Dennis Byrne reports on Rahm Emanuel's fake math:
To rescue his city from utter financial collapse, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is resurrecting an old whine: You suburban and downstate folks are to blame, and now you have to fix it.
There's more:
CPS already gets proportionately more state aid than other schools. According to the conservative Illinois Policy Institute, Chicago benefits from the way the state calculates how much financial aid it gives to CPS. Those technical and confusing formulas take into account such factors as poverty rate, attendance, special education and property tax levels.
All of those factors work in Chicago's favor, said Ted Dabrowski, the institute's vice president of policy. The whole state-funding scheme, he added, is "outdated, convoluted and political." And certainly not as easily described in a sound bite as Emanuel's fairness doctrine.
Dabrowski said in his study, "The current narrative is that historically CPS didn't have enough money to fund both teacher pensions and the classroom — that it had no choice but to shortchange pensions."
Another great one from Dennis Byrne.
