Note to readers from Mark Glennon re: Ukraine
May 6, 2026
3 Comments
Everybody needs a side hustle these days, and mine is Ukraine, where I am now.
-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
“How can we have these amazing gains in the graduation rate with simultaneously declining proficiency rates in high school?” That’s an easy one to answer. They’re graduating almost everybody, even those who can’t read, write, or do math near their grade level. When the learning-challenged kids become adults, will they contribute to making our country more competitive with the other developed countries? Probably not, so this is bad news for America.
That sums it up!
Illinois. Graduating generations of morons. New State Motto?
“ Quantity, not Quality “ now the official mission statement of CPS.
Kids are promoted to next grade without meeting the educational requirements. Il is graduating students who cannot read. Why are the schools surprised by this data?
I can’t imagine they are “surprised” at all. Anyone working in a teaching capacity ought to generally recognize which students are “meeting standards” and which are not. I’m like you presumably and so many others here who are against passing along students who fail to meet those standards. But, there are practical reasons why holding back numerous students simply can’t be done. First, there’s the simple matter of budgeting for it; you need extra teachers, extra materials and class rooms. School budgets are known not to be budgeted for much of that when the numbers of students become significantly large.… Read more »
James, could you explain why you think holding students in the appropriate grade for their skill level would cause budgetary problems? There would be the same number of students, just differently sorted by grade. The only “extra” students would be seniors who would have graduated but didn’t. If a program of refusing to promote unprepared students were properly implemented, hopefully the problem would be resolved long before high school graduation.
I agree with you that the only truly extra students would be 2nd year 8th grade or high school seniors, but it’s not that simple in term of budgeting. At the high school level if you have math or science students, for instance, doing repeat courses you can’t legally assign someone without subject specific certification to do that on a permanent basis. So, an English teacher or P. E. teacher might do it as a substitute but not as a permanent assignment, as an example. Then, what’s true for class enrollments in one year might not be true the following… Read more »
HS graduation from CPS school is a meaningless achievement. Many still can’t read, still can’t write, still can’t do simple multiplication, can’t be higher for task greater than pushing broom, parking cars, packing widgets, or make-work job for City of Chicago.
How? School teach woke, not reading or writing or arithmetic. It’s that simple. And they incorporate SEL and Common Core into every topic, making it so confusing that neither teacher nor student understand what they are supposed to be learning. Focus 6 hours a day on learning and kids will learn. They instead focus 5 hours a day on “the Empathy song” as my son learned in 3rd grade learned.