Family Taxpayers Foundation

That union contract also comes with terms that limit schools' ability to make changes to curriculum, adapt to classroom management needs, or to deal with rare teacher who isn't pulling their weight.  Worst of all, if a district wants to innovate to better assess teacher performance and reward excellence, that's a dead-stop.  And raises that are coming at twice the rate of inflation cannot be sustained, especially when personnel are overwhelmingly the largest chunk of the budget.

The next governor needs to use the bully pulpit to point out the huge salary and pension disparities between the education systems in WI vs. Il.  He needs to explain that the cost of IL public sector salaries and pensions makes IL uncompetitive when it comes to recruiting new business.  He should also be asking why the IL education system costs $5 billion more than WI and what we can do to make our system more competitive.

And finally he should ask why IL's higher cost system results in a 78% graduation rate while WI's much lower cost system has an 85% graduation rate?

An estimated 44 percent of school districts in the state adopted budgets in which they planned to spend more than they would take in last year, even before the state fell $1.3 billion behind in payments to schools. But many districts, like Lemont, have been spending more than they could afford for quite some time. The Tribune's spotlight on District 113A shows what can happen when a school district overspends, the state doesn't intervene and residents lack the accounting background to hold districts accountable.

After decades of measuring education results only by money spent, with little to show for it, parents are finally looking for an objective measure to judge teacher effectiveness. Taxpayers also deserve to know whether the money they're paying teachers is having any impact on learning or merely financing fat pay and pensions in return for mediocrity.

The National Education Association (NEA), the U.S.’s largest labor union, is promoting communism to the millions of American public school teachers it represents.  For the past several months, the NEA website has recommended that its members read books by communist sympathizer Saul Alinsky. And, for a time, the website listed October 1 as a day for teachers and students to celebrate the anniversary of the Communist takeover of China by Mao Zedong.

The schools are failing, the students are being cheated of the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to become productive adults, and the U.S. government thinks that, if it just spends a few more billions, this will change. It won’t.

The federal government must get out of the education business, must devolve responsibility back to the states and local communities, and they in turn should refuse to deal with teachers unions in order to regain control over the education of the nation’s most precious resource, its children.

Five years ago yesterday, the levees broke. Hurricane Katrina flooded roughly 80% of this city, causing nearly $100 billion in damage. The storm forced us to rebuild our homes, workplaces and many of our institutions—including our failing public education system.

But from the flood waters, the most market-driven public school system in the country has emerged. Education reformers across America should take notice: The model is working.