“You look at these figures and you see the millstone around Chicago’s neck is not Lawndale but Commonwealth Edison,” says Lew Kreinberg, public-issues coordinator for the Center for Neighborhood Technology on West North Avenue. The Chicago Public Schools, he says, spend twice as much on energy as on textbooks. Some of the worst culprits are electricity-dependent schools built by the Public Building Commission in the early 1970s, such as Curie Metropolitan High School and Clemente Community Academy. Heating and cooling Curie costs $2.79 per square foot each year ($2.70 of that is for electricity). The figure is $2.48 for Clemente. By contrast, older school buildings that depend on a mix of fuels fare much better: Evanston (82 cents per square foot), New Mier (91 cents), and Lane Tech (84 cents).
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Credentialism runs amok. “How,” asks Ann C. Fishburn in Chicago Lawyer (June 1988), “could Michael P. Fontana practice law–especially litigation–at Sonnenschein Carlin Nath & Rosenthal for a decade without someone discovering he wasn’t a lawyer?” Fontana was one credit hour shy of his diploma; when his firm learned this, he was fired. Neither Fishburn nor the authors of the Tribune’s law column seem to have asked another obvious question: if someone practices law successfully for a decade with one of the city’s top firms, what difference does it make whether he or she had the correct piece of paper on his or her wall?
Hispanics may soon become the nation’s poorest ethnic group, writes Jennifer Juarez Robles in the Chicago Reporter (June 1988), but poverty is not equally distributed among them. “1986 census data show that 45.3 percent of Puerto Ricans in central cities lived in poverty, compared to 30.2 percent for Mexicans and 23.5 percent for other Hispanics.” Why? Robert Aponte of the University of Chicago’s Urban Family Life Project suggests this explanation: “[Mexicans’] move here is more permanent. There isn’t anything to go back to, but Puerto Ricans can return to the island which may prevent them from making the kind of commitment [that Mexicans have made].”
