-- Connecting the dots between our economy, government and business --
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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Gates – really?
Is this the best we can find?
God help us.
Gates is the poster child for why Chicago Teachers should all be fired and replaced with adults who actually care about teaching and not how to loot the taxpayers.
Sure, but where are going to find roughly 20,000 sure-fire-best teacher candidates who are willing to work in that system for the less-than-suburban-system wages and with the numerous “recalitrant” children and parents who will make you dead tired and feeling defeated in your work as you head home many days? You are making the impossible sound easy.
Very true, and that’s why poor inner city school performance is a multifacted problem with difficult and often sometimes unachievable solutions. Sometimes I think the answer would be to return a really strict, almost 1950’s British private school type learning environment, where teachers are smacking kids on the knuckles with rulers for wrong answer. Students that refuse to cooperate are expelled, or pushed into pure vocational training. Students that refuse to do vocational training are expelled, and if they get caught committing crimes in the real world, they can go to jail for a long time. Harsh, tough, and unfair,… Read more »
I can’t actually believe you and I essentially have the same point of view here—an historic first! I had an uncle who told me something that might well apply here: people (kids in this case) almost never put great value on anything given to them without personal cost or sacrifice on their part. Thus, in many places the consumers of such services reduce the theoretically high-value possibilities of such services to the lowest common denominator. Excellence always requires dedication and personal sacrifice. That’s a lesson not always learned.
James – I agree with you as well. In fact, public sector teachers unions serve a purpose that no one generally dare mention. I think they in general harm the public with their politics. Not relevant to the point I wish to make here. But they protect teachers from a population of students that would otherwise have them one way or another fired relatively quickly, or at least constructively discharged for reasons of keeping sanity. And with the Chicago teacher population checking in with 18/19 average ACT scores, they are not going to get hired on at Glenbrook North or… Read more »
I have no problem at all with your argument in the 2nd paragraph. As for the first paragraph I’ll take your word for it that the average ACT score of CPS teachers is as stated, although I can’t imagine you’d know that from published governmental records. I think you’re simply winging it there, but clearly CPS is perfectly willing to hire lots of such teacher candidates and can seldom expect much more with the salaries, work environment and job stresses all being significantly better elsewhere. In short, you get what you pay for. If CPS really wants higher quality results… Read more »
The conundrum has always been do you keep a dying school open in hopes that the surrounding neighborhood will recover someday or do you close the dying school, thereby dooming the surrounding neighborhood altogether?
Keeping declining enrollment schools open for decades in the hopes that enrollment will turn around is an expensive gamble that saps finite resources away from all the other schools. But if there’s no school in the neighborhood, will anyone move there? Maybe artists and yuppies, but they have more preferable neighborhoods to gentrify. There is no perfect answer.
Very well said, indeed! LIke most things of a political nature the problem seems simple enough on the surface, but the ramifications often go way beyond what’s immediately being considered. Personally, I prefer the clarity of the financial side of it and act upon that as a higher priority. Just sayin’.
…and another 20,000 enrollment drop in the cards for CPS. Great job CTU, you destroyed CPS and chased thousands of families out of Chicago forever.