catalyst-chicago.org

CEO Ron Huberman said Wednesday that he will not publicly release
racial and socio-economic data on the students who received offers to
attend the coveted selective enrollment high schools.

But, after his own review of the information, he is adding 25 seats to
each of the freshman classes of Whitney Young, Jones, Walter Payton and
Northside Prep and reserving them for students from the city’s worst
elementary schools, all of which serve only black, Latino and poor
students. These four high schools are the best ones in the district.

Last week, CEO Ron Huberman started his doomsday budget press conference by saying, “You are going to hear me talk a lot about the pension.”

Pension costs have long been an issue for CPS, and costs have now skyrocketed to $587 million—three times what the district was required to pay into the teacher’s pension fund just three years ago.

As a quick fix, Huberman hopes to convince lawmakers to simply reduce Chicago’s additional payment by about $300 million, which would cut the nearly $1 billion deficit by about a third.

But Laurence Msall of the Civic Federation says Huberman is proposing a “slippery slope” for an already shortchanged pension system. Even under current requirements, he notes, the fund won’t be funded at the required 90 percent level for another 35 years.