-- 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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The things that the geniuses running DPS can’t measure are the sense of despair and hopelessness their graduates feel when they start a job or pursue higher education and realize that DPS failed to teach them even the most basic concepts and skills they need.
Statements like “we thrive at things you cannot measure” and “we are unable to make improvements based on outside factors” undermine their entire argument.
A column that takes a long time to tell us that Decatur school officials don’t dispute any of the data used to support the WirePoints and WSJ articles, but that they believe the articles are unfair because lots of other stuff, that they don’t identify, is going well in the district. Aside from the school cafeterias reliably providing taxpayer funded meals to those kids who bother to show up, I wonder what the other “successes” might be. With a number approaching half of the district’s students chronically truant, I suspect that the district’s unidentified “successes” are pretty much just a… Read more »
but this one-sided article unfairly paints DPS, our staff, and our students as a failure.” Of course they fail the most important, and really only metric that matters, academic performance.
But they claim they are thriving in other areas. What areas are those? Social justice? Gender bendering? Grooming? Equity? You have a thriving equitable atmosphere?
And then they blame IL for low funding of education. How completely disingenuous. Mostly local taxes fund schools in Illinois, so yes, IL funds states at a low level.
3 out of every 4 students in America would love to have the per pupil funding of Decatur.