but his appropriation-higher education committee demanded considerable time.

“I have no interest in taking advantage of the system,” he said. “All of us down here, we’re not hustling the system. I’ve spent a ton of hours on my appropriations committee. I disagree that tourism only met one time. We met three or four times. With tourism, there just aren’t that many bills. That’s just the way it is.”

In addition to international trade and commerce, Franks last year headed the panel that deals with state government administration, one of the House’s more active committees. He said committee work was part of the job, and the stipends for serving as committee officials allowed Madigan to steer extra pay toward lawmakers.

“I think it’s a way to get more money to members of the General Assembly without having to increase salaries,” Franks said. “That’s what it’s designed to do. If we’re honest with taxpayers, the more honest thing would be to vote to raise salaries.”

In 2009 and 2010, the biotech committee, led then by Representative Maria Antonia Berrios, met a total of four times. She was not heading other committees, records show. Computer technology, the only committee for Representative Careen Gordon, who has since retired, met twice in 2010, as did Representative Esther Golar’s disability services committee, the only panel she headed that year, according to the records.

House Republicans earn extra pay as well. The minority spokesman’s position on each committee is held by a Republican. Two committees, pension investments and veterans affairs, are led by Republicans.

Madigan creates committees based in part on members’ personal interests. That was how the railroads industry committee, headed by Representative Elaine Nekritz, started.

“I was in a class of 35 people,” said Nekritz, who was elected in 2002. “So by the time the speaker went through the seniority system, there wasn’t really one left. He asked me if there was a subject area I was interested in, and I told him railroads. Then, later, I took over judiciary.”

The number of House committees rose to 56 in 2009, dropped to 53 in 2010 and fell to 46 last year.

In 29 states, lawmakers do not earn extra pay for committee work. Ten states pay committee leaders extra, ranging from an $18 per diem in Kentucky to $34,000 for certain committee posts in New York, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Representative Will Davis oversees the appropriations-elementary and secondary education committee, which met 13 times last year, and the less active health and healthcare disparities panel, which met five times. He asked Madigan to form the health committee to address growing concern over health care delivery.

“He allows members the opportunity to create their own committees,” Davis said. “My committee doesn’t see a lot of bills, but we’ve had many subject-matter hearings, and I’ve asked for certain bills to be assigned to it.”

Some lawmakers say the number of committees can complicate their schedules. A member may be assigned to seven or more with overlapping meeting times.

“I couldn’t even call my own bills today because too many members were running to other committees,” Franks said of his government administration committee meeting. “We could certainly cut down the number of committees.”

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Moments after federal authorities announced allegations against him, the ever-quotable Beavers professed his innocence and said he was being punished for refusing to cooperate in a probe of John Daley, the Cook County commissioner and brother of former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

“I’ve been investigated since 2009,” Beavers said. “I refused to wear a wire against John Daley. The next week, I got a letter that I was being investigated for taxes.”

Beavers, 77, was charged with failing to pay taxes on campaign funds and county expense account money that he allegedly used for personal purposes, U.S. Atty. Patrick Fitzgerald’s office announced.

But Beavers said he had done nothing wrong: “I paid all my taxes. [Screw] them.”

According to the indictment, Beavers wrote checks to himself and others from his campaign accounts and used the money “at least in part for his personal purposes, including gambling.” The corrupt use of the political committee funds totaled more than $225,000 between 2006 and 2008, authorities said. Beavers allegedly masked the use of political money for personal purposes by filing false campaign-disclosure reports.

Prosecutors also said he should have reported county dollars that he converted to personal use as income on his tax returns.

John Daley said Beavers’ comments in the face of the federal allegations were “typical Bill Beavers.”

“The indictment is against one person and that’s all it is,” said John Daley, who also is leader of the 11th Ward Democratic Organization. “It is against him and only him.”

He said he had “absolutely not” been contacted by federal investigators.

Asked about the allegation that Beavers was indicted because he wouldn’t wear a wire to record conversations with John Daley, Fitzgerald said his office “doesn’t comment on people not charged.”

Fitzgerald said Beavers “caused his employees to file inaccurate campaign finance reports” and then told them certain checks had been voided or not cashed when, in fact, they had. Some of Beavers’ campaign fund went toward gambling purposes, which also should have been reported as income, Fitzgerald said.
Beavers faces up to 12 years in prison if convicted on all four counts in the grand-jury intdictmen.

“If people are using campaign funds for personal use, they ought to be aware of state laws,” Fitzgerald said. “They are obligated to pay taxes.”

The state’s Gift Ban Act, passed in 1998, prohibits public officials from spending money from their campaign accounts on personal items. There are exemptions in the law, however, for elected officials who had campaign accounts open at the time.

A proud master of old-school Chicago politics, Beavers was alderman of the 7th Ward, on the South Side, for more than 20 years. He was chairman of the City Council’s powerful Budget Committee under Richard M. Daley and also was the 7th Ward Democratic committeeman.

Beavers joined the county board in 2006 as part of a convoluted and widely criticized job swap involving John Stroger and Stroger’s son, Todd Stroger. Beavers took John Stroger’s seat on the county board, Todd Stroger ran to succeed his father as county board president and Daley appointed Beavers’ daughter, Darcel, to take his place in the council.

But Darcel Beavers lost her 2007 bid for election to Sandi Jackson, wife of longtime family rival U.S. Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.).

Even as indictments rained on colleagues in Chicago politics, Beavers remained among the few public defenders of patronage hiring. And he eagerly reveled in the image of a powerful ward boss, often bragging about his clout.

Long after a smoking ban was enacted at City Hall, Beavers declared his office exempt from the ban and puffed on Pall Mall cigarettes during meetings in his aldermanic office. After all, his official biography boasted of his acumen at conducting business in “smoke-filled rooms.”

Darcel Beavers said in 2007 that she believed her father’s working-class constituents appreciated the sort of blunt talk that frequently provoked criticism from reporters and reformers.

“He is a strong black man,” Darcel Beavers said. “He says what he means to say. Some people don’t like that he’s frank, but you don’t ever have to wonder where he’s coming from. People respect him for that.”

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