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The institution that went into bankruptcy is very concerned about the sustainability of the CPS because it has to increase property taxes modestly.

They issue a series of questions that are mostly easy to answer and have been answered by anyone who bothers to look at actual data.

•Why are expenses rising as enrollment decreases?

It’s that thing that they teach in high school economics called inflation, but looking at the numbers it’s not hard to understand this.  Students leaving the CPS tend to be students who have fewer problems.  Limited english proficiency, students with IEPs, high poverty students, tend to not leave at the same rate as students without those challenges and thus, it’s more expensive to educate them because they need individualized attention.  The rate of LEP is nearly twice that of the state depending on the year and poverty rate is just about twice the state average.  So add to this the need to deal with these students in smaller class size settings and yet the CPS has more students on average per classroom than the state.

Making all of this more difficult is that personnel costs and especially health care are increasing faster than the rate of inflation and you end up with avery modest enrollment increases leading to higher costs per student.

One of the things to keep in mind, the CPS keeps pretty close to state averages on expenditures except for students services which is higher because of the types of students overrepresented in the CPS as mentioned above.  Given that the instructional and overall spending isn’t that outrageous:

That’s pretty good for a district with the sort of challenges CPS has.  All bureaucracies can be made more efficient, but the know nothings at the Trib Editorial Board would be well served to understand that education costs money.

Why hasn’t CPS controlled costs better by outsourcing more jobs, including central office jobs that could be more efficiently and economically run by outside contractors?

This is baffling and largely not consistent with evidence regarding the costs of outsourcing.  Central office jobs mostly maintaining programmatic support and monitoring.  Some aspects of schools might be served by some outside services, but those are essential to running an effective district.  Making broad claims about outsourcing is a meaningless trope that makes the great white guys feel smart, but has no meaning.

So CPS proposes a tax increase — and even more troubling, a raid on reserve funds. There are some efforts at discipline. CPS will deny teachers a scheduled 4 percent raise, cut scores of central office middle managers and streamline departments. It will slash many popular programs, including mentoring for at-risk students; bilingual education; literacy initiatives; extracurricular math, science and technology clubs; and other after-school programs.

Perhaps they need more revenue?  How long do you think you can run an effective organization without raises? Sustainability isn’t about cutting things when you are trying to reach students who are harder to educate than the average student.  These cuts are exactly what leads to a District like CPS offering fewer opportunities and attracting less qualified teachers and it happens where the students need those the most.

Excellent

Quinn regularly plugs Illinois’ network of 48 community colleges — the country’s third-largest community college system. For every student at at a public four-year-college in Illinois, two attend a community college, Quinn notes.

Giannoulias, 35, served as state treasurer and narrowly lost a race for U.S. Senate last year to Republican Mark Kirk. Giannoulias ran just two percentage points behind his Democratic ticket-mate, Quinn.

Since losing, Giannoulias has been putting together a political science class he will teach at Northwestern University this fall called “Campaigning versus governing.” He said Tuesday he plans to announce next month a full-time job he’ll be taking.

The part-time post as chairman of the community colleges board is unpaid.

“I’m incredibly excited to help reform our community colleges here in Illinois,” Giannoulias said. “Putting Americans back to work is the single greatest challenge facing our country. A well-educated work force is crucial to that. This meshes my two passions: education and creating jobs.”

This and Sheila Simon’s efforts to visit all of the community colleges are a very good sign of an essential element of economic development being prioritiezed by Quinn.

Wait for it–the Tribune Ed Board wants a detailed accounting of each bureaucrat and how fast Alexi will fire them regardless of how clueless the Editorial Board is about the subject.

Community colleges several important functions.  They provide affordable education to students who can’t afford attending a full university and allows less mature students to remain at home while still making progress.  They provide a variety of programs that improve skills prepare those who won’t go on to a full BA/BS for skilled work.  They provide excellent places for students who need to rehabilitate their academic careers.

A higher profile chair can push these issues far more than the usual chairs who are competent professionals, but don’t have the same level of political access.

Eric thinks it’s a victory for Walker because they didn’t kill the king.  The thing is, Walker isn’t a king, but a Governor and now he has to moderate because one Republican in the GOP Senate caucus isn’t extreme and is unlikely to pass more over the top legislation.
To add to this, Nate Silver has projected a toss up if Walker is recalled based on the turnout and results last night.

Walker is still vulnerable, more Senators can be recalled along with him in January.  Change is often slow and requires patience, but this is progress.  The worst of Walker’s agenda is stopped and he seems to be vulnerable for the spring.  Being a liberal often comes with the problem of assuming we’ll find a way to lose, but sometimes we do win and that usually comes from persistence and hard work.

Sigh:

But sometimes, when politicians would insist on releasing hot air at the wrong time, Papou Pete would become aggravated. And so, at these special moments, he had a favorite saying:

Af-TOS mee-lye, ke o GUY-thou-ros KLA-nee.

Loosely translated, it means:

“When he speaks, the donkey breaks wind.”

And so, as frightened Democrats tried to blame conservatives for Standard & Poor’s downgrading of America’s credit rating, I thought of my grandpa’s words.

You’d think a columnist would be required to read what the actual downgrade report said:

Republicans and Democrats have only been able to agree to relatively modest savings on
discretionary spending while delegating to the Select Committee decisions on
more comprehensive measures. It appears that for now, new revenues have
dropped down on the menu of policy options. In addition, the plan envisions
only minor policy changes on Medicare and little change in other entitlements,
the containment of which we and most other independent observers regard as key
to long-term fiscal sustainability.

===

Compared with previous projections, our revised base case scenario now
assumes that the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, due to expire by the end of 2012,
remain in place. We have changed our assumption on this because the majority
of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise
revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act. Key
macroeconomic assumptions in the base case scenario include trend real GDP

growth of 3% and consumer price inflation near 2% annually over the decade.
Our revised upside scenario–which, other things being equal, we view as
consistent with the outlook on the ‘AA+’ long-term rating being revised to
stable–retains these same macroeconomic assumptions. In addition, it
incorporates $950 billion of new revenues on the assumption that the 2001 and
2003 tax cuts for high earners lapse from 2013 onwards, as the Administration
is advocating. In this scenario, we project that the net general government
debt would rise from an estimated 74% of GDP by the end of 2011 to 77% in 2015
and to 78% by 2021

So revenue is included in the best case scenario and a reason why the downgrade was done by S & P was the inability to reach some sort of compromise that included revenue increases.
Who else would be at fault other than the Tea Party and their fantasies of rugged individualism?

The modern day Michael Flanagan has a video made in his honor:

Stolen from Balloon Juice comments

Markets hate uncertaintly

“I think it is important to emphasize that most people think both of the plans are really Band-Aids and don’t deal in any significant way with the spending and cost issues in the country,” Burnett said. “The issue was that Speaker Boehner’s plan does not cut enough spending right away. Harry Reid’s plan would cut about $2.7 trillion. Just because it is bigger than Speaker Boehner’s plan is really the reason the Boehner plan may still trigger a downgrade.”

Burnett was far from equivocal. At one point she added that, per a conversation with an investor, “in the short material, either deal will probably be enough.” But then she went back to waxing skeptically at the Boehner approach.

“Really interesting this afternoon, when I was talking to an investor who had met with the ratings agencies at Standard & Poor, talking about the potential of a downgrade — which by the way could raise interest rates the same way a potential default could — and they said the Boehner plan probably wouldn’t hit the hurdle to prevent a downgrade,” she added. “Even if that deal was reached, you could still get a downgrade. It is unclear whether that would happen for sure, but that would be a real possibility. Whereas the Reid plan, even though a lot of the parts of that are seen by many as gimmicks, probably would pass that hurdle and you wouldn’t get that immediate downgrade. That’s an interesting distinction.”

JoshuaGreen JoshuaGreen

The ‘Boehner Drop’ a day later? RT @ fivethirtyeight Dow Jones futures off after the speeches. Had been at -12 before IIRC, now at -39.

Apparently Boehner not happy with having to corral unruly children.

jacksonjk Jill Jackson

by GlennThrush

Overheard Boehner saying “I didn’t sign up for going mano-a-mano with the President of the United States” leaving the Capitol.

Arkansas High School names white student with lower GPA co-valedictorian to avoid a big mess.  Given I’m writing about this, I think we can say the whole avoiding a big mess was a giant Fail.

Wimberly’s mother is the school’s “certified media specialist.” She says in the federal discrimination complaint that after her daughter had been told she would be valedictorian, the mother heard “in the copy room that same day, other school personnel expressed concern that Wimberly’s status as valedictorian might cause a ‘big mess.’”
McGehee Secondary School is predominantly white, and 46 percent African-American, according to the complaint. Bratton says that the day after she heard the “big mess” comment, McGehee Principal Darrell Thompson, a defendant, told her “that he decided to name a white student as co-valedictorian,” although the white student had a lower G.P.A.

I want to have been in the room when the school’s lawyer looked around and asked, “Who’s the fucking idiot who thought this was a good idea?”

Because there is no other way to respond to idiots of this level.   One might think the school would be embarrassed that for the first time in 22 years someone of the the race of 46 percent of the students was going to be valedictorian.  Most people would be breathing a sigh of relief that they could show some very minor progress towards racial equity in the school system.  Not these assclowns–they were worried some white folks would have their feelings hurt because we treated a student equally under the law.  Fucking geniuses.

It’s hard to imagine that the Republican Party has gone so far crazy that they are allowing the modern day Michael Flanagan AKA Joe Walsh try and have anything resembling a clue regarding the debt. 

And so, when a Democratic president, who cares about discretionary spending, and who knows it’s not a significant source of red ink, offers a massive $1 trillion cut to that spending, that is a real compromise. When President Obama also offers $650 billion in entitlement cuts over 10 years — cuts that would hurt his party’s constituents and anger his strongest supporters, that is a real compromise. When the White House offers hundreds of billions less in new revenue than any of the three (rather center-right) bipartisan budget proposals on the table — indeed, offers almost $4 in spending cuts for every $1 in new revenue — that is a real compromise.

Democrats should note that the president was so desperate for a deal he went well to the right of the proposals to which rock-ribbed Republicans like Sen. Tom Coburn and former senator Pete Domenici had agreed. Republicans should note that nobody is talking about higher tax rates, but about eliminating loopholes, subsidies, and deductions, and doing fundamental tax reform in a way that conservative economists have advocated for decades.

Add to this Reid’s plan that was rejected and had no revenue increases and you see one party in this negotiation doesn’t want a deal.  All of which is fine, but this should be a non-controversial issue, but it is an essential issue for the financial health of the nation.  There’s a perfectly good way to have this fight and not endanger the full faith and credit of the US–fight over this in the budget.  The GOP can even shut down the government and do far less harm.

A new report on principals conducting  teacher evaluations in the CPS:

“There’s been concerns by unions that principals don’t know what is going on in the classroom in large high schools or they may know what’s going on but for personal reasons they don’t base decisions on who is most effective, but rather who they like,” Jacob said. “What we found is that principals can identify teachers who are more productive and that it’s important to them in making dismissals.”

Prior to the new union contract negotiated in Chicago in 2004, virtually no teacherswere dismissed for cause in the district, Jacob says. But when the new collective bargaining agreement went into effect, principals every spring could log into a district computer system and with “a click of a button” indicate whether the probationary teacher should be renewed. Although the principals were required to provide district officials with at least one reason for the firing, they were not required to justify or explain their reasoning.

At the time, teachers who had worked in the district for less than five consecutive years were on probation.

Looking at teacher personnel files, school demographic data and student test-score information, Jacob found that approximately 11 percent of the probationary teachers were dismissed each year from 2005 to 2007.

But the study showed that teachers whose performance evaluations dropped from a “superior” ranking to “satisfactory” were 22 percentage points more likely to be fired. Teachers who had more than 21 absences in a year saw a 13 percentage point increase in getting dismissed.

In grades and subjects in which students take standardized tests, Jacob found a 7 percentage point jump in elementary school teachers getting laid off because their students did not show as much academic improvement. Among high school teachers, the increase was 0.4 percentage points.

Part of the challenge for the CPS is demonstrating that the teacher evaluation process isn’t purely a punitive system.  Far too often, reform has meant firing teachers to far too many people.  The issue of accountability has become very confused during the debate.  For many of us who have worked with inner city districts the idea of accountability was having district management accountable and focused on teaching students and not being worried about the political issues who does a teacher know or how much pressure was there to protect certain people.

To make matters worse, the Obama administration has extended NCLB to include teacher evaluations being partially based on student achievement data on state tests. The problem is those state tests don’t even measure student achievement well let alone evaluate how teachers perform.   What a sane system would do is build upon the model used in Chicago above and not deal with student achievement data because those data are not suited to measuring teacher performance.  What you want to know is whether a teacher  is well prepared, using the proper pedagogical techniques, and how well they manage the classroom.  Student performance on standardized tests tends to be only modestly affected by teachers.  If a child lives in a poverty stricken neighborhood the ability to focus on school work is severely limited and hence, socio-economic status is the best predictor of how a student does on standardized tests.  Good teachers are necessary, but not sufficient causes of student achievement.  By focusing on data from standardized testing  in teacher evaluation we are not measuring teacher effectiveness, but the entire life and environment of that student.  If you focus on that sort of measure then you would end up firing teachers based more on who they teach than how they teach.  This discourages good teachers from wanting jobs with the most challenging students.

When you look at the last paragraph, I can guarantee there are a bunch of people appalled that we aren’t firing probationary teachers at a higher rate who have students who don’t show improvement on standardized tests, but the relatively low number is due to a very poor correlation between standardized test results and quality teaching.  Principals appear to be sorting that out when they are doing the evaluation and that’s a very good thing.

There’s a far more detailed bit on teacher evaluation over at Catalyst that I think really captures the issues in teacher evaluation.

Illinois is introducing a new system starting in 2012 while it is a collaborative process, the key issue right now is whether the attempt to create a new system instead of adapting an existing one will be most effective.

Allen West:

I believe we are headed towards the ultimate ideological clash in America. There is a widening chasm which has developed between those who believe in principled fiscal policies and those desiring the socialist bureaucratic nanny-state. [...]

And all we hear from the President is talk about “shared sacrifice,” “tax the rich,” and “increase revenues by tax hikes.” It was just December 2010 that President Obama and the Democrats extended the Bush era tax rates for two years…now less than a year later they are FLIP-FLOPPING! [...]

I must confess, when I see anyone with an Obama 2012 bumper sticker, I recognize them as a threat to the gene pool.

 

 

So says the guy who hangs out with 1%er Biker Gangs.

Joe Walsh should know dumb, stupid, rude, and condescending is now way to go through life.

His Chris, Chris, Chris, is like the obnoxious Sir, Sir, Sir you get from really annoying people in the service industry who decide they need to tell you where your place is (and yes, I worked retail for years and I’d put a stop to that crap when someone worked for me and they did that).

Marcus Bachmann Is Completely Heterosexual

Posted by Dan Savage on Mon, Jul 18, 2011 at 4:20 PM