Progress Illinois

Earlier this week, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Kevin McDermott devoted a blog post to the latest Illinois Policy Institute memo on disparities between private sector and public sector pay.  He specifically zeroed in on the comparison of prison barbers (who make an average salary of $66,000) with normal barbers (who make around $27,000, on average) and even quoted the Institute's executive vice-president suggesting ways to bring the state's barber costs down.

McDermott described the Institute as "testing the theory that the government is more wasteful (or, put another way, more generous) than private businesses."  But he failed to note -- in clear, obvious language -- that the conservative think tank's method was wholly unscientific.  Indeed, in our response to their report, we just as easily found occupations in which the state pays less than the private sector. 

Any discussion of this nuanced issued should note the comprehensive and rigorous study recently conducted at the University of Wisconsin which found that local and state employees often make 15 percent less than their private sector counterparts.  

After months of silence on the issue, it was encouraging to see several Chicago aldermen voice anger in May over the Daley administration's opaque and inequitable use of TIF "porting," in which revenue captured in one tax increment financing district is transferred to projects in an adjacent district. In this week's issue of The Reader, Ben Joravsky describes the 10-member dissent as a "mini-revolt." He also explained why using TIF money for school construction distorts the original intention of the practice:

While fixing or building schools doesn't sound like such a poor use of public money, TIF isn't really intended to pay for projects like schools. In fact, while legal, using TIF to build schools is antithetical to the program. TIF projects are supposed to pay for themselves by subsidizing new development that will fill the coffers with more property taxes. Public schools don't pay property taxes. (And while some schools may help lift surrounding property values, others have been shown to push them lower.)

Is a "merit pay" pilot program working in Chicago's schools? Not according to a new report released by Mathematica Policy Research. The education policy watchdog studied results from the first two years of the city's Teacher Advancement Program (TAP), designed jointly by district officials (including Arne Duncan) and the Chicago Teacher's Union. As the Tribune reported, "selected schools are performing no differently than schools that did not implement the program"

Advocates of merit pay say two years is not nearly enough time to judge the efficacy of the approach. Meanwhile, other Chicago bloggers have raised some very valid concerns about the pilot program's design: it spread bonuses to administrators and staff as well as teachers; it paid out less than was originally promised; and it doled out bonuses on a school-wide basis because the link between student-growth data and individual teachers was difficult to obtain. These issues aren't necessarily unique to Chicago's program, however. New York City, Memphis, and other districts have all operated school-wide bonus systems. Further, it is very difficult to generate data linking individual teachers to individual students scores, given all of the factors (both in and outside the classroom) that contribute to a student's success.

That's not to say Chicago's pilot program should be abandoned. But it definitely needs to be reassessed.  For more on the skepticism surrounding "merit pay" programs, check out this January article by Elaine McArdle.