By Michael Miner
What about the letter you sent him last Friday telling him that was his last day? I asked.
“If you notice our Educator, we’ve never even had a table of contents,” she told me. “There’s no way to know exactly what’s in the paper unless you turn every page.”
Hunt told Lowe that she would assume the title of editor and he’d be managing editor. “As director of this department I’m automatically the editor,” she explained to me. “I oversee it.”
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The September 10 Chicago Educator contains six articles written by Lowe and eight by freelancers Susan DeGrane and Laurens Grant. The paper’s losing all three writers; one of the last things Lowe did before leaving was tell his freelance writers that Hunt was cutting the budget and wasn’t going to pay for their stories anymore. From now on the Educator would be written in-house by Hunt’s staff.
“The school system is not viewed as a place where high-quality people work or that produces a high-quality product. To help counter that, my idea was that you can’t present a sloppy product. You had to let people know that Gery Chico, the mayor, Paul Vallas were part of a new regime that was going to turn this system around, and excellence was their bottom line.”
