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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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Here’s a proven cure:
Personal malpractice liability for teachers and administrators.
Let’s do for education provision what is done to medical provision: create a ‘defensive medicine’ protocol equivalent in education.
It would be a BIG improvement to improve outcomes for the clients of education who are trapped in the monopoly provision system.
Let’s do the same thing for the prisons where people are returned for further imprisonment. It’s clearly all the fault of those prison workers. I’ll bet this makes great sense to you since the logic seems so similar. Obviously, then, its also those damned do-nothing, know-nothing, blood-sucking, lazy teachers who likewise are clearly at fault when students are not well educated, right?
So if I understand your analogy, you are equating students with convicted criminals?
I think the analagy is a reasonably close approximation of your point view as expressed in your posting. By the way, surprising as it may seem to an outsider, many “students” do treat their school experience as something of a prison, almost literally watching the clock turn as their self-designed daily mission and not doing much in the way of persistent effort better than that. Life is all about attitude; it you think something is true you’ll likely act to inadvertently make that your reality eventually. School can be a springboard to a positive future or a prison; its each… Read more »
Mark-You recently had an article about a school with 33 students and per pupil expenditure at $68K or so. Not sure on that but do you have a breakdown of all the other public schools that have very low enrollments compared to capacity. It would be great to know that school ABC has 200 students but capacity of 1,500 and school XYZ has 125 students with capacity of 1,500. This way we would know the costs per pupil in individual schools and not and average of the entire district which is $30K. Remember that each school has a full complement… Read more »
Freddy, good question but we haven’t done a statewide look at school capacity vs enrollment because CPS is the only district we know of that releases an official classroom utilization report.
For our work on underutiltization at CPS, see:
https://wirepoints.org/new-cps-data-mayor-lightfoot-chicago-teachers-union-continue-to-keep-dozens-of-empty-failing-schools-open-wirepoints/
https://wirepoints.org/chicago-wants-14-billion-to-modernize-public-schools-one-third-of-which-are-half-empty-wirepoints/
Yep, that’s what you need – hand a bunch of tax dollars directly to the schools…. Perhaps have the parents pay for their children’s education, perhaps let the parent choose the school for their kids and have their tax money go to that school. A little free market competition…Oh wait…this is Illinois – can’t do that here…
There’s nothing with Chicago schools that a few thousand nuns couldn’t fix!