As I’ve mentioned before from time to time, it always bugs me when national news media cover Chicago local stories. They invariably get the basics wrong.
Take this article from the Washington Post about Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s novel strategy of portraying political incompetence as a civil rights issue:
Say what you will about Rahm Emanuel, Chicago’s Democratic mayor, but he has been in the thick of just about every major policy and political battle in recent history. Few politicians bring more savvy to whatever the fight may be.
Emanuel’s latest provocative move is to recast the Chicago public schools’ pension-funding woes as a modern-day lawsuit equivalent to Brown v. Board of Education.
Though the problems behind the case were made in Illinois, its implications are national. Emanuel’s city isn’t the first U.S. jurisdiction to face brutal trade-offs between the contractual entitlements of unionized teachers and the educational needs of America’s public school kids — most of whom, as of 2014, are “minorities.†And it won’t be the last.
Here’s the part of the article that bugged me:
To be sure, Chicago’s lawsuit expressly disavows attacking the teachers, or their pensions; Emanuel, having endured a 2012 teacher strike, isn’t going there. The defendant is the state government, for allegedly sending a disproportionate share of its annual $10.6 billion in education aid to mostly white school systems outside of Chicago, whose students are 88 percent black, Hispanic or Asian. That’s “separate and unequal,†the lawsuit claims, in violation of state civil rights law.
Chicago’s chronically underfunded teacher pensions are the heart of the matter, however. A state-law requirement to pay into them from city resources accounts for Chicago’s financial desperation. The city owes 13 percent of the schools’ operating budget, or nearly $1,900 a year per student in 2017, for teacher pensions.
Without a quick injection of $215 million, Emanuel has said, Chicago public schools may face drastic service cuts, imperiling the fragile but real progress they have made during his administration.
Almost everything in that section is wrong. Autonomy of the Chicago Public Schools wasn’t forced on it, as the above implies. The CPS demanded it. The graph at the top of this post illustrates the source of the problem. Over a period of years the CPS failed to increase its contributions to its teachers’ pension fund. The fund isn’t chronically underfunded. It’s acutely underfunded and that underfunding was due to political incompetence, misfeasance, and nonfeasance. It’s like taking an ax to somebody and then characterizing it as a chronic health condition.
That’s what the Chicago Teachers Union has been complaining about. There wouldn’t be a problem if their pensions had been funded as they should have been in the first place. It’s too bad they didn’t complain during the six mayoral elections that have taken place over the period illustrated by the graph. Note that the Chicago Public Schools weren’t under City Hall’s control until 1995. Coincidentally, that’s when the Illinois General Assembly turned the keys over to Chicago’s mayor.
Is that going to work when democrats retake Illinois gov in 2018?
By the way, lets say Chicago wins, how will Illinois pay for it — seems better to sue the feds, would pay better politically and the Federal government still has an AAA rating!
Thinking that Democrats will solve this problem is a neat example of time inconsistency. Democrats didn’t solve the problem during the fifteen years that they held veto-proof majorities in both houses of the state legislature and the governor’s mansion. They’re going to solve it now? Really?
Oh I thought this was a cynical attempt to deflect blame and an excuse to do nothing by the mayor – not an actual attempt to solve the problem.
And that’s why I was criticizing it – as a piece of theatre it won’t work if the governor is a D and tells the mayor to pound sand. As theatre it works better with Trump, he’s got another 4 years, and both sides gain if they “fight”
One of the many complications in Illinois’s situation with respect to public education is that in Illinois the state’s share of public education funding is among the lowest of any state. Most of the burden falls on the districts themselves.
That exacerbates the differences between school funding in rich districts and poor districts. The rich districts tend to be preponderantly white. Preponderantly black districts tend to be poor.