Progress Illinois

For the past few years,
Cristina Garcia (pictured right) has hounded officials in Springfield and brought the
campaign for humane immigration reform to the streets of Chicago. Last
week, she took her advocacy to a whole new level. Through a national
program hatched by the ...

The stimulus process has been
justifiably frustrating for Illinois school officials. First they
watched billions in construction money slip away and now come concerns that they might not be able to cash in on the full allocations the U.S. Department of Education is ...

Today the Sargent Shriver
National Center on Poverty Law came out with its annual poverty
scorecard and the Prairie State’s congressional delegation inched up
the charts, ranking 19th in the nation for supporting policies that
reduce poverty (in 2007, our delegation ...

Opponents of Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 initiative have been pointing out
for some time that the rationale for privatizing schools just doesn’t
add up. Schools in gentrifying neighborhoods are repeatedly shut
down -- despite decent performance -- and private companies ...

The Prairie State is poised to
net roughly $3 billion worth of Medicaid relief thanks to the stimulus
package President Obama signed into law yesterday. However, the Illinois government is going to have to change some of its ways in order to hold on to these much-needed ...

With a key ally in the White House and the government ready to move $787 billion out the door, thousands
of union members turned out on Chicago's West Side last night to congratulate President Obama
on the passage of his economic recovery package and remind Congress
that ...

When the CTA, RTA, and Pace all raised fares last fall, making Chicago-area transit one of the most expensive systems in the nation, board members hinted that their agencies weren’t out of the woods, despite the new revenues.

Yesterday, the Tribune’s Jon Hilkevitch ...

They’ve already targeted the
school board and elected officials. Now, teachers, parents, and
progressive education activists fed up with the top-down approach of
Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 initiative are taking their frustration
to private funders who support the plan...

On a trip to Beijing back in August, Mayor Daley raved
about the city’s new state-of-the-art subway system and took note of
how to incorporate some of what he saw into transit upgrades back home
in preparation for Chicago’ 2016 Olympic bid. It looks like he didn’t ...

Thanks to some
forward-thinking public officials and a push by organized labor to save
for a rainy day, Illinois’ unemployment fund is currently flush with cash, as we noted in December. But as commenter Bridget1 mentioned
in response to our original post, employer denials ...