Curb YOur Enthusiasm
To his credit, Duncan’s established himself as a charismatic cheerleader for the system. In fact, it was a speech by Duncan that convinced Handley, who grew up near East Saint Louis, that she wanted to teach in Chicago. In the spring of 2001 she was a 22-year-old history major just out of Tulane University who’d enrolled in Teach for America, a federally funded program in which recent grads commit to teaching for two years in an underserved system in exchange for a break on student loans. “Arne spoke to a group of us,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I wish there were more of you and I hope you stay. You are the future.’ He had us fired up.”
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Handley spent her first year at a south-side grammar school. In her second, she transferred to Austin High, at 231 N. Pine, where she taught sociology and debate. At the end of her first year at Austin she wasn’t sure she wanted to come back. “My obligation to Teach for America was over,” she says. “I was thinking of going to grad school or law school.” But she decided to stay. “A student asked, ‘Are you coming back next year?’ It’s a funny question–growing up, I would never have asked my teacher that. I would have assumed my teachers were coming back. But these kids assume just the opposite. They’re used to so much uncertainty, so many teachers and principals and programs coming and going. I played it off with a joke: ‘You are not going to get rid of me.’ That’s how I made my commitment.”
On August 24 Duncan came to Austin to make his pitch. “He showed up with a whole slew of people in nice suits,” says Handley. “To whatever we asked they said we should submit RFPs.” As usual, Duncan was very passionate in his speech. But this time he didn’t fire Handley up. She’s a teacher, not a wannabe charter-school administrator. “What message was he sending to the kids?” she says. “His message was you have failed. Your teachers have failed. They never mention that we’ve had four principals in one year, or ten principals in ten years. It’s dispiriting.”
Jay Stone didn’t find his name in the 9/11 Commission’s report, but he found something more useful–an explanation. “I think I know why no one did anything about the knife,” he says.
On November 27, 2002, Congress created the commission panel. Its analysis regarding the FAA’s policy on knives is on pages 82 through 86 of the report, which came out in August. “The [FAA] has been vested by Congress with the sometimes conflicting mandate of regulating the safety and security of U.S. civil aviation while also promoting the civil aviation industry,” it says. “While FAA rules did not expressly prohibit knives with blades under four inches long, the airlines’ checkpoint operations guide (which was developed in cooperation with the FAA) explicitly permitted them.” The report notes that a “proposal to ban knives altogether in 1993 had been rejected because small cutting implements were difficult to detect and the number of innocent ‘alarms’ would have increased significantly, exacerbating congestion problems at the checkpoints….In the pre-9/11 security system, the air carriers played a major role. As the Inspector General of the Department of Transportation told us, there were great pressures from the air carriers to control security costs and to ‘limit the impact of security requirements on aviation operations, so that the industry could concentrate on its primary mission of moving passengers and aircraft.’” The commission also quotes an anonymous FAA security official who “described the air carriers’ approach to security regulations as ‘decry, deny and delay’ and told us that while ‘the air carriers had seen the enlightened hand of self-interest with respect to safety, they hadn’t seen it in the security arena.’”
On September 15 Sun-Times columnist Carol Marin broke the story that Andy Ryan, the baby-faced 19-year-old son of Tom Ryan, a high-ranking official in the carpenters’ union, was holding a $49,548-a-year job (with generous health benefits) as a building inspector. It seemed clear that the younger Ryan had some major pull, befitting the son of a man whose union contributed about $84,000 to Mayor Daley’s reelection campaign last year. Daley’s response to Marin’s story–and the barrage of embarrassing follow-ups: shock. Then he went on to blame everything on Stan Kaderbek, the hapless technocrat he’d installed as building department commissioner.
