Over the weekend we were working on a post about Park Ridge-Niles School District 64’s replacement of all its 2,782 Chromebooks after more than half of them underwent repairs just this year alone, according to an article in last week’s Park Ridge Herald-Advocate (“All Chromebooks to be replaced in District 64, officials say,” May 2).

But then we received an over-the-transom gift: a forwarded e-mail from D-64 Supt. Laurie Heinz announcing “a new style of online forum called Thoughtexchange.”

With apologies to The Who: Meet the new cooked survey, same as the old cooked survey.

That caused us to look at the Report for tonight’s Board Meeting, where we discovered even more propaganda about this new Thoughtexchange survey in Appendix 4 – starting with all the usual buzzwords and phrases designed to excite and mesmerize the usual simpletons, like “very innovative new format,” “online outreach tool,” “various stakeholder groups,” “360-degree online dialogue” (Wouldn’t that be talking in circles?), “very engaging,” “fresh approach” and “engage them in the process,” all of which we’ve highlighted in yellow for your convenience.

According to Heinz and the District’s propaganda minister, Bernadette Tramm, the Thoughtexchange process got an “enthusiastic response” from Heinz’s handpicked “Community Relations Council.” And we would expect no less of the CRC, which we wrote about in our 10.08.15 post. In fairness, not every one of those CRC members are stooges or shills for Heinz, but you can be sure that one of the reasons Heinz picked them in the first place was that she subscribes to the “We don’t want nobody that nobody sent” Chicago-style of politics – as do most bureaucrats in this corrupt state.

And the reason Chicago-style bureaucrats pick stooges and shills is that they tend not to have the ability and/or the desire to detect all the “bullsh*t” – as Jon Stewart so keenly and eloquently elucidated it in his final monologue (see the video here, read the transcript here) last August – that is regularly dispensed by the likes of the D-64 Board and Administration. Or to actually possess the courage to say something even if they did detect it.

Notwithstanding all of Heinz’s and Tramm’s buzzwords and phrases in Appendix 4, we’ve highlighted the real b.s. in orange, starting with calling the result of this goat rodeo “a satisfaction survey that can be used primarily with staff and parents.” [Emphasis added.]

That’s because this survey is being designed to pander to the basest concerns and desires of the folks with the most to gain from manipulating the process to justify spending even more money with no better results: “staff,” who already appear to be overpaid based on D-64’s lackluster (if not declining) performance – as measured by standardized testing, not intramural havel-gazing – yet are in the process of negotiating for more, more, more; and “parents” for whom money is no object so long as they can get away with paying only around 25 cents on the dollar in RE taxes for the D-64 $14-15,000 education for their first kid, and ZERO for every additional kid.

That’s one big reason why “[a]ll parents and staff will receive direct email invitations to participate” in this survey “through May and into early June.” That way, D-64 can hope to receive as many of those special-interest responses as possible (and as few of the regular taxpayer responses as possible) before the District announces the latest sweetheart contract it has been negotiating in secret with the teachers union – a report about which is listed on tonight’s meeting agenda as one of two items scheduled for a special two-hour secretive closed session, starting at 5:30.

Will dinner be served…at taxpayer expense?

And don’t think it’s any coincidence that neither Heinz’s e-mail nor Appendix 4 lists any of the “3 open-ended questions about our schools and District” the Thoughtexchange survey allegedly will be asking, even though those questions must already have been vetted by the Board (or at least we would hope so, although we can’t find any evidence of it) and are locked and loaded if the plan is to collect all the responses “through May and early June.” By not listing the questions, it’s a lot tougher for our flummoxed local media (or any pesky bloggers and taxpayers) to shoot holes in them before the answers start rolling in.

So we’ll offer three open-ended questions of our own, just for grins:

1. Why has D-64’s standardized testing performance been stagnant-to-declining compared to other districts with similar economic profiles and per-student spending?

2. How will D-64 schools help Park Ridge taxpayers maintain and increase their property values in the face of those stagnant-to-declining comparables while RE taxes keep increasing?

3. Why does the D-64 Board keep rewarding administrators and staff with more money for stagnant-to-declining student performance?

Don’t expect those questions, or anything like them, being asked by Thoughtexchange.

And as best as we can tell from perusing the Thoughtexchange.com website, what we can expect is another typical collection of easily-manipulable anonymous data points collected through a process that might not even be immune to the kind of “ballot-box stuffing” – multiple responses by the same people – that characterize all those half-baked SurveyMonkey surveys and Change.Org. petitions so many of our local elected officials and bureaucrats prefer for their finger-to-the-wind management decisions.

The sad truth is that this isn’t even intended to be a legitimate “community” survey focusing on what two-thirds (or more) of Park Ridge households who DON’T have kids in D-64 schools think about D-64. It’s a charade and a  propaganda exercise by a dishonest Administration conspiring with a bumbling School Board to cover up the District’s pitiful lack of educational, managerial and financial competence.

And, worst of all, it cheats both the taxpayers AND the students.

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