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On Education & Equity in Chicago Public Schools

by Mike VanWinkle

State Senator, and Reverend, James Meeks launched himself back onto front pages Monday, by encouraging students in inner-city neighborhoods to skip the first day of school. The reason for the protest is something Meeks has harped on for years: inequities in school funding.

The reality is, if there is anything for inner-city kids to protest, it is the system of public education itself. Inequality is literally built into the system by rigid union contracts that forbid schools in need from paying higher salaries to attract the best teachers.
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"For the Kids"

It’s the battle cry of the modern American Left when arguing for everything from assault weapons bans to Head Start funding to a State Children’s Health Insurance Program that would serve an awful lot of adults. Liberals, in their wisdom, believe the children are our future, and we should teach them well and let them lead the way.

Fair enough, but when liberal politicians and labor unions begin quoting from the pop prophet Whitney to justify their policy positions, the proper response from millions of American schoolchildren should be something from the catalogue of another popular ’80s songstress: “What have you done for me lately?”

Great series exposed the sickness inside

As published in the Daily Herald, December 14, 2007:

By Pete Speer

Please read Chapter 10 of the Pulitzer worthy series produced by the Daily Herald and written by Emily Krone. Buy the paper, give copies to your friends and neighbors, especially those with school- aged kids.

The only improvement that I would make, is that this chapter ought to be labeled Chapter 11 -- to describe the intellectual bankruptcy of the public school system. The dragon that is Big Ed is hollow inside. The system is rotten and eaten away.

Getting Past 'No Child'

By George Will

No Child Left Behind, supposedly an antidote to the "soft bigotry of low expectations," has instead spawned lowered standards. The law will eventually be reauthorized because doubling down on losing bets is what Washington does. But because NCLB contains incentives for perverse behavior, reauthorization should include legislation empowering states to ignore it...

With mandated data collections -- particularly tests of "adequate yearly progress" in reading and math -- NCLB was supposed to generate information that would enable schools to be held accountable for cognitive outputs commensurate with federal financial inputs. Bad data would make schools blush and reform.

Fourteen months ago, the president said, "The gap is closing. . . . How do we know? Because we're measuring." But about those measurements . . .

The Center for Tax and Budget Accountability in not “bipartisan”

By Chris Jenner

I sent the following note to the Daily Herald’s excellent education reporter, Emily Krone, following the second installment of her 10-part series entitled “School Finance 101.” Her articles are usually even-handed and represent various views of issues fairly and equally. I had to take exception with a passage from Chapter 2 in which she referred to the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability as “bipartisan.”

The CTBA is about as bipartisan as moveon.org -- or FTN, for that matter. To bolster my objection, I re-reviewed the members of CTBA’s board of directors. Details are in my note to Emily below. CTBA should not be taken lightly. It drafts some of the socialist legislation the Illinois General Assembly (in a bipartisan fashion) considers, while wringing its hands trying to figure out how lull taxpayers to sleep so they can pass their tax hikes. The most recently famous would be HB750 (which looked much better than Balgojevich’s proposed Gross Deceit Tax).

Schools Spend All They Can Get, Study Shows

From Budget & Tax News:

In conducting a study to determine whether consolidating school districts would save Michigan taxpayers money, a researcher found evidence showing school officials spend as much money as they can.

While that didn't surprise Andrew Coulson, director of the Cato Institute's Center for Educational Freedom and author of the study, released in May, he was surprised how much that factor affects education spending.

To control for other variables in his study, "School District Consolidation, Size and Spending: an Evaluation," in order to isolate whether consolidation saves money, Coulson compared two theories on how public officials spend it.

"One was that if there's a lot of demand, they spend more, and if there's not, they spend less," otherwise known as the benevolence theory, Coulson explained. A competing theory from economics--public choice theory--says when public officials make a decision, they consult their own interests, just like a shopper would.

The Confidence Men: Selling adequacy, making millions

By Eric Hanushek

Lawsuits aimed at compelling legislatures to increase school funding have been filed in some 42 states. Courts have found for the plaintiffs in more than half of the cases on the grounds that schools are not “adequately” funded.

These decisions have, in effect, changed the way education appropriations are made, moving decisionmaking from legislatures to the courts. Instead of flowing from the political process, determinations of adequate appropriations come from judges who are informed by paid consultants. Recently, adequacy plaintiffs have suffered some serious setbacks. Undaunted, they soldier on.

More bad news for the taxeaters: ALEC unanimously passes Taxpayer Transparency Act

An Act Relating to Creating a Searchable Budget Database for State Spending

The Legislature finds that taxpayers should be able to easily access the details on how the state is spending their tax dollars and what performance results are achieved for those expenditures. It is the intent of the Legislature, therefore, to direct the [state budget office] to create and maintain a searchable budged database website detailing where, for what purpose and what results are achieved for all taxpayer investments in state government.

Broker compensation: In the Public Eye

By Glenn Morrison

Administrators of both educational and municipal employee benefits programs are constantly challenged by escalating premiums at a time when their budgets are not growing at an equivalent rate to keep pace. They are charged with the seemingly impossible task of providing their employees competitive benefits packages, while upholding their duty to the public for fiscal responsibility. To top it off, their actions and decisions to use available dollars most efficiently and effectively are under the daily scrutiny of taxpayers and board members. And, no expense or aspect of the plan is beyond inspection.

Many administrators cannot confidently claim to know exactly where every dollar is going and may not feel they even know all the right questions to ask. There are many aspects of a benefit plan to review, but there is one area that draws a particularly high level of confusion: broker compensation. This article will discuss two aspects of broker compensation and how it impacts employee benefits plans and the people making decisions about them. Read More

“Expert” school administrators have big problems managing taxpayer money

It’s common practice in Illinois for school administrators and school board members to refer to their top financial officers as “expert,” especially during a tax hike referendum when they’re apt to say anything to bolster the credibility of their case for more of your money. During last year’s referendum campaign, District 300 Board President Mary Fioretti publicly declared D300 CFO Cheryl Crates to be “an expert in her field.” Here is what Fioretti said:

"This woman [Crates] is not some backroom monkey with a pencil," Fioretti said. "She is an expert in her field. We are being judged by those who are not experts in this field."

But an article in the Northwest Herald this week raises serious questions about D300’s financial practices. According to that story, D300 is going to court to obtain financial records from a former employee who may have mishandled more than $100,000 missing from a student funds account. Actually, the district doesn’t even know how much money is really missing due to the record-keeping that D300 Superintendent Ken Arndt has described as “shoddy.” Taxpayers are left to wonder the following...