“Chicago’s teacher salary schedule makes the city a great place to start teaching but a much less attractive place to stay,” reports Catalyst Chicago (February). “In the six-county metropolitan region, beginning elementary teachers have few better-paying alternatives to Chicago, and the city offers fairly competitive pay for beginning high school teachers. But for seasoned veterans, most teaching jobs in the six-county region pay more than Chicago…. Only 3 percent of the region’s high school teaching jobs have a lower top salary than Chicago.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Department of invisible tax cuts. In 1957 Illinois taxed gas at the rate of 5 cents a gallon. Now the tax is 19.3 cents. This isn’t a tax increase, according to the February issue of “Progress,” newsletter of the Surface Transportation Policy Project. If that 1957 tax had increased at the rate of inflation it would now be 27.1 cents.
Politics: a job for specialists? You bet, says Chicago’s seventh circuit appellate judge Richard Posner in his new book, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy. “A considerable virtue of modern representative democracy is its enabling people to delegate most political responsibility to specialists in politics, leaving the rest of us free to pursue our private interests. Delegation is not abdication. The political process is competitive, like the market….The relation of officials to voters resembles that between sellers and consumers and between corporate managers and shareholders rather than either the relation among the members of a scientific team or the relation between a charismatic religious leader and his flock.”
