The latest in your series of expos (c)s of Illinois school superintendents’ excessive compensation (“Loophole lest educators collect pension and salary,” Jan. 30) fails to address the root of the problem, the absurd number of tiny school districts indiscriminately setting salary and pension levels for superintendents.
I am a native of the District of Columbia. Metropolitan Washington is somewhat more than half the population of metropolitan Chicago and is statistically the most affluent and best educated metropolis area in the country. This is due in part to a much smaller percentage of Catholic residents — a higher percentage of D.C. area students attend public schools than in Chicago. Among D.C., Maryland and Virginia there are a total of eight school districts. (Also, eight police and fire departments, library and park departments, zoning boards, etc.). In the Chicago area we have hundreds of tiny, mismanaged school boards. Likely, the members of the Tribune editorial board send their children to obsessively exclusionary, publicly funded de facto private schools.
If the Tribune is serious about reform it will use its editorial page to support a state law along these lines: “Every school district in Illinois must be (1) vertically integrated (K-12); (2) contained within one county and consist of contiguous municipalities; and (3) either serve an entire county (regardless of size) or a total population on the date of establishment of 200,000 or more residents.
— Fred and Sam Barder, Chicago
