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"Statewide (and) nationwide," he said, "it is a proven fact that students are below grade level and (schools) are just working on starting to get kids caught up at this time, and I think that's just the trend that was here."
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.
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School systems were given hundreds of millions in Covid funding of which most of what was spent went to facilities (air handling, computers, ridiculous plexiglass structures etc. Apparently there is a lot that reminds unspent. I am wondering why this money would remain available as the Covid emergency has passed. I am not aware of any significant effort to apply funds to catch students up through extending the academic day, weekends, or summer programs. Both school administrators and parents the unserious on this point.
Grade inflation is created by tenured unionized teachers to hide their incompetence in teaching your children.
I’d sat it has more to do with keeping the school administrators, students and their parents happy. There are lots of pressures brought to teachers who have even remotely strict standards for assigning high grades. Educators are eventually molded into thinking that happiness is more important the high achievement. Now, where both can occur simultaneously that’s even better, but the real underlying message is “don’t make waves here; keep ’em entertained and happy.”
Everyone here seems to have fixated on the inflated grades, when the real proof is in the standardized test scores, which (thank you Wirepoints!) are a turds that cannot be polished no matter how much elbow grease you use. In response to your post, yes and no. For sure, there are incompetent teachers who should not be teaching and who use tenure as a shield. However, like James said, these people are also generally the “don’t make waves” crowd. So they “teach” their classes in such a way that makes it impossible to fail, hence grade inflation. For those of… Read more »
But hey! No worries everyone! The new mayor doesn’t even believe in grades, so now we got that goin’ for us!
This started a long time ago. Inflated grades, social promotion, restorative justice, and SEL have all replaced a rigorous curriculum and adherence to standards, both academic and behavioral. That being said, there is plenty of blame to go around, in addition to poor teacher performance. As I stated, this has been a long time coming. The lockdowns provided a lens for parents to look into their kids’ schools, but in reality it has been there all along for everyone to see. All you had to do was look. Did anyone go to school board meetings and ask about curricula, promotion… Read more »
Inflated grades were needed to conceal the truth from the parents, who might have been up in arms sooner if honest assessments had been given. The education establishment has controlled schools for more than 50 years. No outsiders need apply. Administrators advance from the ranks, or at least have degrees in education. No school board in the past could get elected without the support of the teachers union. Parents provided their votes for the school board members that teachers wanted, in the belief that they were helping the schools. Now the whole enterprise is tumbling down, but the education establishment… Read more »
Yes, this is true. Education is a guild and no outsiders need apply. And the policies of wokeness come from the very top, heretics are burned at the stake, figuratively.
What you’ve said is partly due to school administrators not having tenure. Like every other employee everywhere they want to keep the job they have and have a reasonable hope of moving to a higher one. What does that mean, and who cares? Well, on the downside it is a continual reminder that their current job title carrie’s very little job security unless they create it by (1) continually pleasing the immediate boss who must always be given exaggerations of good things being done and reducing the impact of bad news to be reported, and (2) seeking allies among the… Read more »
Are you seriously suggesting that administrators should be given tenure, thus making sure that they can never be fired? Give everyone in the existing system tenure, that should make things better??
Well, the upside of doing that is for administrators who are not forever scheming for a job promotion they would be freer to demand more in the way of academic excellence and reduce the grade inflation pressures continually placed on teachers. Students don’t “feel good”? Too bad. Give them whatever grade you think their performance suggests. Parents complain? Tell them to take it up with a psychiatrist. Admittedly there were would be a multi-year community adjustment period for any school system to be accepted—and hopefully at least minimally appreciated—for having “student performance standards” when that concept was tossed out long… Read more »
I think we both see the problem, but differ in the source. You seem to see the current system as having been forced upon the educators, including teachers and administrators, by some nebulous outside agent that really doesn’t understand the problems in education. My contention is that the education in this country is completely insular, and no outsiders have forced anything. The system is the result of the choices made by the university professors who educate the teachers, the administrators who have the same background, the teachers who select their union leaders, and the boards of education who have been… Read more »
I no response to your direct response here. All I really know is what parents want most is for their childen to be forever happy. What school administrators want is for their parents to be forever equally happy. That avoids distasteful disagreements but comes at a terrible cost. Anything that truly takes personal effort from either such group will naturally tend to subtract from their happiness-level rating. When was anything worthwhile ever achieved without considerable personal sacrifice being required to get there? That usually only happens where Daddy can buy you a pass to any such distasteful situation, I think.
“What school administrators want is for their parents to be forever equally happy.” Really? It seems like school administrators are intent on making parents angry, extremely angry: grooming children into changing genders; hiding gender transitions from parents; teaching the tenets of CRT, white privilege, gender theory; allowing filthy degenerate books into the libraries; keeping tabs on ‘problem’ parents who complain, forcing children to wear masks; doing whatever the unions want. It seems to be that the unions own the schools, and the schools believe they own the children, and parents are merely ‘stakeholders’, far down the list, in the education… Read more »
As usual your mileage may vary. I see it through my lense, and yours is different. We’re like blind people describing an elephant to each other, I guess.
Your lens is cloudy, you said you weren’t teaching any more. I have a child currently in the school system. It’s not even close to what it once was.
Maybe that’s true for Chicagoland, but rural IL tends to be more politically conservative. I mention that because you portray woke education as happening virtually everywhere as I understand it. I doubt it’s happening much at all in the historically conservative areas of IL and similar areas of the whole country as well. I think you are giving me your strongly held opinion rather than factual information. The whole woke push is an unfortunate time-wasting distraction where politics has no logical ongoing play in the class’s curriculum as I see it at least.
James, woke is education now in schools. I’m not just giving you my opinion. I’m giving you an objective fact that wokeness permeates every aspect of every facet of the entire educational system. Entire curriculums are designed around it, my high school is getting rid of honors classes “for equity” and replacing the English curriculum, for all practical purposes, Mark Twain with Ibrahim X. Kendi. Educators everywhere are steeped in the critical consciousness philosophy, and while there may be less of it today in rural areas, it’s already there. Below is a link to Biden’s 2022 Equity plan to include… Read more »
The other side of that coin is that you can’t quickly or easily convince even mid-career teachers to enthusiastically take on an entirely new approach to their daily work output efforts. They will do so kicking and screaming against it. This concept of teaching in a woke style is maybe going to be embraced by newbie teachers. But, expect most of the rest to give occasional lip service so they can claim to be onboard with the concept without embracing it with heart and soul passion. There is a huge difference in delivery effectiveness if the latter level of acceptance… Read more »
Always the parents. The parents wanted their kids to get an education. Inflated grades fed the illusion that the kids were doing just fine. Maybe the parents wouldn’t expect “forever happy” if they hadn’t been fed exactly that by an education system desperately trying to cover its failures.
“It’s failures” involve a lot more people and societal impacts beyond those of the immediate teacher(s). There’s a sizable list of reasons why some kids do well in schools while others don’t.
Well, you’re certainly to be commended for trying. When my wife was completing her PhD in Counseling Education in the late 90’s she was in her 40’s, and intended the degree to further her private sector disability work. She grew close to several other women of the same age who were also high school teachers at the same time. Earning their PhD’s, as a means toward getting out of their public high school classrooms, which they’d decided had become intolerable. Met a couple of them at functions with my wife. I shared my experiences as a manager trying to recruit,… Read more »
Blame means nothing. What counts is results and teachers get paid for doing zero. Highest costs lowest results. This is a system designed to fail.
“What counts is results and teachers get paid for doing zero.” Now, how in the world would you know that to be true? All a teacher can do basically is talk, listen and try to give advice based on personal knowledge, life experience and academic training. Students in our society are well trained in most homes and by American society in general to do whatever they want throughout their school years as regards interacting with their teachers: take it all in with enthusiasm, take some of it in or reject nearly all of it. More students do the latter two… Read more »
“others remain skeptical” – that would be everyone with half the brains God gave geese. What I particularly enjoy about all this is how the keep-kids-at-home teacher’s unions received a big “be careful what you wish for” moment. They led the charge for keeping kids at home, and what a surprise! Parents forced to deal with little Buster-n-Muffin going to ‘school’ at the dining room table suddenly found out what teachers were ‘teaching’ their kids, who can’t read, write and add at grade level. Many – most? – didn’t care for the lesson plans a bit, and suddenly woke school… Read more »
I say to those parents who had kids at home during the lockdown , if you didnt like the curriculum , take matters into your hands and home school them yourself.
But then how would everyone complain? Much better to just blame others than have any personal responsibility. People love being victims.
Boy, you said it all. But, I doubt many soaked it in when afflicted with some level of selectively-reduced reading/hearing ability. We are a nation of complainers far more than one of responsible adults who truly take personal action on our own so that they and their offspring can have better lives. No, its much easier to sit on the couch complaining about how the other guy clearly is not doing his job. After all, any problem we have can’t be of from our own supurb family-management style, or can it?
In my 45 years of business and guvmn’t management, James, I typically learned that if I was paying someone to do something, and they weren’t doing it, I was both entitled and required to do something about it.
‘Educators’ whining about parents complaining about teachers not teaching their kids to read and write is laughable. Happens all the time though. Teacher’s unions first line of defense.
It’s hilarious when they self-righteously talk about “personal responsibility” while simultaneously blaming everyone and everything but themselves for the problems in the schools. Which they have controlled for more than 50 years.
What most people seem not to really understand is that there is a logical problem that inevitably results when you mandatorily assign people to any given situation (classes in this case), presume that they will automatically become interested in being there to the extent that they will fully engage in it and be grateful for the experience. It’s a bit like assuming a prisoner will take to the idea of loving to be prison and upon his release profusely thanking everyone there who participated in his rehabilitation. While that analogy may seem a stretch to you a LOT of kids… Read more »
Thing is, if you do that, you still pay taxes to pay teachers to do a bad job of ‘teaching,’ don’t you?