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Chicago community organizer has roots and clout dating to 1960s but current issues hang over his multimillion-dollar empire

The Rev. Leon Finney Jr. is a noted community organizer on Chicago’s South Side, and some of his related multimillion-dollar business operations are under scrutiny. (Abel Uribe, Chicago Tribune / December 9, 2011)

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The Rev. Leon Finney Jr. built a name for himself in the 1960s by fighting slumlords and helping to save his Woodlawn community from being swallowed by the University of Chicago.

The community group he came to lead, The Woodlawn Organization, became a national model as Finney built a network of social programs and gained control of millions of dollars in publicly funded development.

But now Finney’s business dealings are being questioned on a number of fronts.

Federal housing authorities are investigating allegations that the Gary Housing Authority was overbilled by $850,000 for payroll expenses related to public housing projects managed by the Woodlawn Community Development Corp., where Finney is chief executive.

A federal lawsuit filed by Finney’s former chief financial officer alleges a host of financial improprieties, from ghost payrolling to the use of government money for Finney’s private pursuits, including a family-owned restaurant.

In addition, government-mandated audits, court records and other documents obtained by the Tribune show:

•A federal housing consultant lived in a Woodlawn apartment owned by a company run by Finney while in charge of monitoring property management contract awards in Gary. During that time several contracts went to the Woodlawn Development Corp. Court records show the consultant failed to pay $17,000 in rent on the apartment.

•In several instances, government subsidies awarded to one low-income housing development were used to pay the utility bills and other expenses of unrelated properties, a violation of federal rules governing those funds.

•The Woodlawn Organization, headed by Finney’s wife, Georgette Greenlee Finney, spent $132,000 to lease office space from a real estate company owned by Finney, a 2008 audit shows.

Finney, 73, declined to comment on the Gary investigation, as well as most of the allegations made in the federal lawsuit filed by his former chief financial officer, Virgil Savage. His attorney, Devlin Schoop, also declined to comment.

However, Finney acknowledged financial problems at The Woodlawn Organization and its network of nonprofits and property management companies, which have been sued for a host of unpaid bills.

That has led to a scramble to “keep it all together” by shifting money from one organization’s bank account to another’s in an effort to pay bills, Finney said.

Finney’s network of organizations and companies runs seven social services programs and manages or owns roughly 5,000 subsidized apartments in Illinois and northwest Indiana.

“When you have no stockholders to go to get an additional capital infusion, in an effort to try to keep it all working, in instances you borrow from one property to another in order to keep the whole working and you hope that in the interim you can pay it back,” he said.

But, Finney insisted, “No money has gone into my pocket or anybody’s pocket.”

Attorneys with the Gary Housing Authority confirmed the agency is cooperating with an investigation by the federal department of Housing and Urban Development. HUD officials declined to comment.

Gary housing officials said the investigation is largely based on allegations made by Savage, who in 2010 was fired as chief financial officer for The Woodlawn Organization and its affiliated entities after about 2 1/2 years.

In his lawsuit, filed last winter, Savage, 53, claims he was fired shortly after he sent an internal memo to the organization’s board members that accused Finney of using money budgeted for federally subsidized properties for his personal benefit and to pay employees of Finney’s church.

“That’s when our relationship began to sour,” Savage said.

Source: Chicago Tribune

 With a promise of 2,400 jobs for Chicago, ComEd on Wednesday launched the hiring blitz it promised in exchange for a $2.6 billion rate hike that will finance “smart-grid” technology.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel held a news conference with ComEd President Anne Pramaggiore to tout the benefits of legislation denounced by Gov. Pat Quinn as “smart greed” for the campaign contributions the utility lathered on state lawmakers who overrode the governor’s veto.

The hiring will begin with 350 to 400 Chicago jobs this year and up to 2,400 over the next decade, Pramaggiore said.

That rosy figure includes 1,000 construction jobs, much of it tied to regular system upgrades. They include putting some power lines underground, shoring up above-ground lines to insulate them from wind and tree damage, making $50 million in improvements at O’Hare and Midway Airports and upgrading the Crawford and Fisk sub-stations.

Another 1,000 jobs will be tied to energy efficiency and renewable energy programs. Annual spending on those projects is expected to increase by at least $40 million or 26.6 percent, under the smart-grid legislation.

Pramaggiore predicted that 150 jobs would be generated by a $22.5 million Science and Energy trust fund created to support “energy innovation entrepreneurs.”

The final 150 jobs will be created by two companies hired by ComEd to support the smart-grid system that will allow consumers to monitor their energy use.

They are: Silver Spring Networks, the Silicon Valley-based company hired to design and deploy the networking platform and communications system and Choctaw-Kaul Distribution, a Native-American owned distributor that will provide Edison with the power tools and protective safety equipment needed to do the work.

“The jobs cover a wide-range of skills: engineers, work planners, construction workers, communications specialists and workers with manufacturing skills,” Pramaggiore told a news conference at the Robert W. Galvin Center for Electricity Innovation at the Illinois Institute of Technology, 10 West 35th St.

“To support the enhanced workload, ComEd will build a new training center on the Southwest Side of Chicago. Here, we will train splicers, laborers and linemen. And we will use the construction of the training center to help train Chicago’s next generation of architects” with a design competition involving college students at accredited architecture schools.

In his failed campaign to uphold his smart-grid veto, Quinn likened consumer-friendly improvements to the rate-hike bill to putting “perfume on a skunk.”

On Wednesday, Emanuel made the legislation sound and smell rosy.

And the mayor categorically denied that, by embracing smart-grid and the rate hikes that will bankroll the system, he was abandoning his right to hold ComEd’s feet to the fire after the utility’s dismal performance in last summer’s violent storms.

“I don’t think anybody’s ever said Rahm is a very quiet, meek person. That’s never been said. I don’t think [wife] Amy would describe me that way. I don’t think my kids would. I don’t think my family members or my friends would,” the mayor said.

“I will use my voice [when necessary]…They don’t get a pass because they made this investment. They have a resonsibility and I will hold them to that. And they woudn’t expect anything less….This is an essential thing to do. You can’t get from here to there without it. But even if they do this, there will be problems.”

Source: Chicago Sun-Times

Mayor Rahm Emanuel today said he erred last month when he said tighter protest rules and higher fines for thwarting police would be temporary measures designed just for a pair of spring meetings of international leaders in Chicago.

“I misspoke, and I take responsibility for the confusion,” Emanuel said at an unrelated news conference. The mayor meant to say that only the blanket spending authority for the G8 and NATO conferences, which he is seeking along with the other measures, would be temporary.

The mayor’s description of his errant statement came after protest leader Andy Thayer, noting today’s Tribune story that explained how the measures were permanent, accused the mayor of lying.

“Mayor Emanuel has frankly lied when he said that these ordinance changes would be temporary,” Thayer said. “He knew what it was about.”

Thayer and other members of the Coalition Against the NATO/G-8 War and Poverty Agenda this morning filed a permit application for a mass march on May 19 that would start at Daley Plaza and end at McCormick Place, where the NATO and G-8 summits are to be held.

Before filing the application, Thayer stood before a throng of television cameras, calling on Emanuel to reverse course on the proposed protest changes and aldermen to reject them before the Jan. 18 City Council meeting.

Don Rose, a political consultant who was an anti-Vietnam War spokesman during the troubled 1968 Democratic National Convention that led to riots, also spoke. He said tougher protest restrictions could trigger “acting out” by frustrated protestors seeking to peaceably demonstrate.

“I was one of the organizers when the whole world was watching, and I see some unfortunate parallels here,” Rose added, saying the “Battle of Michigan Avenue” was touched off in 1968 after marchers took to the sidewalks after being unable to get permits. “If they are serious about protecting first amendment rights, they will expedite and cooperate in giving the parade permits.”

Emanuel’s proposed new rules would double the maximum fine to $1,000 for protestors charged with resisting or obstructing a police officer, as well as those helping protestors escape custody. The minimum fine would soar to $200 — a $175 increase.

The duration of demonstrations would be reduced by 15 minutes to exactly two hours. Public parks and beaches would be closed until 6 a.m., two hours later than now. Loud noise, amplified sound and music at parades and public assemblies would be allowed only between 8 a.m. and 10 p.m.

“Every piece of sound equipment would need to be registered with the city a week in advance,” Thayer said, citing one of the proposed revisions he believes is unworkable. “You can’t predict who’s going to show up with a bullhorn, who’s going to show up with a megaphone or what have you.”

Emanuel, meanwhile, again said his intent is to allow world leaders to meet and conduct their business while also protecting protestors rights to free speech.

“Our fee structure hadn’t been updated in 20 years,” he said of the proposed fine increases. “We’re bringing it more in line.”

The NATO and G-8 summits are scheduled for May 19-21 at McCormick Place. Emanuel has stressed that the event in President Barack Obama’s hometown is a chance to showcase the city, while some observers note riots have resulted in other cities where those groups have met.

Emanuel was back on the job today with a tan after spending much of the last two weeks vacationing with his family in South America. The mayor, his wife, Amy Rule, and his three school-aged children went to Chile and Argentina on a 70-mile white water rafting trip. They also spent their time outdoors fly fishing and hiking, the mayor said. And the Emanuels brought in the New Year in Buenos Aires.

“Every year we try to take the kids to a different part of the world to see,” Emanuel said. “When you grow up again, you want to be an Emanuel child at some point.”

Source: Chicago Tribune 

Chicago is facing a whopping $635 million budget shortfall next year, and it will rise to $790 million by 2014 if City Hall doesn’t fundamentally change the way it does business, aldermen were told Friday. † Targeting the Chicago Police Department by eliminating “unnecessary layers of management” and supervisory benefits, reducing “chronic absenteeism” and redrawing maps of police districts and “strategizing beat staffing” based on the U.S. Census, 911 calls and relevant crime data.

 The jaw-dropping deficit figure wasn’t a surprise. Mayor Rahm Emanuel talked about it throughout the mayoral campaign and ever since he took office on May 16.

The question now is what the mayor intends to do about it. Chicagoans should know more after a mayoral news conference later today.

In an unprecedented move, Emanuel personally briefed some aldermen about the budget.

“Obviously, it’s a pretty daunting gap, but what I’m heartened to hear is that the mayor is not gonna engage in any more one time fixes or kick the can down the road temporary solution,” said Ald. Joe Moore (49th).

Asked what it would take to close the gap, Moore said, “A lot of sacrifices.”

Earlier this year, the Civic Federation offered Emanuel its road-map to financial stability for the city. It included everything from cutting the City Council in half and privatizing Midway Airport to doing away with the elected posts of city clerk and city treasurer and targeting the previously sacrosanct police and fire departments. Its suggestions included:

† Cutting the Chicago Fire Department’s $526.5 million budget by re-evaluating everything from minimum staffing requirements for fire apparatus and the number and location of fire stations to possible out-sourcing and ways to reduce disability absences. The review would be the first since the largely-ignored, 1999 report by the Tri-Data Corp.

† Developing a “water management plan” to accurately determine all expenses, including infrastructure needs, so rates can be adjusted to “recover the full cost of delivering water service.”

† Divide the city into “franchise areas” and hire a private waste hauler for each to service residential buildings and businesses that don’t get city garbage pickup.

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Source:  The Chicago Sun-Times

Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s effort to tighten the city’s lobbying rules stalled Wednesday after aldermen suggested it could stifle democracy by scaring off volunteers who otherwise would get involved in their communities.

Whether the setback lasts long enough to be more than a blip on the mayor’s “reform and change” agenda won’t be known until Thursday morning. That’s when the City Council Rules and Ethics Committee meets again to consider a modified proposal being tweaked overnight.

Aldermen balked at a provision that would require anyone advocating city action on behalf of not-for-profit agencies to register as lobbyists if those agencies represent for-profit businesses. Local chambers of commerce were cited as an example.

After aldermen questioned the provision, a top lawyer for Emanuel’s administration agreed to exempt board members or unpaid directors of not-for-profit agencies. But it would still apply to paid employees of those agencies.

Under current city rules, those who must register are paid advocates such as attorneys and consultants, or unpaid advocates if they directly represent businesses. Registration costs $350, plus $75 for each for-profit interest represented, and quarterly reporting of lobbying activities is required.

“I’m afraid this could actually discourage participation in our community, with this kind of requirement and cost,” said Ald. Thomas Tunney, 44th. “With these volunteers, I just really feel it’s going to be a hindrance, rather than an enhancement, of democracy.”

Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd, said the city could be in the ironic situation of having paid directors of local chambers pay city fees after receiving significant government grants the council doles out to keep them financially afloat.

Emanuel’s proposal also would limit to $100 a year the value of gifts lobbyists could give to a single city employee or official and bar lobbyists from giving loans to employees or officials. And it would require lobbyists to report campaign contributions to city employees and officials.

Other provisions would require the Board of Ethics to create an online, searchable database of lobbyist reporting, much like the one the Cook County clerk established, and put into law a mayoral order barring city executives and mayoral appointees from becoming lobbyists until two years after leaving City Hall.

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Source:  The Chicago Tribune

The Chicago Federation of Labor on Tuesday served up a smorgasbord of ways to cut the city budget by $242 million — by eliminating redundant layers of middle management, improving efficiency and having city employees do work currently doled out to politically-connected contractors.

Conspicuously absent from the menu of ideas presented to Mayor Rahm Emanuel were the work-rule changes the new mayor said he needs to avert 625 layoffs.

Instead, the report prepared by Pennsylvania-based Public Works focuses on labor’s longstanding beef that City Hall has been quick to farm out work formerly done by city employees and too slow to eliminate unnecessary layers of supervisors, many of them earning six-figure salaries.

If City Hall asked its supervisors to oversee just one additional employee, Chicago taxpayers would save $37.5 million, the report states.

The city’s Department of Family and Support Services — the super-agency that merged multiple human services departments — has 203 supervisory employees overseeing 334 frontline workers, the report states. That’s an astoundingly inefficient ratio of 1 manager for every 1.4 employees, the report states. The optimum is somewhere between 10 and 15 to 1.

The report also suggests establishing apprenticeship programs to reduce labor costs and having selected city crews work ten-hour shifts, four days-a-week to improve productivity.

The report estimates that a managed competition between city employees and private contractors would easily save taxpayers $40 million or ten percent of the $400 million the city spends each year on professional, technical, skilled and general labor contracts.

When the city’s Department of Aviation retrofitted gate lighting at O’Hare Airport’s Terminal 2 to make it more energy-efficient, a private contractor bid $941,962. City workers won the job with a bid of $539,775, saving the city more than $400,000, the report states as an example.

Other contracts that could be done cheaper in-house are electrical work at city facilities and maintaining the brooms that remove snow from runways at O’Hare and Midway airports. Vendors charge $140 an hour to do the electrical work, while city employees can do it for $75 an hour, the report states. The city could save $800 per broom by using city employees.

Aviation employees also under-bid private contractors by a combined $1 million on four other airport projects that include ramp lighting and other repairs.

To generate revenue, Emanuel should also empower 100 supervisors to issue citations and authorize city laborers to pick up small business trash carts they drive by every day. If only 100 small businesses agreed to pay $75 each month for the service in each of the 50 wards, the city would raise $3.7 million annually.

Chicago Federation of Labor President Jorge Ramirez said if Emanuel agrees to even a fraction of the recommendations in the 31-page report, he will have the $10 million in savings he has said he needs from organized labor.

“The commitment that we had from the mayor is that, if our efficiency models did handle that amount of money he was seeking for his 2011 problem, that all the work-rule discussion and all the layoffs would go away,” Ramirez said.

“Before you outsource anything or before you look to cut anything or look for anything else from your workers, you should at least be managing the city in a way that taxpayers really demand. And that’s as efficiently as possible. What this report attempts to do is highlight some of those inefficiencies.”

Tom Villanova, president of the Chicago Building Trades Council, added, “We went to great lengths and cost to do this. It wasn’t 20 ideas written down on the back of a napkin that were dreamt up two days ago. … $242 million is a huge amount of money. … It’s not pie-in-the-sky ideas. These are realities that can be done.”

Emanuel welcomed the report and wholeheartedly agreed that the city has too much middle management. In fact, he has already cut 350 middle-management jobs to save $22 million-a-year.

But the mayor said the suggestions made by organized labor do not avert the need for work-rule changes to address the $31 million hole in this year’s budget and the $700 million operating shortfall in 2012.

“Every part of the budget has to be open to review for one simple reason: Doing the same things over and over again and expecting you to close the budget gap won’t get you there,” the mayor said.

“I appreciate their ideas about management. Been there, done that. Will continue to do it. And they’re right. Middle-management deserves review. Top management deserves review. Service delivery deserves review. But it doesn’t mean we avoid doing work rule reforms. … When you have the private sector paying time-and-a-half for overtime, why should we pay double-time?”

In a letter sent later in the day to union leaders that began, “Dear Partners,” Emanuel said he appreciates the Chicago Federation of Labor’s efforts and plans to “review the report with my team so we can begin to discuss how to incorporate these and other ideas in a way that best serves” Chicago taxpayers “in 2012 and beyond.”

“Not only do I agree with some of what I read in the CFL report, I have already taken action on some of the suggestions,” Emanuel said.

The mayor noted that he has cut the annual payroll of the mayor’s office by 10 percent, eliminated 100 non-union jobs in senior and middle-management and frozen hiring for 175 other such positions.

“These three actions save $21 million. And my administration is not stopping there,” the letter said.

Emanuel has honored a campaign promise to eliminate unpaid furlough days he called a morale-killer. But that blew a $31 million hole in former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s final budget, which assumed a full year of savings from union concessions not yet negotiated.

On July 15, the new mayor said he would send layoff notices to 625 employees — and put off 61 blocks of curb and gutter improvements and 76 blocks of sidewalk repairs — after union leaders refused to agree to work rule changes or identify alternative cost savings by an extended deadline.

Cement Masons Local 502 has since agreed to accept time-and-a-half for overtime, instead of double-time, saving the jobs of six members targeted for seasonal layoffs.

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Soure:  The Chicago Sun-Times

A building trades union has agreed to work rules changes requested by Mayor Rahm Emanuel to save jobs.

The decision by Cement Masons Local 502 to accept time-and-half for overtime, instead of double-time, may save the jobs of six members targeted for layoff.

Earlier this month Emanuel said the city will lay off as many as 625 workers to save as much as $12 million this year. The mayor is working to close the city’s $31 million budget gap.

Chicago Federation of Labor President Jorge Ramirez on Monday denied the cement masons’ decision represented a break in labor solidarity. He said the labor organization has “never said no” to work-rule changes.

Ramirez today plans to unveil his group’s plan for cost saving alternatives to work rule changes.

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Source:  The Chicago Tribune

Chicago taxpayers will pay a $7.5 million price in the next few years for former Mayor Richard M. Daley’s decision to require city employees to take unpaid furlough days and accept comp time instead of cash overtime, the city’s inspector general has concluded.

At the end of 2010, the accumulated balance of comp time hours owed to city employees — not including police officers, firefighters, paramedics and Inspector General employees — had ballooned to 201,000 hours, a 144 percent increase from the 140,000-hour balance in 2008, said Inspector General Joe Ferguson.

That’s a $7.5 million “liability” that Chicago taxpayers will be “obligated to pay over the next several years,” Ferguson said.

“This illustrates that a major effect of the substitution of compensatory time for overtime pay is to postpone the cost of overtime — either in payments to city employees or in paid time off — to future years,” the inspector general wrote in a report released Wednesday.

“Regardless of whether the city has to pay for these hours directly or give employees paid time off, the cost to the city whether in cash or lost productivity is the same. … This is a significant future obligation that should be factored into and publicly disclosed as a consequence of furlough as a budget strategy.”

Contrary to his own prior reports, Ferguson also concluded that the furlough plan dramatically reduced overtime. He did not detail whether that savings in overtime offset any of the comp time liability.

Although key departments were forced to operate short-handed while co-workers took unpaid days off, overtime payments through June 30, 2010 in six key departments — Streets and Sanitation, Transportation, Water Management, Aviation, Fleet Management and General Services — declined by 24 percent over the same period the year before.

In each of the last two years, city employees were required to take the equivalent of 24 unpaid days off and substitute comp time for cash overtime.

Mayor Rahm Emanuel has condemned the furlough days as a “morale killer” and ended them for the entire city workforce. That blew a $31 million hole in the city’s 2011 budget that the new mayor plans to fill with 625 layoffs now that union leaders have spurned his demand for cost-saving work rule changes.

In earlier studies, Ferguson concluded that, although the furlough plan cut costs, the savings was actually $11 million less than Daley claimed because of the liability absorbed by grossly under-funded city employee pension funds.

The inspector general also complained that Chicago Fire Department brass got more than $335,000 in overtime they were not eligible for over the last two years, wiping out the benefits from the furlough plan.

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Source:  The Chicago Sun-Times

The protracted, clout-heavy fight over a multi-million dollar contract to run the restaurants and stores in O’Hare airport’s international terminal moved a step closer to being resolved today.

The City Council Aviation Committee endorsed Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s recommendation by voting for a contract with Westfield Concession Management LLC, a subsidiary of multinational shopping mall and concessions developer the Westfield Group.

As she has at prior hearings on the O’Hare plans, Aviation Commissioner Rosemarie Andolino testified that Westfield – which runs concessions at several airports around the country — provides the most realistic revenue projections.

Aviation Committee Chairman Ald. Michael Zalewski, 23rd, read letters from officials at both United and American Airlines in support of the Westfield pact.

The 25-year Westfield proposal guarantees the city at least $5.1 million in annual rent as well as $26.2 million in renovations and new construction to the concession area.

If approved by the City Council next week, Westfield will replace Chicago Aviation Partners, the company with ties to former Mayor Richard Daley that has run terminal 5 concessions since 1993.

Aldermen were close to voting on the O’Hare contract near the end of Daley’s term, until Emanuel sent word he wanted a chance to review the proposals after taking office. Emanuel came out in support of Westfield early this month.

The committee vote was 14-1, with Ald. John Arena, 45th, the lone dissenter. Arena said aldermen didn’t have time to accurately assess the bids, because information on the plans was only released to them by the Emanuel Administration this week.

“I just wasn’t convinced the process was clear and transparent. The numbers just didn’t add up for me,” Arena said.

Both CAP and Westfield have City Hall connections.

Westfield’s lobbying team includes Tim Dart, brother of Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, and Demetrius Carney, president of the Chicago Police Board.

Among CAP’s shareholders is Jeremiah Joyce, one of Daley’s closest political advisers. Former Cook County State’s Attorney Richard Devine lobbies for the group.

Joyce, a former alderman and state senator who has kept a low public profile in recent years, testified briefly. He urged aldermen to look closer at the proposals.

“You have this hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo numbers thing going on,” Joyce said. “And if I sat where you guys sat – or ladies – I would ask for some sort of a forensic audit on these projections and find out what the numbers really are.”

And Devine argued CAP’s $11.5 million annual minimum rent guarantee is far from the pie-in-the-sky promise Westfield supporters have said it is. But city officials have said CAP has always fallen short of revenue projections under its current contract.

As the high profile O’Hare contract moved toward a vote by the full City Council, Emanuel’s office also announced they will enact previously discussed initiatives the administration says will make contract bidding more transparent and competitive.

Open online bidding for city contracts will allow companies to repeatedly bid against each other, driving down costs, according to a news release from Emanuel’s office.

And contracts to be awarded without open bidding will be posted online before the city’s Non-Competitive Review Board votes on them, to allow public comment.

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Source:  The Chicago Tribune

A new questionnaire that probes the “soft skills” needed be a teacher has resulted in what critics call the “blacklisting’’ of hundreds of potential Chicago Public School teachers — including some who already had job offers, the Chicago Sun-Times has learned.

Graduates of the Academy for Urban School Leadership’s teacher training program touted by Mayor Rahm Emanuel have, in effect, flunked the test. So has a winner of a prestigious Golden Apple scholarship. Likewise a special-education major who made the dean’s list at Michigan State University and was described as a “dream candidate’’ by a CPS principal who wanted to hire her.

Of the 3,900 CPS teacher applicants who have taken TeacherFit since June, 30 percent have scored low enough to be excluded from hiring — for the moment, said Alicia Winckler, head of the CPS Office of Human Capital. Some were told to reapply in 18 months, but CPS is now rethinking that 18-month time-frame and whether to grant some low-scoring applicants some leeway, Winckler said.

Winckler and a spokeswoman for the Chicago Public Education Fund, which spent $130,000 to develop TeacherFit for CPS use, say they believe strongly in TeacherFit’s validity and ability to identify strong teacher candidates. They note that similar personality-test-like job application questionnaires are common in the business world.

However, deans of 22 Chicago area colleges of education are requesting a meeting with CPS officials over the use of TeacherFit as a tool that can completely knock a candidate out of the CPS teacher applicant pool, said Victoria Chou, dean of the College of Education at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

“It’s smelling bad so far,’’ said Chou, who called some of the TeacherFit questions “crazy.’’ “I cannot help but think there hasn’t been enough evaluation undertaken before these high stakes are put into place.’’

The Chicago Teachers Union is asking CPS to dump the test completely, said CTU President Karen Lewis.

“It’s unacceptable,’’ said Lewis. “Any test can inform [the application process] but it shouldn’t drive it.’’

“No one should be blacklisted, in 1950s talk, simply because they didn’t score appropriately,’’ agreed John Butterfield, a former CPS principal and now assistant to the president of the Chicago Principals and Administrators Association. The association plans to “lodge a complaint’’ with Winckler, he said.

“I don’t think anyone’s career should be up or down based on one test,’’ Butterfield said.

Butterfield, Chou and other area deans of education say their email and phone lines have lit up since last week, when CPS teacher applicants started to be notified that their TeacherFit responses had knocked them out of the applicant pool — including some who had already been offered CPS jobs.

Sandy Traback, interim principal at Kozminski, said that only a few weeks before year-round classes start she was blocked from hiring a “dream candidate’’ who had two other CPS job offers as a special education teacher because of TeacherFit scores.

The candidate had made the Dean’s list at Michigan State and had received rave reviews from supervisors at two different CPS schools where she had student-taught and taught summer school. Traback even personally observed her summer school teaching and was impressed.

“Everybody said, ‘If you need a special education teacher, this is the one you want,’ ” Traback said.

But with the candidate sitting across her desk, Traback tried to select her on the CPS computer system and couldn’t find her application. She called CPS Human Resources, only to be told “she didn’t pass the TeacherFit evaluation. And I said, ‘what the hell is that?’ ”

“I could actually watch her teach,’’ Traback said. “I saw the quality of the work she was doing. . . . I am very concerned that some candidates have been caught up in this, and it’s going to be a loss to CPS.’’

The candidate — and many others — said she thought she was merely taking a survey when she filled out TeacherFit. She had no idea her career would rest on her answers, she said.

“Had I known, I might not have been as honest,” and instead given the answers she thought test evaluators were seeking, said the candidate, who asked to remain anonymous.

The CTU’s Lewis said the union complained about some questions during the TeacherFit development process because some seemed to probe for people who were “willing to work for free.’’ One current question asks candidates “how do you feel about a job that would require you to regularly work after hours?”

Other questions ask candidates to recall how frequently they did something — such as help their peers with a difficult task — over a 10- or five-year time frame. A 10-year span would take a 21-year-old teaching candidate all the way back to age 11, one education professor noted.

TeacherFit co-author Neal Schmitt, a psychology professor at Michigan State University, said many of the questions involve “personality or attitude’’ items that try to get at the “soft skills’’ needed to be a teacher — student focus, planning and organizing, results-focus, perseverance and self-initiative.

Development of the test was paid for by the Chicago Public Education Fund, which counts as a board member Bruce Rauner, a wealthy venture capitalist and close ally of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and former Mayor Richard M. Daley. Rauner was a driving force behind the sweeping school reform bill that Gov. Pat Quinn signed into law last month.

Penny Pritzker, a member of the billionaire Pritzker family, stepped down as the fund’s chair after Emanuel named her a Chicago School Board member.

TeacherFit questions were field-tested on a sample pool of 867 CPS teachers, with an average work experience of four years, who were also rated separately by their principals. TeacherFit scores wound up correlating closely with how teachers were rated by their principals, Schmitt said.

However, CPS ultimately decided which scores would fall into what CPS calls a “red, yellow or green’’ category, with “red” being the lowest score, and what stakes to attach to results, Schmitt said.

North suburban academic powerhouse Stevenson High School also uses TeacherFit as a candidate evaluation tool, but not a blacklisting device, said Stevenson Township High School District spokesman James Conrey.

“No current candidate at Stevenson is excluded from consideration based solely on TeacherFit answers, and no future candidate will be excluded based solely on TeacherFit answers,’’Conrey said.

“TeacherFit is just one piece of the puzzle, in our view, not the be-all, end-all determining factor in deciding to hire teachers. We wouldn’t stand for a teacher basing a student’s semester grade solely on the result of one test, so why would we follow a different philosophy in our hiring practices?”

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Source:  The Chicago Sun-Times