15 seconds

It took only 15 seconds last week for Gov. J.B. Pritzker to reveal what’s so wrong with his brand of leadership, where he refuses to acknowledge Illinois’ many problems and, instead, prefers to deflect and name call when someone else draws attention to those problems.

Those few seconds came during the governor’s first debate against challenger Darren Bailey. Bailey brought up a recent hard-hitting Wall Street Journal editorial that reported, among other failures, that just 2 percent of Decatur Public School’s black 3rd-graders could read at grade level in 2019, while nearly 100 percent of the district’s teachers were evaluated as proficient or excellent.

Most of the data came directly from Wirepoints’ recent report: https://wirepoints.org/poor-student-achievement-and-near-zero-accountability-an-indictment-of-illinois-public-education-system-wirepoints-special-report/

When confronted with those facts during the debate, all Pritzker could do was declare that Wirepoints research was “wrong” and call us his favorite phrase: “carnival barkers.”

But our education research wasn’t wrong. All our data came directly from the Illinois State Board of Education – part of Pritzker’s own administration.

You can check out the WSJ piece “Illinois’ Shocking Report Card: The Land of Lincoln is failing its children and covering it up" here: https://wirepoints.org/wirepoints-in-the-wsj-illinois-shocking-report-card-the-land-of-lincoln-is-failing-its-children-and-covering-it-up/