University of Illinois President James Easter and Southern Illinois University President Glenn Poshard told state lawmakers Thursday their schools would rather assume part of the pension costs than lose more state and federal funding.

“We’re willing to do whatever it takes,” Poshard told lawmakers. “This issue is the single greatest issue threatening our people over the long haul.”

Notice he said “our people”, not “our students.”

Poshard, and the U of I’s Easter, have made it clear — the universities will charge students for any new pension costs the schools inherit from the state.

Continue reading at My Web Times…

Why is the judicial pension system being left alone while the other four may be placed on a forced diet? Because ultimately, seven of the nearly 1,000 judges holding court in Illinois likely will be asked to decide whether desperately-needed pension reforms passed by lawmakers and signed by the governor are constitutional. Those seven are members of the Illinois Supreme Court.

Cynics suggest it’s an outright bribe: Leave judges’ benefits intact and they’ll approve fixes to the other troubled pension systems, helping the state out of a tight spot. House Speaker Mike Madigan says it’s not that at all; he just doesn’t want to put the justices in a conflict of interest. Either way, it’s an insult to our state judiciary, suggesting Illinois’ highest court is unable to put self-interest aside and properly weigh legal arguments presented by interested parties.

Am I naïve, caught in a junior high civics class time warp?

Then, there’s this: No state pays its judges more. A circuit court judge makes about $181,000 a year, associate judges somewhat less, appellate and Supreme Court judges somewhat more. There are about 1,000 retired judges getting annual pensions averaging $112,000 — not quite triple what a typical retired public pensioner gets. And I don’t have a problem with that.

Continue reading at the Pantagraph….

Anxiety and anger are growing among state employees and retirees who wonder what will happen to their pocketbooks if lawmakers make expected changes to the state’s pension systems that could require workers to pay even more toward retirement, increase the retirement age and cut annual increases in bene-fits.

Workers spent their careers paying into their pension funds what the law told them to pay while, for decades, Legislatures and governors shorted and even skipped the state’s required payments. Now the General Assembly is scrambling to solve a Goliath-size fiscal problem: a $97 billion shortfall in the money needed to cover promised payouts to current and former employees who belong to five state pension systems, including public school teachers, judges and legis-lators themselves.

“It’s legalized robbery,” said Paul Morton, an office assistant for the Illinois Department of Health care and Family Services who fears he won’t be able to afford his health care costs if his pension is significantly reduced or if he’s forced to drop his health insurance. Morton, 47, says his wife has diabetes, and he estimates half of his an-nual retirement would have to go toward insurance costs — a benefit the state had promised to fully fund after 20 years of service.

Continue reading at The Southern…

Indiana law now requires that the Common Core standards be evaluated and compared to existing state standards, and that a cost assessment be conducted by the state’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) before implementation moves forward. It’s something every state that adopted Common Core should have done before agreeing to do so. Specifically, the law states that

“After May 15, 2013, the state board may take no further actions to implement as standards for the state or direct the department to implement any common core standards developed by the Common Core State Standards Initiative until the state board conducts a comprehensive evaluation of the common core standards.”

Continue reading at The Foundry…

The Common Core State Standards are part of an effort that, if one chose to, could have its origins drawn all the way back to the country’s early republican era. Then, people such as Pennsylvania’s own Benjamin Rush were calling for the creation of a public schooling system that would, “by producing one general and uniform system of education…render the mass of the people more homogeneous and thereby fit them more easily for uniform and peaceable government.”1 The goal was to create a consistent, values-shaping education for all citizens of the new nation. But this ran up against a much more deeply-ingrained tradition: local — indeed, for a long time family and church — control of education, which more or less held sway in American education until the mid-1960s, when the federal government first became deeply involved in American schooling. Quite simply, until very recently few people would have even contemplated having federally supported, national curriculum standards. Local control is cherished.

It was not until the late 1980s that the federal government began to ask states for evidence about the performance of federally aided students, and not until the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002 that states began to seriously comply with the letter — if not the spirit — of federal law by instituting standards, tests, and progress reports. Which brings us to the current drive for national curriculum standards and tests. Almost…

Continue reading at Cato Institute…

And taxpayers exist only so the politicians can suck the marrow from their bones.

Madigan says pension funding for downstate and suburban teachers must be moved to school districts because the current system is unfair to Chicago.

Chicago finances its teachers’ pension system, the argument goes, and Chicago taxpayers also contribute to the system for teachers outside the city.

What Madigan and the other Chicago politicians don’t say is that Illinois’ education funding system always has been rigged to shift more money to the city.

Continue reading at Southtown Star…

It is all about how wonderfully a new gaming initiative will fund our schools!

Modern, light filled buildings. The most up-to-the-minute technology. 21st century kids deserve nothing less than the best.

We all know by now that neither the state, nor the federal government, nor the city fully fund education. Even when it isn’t the best, even when it is a pretty low-budget proposition and doesn’t look quite that shiny. They can’t, or they won’t, it doesn’t really matter. CPS is in a big big hole, or so CPS says anyway, and it’s because nobody is ponying up.

The Mayor’s going to fix that, you know, by closing 54 schools. Oh, it won’t save nearly as much as they thought at first, but whatevs. A shuttered school is a pretty cheap school.

Continue reading at Chicago Public Fools…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ZulH8g2BnA

During a brief interview with Congressman Steve King (R-IA) we discussed the Common Core State Standards and whether he’s aware of any ongoing action within the House.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gyZDtzgta8

Continue reading at Caffeinated Thoughts…

In detail, the report revealed the growing educational deficits facing American schoolchildren at that time. It emphasized that America could fall even farther behind other industrialized nations if it failed to act.

It’s been 30 years, and we must ask ourselves, how far have we truly come?

Continue reading at Freedom to Learn IL…