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Monday, July 8, 2013

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.

Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.:






“It was a very pleasant meeting,” said Governor Quinn.
  Cullerton and The Madman. As predicted, today’s meeting of the Gang of Ten came and went. Results? Bukis. Greg Hinz in today’s Crains Springfield’s top Democrats met face to face in Gov. Pat Quinn’s Chicago office for nearly two hours today to talk about pension reform, and it appears they left the meeting exactly as they went in: stalemated.  Despite two credit downgrades of Illinois’ debt in

The in box. The Jazzman: “We need to have this conversation.”
Hi Fred, I was unclear about something in my post, and I hope you’ll let me clarify it here: I think you were more than fair in all of your posts about DVR and the NEA RA. And I’ve never thought you attacked the leadership personally. You did us all a service by giving us your candid views about what happened in Atlanta. It’s clear I’ve struck a nerve, but that’s fine. We need to have this convers

Thinking about the Jazzman’s concerns about our attitude towards union leadership.
Yesterday I reposted the Jersey Jazzman. He expressed concerns about questioning the motivation of our teacher union leadership, even as we disagree with their actions. I hear this a lot from my union colleagues. Of course, I have never suggested that state leaders of the IEA or national leaders of the NEA were personally corrupt. I have always tried to frame my disagreements as disagreements in p
Hi back at ya.
  A standing vote at the NEA RA. After a few years of doing this blog and now getting 3 to 4 thousand site visits a day, I feel a connection to readers. A core of you write comments regularly. Which I enjoy. A few haters show up now and then. As long they are not terribly offensive, or piss me off, I’ll post their comments too. Once in a while I’ll get a comment from someone we haven’t heard from
The return of the Gang of Ten.
The third meeting of the Gang of Ten, the Illinois legislative committee that was formed after the failure of the General Assembly to agree on the best way to cut public employee pensions, will take place today in Springfield. Nothing will come of it. If you are truly desperate for something to do, you can watch. What will not come out of the committee is a plan to address raising revenue. Maybe