by Collin Hitt Illinois lost a very-high-stakes federal grant competition. The “Race To The Top” program has gathered headlines across the country for the better part of a year. It wrapped up earlier this week, with 12 states and the District of Columbia splitting $4B in stimulus largesse to fund public education. Ostensibly, the grant...
by Kate Piercy “Where are the new jobs?” asks John Stossel in his article today. Why aren’t businesses hiring? Well, Stossel concludes businesses will not start investing in new workers until the current “regime of uncertainty” ends, explaining: After previous recessions, unemployment didn’t get stuck at close to 10 percent. If left alone, the economy can...
by Kate Piercy Here’s an interesting chart from the Mercatus Center’s Veronique de Rugy, who has examined different states’ unemployment at the time The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) passed and the stimulus funds each state has received so far. De Rugy found no correlation between the two variables. The chart suggests stimulus funds...
by Collin Hitt Chicago Public Schools has announced that it is moving forward with a new plan to extend the school day at select elementary schools by using online learning technology. The Trib carried the story: In an effort to extend what is one of the nation’s shortest school days, Chicago Public Schools plans to add...
by Collin Hitt That, according to a new survey of thirty American cities by the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation. Overall, the study attempted to rank major cities based on their attractiveness for school reform – the charter school element was only one piece. Chicago got a C and was ranked 11th out of 26 states offered an...
by Kristina Rasmussen From Crain’s: Illinois Teachers’ Retirement System, Springfield, plans to sell $3 billion in investments, or about 10% of its $33.1 billion in assets, in the current fiscal year to pay pension benefits, according to Dave Urbanek, public information officer. The system is the fifth Illinois statewide defined benefit plan to sell off investments this...
by Amanda Griffin-Johnson The Institute recently released “Spotlight on Spending #9: The State Un-Fair” reviewing the Illinois and DuQuoin State Fairs between fiscal year 2001 and fiscal year 2009. There has been some confusion about the paper, and we’d like to take a blog post to help clarify some of these questions. 1. “If you can...
by Will Compernolle The Department of Agriculture for the State of Illinois paid 11 meat and poultry inspector supervisors $616,597.87 in combined total wages in the fiscal year 2008. The average meat and poultry inspector supervisor was paid an annual salary of $56,054.35 with the highest salary being $61,633. The Illinois Department of Central Management Services website...
by Kristina Rasmussen Add this to Illinois’s debt tab. According to the State Journal-Register: Illinois has borrowed more than $2.2 billion from the federal government since July 2009 to pay unemployment benefits. Unemployment benefits are funded through withholding taxes on employers; raising those taxes in a fragile economy is a non starter.
by Kristina Rasmussen This bit of news is creating quite a stir in certain circles: The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) charged the state of New Jersey Wednesday with lying and withholding information to investors in billions of dollars worth of municipal bond deals. The allegations involve $26 billion of bond offerings from 2001 to 2007 in...
by Collin Hitt A new national group has formed to advance online and technology-driven learning in public schools, the Digital Learning Council. I’ve been asked to serve on the council, an honor considering the accomplished careers of those who’ll also be joining the group – for starters, the council is co-chaired by former governors Bob Wise and Jeb Bush. It looks...
by Kate Piercy From S.T. Karnick at The American Culture: In case you missed it, LA Times reporters Jason Felch, Jason Song and Doug Smith used California’s public records law to obtain seven years of math and English test scores from the Los Angeles Unified School District. They asked Richard Buddin, a well-respected analyst at the RAND Corporation,...
by Kate Piercy R. Eden Martin, president of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, offers some solutions to the critical pension problem facing Illinois in today’s Wall Street Journal. Martin concludes, “Public pension funds are in dire need of change, but state and local hopes for a federal bailout now stand in the way...
Veronique de Rugy of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University constructed the diagram below using data from the Congressional Budget Office during the very early stages of the Great Recession and before the Obama presidency. It shows the increase in marginal tax rates required to fund entitlement spending for 2010, 2050 and 2082. The required increase...