-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Summary and audio linked here.
Chicago’s political leadership is floating a pension buyout program as evidence it is seriously addressing the city’s thirty-six-billion-dollar unfunded pension liability, but Mark Glennon, founder of the Illinois policy research organization Wirepoints, said that the proposal moves debt from one column to another rather than reducing it, and that the broader fiscal picture facing the city continues to deteriorate across every measurable dimension. Audio here.
Expect no retraction or apology. This what they do.
The state’s existing buyout program for its own pensions is the precedent for Chicago, which should be a warning: Look out for similar exaggerated claims and shoddy analysis.
Full interview and summary linked here.
SIGN UP HERE FOR OUR FREE WIREPOINTS DAILY NEWSLETTER
I’d be glad to teach math, physics and electronics technology and software classes in retirement. But not if I’d have to get some damn certificate or license or join a union. Teaching certificates and unions are a giant wall separating kids from a wealth of private sector folks who could truly inspire kids if only they were allowed to teach.
Is joining a union ever mandatory as you’ve suggested for public schools? If that’s ever the case it has to be rare. Union membership almost always requires dues, a voluntary choice as far as I know.
Free up all the drivers ED teachers to teach other courses, and have the driving professionals — Bus Drivers- teach drivers ED.
If there truly is a teacher shortage, what’s preventing every CPS teacher from obtaining employment in one of Illinois’ other 851 school districts? By all accounts, CPS is a horribly run enterprise that never does anything right. So why go back to a slumlord employer when you can easily get a job anywhere else in Cook County? Don’t say it’s for the poor minority children because the south suburbs are full of them, as are Elgin and Aurora. Plenty of poor children downstate too. CTU has been complaining for decades about CPS, yet they sign each and every contract. If… Read more »
Most districts want to hire the brand new teacher because they are the cheapest. As you’ve noted on your other post, school districts go out of their way to offload senior teachers so they can lower their average teacher expense. It’s not that easy for an experienced teacher to get hired into a different district and keep their pay. Sure if a district is desperate they may hire the teacher that has twice the salary but more than likely they will leave the position open and say they can’t find anyone. Kind of like all the fast food restaurants that… Read more »
And rural areas and towns throughout Illinois are sad, depressing areas and are losing population. few including teachers want to live there. As the other article here today says, 80% of IL counties lost population since the last census. This is not unique to Illinois but it is certainly more acute. Our small to medium sized towns in IL – Elgin, Marion, Decatur, Rockford, Freeport, Joliet, Danville, Watseka, Charleston, etc are $hitholes compared to, for example, in Wisconsin, Eau Claire, Green Bay, Sheboygan, Wausau, La Cross, Whitewater, Eagle River, Stevens Point, or in Indiana – Ft. Wayne, Bloomington, Elkhart, South… Read more »
Something worth noting regarding small Illinois towns is that many of the towns had a vibrant community till the coal mines shutting down. Interesting enough was Obama’s war on coal when it was people in his home state that his war was hurting and now live in the aftermath.
Over the past 30+ years, Illinois incentivized teachers to retire early. From early retirement options to increasing service year credits earned to increasing sick time accruals. A teacher in 1997 with a large bank of sick days would have to put in 37-38 years of service to reach full pension vesting. Today, that same retiring teacher only needs 32. And now they’re starting to feel the impact of those decisions. “He wants it, her gets it.”
Many of the early retirement incentives were designed to off-load higher seniority teachers who were most expensive salary-wise and health-wise. Getting them off a district’s health plan and on to the retirement system health plan saved the district money … short term. Parochial short-term thinking (saving budget dollars next year and kicking the liability down the road) is a part of the thinking in most sectors. MBA grad’s looking for incentive bonuses this year and next and pumping stock prices so they can cash in and move to their next job are just as sinister. And, as we are seeing,… Read more »
Getting rid of high paid teachers earlier than planned merely shifts the cost burden from school district to state. Over the 4-5 years of that early retirement phase, taxpayers are paying two teachers: a retired teacher (via earlier pension payments) and his replacement. There are now also covering 2 health plans.
My point exactly. Local district gets rid of high-cost high-seniority teacher who is older and requires more health care. The cost of the early-retired teacher transfers to the state and the district and its residents will pay in the future for what it has “saved” today. This teacher will have more years of pension and health care than he/she would have otherwise had. Just moving around who pays and when they pay.
Nobody takes an early retirement package unless on balance it’s beneficial to THEM …. and benefitcial to THEM always means there a NEGATIVE impact on Taxpayers. Sure, there may be some shifting among the various pots of money (wages, pensions, etc.) but in total the Taxpayers are ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS treated as the sucker in the room. Why ? Because when politicians “make nice” to Public Sector workers (ALL OF THEM ….. teachers, Cops, others) by giving them great wages and pension/benefits that those in the Private Sector could only DREAM OF, those favors are returned in the form of… Read more »
This is correct. Teachers and others are “incentivized” with something of value. The issue is why do school districts and colleges and, now, the state of Illinois consider and approve these buy-outs? Part of it is vote-buying as you observe. The rest is temporary budget relief which goes hand-in-hand with superintendent pay, active teacher pay, legal fees for the accompanying paper-work and active encouragement from the same lawyers and the unions and the insurance agents who get commissions from tax-sheltered annuity sales persons. There are consultants and CPA firms that promote these to administrators because the administrators can claim short-term… Read more »
Piling the IOUs into pension and retiree healthcare promises (instead of better wages today) is a schrade. I see no way (short of a Federal Bailout … ala the woefully underfunded Multi-employer pensions plans) that those promises can ever be paid. There simply will never be sufficient money to do so.
They have to retire early otherwise after a while they realize what they have been teaching is total BS.
the steady departure of school employees during the pandemic… The teacher quit rate is lower than every other job category except federal employees. Has been and always will be. And considering quits include teachers who left their present job to accept a different teaching job, that number is even further inflated. Adding this category of employment (local education) also includes cafeteria workers and janitors, making teacher turnover an even more rare occurrence. So a lot of false flags around what constitutes a shortage. Meanwhile, K-12 enrollment has been stagnant at best and the student-to-school-employee ratio has been dropping for decades.… Read more »
Fewer and fewer children are being born every year in IL.
IL Births have been lower basically every year since 1990.
https://dph.illinois.gov/data-statistics/vital-statistics/birth-statistics.html
Plenty of unhired teachers at the state university near me…perhaps the statistics are a Chicago thing.
For the 4th academic year in a row, crooked and corrupt Illinois teachers unions will keep schools closed.
Teacher shortages, pilot shortages, trucker shortages, fast food worker shortages, nurse shortages…I can’t imagine what caused all these people to be forced out of the workplace in states like IL. It’s like when you decide to purge people for wrongthink they disappear. Who’d of thunk?
I’m sure all the expert commenters here at WP will be available to teach in these schools. They will finally be able to get rich while teaching.
Sure, and let’s repeat at least a few of the oft-stated benefits one more time: (1) teacher applicants on average have lower-than-average SAT scores, so surely its true that almost anybody can do it; (2) all most do is baby-sitting work; (3) you often have maybe a 7-hour workday in some central-city districts; (4) EVERYBODY knows that almost no teacher does any work beyond that scheduled work day; (5) you get a huge number of paid holidays; (6)) you only “work” roughly 185-ish days a year: (7) you get lots of paid sick days and personal days to use at… Read more »
The crazy insane leftists in your profession are scaring away normal people from joining. What normie wants to work in a profession filled with angry pink haired women who only want to discuss their pronouns?
Yes, but those benefits I mentioned ought to entice some fence-sitters! So, you have to deal with a few odd characters. No job is perfect. No “work,” lots of bennies, praise and helpful people at every turn. What’s not to like and even envy! I can’t think of a thing not to like. And you only have to spend some three decades to get that fat FL-lovin’ pension.
James – why the teacher shortage?. You surely have some insight into why there is a shortage in Illinois. And despite your snark, it can’t be the pensions. Tier 2 is an awful deal. I mean, overpay for a mediocre education at Illinois State or Western Illinois with often student loans and then face a difficult job with scant pension benefits? Gee, sounds exciting. Is it pay, now thin pensions, increasingly difficult students where in many schools little learning happens, politically unresponsive administrators? I mean, while I find the woke stuff irritating, it means little to me if so many… Read more »
In spite of what so many here feel and what I said (with a wink) to the contrary the job of teaching without a true internal gift for it can be—and often is—a very stressful occupation. Anyone who is an adult and was an Honors-type student in terms of intellect and cooperative personality who generally had an equal set of class peers can’t begin to imagine the difficulties of trying to lead often-recalcitrant and half-hearted-effort students towards a set of adult-created goals in which they have NO interest and sometimes even seek to undermine the teacher’s efforts. Then, you have… Read more »
Don’t you think that in many respects the entire system needs to be turned upside down in our failing cities? Fix what hasn’t been working for decades? Such a fix would interfere, however, with the expectations of older teachers and their unions and, accordingly, with the expectations of politicians for contributions and re-election. If this analysis has at least some validity, where does one start? The beleaguered teachers and their unions are the biggest obstacles to reform. Their opposition is based on the expectations they have developed because of all the unsustainable promises they’ve been given. How many of these… Read more »
Personally, yes I think the public education system in the U. S. needs major reforms. One of biggest problems is the underlying assumption that almost literally every child needs a college-prep track education. That concept started for a variety of reasons but became cemented years ago first when college “recommended” certain courses for high school students planning on going to college which then started to be mandated by state-level boards or departments of education. There are some obvious downsides to that. More parents want their children to be college bound than do the students themselves, the ones who actually have… Read more »
James the European system would never work here. There would be enormous disparities between and among certain groups, and there is no way the establishment would ever permit it to happen.
Yes, I know. The ordinary prudent person tends to put his money where he think its spent most efficiently and effectively. The government is another thing entirely, always throwing ever more money towards its loudest, most organized constituencies to curry their favor and keep the peace.
Proof positive that one size does NOT fit all. We were ‘tracked’ when we began high school: college, business, domestic. Now there’s too much emphasis on college; too little emphasis on life skills; too much time wasted on DIE. The 3 Rs are an afterthought and civics? Nah, too racist. When a young person finished high school they should have the skills to be able to join the workforce or continue their education in the trades or college AND be schooled in how our government works and why. To prepare young people any less is a huge disservice to both… Read more »
Public education is as intractable as the Mideast in the sense that neither can be ameliorated without individuals’ reasonable expectations for their own lifetimes being disrupted. What I see in places like Chicago and Detroit resembles the lot of coal miners in West Virginia or pecan farmers in California. Further, in a system built on advocacy, people and their organizations will fight like mongooses and cobras to preserve what they have or to get the best deal possible. Perfect economic justice is as unfeasible as reparations. Courts won’t work — Think reshuffling land titles in the West to restore what… Read more »
Good analysis – but what’s the solution to the problem of ill-prepared ‘graduates?’
As long as a child of a certain age that can pass the breathing test is considered a “student” due equal opportunity funding even without the slightest motivation or academic merit then the academic standards will forever remain low overall. A great many totally unmotivated “students” think of school as jail time, treat it with that sort of disdain and essentially waste their time as well as that of their teachers and the public’s money to pay the freight for it. I’m against the expense where such effort is not apparent. Let ’em waste time somewhere else at their parents’… Read more »
All good ideas, and all have noted that we need a drastic change to how we view education and implement an education system. There seems to be a lot of agreement on that.
But we need to acknowledge the elephant in the room. The primary impediments to making changes are the education establishment and teacher unions.
Well, to the extent that any such change would heavily threaten their economic welfare that needs to be addressed, assuming you’d want their support. Almost literally nobody will support any such policy change when it took years years of preparation on their part to reach an older model presumed to last with only minor alterations for an entire career. If you think it can be done otherwise “go ahead; make my day.”
Yes, some change might be disruptive to career expectations. But that happens to many of us as technology and the economy change. Workers on the Keystone pipeline can attest to that. Is there some reason why teachers should be exempt from change?
No. I simply said their concerns should be addressed if you want their support. What “addressed” means would have to be determined.
Tough question — I don’t think the real world incorporates a solution. By real world I think of pragmatic cost-effective sustainable solutions. So ultimately it is the graduate’s problem and the problem of those who support the graduate. Why shouldn’t society [a.k.a. taxpayers] support the graduate? That gets us back to the “real world.” The buck stops where? Teachers say that they support the students no matter what, but if that were the case there wouldn’t be so many demoralized teachers. So, for the sake of teachers and taxpayers both we should support schools being for education of those who… Read more »
I can’t wait to see the next CPS enrollment decline, it’s going to be big. My kids’ old school on the northside has lost almost all it’s white families who pulled either last school year or this summer moved to suburban or catholic. I hope CPS, CTU and their freak show teachers choke on it. They wanted to burn it all down well, it worked. The left owns the destruction 100% and then some. I hope they close more schools and fire more teachers, in fact I’m rooting for it.
Some suburbs, at least the one I live in, are booming, mostly at the expense of the city, as families have fled the crime and degeneracy for yards and schools with teachers who actually teach. My kid’s week long summer camp and the matching fall program had *the largest* number of registrations ever. The email last week from the organizer expressed utter shock at the overwhelming enrollment. It seems all the community sports programs are the same way. The elementary schools are building additions because they’re overcrowded. The community pool, which is normally crowded, is seemingly bursting at the seams… Read more »
This is in contrast to the baby bust that is going on virtually everywhere else. Families with children, as long as they have even limited means, are congregating in certain ‘safer’ suburbs, looking to avoid the ‘growing up in the city’ lifestyle entirely.
Just last weekend we were at a pool party with ex-city families, one mother having been a former CPS principal even. Every last one of them said it wasn’t the taxes, the crime or traffic. It was CPS ongoing BS and unreasonable covid hysteria in the city aka vaccine mandates. CPS has ensured the city will revert to the ultra rich liberals and the trapped, impoverished minorities. I guess that’s how commies like it.
Interesting, I’ll ask my village’s new families, when I meet them, why they left. I’ll report back in a few months.
I wouldn’t be surprised if CPS enrollment stabilized, if only because the last two years of enrollment declines have been so drastic. Their best hope is mass immigration and a resurgence in sanctuary state children. Chicago’s Asian population might buoy the numbers, but that demo is very picky about education quality and won’t stick around in CPS keeps them an afterthought.
Like the kid who killed his parents, then cried that he was an orphan. Who do you think has been running these schools for the last 50 years? Now they are a mess, and educators don’t want to look in the mirror for the problem.
Sure, its those damned teachers. Shoot ’em all. Worthless blood suckers.
Kill them all seems a little strong, but certainly a little self-reflection is in order.
But silly me, let’s just sic the DOJ on those domestic terrorist parents instead.
Teach? I thought teachers’ job was to share their pronouns and talk about their sexuality!
These days kids learn nothing in Illinois schools, except — how to hate each other based on race — the 194 made up genders — sex perversion as a virtue — how to hate America/the flag/the pledge/the anthem/the founding fathers — why police are the enemy and crime-thugs are the good guys — why a 10th month abortion is good for society — why boys should be allowed to put on a sports bra and take sports awards away from girls (and then take a long creepy shower with them) — that good grades and hard work are white supremacist… Read more »
yup, and they would be wise to teach some idiots to become docs and nurses (or coders to create AI robo-docs/robo-nurses) to serve their entitlement healthcare demands during their 20 year vesting period and post age 55.
your species seems to thrive, so no worries.