Duncan's office kept list of politicians' school requests (Doesn't sound good))

[mucifer]

March 22, 2010

BY ROSALIND ROSSI Education Reporter

For several years during U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan's tenure running Chicago's public schools, his office kept a list of elected officials and others trying to get children into the city's elite selective enrollment schools, top CPS official David Pickens told the Chicago Sun-Times today.

“Sometimes it was parents. Sometimes it was somebody from central office, sometimes it was an elected official, member. It didn’t matter,” said Pickens, who was a top aide to Duncan and is still with CPS. “Sometimes they would call Arne. Sometimes they would call me directly.”

The CPS inspector general is investigating the list, Pickens said, adding that they began keeping it at the request of principals who were inundated with calls from parents about gaining a seat in a magnet or selective enrollment college prep school.

Pickens described the list as a “log” maintained by his assistants to keep track of the requests.

“They may not get the answer they want, but at least we followed up,” he said.

Peter Cunningham, Duncan’s spokesman, told the Sun-Times last week “There’s no list that I'm aware of. ... Our standard procedure is that if people called us about this, we would forward their names to the principal, and it was up to the principal. The principals had 5 percent principal discretion.”

Principals of magnet and college prep schools are allowed discretion to select 5 percent of their students.

The inspector general and federal investigators have been investigating whether clout influenced the admissions to the elite schools.

http://www.suntimes.com/news/education/2116854,cps-duncan-list-political-school-requests-032210.article

This sounds like bad news. In Chicago most of the schools that aren't magnets are pretty bad.