Mayor Brandon Johnson fired Dr. Allison Arwady, commissioner of Public Health in Chicago for the last four years, on Friday as part of a routine “transition” to another administration.
“Every single administration has to be prepared for transition. My administration is no different in that regard. Transition is difficult for everyone,” Johnson said. “But as has been already articulated, I don’t know how many times you’re allowed to quote Tupac in a press conference, but you can’t always go by the things that you hear. Real eyes, right, realize real lies. That’s also Tupac Shakur.”
Quoting a dead gangsta rapper may be a first for a Chicago mayor. But the media questions directed at Johnson weren’t concerned with the mayor quoting the “face of ’90s West Coast gangsta rap.” They were about the reasons that Arwady was canned more than three months into Johnson’s administration.
Prior to running for mayor, Johnson was a Chicago Teachers Union organizer, and the CTU had serious clashes with former Mayor Lori Lightfoot and Arwady over the reopening of schools during the pandemic.
Writing about Johnson’s run-off victory over former Public Schools CEO Paul Vallas, I noted that the city was now under the thumb of the CTU.
We’ve had cities controlled by one industry before. Detroit (autos) and Pittsburgh (steel) were company towns until the 1970s when unions drove their industries into the ground.
But teaching isn’t an “industry” and the public schools aren’t companies. In Chicago’s case, the schools are a means to an end — not educating children but rather funding a gigantic radical-left political machine. And the $2 billion in funding spent on the schools may as well be ancillary to the advancement of “progressive” politics.
It should frighten every Chicagoan to know they now have a toady in office who will do the union’s bidding.
Was I wrong?
The Chicago Tribune was incensed at Johnson’s “unconscionable” firing of Arwady.
It all boils down to Johnson’s allegiance to the CTU, which did all it could to fight Lightfoot and Arwady’s attempts to open the schools and get the city’s kids back in the classroom, alongside the city’s kids in private and parochial schools who were already back, as were children in the Chicago suburbs, in Europe and in many other U.S. states.
We know of no entity other than the CTU that actually believes Arwady should not have tried to reopen the schools when she did. On a national level, union leaders like Randi Weingarten now are trying to walk back their vehemence when it came to keeping schools closed. That’s because there is an abundance of data to suggest that Arwady and Lightfoot were right to push the union to get Chicago kids back in school, given the lack of evidence of widespread COVID classroom transmission. With the benefit of hindsight, it’s clear that that the price paid in learning loss was much too high.
Indeed, the CDC was prepared to recommend in February 2021 that schools reopen — until the teachers’ unions got the ear of former CDC Director Rochelle Walensky and, in an unprecedented action, allowed the teachers’ unions to recommend and dictate policy on school reopenings.
“Documents and testimony show, however, that Director Walensky downplayed the degree to which CDC departed from past practice to allow AFT to affect the policymaking process. In fact, CDC allowed AFT to insert language into the Operational Guidance that made it more likely schools across the country would remain closed after February 2021,” says the report.
Arwady pushed back against the CTU’s refusal to reopen schools in Chicago, and it cost her. And Johnson made it absolutely clear that there’s a new sheriff in town, and its initials are C.T.U.
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