Romney campaign rally just prior to Saturday’s vote.
Professor Mark Naison says “data driven instruction” is just a euphemism for “teach to the test.”
“No bonus for me, thanks,” says NY teacher Arthur Goldstein in a column in the NY Daily News. Goldstein teaches ESL at Francis Lewis High School.
Pension Education’s vocabulary word of the week: Default. “We bought into the future, you know, and we purchased a good house in district during the height of the housing boom. Now, we have two children and we made payments on a house that’s worth considerably less the what we still owe. But we are not walking away. We believe that doing anything else would be wrong, and we love our work and we love where are kids are growing up.”
I know, I know—I should have already weighed in on the gazillion-dollar tax break Christmas present the state gave the Chicago Mercantile Exchange last month.
But I was preoccupied with holiday parties, Bulls games, old movies, giving my dog a bath—anything to dull the pain of what our elected officials were up to. Like the aforementioned gazillion-dollar tax break for CME.
To refresh your memory, that’s the one where CME, the international options-trading behemoth, decided it was paying too much in state corporate income taxes. And its top officials let it be known that if the state didn’t lower the tax tab right away, the Merc would move to Indiana. Maybe call itself the Munster Mercantile Exchange.
Governor Pat Quinn, house speaker Michael Madigan and senate president John Cullerton responded by pushing through a bill that effectively lowers what CME pays in income taxes by an estimated $125 million in the next two years and untold hundreds of millions after that.
After which Mayor Emanuel sent out a press release hailing the tax break as “reform.”
Once again: I think it’s a good idea not to use that word in relation to anything any politician ever does in Illinois.
So . . . the state that’s already tens of billions of dollars in debt now has to find new and creative ways to make up for the hundreds of millions of tax dollars it won’t be getting from CME. Probably by asking retired cops, firefighters, and teachers to live on less. Call it pension reform. Because as everyone knows, it’s not really financial reform unless you’re making old retirees pick up the tab. Ben Joravsky, Chicago Reader.
Fred Klonsky 