"These sessions were organized with nearly a half-million dollars in donations from Walmart’s charity, the Walton Family Foundation, which paid for a marketing agency to set up focus-group-style sessions.
Appointed schools chief Barbara Byrd-Bennett told the media she wanted to hear from community members in the hearings. What she got was the overwhelming message: don’t close our schools.
A February hearing in the Pilsen neighborhood on the South Side overflowed with shouting and protesting parents. They refused to participate in the break-out sessions, preferring to speak up in the large auditorium setting. Similar scenes took place in the Logan Square and Uptown neighborhoods"
http://www.labornotes.org/2013/03/chicago-school-closings-spark-wildfire-protest
Wow, well done Chicago! Rejecting this Penn Praxis style of fake civic engagement is a very important development!
Philadelphia has all of these professional activist organizations, which try to disempower grass roots anger, and shepard a fake movement to embrace the agenda of the Democrat party! Train for Change did this with the nascent movement to save the libraries and destroyed the people's grass root movement that was about to begin several years ago! "Reasonable solutions" betrayed Occupy Philly, and tried to cut a deal with the mayor based on the lies about Dilworth plaza.
We owe Chicagoans a great deal for showing the way to reject the fake engagement tactics practised by Penn Praxis!!! No more break away "focus groups" Well done!!!!
150 of our brothers and sisters currently at the mercy of Chicago PD
