-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
Keep your eye on the under-the-radar case of Illinois. That is where woke has gone for broke, and America may soon pay the price. Should the rule be ratified on February 16, the entire Illinois teacher corps will be effectively forced into political re-education and compelled to turn their classes into woke indoctrination sessions. Illinois is literally about to mandate that every one of its licensed teachers adopt progressive political orthodoxy and impart that ideology to students.
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.
SIGN UP HERE FOR OUR FREE WIREPOINTS DAILY NEWSLETTER
One would think there would be outrage by the parents because “woke awareness” won’t qualify their children for a good future at college and career. Apparently then I assume that a majority of Illinois voters are fully versed on their children becoming dependant on the government for their living expenses. These individuals are not the ones fleeing the State and are staying to reap the rewards that go along with their loyalties on election day. The flaw in their thinking process though is that the ones that finance this charade, the working taxpayers, are fleeing the State with an eventuality… Read more »
Half of all students leave the state for college. Not sure how many come back.
I happen to rent property in a college town and in doing so get to communicate with many of the student body. Most every student I talk to plans on leaving Illinois after graduation. As an overall view I have to admit I only speak with a very few of the student body so I can not generalize that it is the opinion of the total student body but I am surprised that so many of our younger citizens plan on getting out of Illinois when they enter the working world.
Culturally responsive teachers
They have the cult part correct.
Here’s a group of lawyers getting active against critical race theory. Sure hope they come to IL: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/legal-coalition-critical-race-theory
Do they realize that they are driving the very people they need to pay for all this, out of IL…?
Do they even care…?
Yes, and no, they don’t care.
The reality is that progressives screw everything up. Just as the atzecs sacrificing peasants from the field, for their death cult, had no real effect on the weather or the harvest, I believe that indoctrinating children into the progressive victim cult may have little effect. Teachers can’t barely teach math or reading in school, so why would teaching something as illogical and incomprehensible as critical race theory stick? They are unable to balance a checkbook and they won’t be able to identify anti-racist activities either. Teachers can try to teach kids all they want in school but if 95% of… Read more »
Because they won’t be able to identify anti-racist activity, all activity will become racist if undertaken by people of the wrong skin color.
This is an excellent article by Stanley Kurtz. He would make a good guest on AM 560’s The Morning Answer. There will eventually be a lot of angry people if these standards are approved by the JCAR committee (consisting of 12 appointed state legislators) on Tuesday February 16. Basically, the proposed standards enable the conversion of the current public education system into leftist education in Illinois. It’s a phased approach. First, train the trainer. So, existing and future teachers, administrators, and support personnel would be trained by public and private universities preparation programs to be leftist educators. As of October… Read more »
Things said by my teachers 25 years ago: “you won’t be able to carry around a calculator everywhere you go. You will need to learn to spell so you can communicate effectively. There will be no arctic sea ice by 2013. Pluto is a planet.” Think about it, almost everything learned was fake, a joke, or political brainwashing. Today, teachers cannot even understand the concept of positive and negative numbers. Today, teachers cannot understand that the constitution limits government. If you say BS! Then where are all the math teachers pointing out the budget is negative. Where are the social… Read more »
A lot of so called Math teachers are not “Certified Math Teachers” because under Illinois law blah blah blah etc. Some years ago a Math class one of my children attended was going to be taught by some special ed teacher that had burned out in special ed. The teacher had tenure as well as union backing so firing her was out of the question. The district decided to plant her in a Math class where her lack of Math skills was quite obvious. A group of many parents objected, went to board meetings and became a sore thumb to… Read more »
Illinois just keeps giving taxpayers, conservatives, and parents more and more reasons to leave. Not that it matters, but I have to wonder what kind of parents would willingly decide to raise their children in Illinois.
There is so little candor in public education. In the mid 70’s to the late mid 80’s, the black white education gap was closing, and if the academic improvements continued at the same pace, the gap would have been very small around the year 2005. First, results matter, and black achievement did not come about because of critical race theory being taught. In fact, the impression gained at the time is that this was anticipated at the time of the civil rights gains in the 60’s and 70’s? Second, what happened? Crack cocaine? The welfare state creating single parent homes… Read more »
The welfare state, followed by the hollowing out of the middle class contributed greatly to the demise of the american family. not just the black family but the white and hispanic family too. Throw birth control into the mix and the cultural rejection of the ‘shotgun marriage’ and you have a recipe for civilizational collapse.
Everyone knows that even a suboptimal nuclear family, with a dad and mom and kids, is a superior living arrangement to a single parent household with random men or women coming and going all the while struggling financially, despite what feminists and psychologists say.
Kay Hymowitz has pointed out that upper middle class women – in her words, the typical highly paid woman associate at Debevoise (a big NY city law firm) – doesn’t need marriage anywhere as near as much as middle and lower middle class women. Yet the upper middle class women really make it a goal to get married. Why? They know that having a responsible father around is the way to raise children properly. They know this is the ticket to having educated, well behaved and productive children, These women of course have all of the previously far more common… Read more »
“The left argues that there is no reservoir of decent men, but those who get married before they have children and have uninterrupted periods of employment (no matter the wages) tend to do very well.” The left is correct that there is no “reservoir of decent men”. Not sure if this is a symptom of civilization decay or a cause of it, there are different theories. But the facts on the ground show that children out of wedlock is rampant, it is very expensive for young couples of purchase or rent housing, child care is expensive, often more than rent,… Read more »
Charles Murray wrote an excellent book on this topic, “Coming Apart”. It was written about 20 yrs ago, and shows the correlation between cultural pathologies in communities and the resulting downward spiral in their lives. Also interesting because he slams the elites for not “preaching what they practice”. They promote destructive cultural ideas that they do not practice in their own lives.
Heyjude – absolutely. In the 80’s, I was on the editorial board of the Law Review, and I was the only one who was not a flagrant leftist. Given my background of poverty and as a competitive athlete in a very diverse sport, I was incredibly suspicious of these elitists and believed they, even if unwittingly, did not look out for people like me and others stuck in poverty or negative situations. Heck, they resented the heck out of me for being a Teamster because that meant they could not go on and on of the virtues of unionism because… Read more »
Willowglen, props to you for getting further than I did on l. rev. I did not make it editorial board for just those kinds of reasons.
Unfortunately not enough people were suspicious then; there was and still is a lot of gullibility. I hope one thing we all learn from this is not to ignore ridiculous ideas on college campuses. We in a (slightly) older generation heard about some of the wacky ideas, laughed at “silly kids”, and went about our lives. We didn’t realize that it wasn’t just silly, it was dangerous.