Chicago teachers are voting this week to authorize a strike, though it wouldn’t occur any time prior to March 2016. Catalyst Chicago quotes Karen Lewis, President of the Chicago Teachers Union, explaining, “We don’t want a strike; we’d like to have a settled contract.” But the contract negotiations have dragged on and on and have […]
Here in Ohio, during the current lame duck session, legislators are considering a new school funding formula. The Cupp-Patterson Fair School Funding Plan has been in the making for almost two years (See here and here.), but even now as the plan comes to a vote before December 31, the end of the current legislative […]
Here we are in mid-July. Facing enormous challenges, school district leaders are trying to figure out how they can safely provide school this fall. Here are the two biggest questions: How can schools be reopened safely as COVID-19 is now raging across many states and local hot spots? What funds—in the midst of recessionary state […]
School finance in somebody else’s state seems like the ultimately irrelevant, boring, and “in-the-weeds” kind of topic. Except that what is happening in Illinois ought to interest us all because it is a microcosm of today’s ideologically driven, rancorous and dangerously divisive state politics. In Illinois, discord between the General Assembly—both houses dominated by Democrats—and the […]
It shouldn’t be particularly surprising that a proposal to add tuition tax credit school vouchers for children living in families with annual income up to $113,775 has been thrown as a bargaining chip into the Illinois school funding impasse being negotiated in a special session in Springfield. After all, Governor Bruce Rauner has hired a […]
I confess to breathing a sigh of relief when some other state has a school funding crisis. At least it’s not Ohio (my state) this time! I have to force myself to remember that political trends at the state level matter. Really, if you think about it, it isn’t important that Betsy DeVos is unlikely […]
In an ugly special legislative session in early July, Illinois finally enacted a budget when the Legislature overrode Governor Bruce Rauner’s veto. It is the first budget the state has had since Rauner was elected governor over two years ago. But the wrangling between Republican Governor Rauner and the Democratically dominated Illinois Legislature continues. On […]
What’s been happening in our statehouses over the past few weeks may help us picture the train wreck that looms if President Trump’s proposed budget, and/or the repeal-and-replace or total repeal of the Affordable Care Act should be enacted by Congress. We were warned several weeks ago in a report from the Center on Budget […]
The Chicago Teachers Union has voted to strike next Tuesday, October 11. The union has not had a contract for over a year, and in threatening to strike, teachers are not only expressing dissatisfaction with the contract offered by Chicago Public Schools but also with years of state funding cuts and financial mismanagement that culminated […]
It is really, really hard to parse out the problems in the Chicago Public Schools less than a month from the beginning of the school year. What is clear is that all the years of financial shenanigans in the school district’s management including long-running borrowing from the teachers’ pension fund to pay for the district’s […]
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