“We tend to think of time as a smooth-flowing river,” writes IIT’s Michael Davis in Perspectives on the Professions (August). “History is different. It does not so much flow as jerk along like a worn commuter train, stopping often and only rarely moving fast. This year was one of the rare moments.”
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Your tax dollars at play. “The data on economic activity in enterprise zones reported by [the state Department of Commerce and Community Affairs] are all of the ‘good news’ variety,” according to the Illinois Tax Foundation’s new report, Enterprise Zones in Illinois. “Data on disinvestment in enterprise zones (plant closings, major layoffs) are supposed to be collected by local zone administrators and reported to DCCA. Very little of this information is systematically collected locally and none of it is reported by DCCA.” Even the good news is grossly inflated. In one case “a $35,000 remodeling project at a plant purports to retain 150 jobs–the entire work force of the firm. This kind of reporting makes the ‘jobs retained’ data virtually worthless for serious program evaluation.”
“Women’s history is still a puzzle of enormous dimensions,” according to Telling Women’s Lives (September), newsletter of the Chicago Area Women’s History Conference. Based on bibliographic research in the city’s main libraries, “we may have to adjust our understanding of the possibilities open to women in the late 1800s. It would seem that women lost far more ground in the course of the twentieth century than we had hitherto suspected.” Somehow there was a “movement toward increasing social and emotional dependence, at the same time that women won important political rights, seemingly enabling greater independence.” Who would have thought the Victorian era might be the feminist good old days?
The people versus the unions. According to Michael Klonsky, writing in Catalyst (September), school-reform advocates lost out to status-quo-minded unions in the spring state legislative session. The Teachers’ Task Force of the Citywide Coalition for School Reform sought to have teacher members of Local School Councils be elected rather than appointed; the CTU thought otherwise, and prevailed. Reformers also argued that principals (who are held responsible for their schools) should have authority over the custodial staff and over such matters as shifting money between staff and supplies. “Unions, especially the operating engineers’ union, blocked legislation that would have given [them] that authority.”
