Chicago State University has been unable to locate $3.8 million worth of equipment, including 950 computers that could contain confidential information, according to a state audit.
via Chicago Tribune.
Doh!
The story reflects that most of the equipment was actually purchased, and pilfered, during the Daley administration.
I hope that this was discovered as a result of Rahm and Gerry Chico looking into the misadventures of Elnora Daniel the former CSU president who belongs in jail.
[In] 1995 … then-U.S. Attorney Eric Holder announc[ed] a public campaign to “really brainwash people into thinking about guns in a vastly different way.”
Holder was addressing the Woman’s National Democratic Club. In his remarks, broadcast by CSPAN 2, he explained that he intended to use anti-smoking campaigns as his model to “change the hearts and minds of people in Washington, DC” about guns.
“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”
…
Despite strict gun control efforts, Washington, DC was and remains one of the nation’s most dangerous cities for gun violence, though crime has abated somewhat since the 1990s.
via Brieitbart.
Video:
http://content.bitsontherun.com/players/vvy0FSoM-svqBtzyp.html
He also exposes how modern progressives use schools to promote their brainwashing on America’s youth.
Local political leaders and celebrities, Holder said, including Mayor Marion Barry and Jesse Jackson, had been asked to help. In addition, he reported, he had asked the local school board to make the anti-gun message a part of “every day, every school, and every level.”
Right thinking people believe that parents are the primary educator.
More and more it’s quickly becoming clear that Holder is an anchor around Obama’s neck… if the media would just wake up.
Karen Lewis, the Chicago Teacher’s Union President, and Mayor Rahm Emanuel, have a testy relationship at best. …
The two leaders met privately last year ahead of Emanuel’s inauguration. They went for dinner and to attend a dance — both are fans of the art form — and to develop a working relationship. …
“In that conversation he did say to me that 25 percent of the students in this city are never going to be anything, never going to amount to anything and he was never going to throw money at them.”
via NBC Chicago.
But naturally Emanuel’s people respond:
The Mayor’s Office said Lewis made up the anecdote.
“That’s simply false,” said Emanuel Press Secretary Sarah Hamilton. “The Mayor is committed to making sure that every single child in Chicago has access to an excellent education, which is why he is fighting so hard to transform the Chicago public schools that have failed our children year after year.”
No one knows what was true except those who there. But that’s not really the point is it?
The real issue is that CTU President Karen Lewis believes that the way to improve education is to throw money at it. And doesn’t that just about say about everything that needs to be said?
We have been throwing more and more money at CPS for years. The results have not trended with the spending. Check this out:
I wonder how much more money Ms. Lewis want to spend?
The Chicago Teachers Union is asking for raises amounting to 30 percent over the next two years, the opening salvo in heated contract negotiations with school officials who are implementing a longer school day across Chicago Public Schools next school year.
Documents obtained by the Tribune show that in the face of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s expansion of the school day, the union has led with an offer seeking a 24 percent raise in the 2012-13 school year and a 5 percent increase the following year, the net effect being 30 percent.
via Chicago Tribune.
This just goes to show the world how completely out of touch the CTU is with the taxpayers that pay the bills.
The city is broke; the state is broke; the feds are broke. The wheels are falling off the bus, people everywhere are struggling, and here comes the teachers asking for a 30% raise over two years.
According to CPS’s own website the starting salary for a teaching with a bachelor’s degree is $50,577.00 for 38.6 weeks or 193 days. It further provides that, “[t]he salary and total compensation figures are based on a regular school term of 40 weeks, at 6.25 hours per day….
The way I figure that’s $50,577.00 / (6.25 * 193) = $41.92 / hour. That’s not too bad for some 22 year old right out of college.
Consider some other public servants: Assistant State’s Attorneys. A Cook County ASA starts at $57,196.00 for a regular, real, full-time job. $57,196.00 / 2080 = $27.50 / hour.
So we, the taxpayers, already pay teachers with a bachelor degree over 150% more per hour than we pay ASA’s with a law degree and passed the bar exam. And on this they want a 30% raise.
It’s no wonder our schools are failing. Their They’re run by greed greedy pigs.
UPDATE: Fixed some bad grammar as noted.
Crane is not a school; it’s voluntary daytime detainment for youth. It can’t die soon enough. If only parents had a real choice of schools they would never send their children to Crane. But some refuse to let it die.
A coalition of Crane teachers, students, parents and Near West Side community activists unveiled a plan Friday night to turn around the 109-year-old high school at 2245 W. Jackson Blvd., focusing on adding programming and services to the school. …
After an hour of testimony in support of keeping the school open from neighbors, teachers and students (including the basketball team), the Crane coalition took the stage with a rap music video created by Crane students in an After School Matters program in 2010.
Then they showed off their plan. To improve Crane, they said, programs need to be added to make it more appealing. Add an International Baccalaureate program, add trade-focused classes like cosmetology and video game programming, and reach out more to Crane’s feeder schools.
via Chicago Journal.
Video game programming? Do these people have any idea of what kind of education it takes to program video game? Knowledge of vector graphics. Understanding of electronic inputs and outputs. The ability to develop very complex logical structures. And yet:
In addition, since 26 percent of Crane’s students have special needs, and 87 percent of Crane students are from low-income households, more outreach programs are needed, they said. Solutions, they said, should include mentoring, tutoring and social services.
An IB program? Ok, will someone get a bus and drive these people straight to the men with the white suits. Medication is not going to be enough, they need to be admitted.
Also worth mentioning, one day I get a chance to write about the locals who are collection millions from the city for after school programs. They have a financial self interest to be served; this has nothing to do with saving the children.
If we really want to help our children we’ll inject some competition into the education marketplace and give parents a real choice of where to send their children. Right now CPS (a/k/a CTU) has a monopoly on public education and it’s failing miserably.
Here’s something:
Faith-based groups that have become the face of community support for Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s controversial plans to lengthen the school day and close failing schools also receive millions of dollars in grants from his administration.
…
One of the key players touting grass-roots support for Emanuel’s agenda is the Rev. Roosevelt Watkins, a minister and longtime ally of former Mayor Richard Daley who has seen an uninterrupted flow of contracts to provide services to Chicago Public Schools students. …
A roughly one-month, $1 million contract was awarded for this spring to three groups, including HOPE, for a program designed to keep children off the street during school breaks. In June, Emanuel’s then-newly appointed schools CEO, Jean-Claude Brizard, lauded the Safe Haven, Safe Summer program, which the district said involved about 100 churches.In July, Watkins’ group was among 10 community organizations that collectively received a one-year, $6.3 million Safe Passage contract to watch over children going to and from school and to defuse potential conflict, according to public records.
via Chicago Tribune.
If CPS is giving all this money away to religious groups for after school programs then there should be no problem moving to a voucher system and giving CPS money away for during school programs.
This could be the birth of a nice school choice program for the city.
Good News!!
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. (AP) — Unemployment dropped to 9.8 percent in Illinois in December, state officials said Friday, a second straight monthly decrease that capped a year in which the jobless rate fell almost a full percentage point from 2010.
via Chicago Tribune.
Or, maybe not:
The unemployment rate in the Chicago area rose to 10.2 percent in December from 9.3 percent a year ago, according to seasonally adjusted figures released Thursday by the Illinois Department of Employment Security.
via Chicago Tribune.
Hummm… So, I can’t tell if this is good news or bad news. So I did some searching and found a cool link at CapitalFax.com which led me to a supercool Google tool were one can graph public data.
The unemployment rate for the last 20 years of several mid-western states:
Then check out the same graph for the last 5 years:
Wisconsin and Michigan appear to be heading in the right direction. Illinois… not so much.
Six of every 10 Illinois public schools failed to meet federal test targets this year and risk federal sanctions as a result, according to information released Thursday by the Illinois State Board of Education.
High schools fared the worst.
Statewide, 656 of the 666 public high schools fell short of the proficiency standard on math and reading tests that students take every spring. Only eight high schools where students take the exam in 11th grade met federal standards. Two more high schools made it based on participation and student performance on other state exams.
via The Chicago Tribune.
I guess this is why the teacher’s union doesn’t want merit pay for teachers. It appears most are failing miserably.
I’ve recently had a fairly heated email exchange with a family member, and former public school teacher, about the standard by which teachers should be measured. Of course, the teachers’ union’s position is that it is completely unfair to measure teacher performance at all. This is at the root of our problem.
One word: ACCOUNTABILITY.
If we keep going down the current path and Illinois will become a wasteland.
But if we make teachers AND PARENTS responsible for the education of their students and things will improve. I’ve written up a pretty basic plan that I will share with everyone one say soon.
A study by two University of Illinois at Chicago professors Thursday dumped on the idea of a Chicago Public Schools “miracle’’ under Mayor Daley and pushed for an elected — rather than appointed — school board to move city schools forward.
The disparities between black and white students, and between Latino and white students, have only grown larger under Daley, creating a “two-tier” public education system, according to the analysis by Pauline Lipman and Eric “Rico” Gutman.
Well the UIC professors just proved what many of us already knew.
The cool indy magazine Fast Company has a huge spread on education called, plainly enough, How to Spend $100 Million to Really Save Education.
Naturally not all of the ideas are fully baked. It is Fast Company after all; it’s meant to be an article on the fringe, and on the fringe it is. But at least it’s raising the ideas so we can talk about them.
Let’s bring all these ideas forward and start talking about them. Testing some over here and others over there. What we know is that the current situation is not working. So there is little to lose.
We must being the fundamental reform of education.