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.
The Chicago Public Schools are best compared to a frontal system on a weather map. You have teachers who have known nothing but academic success meeting students and parents who have experienced nothing but academic failure and hold a grudge against teachers. Where fronts meet, violent storms occur.