Despite increased funding over the past10n years, most Illinois elementary schools and high schools still struggle to teach students the basics of reading and math. Some of this is due to laws that allow poor-performing teachers to stay in classrooms, but most is due to the structure of Illinois’ education system itself. Here are 10...
You may be hearing about rosy new pension estimates coming out of Springfield, but don’t be too quick to bite. A memo recently released by legislative leadership points to “good news” coming from a new analysis of Senate Bill 1 to be included in Illinois’ upcoming bond offering on Feb. 6, 2014. The memo claims...
The Illinois Policy Institute awarded the city of Evanston a Sunshine Award at the city’s Jan. 13 board meeting. By posting everything on the Illinois Policy Institute’s 10-Point Transparency Checklist, Evanston recently became the sixth local taxing body in Illinois to garner a perfect transparency score, joining Kane County, Hanover Township, Orland Park, Lombard and...
The enrollment failure of ObamaCare is well documented – so much so that it has become the nation’s late-night talk show punch line. In fact, Moody’s changed the outlook for U.S. health insurers to negative from stable, as implementation of ObamaCare continues to create uncertainty for the industry. The sad reality is that millions of...
It’s common knowledge that Illinois lags behind other states when it comes to embracing education reforms. But a new report recently released by the Friedman Foundation shows just how much catching up the state has to do. The 2014 edition of the Foundation’s “The ABCs of School Choice” highlights every school choice program in the...
Illinois continues to fall behind the national unemployment average in December, as the Illinois unemployment rate moved to 8.6 percent – nearly two percentage points above the national average of 6.7 percent. The state lost 3,200 nonfarm payroll jobs in December. Illinois’ nonpayroll jobs loss came despite the fact that the U.S. added 70,000 nonfarm...
Gov. Quinn’s State of the State Noon Wednesday, Jan. 29 Tune in to Gov. Pat Quinn’s State of the State address live online. HOW TO PLAY Download one version of our cards below. Watch Quinn’s State of the State address Follow @illinoispolicy on Twitter and use hashtag #ILSOTS (we will be live-tweeting throughout the speech) or...
The story of Illinois’ steady out-migration problem is well known, but just where are Illinoisans moving to? Is the outflow driven entirely by retirees and beach-goers moving to Florida? Not according to the U.S. Census Bureau, which just released its 2012 American Community Survey of state-to-state migration flow data. These data use census surveys to...
Despite increased funding over the past 10 years, most Illinois elementary schools and high schools still struggle to teach students the basics of reading and math. Some of this is due to laws that allow poor-performing teachers to stay in classrooms, but most is due to the structure of Illinois’ education system itself. Here are...
Chicago is a great place to make a movie. Tom Cruise got his big break in the North Shore-based drama “Risky Business,” and comedy star Vince Vaughn claims the Windy City as his home. Film favorites ranging from “Ferris Buehler’s Day Off” to “The Untouchables” and the annual Christmas viewing requirement that is “Home Alone”...
A little-known, but important, provision in the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, is coming under increased scrutiny. The ACA, commonly known as ObamaCare, includes provisions to pay insurers for their financial losses in the ObamaCare exchanges. Known as “risk-corridor payments,” health insurance companies could receive up to 80 percent of the money they lose in...
As few as 11 percent of those purchasing new health insurance policies and believed to be eligible for coverage in the ObamaCare health insurance exchanges were previously uninsured, according to a recent survey by McKinsey & Co. In other words, the Affordable Care Act, or ACA, which was supposed to reduce the uninsured by almost...
It’s time to bring school choice to Illinois – so says the Chicago Tribune, in a convincing editorial published this weekend. Not only did the Tribune discuss the poor performance of Chicago’s persistently low-performing schools, it also talked about successful school choice programs in Wisconsin and Indiana – Illinois’ neighbors to the north and east....
Pam is a mom in northern Illinois whose son, Joshua, needs constant care because of a rare genetic syndrome that causes severe intellectual and developmental disabilities. Pam receives a modest subsidy from a Medicaid-waiver program that allows her to stay home and take care of Joshua. She isn’t a state employee; she just gets a...