Discussion+Question+-+Week+Five

**I gave you all the link to the Quality Counts report on Illinois's preparedness to engage our students to compete globally** .** The report is broken down into sections and I would like you to address the important issues under either of the sections related to The Teaching Profession or School Finance. We received terrible grades in both areas and they greatly impact our work as educational practitioners. Please link the data with the Governor's recent State of the State report and look below the surface and make the connections. What are the implications for the classroom teachers in Illinois?? Connect the dots and offer your informed viewpoints and we will share them out via the Wiki - see the discussion page (go to, click on , and then look for ) and post your remarks. I also need you to respond to at least two others in the group. **

Here is the Governor's State of the State report:

as well as the report of the report of the Civic Federation of Illinois (see below).

The Civic Federation offers the following proposal:


 * __The State must first enact reforms of its retirement systems__. These reforms must include additional employee contributions and reduced benefits for new State employees.
 * __Expenditures must be cut by at least $2.1 billion__. General Funds spending should be rolled back to FY2007 levels, with the exception of Medicaid and General State Aid to elementary and secondary education. These areas will be kept at FY2010 levels to prevent loss of federal stimulus funds and protect critical funding to local school districts.
 * __Employee contributions to the retirement systems and the State’s group health insurance plan must be increased__. Along with other changes detailed in the report, these measures are expected to save the state more than $400 million.
 * The Civic Federation opposes any revenue increases until pension reforms are undertaken and at least $2.5 billion in budget cuts and savings have been made.
 * __The state income tax rate should be increased from 3% to 5 % for individuals and 4.8% to 6.4% for corporations__. This increase is expected to raise about $6.0 billion in new revenues.
 * __The State should repeal the income tax exemption for federally taxed portions of retirement and Social Security income__. This step is expected to raise $1.6 billion at the personal income tax rate of 5%.
 * The State should enact a $1 a pack increase in cigarette taxes and end specific business tax deductions or credits that are outdated and economically inefficient, such as the income tax credit for research and development.

If this budget plan were enacted, the State would pay down more than $10 billion or nearly 84% of its $12.8 billion deficit in FY2011.

Because the remaining $2.1 billion budget gap would not be closed until FY2012, the State should continue to spend at FY2007 levels until the backlog of bills associated with the deficit are paid off. All other new revenue in FY2012 and beyond will be needed to make the required statutory pension contribution, which will increase in future years.


 * Here is the press release and the full report (104 pages):**

// I found it interesting Singapore was being compared to the most based on international education comparisons, haven't heard much about what's going on there. I would be interested to see more data on schools in Asia where students attend year round, with longer hours, as well as the impact a communist state has on national education policy and implementation. Throughout the report I noticed short answer questions on standardized tests are going down, I have read this in teh news as well, mainly due to budget constraints. Written portiuons of the exams cannot be scored by computers, thus must be alot more expensive to grade. It is interesting that such huge weight is given to these standardized tests, in ever increasing ways - teacher evalution - but when policy makers need to save some cash they will cut a part of the system they hold so dearly. I also pondered why Illinois did not have a rating system for its schools - I know Chicago has been refining there "school report cards" but I figured these were based on AYP. Considering AYP consists of many factors, what other factors should schools be rated on, and should they be rated at all, or scores released to the public. // // The grade of D+ for the teaching profession definitely surprised me, but what accounts for this grade is less exact then the grade it gives. I was surprised to see things like student teaching not being required or other clinical experiences, as well as no subject-pedagogy tests as alarming. No ban or cap on out of field teachers seems liek a bad idea, giving administrators free rein to move around staff filling positions they arent qualified for. An ever looming question in education today is how do you implement accountability in our profession, stadardized test scores seem to be the new fad. How do you incentivize teachers? merit pay? Increased school funding programs like race to the top? Either of these seem to significantly impact teacher performance and thus student learning...Building and supporting capacity held alot of No's which I think is one of teh most important factors in improving teaching performance and supporting staff. Implementation state wide of mentoring programs alone would increase collaboration and rookie teacher effectiveness. Class size limits, student to teacher ratios, and basic things liek building maintenance I believe are huge problems in Chicago, as well as the state that need to be focused on. Overall Illinois looked fairly average among all the states scoring a C and being the majority of the time statistically on average, not the best and not the worst. I feel it is important to read through a report like this and base it on the specific questions it asks, judging specifically at what its targeting, and using the data to improve our system. This report does highlight for Illinois alot of areas that could be improved, sighting specific programs we need to implement, which I believe could be implemented one step at a time, towards a more broader goal of improving our education system. -Larry //