Mayor Rahm Emanuel is headed to Washington, D.C. to meet with U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos on Wednesday.
The private huddle with the nation’s top education official comes after Republican President Donald Trump last week took a vague swipe at the quality of schools in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago, which included a reference to the “numbers” in Chicago schools being “very rough.”
That was enough to trigger a forceful response from Emanuel, who repeatedly has jumped at the chance to defend Chicago after the president takes jabs at the city. Emanuel sent a letter to DeVos, referencing reports he said show Chicago Public Schools students making academic strides. “Fighting #fakenews out of DC with facts from Chicago,” Emanuel’s official mayoral Twitter account posted in announcing he’d sent the letter.
Emanuel accused Trump of having “falsely and flatly denigrated the academic performance of nearly 400,000 Chicago children.”
On Wednesday, the mayor is expected to discuss the district’s academic progress and how the federal government can assist CPS in the meeting with DeVos, whose official schedule shows the meeting planned for 10:30 a.m. Eastern time.
Since Trump took office in January, Emanuel has made at least three trips to Washington to meet with new Republican administration officials.
Also Wednesday, Emanuel is scheduled to appear at a D.C. invitation-only breakfast and discussion hosted by the Wall Street Journal focused on infrastructure. Emanuel is slated to join DJ Gribbin, who is President Donald Trump’s special assistant for infrastructure policy.
Emanuel, who has long clamored for a federal infrastructure plan, has identified the issue as a possible area for cooperation with Trump. The president has called on Congress to approve a $1 trillion in new infrastructure projects financed through public money and private capital, but his administration has yet to lay out a specific proposal.