By Michael Miner
Vallas continued, “You claim that the high school dropout rate is ‘climbing’ when you know perfectly well it has actually been declining in our general high schools.” He went on to accuse Catalyst of accusing but overlooking, of ignoring and not acknowledging, of contradicting itself. And that was just paragraph two. The third paragraph asserted that the Catalyst reporter “knew and understood the data, but chose instead to pen an unwarranted and false attack.” The fourth accused Catalyst of an “apparent editorial bias against the current administration.” Vallas continued for five pages in this vein, and the nearest the letter came to striking a conciliatory note was its very last sentence, in which Vallas said he was enclosing various recent reports “to help you get back on track.”
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Lenz–whom I’ve heard praise Vallas in lavish terms–answered him with a point-by-point rebuttal and an editorial. She began by discussing methodology: “The dropout rates that Mr. Vallas wanted us to use are those published in the annual Illinois school report cards, which by law provide data only on regular schools, not special or alternate schools.” The problem, according to Lenz, is that this method disregards students who transfer from regular to special or alternative schools and then drop out of those. So she chose a method that counts everybody.
A month later, Vallas still gets steamed thinking about what Catalyst wrote. “Let’s face facts here,” he says. “Catalyst is part of the first school reform movement. They have a vested interest in the status quo. The reality of the matter is you had a whole industry emerge out of the first school reform movement in 1988–a whole cottage industry. Foundations handed out almost $60 million in grants in the name of school reform, and between 1988 and 1995 there wasn’t much to show for it. Groups like Catalyst basically embraced this notion that all problems could be solved through radical decentralization–let a thousand flowers bloom. And do you know what happened? Nothing happened. So ideologically Catalyst has always been threatened by the success the schools have experienced since the mayor took responsibility and moved toward standards, moved toward accountability, moved toward a board-directed support program.
Vallas might have gone even more public if the dailies paid closer attention to Web sites as a source of news. Only the Sun-Times reported on Catalyst’s June issue, and neither paper has noted what’s happened since. But times are bound to change. “I think on-line is spectacular,” says Lenz, “because you can keep it going and expand what you do. We posted school-by-school dropout data on-line that we couldn’t get in the paper. We love it.”
He’s going to work as the public information officer for the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of Illinois. No federal court in the country but the Supreme Court had a full-time PIO until a two-year pilot program was launched last January in Chicago’s district court and in Boston’s and New Orleans’s appellate courts. Lehmann was a finalist for the Chicago job, which was given to Christopher Allen. After Allen died last month of cancer, chief judge Marvin Aspen asked Lehmann if he was still interested.
Last February the Tribune surprised Teresa Wiltz by assigning her to “Inc.” with Ellen Warren. Gossip wasn’t the kind of journalism she’d expected to do or believed herself uniquely suited for. It didn’t turn out to be easy either. “It’s a six-day-a-week column,” she says. “It’s a column that never takes a break.” She allows there’s a plus side: “I got to meet some pretty amazing people I probably wouldn’t have had much access to. I got to talk to Salman Rushdie, Germaine Greer….That was fun.”
