A great series finished last month on the Chicago Public Schools district’s engagement in complex bond deals, the lack of public oversight, and the high costs of many of those deals. I’ve been researching interest rate swaps for over a year, and I’m impressed with the thoroughness of the reporting here. THIS is why we…
Tag: education
Fat-Cat Administrators at the Top 25 – NYTimes.com
It’s not hard to find examples of the uneven implementation and consequences of austerity. A great study out last week by the Institute of Policy Studies looks at several indicators at public universities and finds some interesting correlations. The student debt crisis is worse at state schools with the highest-paid presidents. The sharpest rise in…
In History Departments, It’s Up With Capitalism – NYTimes.com
Yesterday I met a doctoral student at Berkeley studying the “history of capitalism” in the history department (in six years, the first history student I’ve crossed paths with, oddly enough). And then this morning I stumble on this piece from last year: In History Departments, It’s Up With Capitalism – NYTimes.com. (linked from an article…
The death of a school district
Heartbreaking story of a Michigan school district that elected to literally shut its doors last week in response to a budget crisis. Teachers voted to work for free (after also voting for four years in a row to freeze their salaries and reduce their numbers by 50%), but the school has locked the doors. In…
Let the austerity begin
One of the first lines of cuts at the bottom of the “fiscal cliff” (or one of the first victims of the austerity bomb) will be local public education. Schools that serve poor and English-language learning children receive more federal money, so will be hit the hardest. The cuts would follow efforts in many school…