Rhee or Vallas to Chicago?

by Collin Hitt Chicago mayoral hopeful Gery Chico says that he’d be interested in bringing Paul Vallas back to run the city’s public school system.  Chico mentioned the possibility to Chicago Magazine columnist Carol Thelsenthal, who had floated the idea of bringing Michelle Rhee from Washington, D.C. to Chicago. I asked announced mayoral candidate Gery Chico, a...

by Collin Hitt

Chicago mayoral hopeful Gery Chico says that he’d be interested in bringing Paul Vallas back to run the city’s public school system.  Chico mentioned the possibility to Chicago Magazine columnist Carol Thelsenthal, who had floated the idea of bringing Michelle Rhee from Washington, D.C. to Chicago.

I asked announced mayoral candidate Gery Chico, a former president of the CPS board, what he thought of Rhee as Huberman’s replacement. He declined to comment about her on the record, instead suggesting that he’d consider bringing back Paul Vallas, who ran the schools here while Chico was board president. Chico said he has not discussed the matter with Vallas, a senior adviser to Chico’s campaign, but said pointedly that Vallas “has a great set of political attributes that allowed him to be able to relate to people.”

Thelsenthal is continuing the rich Chicago journalistic tradition of free agent speculation.  Just remember, I beat her to the punch and joined the Hot Stove beat last week…

Many out there will argue that the obsession with superintendents and heroic figures is the wrong approach to school reform.  Maybe. But that doesn’t change the fact that we’re talking about Chicago, and nobody loves a free agent search more than the Chicago media.

So let me take a page out of the “just-sayin” book of Chicago journalism and throw out a couple names that it would be interesting to hear mentioned.
•    Michelle Rhee, the catalyzing figure hated by the American Federation for Teachers, whose first charter belongs to the Chicago Teachers Union. She’ll be the biggest name on the market, and someone will scoop her up.
•    Paul Vallas, the former Chicago schools superintendent who began many of the reforms under Mayor Daley and nearly won the Democratic nomination for Governor in 2002 as a result.  He’s in New Orleans now, head of the relatively small Recovery School District, and yet finds his way back to Chicago quite often. He’s helping the Gery Chico mayoral campaign, by the way.
•    Blondean Davis, a remarkably successful Southland superintendent and longtime area superintendent in Chicago under Vallas, is a more traditional candidate and is well-known by the Rev. James Meeks.
•    And perhaps some of Chicago’s successful school reformers should be included.  Tim King and Juan Rangel each run successful charter school networks and have shown strong organizational and political skills in other endeavors.  Each has enough cred to have been whispered as mayoral candidates, though victory for either would be phenomenally difficult.