“The estate tax is the only tax in Illinois paid by the wealthy but not by low- and moderate-income working families,” according to an April 23 press release from the Chicago-based Center for Tax and Budget Accountability. “Only the wealthiest 2% of Illinois estates, those with an average value of more than $2 million, paid any state or Federal estate taxes in 1999.” CTBA’s conclusion: even if the feds phase out this so-called “death tax,” Illinois should keep it.
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South vs. north. Mystery writer and University of Chicago alum Sara Paretsky, on her semester as a visiting professor there (University of Chicago Chronicle, April 17): “The students are a very widely and deeply reading group of young people. How seriously they read for their own interest really impressed me. Northwestern, the other place I taught, the students there were prepared in terms of basic writing skills but didn’t read the way the kids here did. Of course a lot of the kids there came out of the journalism school, so that may account for it, but they just weren’t readers the way these kids were.”
“Many failed and forgotten innovations continue to live in schools where they were introduced with great fanfare and subsequently forgotten,” education researcher Diane Ravitch told the Innovations in Education conference April 15 (education news.org). “I have often heard it said that some schools are like archeological digs; one can dig down and find layer after layer of school reforms and obsolete programs. New ones get added, but old ones do not get subtracted.”
