Totaling the unsustainable tax increases and windfall revenue during Pritzker Administration – Wirepoints
May 26, 2026
13 Comments
With $162 billion more from taxpayers, couldn’t you deliver a few bond upgrades, too
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A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.
Let’s face facts: average low-income CPS high-school students haven’t maintained academic progress during their Covid school-shutdown, and won’t recover lost academics before automatic graduation. CPS’s Covid-era grading policy has been “log-on sometimes, pass class anyhow”, with super-lenient “pass/fail” grading. Standardized tests are suspended. No ACT tests. There’s no true measure of academic achievement during past 12+ months, which for CTU is a HUGE victory. There are no benchmarks for evaluating obvious academic stagnation, nor plans to address academic achievement loss due to 12+ months of mandatory “summer vacation”. Chicago employers already contend with academically-weak achievement records of many CPS HS… Read more »
Thats a sad analysis, but its likely true enough. Long, long ago students who made insufficient progress presumably due to lack of interest/effort were given failing grades. Even in more prosperous suburban schools pressures from parents, student and administrators to look good has made the average grade in many places a B+, and failing grades are almost extinct, given only in the most obvious situations. So, while it appears to parents and the communities involved that students are smarter than ever the reality isn’t there far too many times. To prove it all you have to do is get involved… Read more »
James – you are correct. I worry about what will happen to the kids passed through without gaining any valuable knowledge, including mastering the experience and anxieties of taking tests, doing homework and the like. In a global knowledge economy, they will be unemployable,, and will predictably feel at some point excluded and lost. The anger will be palpable, and indeed we have already seen it in many of the protests we have experienced over the past year.
Math and science classes in particular require a progressive learning system, adequately understanding the baseics of the prior level before expecting to do well in the subjects which follow. It surely must be obvious to most college-educated parents and grandparents that the required basic knowledge for the following courses simply isn’t going to be there. Some may argue that the school systems simply have to alter their expectations for such later courses. Yes, I agree to an extent, but at some point that is requiring a college diploma to mean less real knowledge than is really required to be successful.… Read more »
Many of the young people who become doctors and engineers are in a far better position to recover than others. Of course, an interruption in subjects like math is always a problem, but the population that concerns me is the ones that cannot get through algebra.