-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
A former public school teacher documents the profound betrayal of America’s students. "Today, the union is a captured institution, and it argues that the country must be remade for education to even be possible. Favoring ideological indoctrination over academic achievement fundamentally devalues teaching and learning. It is this devaluing that was the nail in the coffin for the school system."
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
Public school Teachers in Chicago have never been the best or brightest among us. They’re locked into classrooms all day with children, primarily of lower economic class parents. They lack family structure and civility.
Burned out teachers have only 2 routes to advancement short of finding a new job. They can become administrators or union activists. Since both avenues make them experts in BS and immutable to change, the public schools are lost in big cities.
Half the problem is that they aren’t really teaching at all. As recently as when I was in high school, the CPS drop out rate was approaching 50%, and the few kids who did remain were much better at learning. But that made for the school to prison pipeline, where dropouts would commit all the crime and then go to jail. Crime used to be really, really bad in the 70’s and 90’s, higher than what we have today. Today’s schooling doesn’t teach kids much at all, except leftist propaganda, and kids can’t read or do math, but graduation rates… Read more »
I taught for most of the 70’s in a really depressing high school on Chicago’s Westside. The near 50% dropout rate you mention was never official but indeed more than half the officially enrolled were missing on a daily basis. I’ve run into former students who followed up high school with military service and became really productive citizens. To a person, they credit the discipline of basic training and job specific training and often travel for their success; school-eh- not so much!
Salute to you for your service as a teacher.
A winning strategy would be: do what the Bad Guys do, do what the sociopathic predators do (because: that is a winning strategy, as evidenced by our current miserable circumstances and bad guys’ current enriched statuses)… But can that be done within the bounds of ‘honorable behavior’? Well, if we describe ‘honorable’ as ‘legal’… AND, we are not describing ‘legal’ as ‘Jenny Thornley Legal’ (meaning, ‘not being prosecuted due to corrupt incestuous relationships with those corrupt political-elite gatekeepers of who gets prosecuted and who does not get prosecuted’)… Then try to be clever… Here’s a legal scenario: Call It The… Read more »
I’ll take nuns for a thousand Alex.
Thank you for linking to this excellent article. Read Thomas Sowell’s “Education in America”, written in the 1990’s; he predicted exactly what we see today.
Who votes for the leaders of the teacher’s union? Maybe those who constantly tell us that it’s the voters’ fault are right after all.
As I recall, the teachers union leadership is people who were failures as teachers.