Balancing the budget with teachers' pensions
Like thieves in the night, Illinois Gov. Quinn and machine-boss Mike Madigan, heisted more than $100 billion from the teachers' pension fund Wednesday. Not only that, but theChicago Civic Committee, calling the heist, "reform," wants more."This bill is a small step in the right direction but it doesn't begin to solve the state's urgent fiscal problems," said R. Eden Martin, president of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago. "The only way to achieve significant cost reductions now is to reform retirement benefits for current state employees prospectively and new hires moving forward."Question: Why hardly a peep from the leaders of the state's teacher unions?
More of Rhee's mess to clean up for Anita Dunn
Here's another problem for Anita Dunn, Michelle Rhee's new million-dollar PR flack.
Supt. Rhee debased the more than 200 D.C. teachers she fired recently, even implying that many of them were rapists and child molesters. Of course her charges turned out to be fabrications and Rhee was forced to recant. Rhee has also been among those yelling the loudest about how difficult unions have made it is to fire bad teachers.
If that's not a big enough mess for Dunn to clean up, how about the fact that Rhee has, at the same time, pushed hard for a voucher system to pay for Catholic school tuition in the District. She has also helped bail out failed Archdioscese schools by making many of them non-union charter schools.
The front-page story in yesterday's NYT revealed that hundreds and possibly thousands of children have actually