Test this
District Dismantlement moves to Philly
April 30, 2012 By Leave a Comment
We are beginning to see the benefits of the New Orleans experiment in disempowering school district bureaucrats and breaking up the large districts. It is time for Rahm Emanuel to consider the same solutions for Chicago’s failing and bloated infrastructure.
Phila. School District plan would dismantle central office, close schools
“What we do know through lots of history and evidence and practice is that the current structure doesn’t work,” School Reform Commission Chairman Pedro Ramos said. “It’s not fiscally sustainable and it doesn’t produce high-quality schools for all kids.”
So, at the SRC’s direction, Chief Recovery Officer Thomas Knudsen on Tuesday announced a plan that would essentially blow up the district and start with a new structure.
It is time for Rahm Emanuel to consider the same solutions for Chicago’s failing and bloated infrastructure.
Knudsen, in a news conference, avoided references to the “Philadelphia School District.”
“We are now looking at a much broader definition of education in the city that includes not only district schools but other schools as well,” he said.
Mayor Nutter hailed the plan, which he said would push control over education down to the school level.
“If we don’t take significant action, the system will collapse,” the mayor said at a separate news conference. “If you care about kids and if you care about education, if you care about the future of this city, that’s what we need to all grow up and deal with.”
Teachers union president Jerry Jordan decried the radical restructuring as the SRC divesting itself of many of the core responsibilities of public education. He called it a “cynical, right-wing, market-driven” blueprint.
“This is totally dismantling the system,” Jordan said. “It’s a business plan crafted to privatize the services within the School District.”
Hallelujah! It is about time we did this!
Schools would have much more autonomy, with the ability to choose their own curriculums.
Though there is some precedent for this kind of work – officials pointed to the decentralization in New York City public schools – Ramos noted that what Philadelphia is proposing “is different from what many other places are doing.”
The central office, already half the size it was a year ago, will shrink further, from over 1,000 employees a few years ago to about 200 in the new model.
Entire sections of administration should be cut off and cauterized.
It’s really nice to see this start happening. We merely need to accelerate the process.
Dismantle the large districts first…
April 28, 2012 By Leave a Comment
Then dismantle the smaller ones.
When the Washington Post starts writing editorials like this, it can’t be long before more liberals start to see the light on education.
The Big Easy’s school revolution
But what really distinguishes New Orleans is how government has redefined its role in education: stepping back from directly running schools and empowering educators to make the decisions about hours, curriculum and school culture that best drive student learning. Now, state and school-district officials mostly regulate and monitor — setting standards, ensuring equity and closing failing schools.
Rahm could just as easily shut down 125 S. Clark. Setting standards is ALL any state or city need do. Let 100s of new independent schools find the best way to meet those standards.
As for the teachers, once free of their unions’ golden handcuffs, they can find solace in once again being viewed as true professionals, and not the rent-seeking collectivized drones of the failed legacy system. From, the article…
One teacher I spoke with during a recent trip talked about the luxury of being pursued by different charter networks willing to pay for her talents. After 11 years of teaching, she said, it was the first time she felt she was being treated as a professional. I visited the classrooms of Sci Academy, where 99 percent of the students are minorities and 92 percent are eligible for free and reduced-price lunch. They have some of the city’s highest scores on statewide tests, and more than 90 percent of Sci Academy seniors have already been accepted to a four-year college or university.
Teachers need to realize that 100s of schools bidding for their talents is better than 4 or 5 districts doing the same. This bidding will eventually raise the pay of the most competent teachers. As for the rest, it shouldn’t be our problem.
The “Human Toll” indeed
April 28, 2012 By 1 Comment
Rich Miller posted some legislator’s comment on the “Human Toll” of the upcoming budget cuts.
It detailed all of the pain that would be generated from some of the cuts to Medicaid that are being discussed. The comment that I placed on this post is below.
Some time around to 2005, I questioned former Rep. Fritchey on the 13% increase in school enrollment and the 157% increase in school funding. His reply?
“Yeah, but that all went to pensions.”
As all the “human tolls” are collected in the upcoming budget cuts, there is only one place to put almost all the blame.
It falls on the legislators who voted for every mandate, every payroll expansion, and every pension benefit increase in the last 10-20 years.
The facts speak for themselves. Unwilling to say no to the powerful spending, borrowing, and taxing interests, these folks (in both parties) voted future generations of Illinoisans into pension poverty and tax increase hell.
You are all now left with a choice. Fund the pension payroll, perks monster you created, or fund government services.
If the taxpayers are asked to do more, which is not an entirely unreasonable request under dire circumstances, the very least you can do is put a stiff, enforceable, and robust constitutional amendment on the ballot.
That amendment should place hard spending caps on all governmental entities, with virtually NO exceptions, and such a cap should be raised only upon a referendum, preferably requiring a super-majority of some sort.
Taxpayers should realize such a cap is worth the cost, and government employees and elected officials should realize taxpayers deserve nothing less after their decades long ride on the debt and pension gravy train.
It is NOT the taxpayer that is to blame for this situation. It is the legislature and the spending interests that purchased them. We can fund services, or we can fund out-sized benefits for too many public employees. Your choice.
Public Sector Unions – just abolish them
June 15, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Two videos to help win the budget debate
April 5, 2011 By Leave a Comment
It’s a testament to the slow witted nature of the Republicans that they haven’t found a way to run this ad across the country. It makes the case for cuts so clearly that only the most partisan person could deny its truth.
Let the sheer magnitude of the problem do the heavy lifting.
Next up, let’s give Paul Ryan the “Profiles in Political Courage” award for tackling Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. I don’t know how this all turns out, but I must say that it’s good to see Republican telling the truth.
Public Unions – Engines of unspeakable greed
February 22, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Read this article to understand how this cancer has metastasized into our entire body politic.
When they ask you how you can use such harsh rhetoric, tell them that “pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered,”
Scott Walker trying to save his state from this fate
February 21, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Farewell, My Lovely
How public pensions killed progressive California
As 72-year-old Jerry Brown enters his second governorship, he has an agenda to match that power, with visions even greater than those that haunted his two-term administration of the 1970s and ’80s: building 20,000 megawatts of renewable power, laying a new high-speed rail network that will connect the state’s major cities, forging a statewide infrastructure for alternative energy, hiring thousands of green employees. The new governor’s environmental agenda is ambitious, untenably expensive, and indelibly popular with voters and lawmakers.
Yet when Brown looks out on Democrat-controlled California, he seems less like Caesar at the Rubicon than Wojciech Jaruzelski at the Gdansk Shipyard. Brown is champion of a workers’ party with monopoly control, yet all his plans are being derailed by a labor movement nobody can harness.
At press time, California was being governed under a state of economic “emergency” declared by Brown’s predecessor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in light of a staggering $28 billion budget shortfall expected in the next 18 months.
It gets worse. Medium-term unfunded liabilities for government employee pensions are pegged by the Legislative Analyst’s Office at $136 billion—and that’s a lowball figure. Legislative analyst Mac Taylor acknowledges in his current fiscal outlook report that the estimate leaves out billions in funding shortfalls at the pension funds for public school teachers and University of California employees. In the next 10 years, taxpayers will most likely be on the hook for somewhere between $325 billion and $500 billion. (Over the past five years, state revenues averaged $94.5 billion per year.)
How did this happen?
It happened because too many people were asleep at the switch, believing we could spend lavishly on a corrupt and lazy class of greedy public employees who bought the politicians they were bargaining with.
It’s time for the Big Haircut. Cut their pensions and health benefits or fire them an hire new people under new rules. It’s that simple.