Progress Illinois

Illinois’ Healthy Water Solutions Coalition has a vision for Chicago’s future.

It includes revitalizing the Chicago River via restoring the natural divide between the Great Lakes and Mississippi River Basins.

Physical separation of the basins and Lake Michigan is the only permanent solution to prevent invasive species from transferring through the Chicago waterways, members of the coalition said at it’s public “Changing Course: Revitalizing the Chicago River” talk Wednesday night. The meeting was set to get more people engaged with the issue.

“This is about a lot more than Asian carp,” said Tim Eder, executive director of the Great Lakes Commission. “This is about more than just one fish that threatens Lake Michigan. It’s about a number of different invasive species ... but it’s also about more than fish, and the ecosystem, and the lake. It’s about restoring and utilizing a precious resource that in many ways the city has turned its back on.”

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Thomas Chalmers Specialty Elementary School on the West Side isn’t slated to shut down at the end of the school year, but its entire staff could be replaced by the Academy for Urban School Leadership if the Chicago Public Schools has its way.

Chalmers Principal Kent Nolen and a few hundred parents, students, teachers and Local School Council members made it clear at the State of the School Address last night that they won’t sit back and let that happen.

“We have been showing significant growth in reading and math and science, so then we should not be touched,” said Chalmers third grade teacher Louis Lane before the meeting. “At first it was space utilization, now it’s turnaround. We’ve turned around. Maybe they should turn around and go back to where they came come.“

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Dozens of South Shore residents weren’t too happy upon learning that a portion of their property taxes have been used as part of the city’s tax increment financing, or TIF, program.

Tom Tresser, co-founder of the CivicLab, came to the 7th Ward, and is heading to others, as part of the volunteer-based TIF Illumination Project, which is intended to promote TIF transparency and provide Chicago residents with a snapshot of what the program is — or isn’t — doing for their communities.  

“I can’t believe that it’s so much money that’s out there that the community does not know about that’s not channeling back into our community, especially with all the schools closing,” Renita Jones, a South Shore resident of more than 14 years, said after Saturday's meeting. Read more »

As the U.S. Supreme Court is set to consider cases surrounding whether racial background should be a factor for consideration in college admissions, questions about the efficacy of affirmative action programs came up as a topic of discussion during a recent debate between legal academics.

The event, held at the John Marshall Law School, featured UCLA Law Professor Richard Sander, whose 2005 article in the Stanford Law Review is credited for bringing attention to the theory of “mismatch”, which says affirmative action can actually hurt those it was intended to help by allowing them to attend schools for which they are not academically prepared, consequentially causing them to struggle in such institutions.

The theory contends that students with qualifications falling below the standards of a school would be better served if they attended an institution with standards more in line with their academic abilities.

Sander said even that although affirmative action helped to allow more minority students obtain a higher education, it has now drifted from its original mission by focusing more on racial preferences alone, and less on socioeconomic factors.

“We largely see preferences tending to reward students from very affluent backgrounds,” Sander said. “I think affirmative action has strayed from its original intent.”

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