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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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The source of the statistics for the article is Fiscal Year 2018 data from ISBE ILEARN.
http://webprod1.isbe.net/ILEARN//Home/Index
FY 2018 statistics are not expected to be on the ISBE Illinois Report Card Library until October 30th.
https://www.isbe.net/Pages/Illinois-State-Report-Card-Data.aspx
FY 2018 data is reported under 2018 in ILEARN, and in the 2019 Report Card (not the 2018 Report Card).
Really this is all about is reducing the performance of the top school districts. It’s not *fair* that those people in wealthier areas perform better – it’s only about money – and not about parental involvements, culture, English proficiency of the students, or anything else – it’s just about MONEY $$$. So the progressives want to take the $$$$ from wealthier districts and give it to poorer districts, and b/c they believe $$$$ = Test scores, they’ll lower the top test scores and increase the bottom, making for a more ‘equitable’ school. Of course, it’s not just *money* that is… Read more »
Who writes this conclusory nonsense: “school districts with large amounts of property wealth were better funded than their property-poor counterparts, enabling them to spend more money per-pupil. That in turn translated into higher student test scores in math and English language arts.” Correlation does NOT equal causation. And then this gem of insight: “According to ISBE data, there was a clear correlation between property wealth and funding adequacy: Poorer districts tended to be the least adequately funded, while wealthier districts enjoyed the greatest funding.” So wealthier people fund their schools better. Do wealthier people also take more vacations, drive nicer… Read more »
Be careful debtsor. Your logic takes you in the direction of crimethink, and if you take that path long enough you might just commit the greatest heresy in our modern cargo cult: You might notice that poverty isn’t an accident, and that poverty is generally heritable because intelligence and productive personality traits are carried on DNA strands, and are not some kind of accident raining down from the sky. All the sacraments of our modern cult rest on the belief that all people are literally interchangeable (unless they fit into one of the mascot classes of the cult.)
I checked out Rondout school district 72. Per pupil expenditures is around $32K one of the highest in Illinois if not the highest. There are 37 full and part time employees for approx 161 students. Average home value around $737K. Property tax’s on those homes are about $25K and over. There are districts in rural and southern Illinois with mostly farmland where per pupil is $6.5K. Do they get 5 times worse education. Probably not. Rondout parents are better educated to begin with and are most likely professionals or business owners thus having more expensive homes. Rondout dist has Reading… Read more »
“At the other end of the spectrum was the wealthiest district on a per-pupil basis, Rondout, with per-pupil property value at more than $2.5 million and where residents paid a tax rate to the district of just 1.57 percent, the eighth-lowest rate of any school district in the state.”
“The poor districts were led by the Ford Heights School District 169, in Cook County, which reported a per-pupil property value of just under $79,000, less than one-third the statewide average, where property owners paid a school tax rate of nearly 21 percent, nearly five times the state average.”
I call BS on that statistic. Why? Who in his RIGHT MIND would pay an average $79,000 for a home he’d then pay AGAIN, every five years, to the county? My bet is that you can’t GIVE AWAY a house in Ford Heights. The listings on Zillow confirm my suspicions. The market for housing in that taxing district is DEAD.
This seems to be the future for ALL residential real estate in IL. (sigh)
It’s easy to misinterpret several points made in the article, including the reference to Ford Heights SD 169. Per pupil property value is not the average selling price of a Ford Heights home. Beyond that, the property value in the article is expressed in EAV, not market value. EAV is about 1/3 of market value. EAV is used to calculate property taxes in Illinois, and thus is used by the ISBE, which is the statistical source for the article. An EAV school tax rate of nearly 21% becomes a market school tax rate of nearly 7%. Furthermore, the school tax… Read more »
Adjustment.
EAV is about 1/3 of market value…except in Cook County.
Cook County residential is assessed at 10% of market value.
Cook County commercial is assessed at 25% of market value.
Source:
“Cook County Classification System and Equalization” presentation.
Presented to the Property Tax Relief Task Force (created as the result of PA 101-0181) Subcommittee on Assessment and Exemptions on October 4, 2019 by Ron Tabaczynski, Director of Government Affairs, Building Owners and Managers Association of Chicago.
https://www2.illinois.gov/rev/research/taxresearch/Documents/Oct%204%20PTAX%20Assessments%20BOMA%20Presentation.pdf
“But the Chicago district also has a relatively low property tax rate, levying just 3.36 percent of equalized assessed value, far below the statewide average of 4.3 percent.”