Does It Matter If Rahm Went To New Trier?

If Rahm Emanuel had graduated from Thornton Fractional, or Niles West, or even Evanston Township, Gery Chico wouldn’t be telling us where he went to high school.

But there’s something about New Trier Township that ignites class resentment. It’s a symbol of elite education, a finishing school for the sort of young people most of us only met by watching Risky Business or Mean Girls. In Jonathan Kozol’s book, Savage Inequalities, he contrasted privileged New Trier with the grungy schools in East St. Louis. In Wilmette, Kenilworth and Winnetka, the villages that feed New Trier, the median income is over $100,000, and the black population is under 1 percent.

Last week, I was talking about the mayor’s race with an ex-steelworker who attended Chicago Vocational School in the 1960s. When I told him Emanuel was a New Trier Trevian, he sputtered in disbelief.

“New Trier?” he exclaimed. “New Trier?!? That’s not even a real high school. That’s like a, a, a fantasy school!”

Gery Chico, who went to Thomas Kelly High School in Brighton Park, knows New Trier elicits that reaction from blue-collar Chicagoans. That’s why he used it to attack Emanuel’s street cred after last week’s debate at Kennedy-King College.

“He went to the wealthiest high school in the state of Illinois,” Chico said. “I do not see how you can relate to the people of the city of Chicago when you have not walked these streets and lived here. If you come from Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest, that’s what you think like. I didn’t go to some elite high school. I went to Kelly High School.”

The Tribune and the Sun-Times, which have both endorsed Emanuel, insist his privileged upbringing shouldn’t prevent him from getting whatever he wants in life.

“The city remains deeply segregated, racially and economically,” wrote the Tribune’s Mary Schmich. “Its mansions and skyscrapers are surrounded by neighborhoods where jobs are scarce, guns are abundant, schools are chaotic and it’s hard to buy a fresh vegetable. The candidate who sees those divisions clearly, and has the best plan for repairs, is the one to vote for, regardless of where he or she went to high school.”

And in a column titled “Top school grads need not apply,” the Sun-TimesNeil Steinberg compared Chicagoans to clannish hillbillies for suggesting an outsider can’t run the city.

“Gery Chico -- who I like to think of as being as qualified as Rahm Emanuel to be mayor -- distinguished himself, in a bad way, last week with a naked play to voters’ basest emotions of envy and class pride, suggesting that Emanuel is somehow unfit to be mayor because he went to a good high school,” Steinberg wrote.

If anyone in this race is handicapped by his high school, it’s not Rahm Emanuel. New Trier has so many distinguished alumni, they have their own Wikipedia page: Ann-Margret, Rock Hudson, Charlton Heston, Mark Kirk, Donald Rumsfeld, Archibald MacLeish, Scott Turow, Liz Phair, Charlie Trotter, and on and on.

Graduating from New Trier has never held anyone back. It’s not going to hold Emanuel back, either, no matter what Chico says. Your Ward Room blogger has both dated and worked for New Trier graduates. (Not the same one.) Their sense of entitlement filled the room. Your Ward Room blogger also went to high school across the street from an auto plant, which is probably why I let it bother me.

There is no such Wikipedia page for Kelly High School, but one of my racetrack buddies is a Kelly grad named Sig Bogdiewicz. Sig is a former Leo Burnett artist who invented Sprout, the Jolly Green Giant’s sidekick. He also worked on the Keebler elves. If Chico wins, they can start the Kelly High Hall of Fame.

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