-- 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.
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It’s not just how our students are taught to read but what they read. I’ve been working as a volunteer for the last 22 years in 7th Grade class rooms, American History, and have observed that many of our students can “decode” the words in a text, that is they can pronounce most words but don’t have a clue as to the meaning of the word. That’s a function of reading simplified and meaningless selections. My suggestion, go back to the McGuffey readers. Go ahead and laugh, but they certainly were effective in bring literacy to the masses. The current… Read more »
Phonics too. All those nuns weren’t wrong.
In reading this article, it states the very problem our kids face with public education. Amanda Mullarky was a teacher with a Masters and was a Certified reading specialist. Her son is dyslexic and she admits that she had trouble helping him. Our teachers are borderline incompetent. How do you have a Masters? The very name of the degree implies a Mastery of the subject. If she cant help her own family with a Cert and Masters, what does she do for her students!!
One interesting thing, often overlooked by ‘education specialists’ is that English is truly one of the world’s most unique languages, because it is easy to learn, but difficult to master. Our phonics are worse than French and more confusing than Arabic. Much of English is still written as Middle English but spoken as modern English. We recognize many words as a whole word not as they are spelled – aka ‘sight words’ for children – much as the Chinese learn the 1,000 character poem to learn the most common symbols in their language. For example, English language countries have spelling… Read more »
The bilingual education has been failure, we knew this nearly 40 years ago, when Bill Bennett in the WaPo said it was, with massive amounts of evidence to prove it. It’s absurd that these commies in public schools keep doubling down on past failures….”bilingual education will work this time, even though it has failed each and every time in the past…”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1985/09/26/bennett-bilingual-education-a-failure/3f96c876-18ca-4dc9-9be3-29532ca04527/