In the waning days of the legislative session, legislative leaders are still searching for a grand tax bargain that might involve dramatic reforms to the state's education system.

The education package would disentangle some of the worst parts of collective bargaining agreements by allowing the state...

The cat is out of the bag: legislative leaders in Springfield are readying a mammoth education reform package aimed primarily at curtailing the power of the state's teachers unions, a shocking turn of events in a state with two powerful teachers unions that is still controlled top-to-bottom by...

Last week, I went to a pre-screening of "Waiting for 'Superman' ", the new documentary about urban education by Davis Guggenheim, the Oscar-winning director of "An Inconvenient Truth". As a charter school teacher, and Teach for America corps member to boot, I figured it'd be nearly impossible for me to...

When it comes to education, Illinois voters have a stark choice this November: a Democrat who would fund the schools versus a Republican who would gut them. But despite this enormous gulf, only one of the state's teachers unions has so far stepped up to the plate.

Teachers unions...

Reform-minded Commissioner Forrest Claypool, a Democrat running as an independent for Cook County assessor, scared off any challenges to his nominating positions this week and ensured that he will be able to take on insider Joe Berrios in November.

Who is Joe Berrios? He's the quite literally the...

Any casual newspaper reader has probably noticed that the educational system in Illinois is on the verge of meltdown.

The Illinois state superintendent, Christopher Koch, has been forced to implement a swingeing $300 million budget cut, one that will devastate the state board of education's programs in areas...

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced earlier this week that he would cancel pay hikes for teachers and principals for the next two years. Teachers would still receive their step increases as they ascend the salary ladder, but the entire ladder won't shift up. After all, Bloomberg said,...

The Illinois General Assembly, acting with a speed and purpose unseen since it defenestrated Rod Blagojevich, approved reforms to the state's pension system yesterday that are projected to save the state $100 billion in the coming decades.

But the most consequential portion of the bill in the near...

Chicago Public Schools chief Ron Huberman dropped an anvil on Chicago residents late last week when he announced that the district faces a $975 million deficit next year on a budget of $6.2 billion.

Huberman is as savvy a fiscal manager as one finds in Chicago government, and...

On Tuesday, Illinois submitted its application for the "Race to the Top" competition, a federal initiative designed by Arne Duncan and financed by what could easily be termed a $4.3 billion education slush fund.

When Congress passed the stimulus last spring, it gave the secretary of education some discretionary...

In two weeks, Illinois will mark the 10-year anniversary of Governor George Ryan's decision to halt executions in the state.

Ryan's controversial decision to enact a moratorium on the death penalty briefly put Illinois at the forefront of a national debate about capital punishment, with Amnesty International...

With less than a month to go before Illinois' sleepy gubernatorial primary, Comptroller Dan Hynes has failed to make a strong case for why he'd be better than Pat Quinn, the progressive gadfly turned accidental governor.

Sure, Quinn has been maddeningly indecisive since he took over in January. He's failed...

For some reason, the State of Illinois thinks I'm qualified to teach history.

I didn't major in history, or even political science. Though I did take a couple history courses in college, they had titles like, "The History of International Institutions" and "The Hindu Novel in the 20th Century"...

This weekend I attended a seminar on charter schools given by a school director of a highly-regarded charter school on the East Coast. As many charter leaders do, he compared the role of the charter movement in public education to the role of Federal Express in forcing the U.S. Postal...

Todd Stroger is the most incompetent Chicago politician to hold major office in decades.

In his first year, Stroger devastated the county government's services by closing a 17 percent budget deficit with an across-the-board 17 percent cut, equally applied to the patronage-stacked clerk's office and the critically-important health bureau....

Pity Todd Stroger, the embattled Cook County Board chief who, having served the machine faithfully by protecting its patronage jobs, is now being tossed under the bus as voters turn their ire on tax-happy politicians.

Crain's columnist Greg Hinz reported yesterday that Illinois' powerful House speaker, Michael Madigan, has...

Recently, I gave my 11th grade students an Economist article about how American schoolchildren attend school far less than their counterparts in other countries, both in terms of hours per week and days per year. As the article reported:

[Americans] have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a...

The headlines have not been good of recent for the Chicago Public Schools. In just the past month, the district has faced tough questions about whether clout affected admissions to its selective-enrollment schools and whether teachers have retroactively massaged up student grades to mollify parents and administrators.

But...

The state's 2009 standardized test scores, released by the Illinois State Board of Education last week, showed incremental improvement in ACT scores, the exam given to Illinois high-school juniors.

How incremental were the improvements? This year the composite is score 20.8. Last year it was 20.7. The two...

Last week, Chicago Public Schools chief executive Ron Huberman announced that the school district, the nation's third-largest, wants to slightly increase property taxes to help cover a rising budget deficit for fiscal year 2010. But the real pain, as Huberman hastened to add, will come in 2011, when the red...