The American City Is Dying

[Geee]

Front Page Magazine:

In an interview with the New Republic, Obama finally admitted that gun control was an urban problem. “The reality of guns in urban areas are very different from the realities of guns in rural areas,” he said. That admission might have been welcome if it had been packaged along with a serious conversation about what is wrong with cities like Chicago. Instead all the big problems are covered over with more claptrap about doing it for the children.

Speaking of the children, Mayor Emanuel and Mayor Bloomberg, Obama’s favorite big city mayors who can be reliably counted on to push his agenda, found themselves kneecapped by education unions who aren’t there for the children, but are there for themselves.

 

 

The New York City bus driver strike is underway along with the usual tire slashings and union leaders insisting that they’re only slashing the tires for the children. These tactics usually work, they did in Chicago, as harried parents can be counted on to tell the city to shut up and give the nice teachers what they want so that the behemoth of the educational system can roll on. But what they want is quickly becoming impossible.

Chicago teachers have the highest average salary of any city, $75,000 a year, while administrators make $120,000, even though only 20 percent of their 8th grade students are grade-proficient in math. Chicago schools have an annual budget of $5.11 billion for a student body that is 87% low-income and likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.