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Wednesday, January 8, 2014

1-8-14 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher

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




Will pension theft be Quinn’s Achilles’ heel.
Weeks before the Illinois General Assembly passed Senate Bill 1, stripping state retirees of crucial benefit benefits, they passed a similar bill raising the retirement age of Chicago Park District employees and reduced retiree COLAs. The workers are represented by SEIU local 73. Yesterday was the last day Squeezy could sign the bill. While the We Are One coalition of state public employees that r




Fishing in November.
Count of Bruce Rahmer to stir it up. With his own millions to spend on union-bashing ads and with deep-pocket contributors like Democrats Glen Tullman and Ken Griffin (Illinois’ richest man), he gets a lot of attention. Last week he ran a TV ad attacking public schools and praising charters, ignoring the irony that he bought a condo in the city for the expressed purpose of getting his own kid into





Alert: Representative Robyn Gabel preys on seniors.
  Retired folks in the north Chicago suburbs should be on the alert for a scam that targets seniors. The scams seem to be the work of a local gang known as the Democratic Party. I can share with you the names of at least two of these gang members: Dan Biss and Robyn Gabel. Here is how the scam goes down: The gang meets at their headquarters down state where they have figured out how to get into t

Standardized testing.
. A few weeks ago I registered to take the online qualifying test for Jeopardy. Maybe like you, I have watched Jeopardy for years. Maybe like you, members of my family have said, “You should be on this show.” I was foolish enough to believe them. I was scheduled for last night at 6PM. I had written the entry password down somewhere, so the first job was to remember where I had put that slip of pa
1-7-14 Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher
Fred Klonsky | Daily posts from a retired public school teacher who is just looking at the data.: Weingarten trashes value added measures. What do we do now?Good news. Diane Ravitch’s blog yesterday reported that AFT President Randi Weingarten has changed her mind about value added measures in teacher evaluation. VAM uses test student test scores to measure teacher effectiveness. It is junk scienc