WBEZ | M(apps) & Data

New flag program to promote air quality in the Chicago area

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 16:35:00 -0500

An airplane pulled out of Midway and over the Chicago Academy for Global Citizenship while a group of kids raised a yellow flag Tuesday to signify that the air is moderately clean, but not perfect. The flag-raising signaled the launch of a program created by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) and Illinois Partners for Clean Air to involve school kids in pollution monitoring.

The IEPA already monitors and color-codes a daily air quality index for the greater Chicago area, but IEPA director Lisa Bonnett says she wants to involve the public more closely in air quality monitoring.

“All of us can do our part,” Bonnett said, “and that’s how you really get those improvements to air quality.”

Although air pollution in the Chicago area has decreased in recent decades, Cook County this year got a failing grade for air quality from the American Lung Association. Meanwhile, says Bonnett, standards for air pollutants have been lowered as regulators discover or confirm new health risks from poor air quality.

Weather is the primary cause of daily fluctuations in air quality; hot, stagnant summer days mean Chicago’s smog sticks around in the area, and the direction of the wind or a storm can also lead to higher-air pollution days.

“The weather’s been a challenge over the last few years,” said Bonnett, referring to drought, flooding and heat waves that have all stricken the region lately.

IEPA says Chicagoans can contribute to cleaner air over the long term by taking public transportation and switching to energy-efficient lighting and appliance options. And the USEPA is taking public comments on a new proposed regulation for vehicle emissions that would hold the whole country to a much tighter standard beginning in 2017.

For now, any school in the greater Chicago area can request air quality flags.

Lewis Wallace is a Pritzker Journalism Fellow at WBEZ. Follow him @lewispants.

Map of commercial and industrial air pollution sources

A USEPA map provides data from 2008 on yearly emissions of six key pollutants from major contributors like landfills, airports and manufacturing plants. Find out more about air pollution in your area on USEPA's website.

How Argonne is using supercomputer Mira to crunch mega-sized data to create visualizations from the formation of galaxies to aneurysms

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:48:00 -0500

One of the participants to Chicago's portion of Big Data Week was the Argonne National Laboratory, which is utilizing the world's 4th fastest computer to create data visualizations that can show a brain aneurysm or the formation of the universe itself.

With new garbage grid, Mayor Emanuel trashes symbol of Machine power

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 06:50:00 -0500

Old grid New Grid

Dual maps code via @GISDoctor

Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel killed the last of the Democratic Machine last week.

Well, not quite.

The finalization of Chicago’s new Grid Garbage Transition marked a dramatic change to the city’s refuse collection grid. Its workings were left largely unchanged in the past 100 years.

That system has strong and storied ties to Chicago’s Democratic Machine, which used city services as political levers to curry favor with voters — and as a vehicle to dole out patronage jobs.

“Adopting the grid garbage collection system allows us to replace an outdated method that started when garbage was still collected by horse and buggy and divert personnel resources to support the citywide expansion of recycling,” Emanuel said in a statement last week.

Chicago’s garbage collection was based on the boundaries of the city’s 50 wards, the recent re-map of which was the subject of controversy and a federal lawsuit.

While ward boundaries zig-zag across much of the city’s geography, the daily garbage routes put even the most gerrymandered territories to shame, resulting in a kaleidoscope of pickups, rarely viewed by the public.

It’s those convoluted routes that Emanuel says costs the taxpayers $18 million in labor and fuel.

According to the mayor’s office, by moving to a grid garbage collection system, “the Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation will reduce its average daily refuse collection truck deployment from nearly 360 trucks to less than 320 trucks each day, while using fewer crews and fuel.”

Garbage collectors and garbage truck drivers have largely been union workers, but the status quo of sanitation services has evolved throughout the years, especially in Chicago.

“In the old days, when I was alderman, we still had 50-gallon drums,” said Dick Simpson, a former alderman and current University of Illinois-Chicago professor.

Simpson served as alderman for the 44th ward from 1971-1979. He said the office would get complaints if garbage wasn’t picked up or if there were special pickup needs such as mattresses.

And he said good garbage collection was good politics.

“Mostly it was used to make the voters happy and to get the voters to vote for you,” he said.

Simpson said addressing other city services such as tree-trimming, fixing curbs and street repair often went a long way with voters too.

When Chicago’s Democratic Machine was at its zenith, party bosses, committeemen and precinct captains utilized the ward-controlled distribution of city services to give priority to those loyal to the party. And since many services were under the control of an alderman, it cleared the way for patronage jobs.

Simpson said the patronage system still hasn’t died out, but it’s been cut back.

“Under the Shakman cases, there were 20,000 patronage workers,” he said.

“Under the Sorich trial, the clout list of people seeking patronage appointments under Richard M. Daley were 5,000,” Simpson said, referring to the conviction of Robert A. Sorich, a former patronage chief of Daley’s.

That trial was sparked by an infamous Sun-Times investigation into Chicago’s hired truck program. It was found to have mob ties and employ deadbeat contract workers.

“Is everyone on a garbage truck a patronage worker? Not necessarily, but quite a few were and quite a few are,” Simpson said.

Simpson said that at one time, there was one driver and three loaders for each garbage truck. One was supposed to be sweep the alleys. With supervisors involved, there could be as many as five people for each garbage truck.

But as truck designs and garbage cans changed, so did the need for manpower.

The transition to the standard rubberized plastic bins began in the early ‘80s. Modern garbage trucks can clasp onto the 96-gallon bins for automatic loading. It allowed for one laborer to be dropped from each truck crew.

Before the plastic bins, larger crews were needed because of the hodge podge of receptacles used by residents was inconsistent — and messy. And before that, well, as Emanuel said: it was collected by horse and buggy. And that was only for residents in nice neighborhoods. Many Chicagoans did not even have the luxury of garbage cans and relied on dumps scattered across the city.

The creation of Chicago’s garbage grid did not fully take shape until the turn of the 20th century. Around that time, cities across the U.S. were dealing with increasing household and industrial waste, sometimes including coal ash and dead animals.

A report made to City Council in 1905 by the commissioner of public works sought to address serious issues with garbage at the time.

The commissioner was none other than Joseph M. Patterson, a storied Chicagoan, who went on to found the New York Daily News. He was also grandson to Chicago Tribune founder Joseph Medill.

Patterson was blunt in his report:

“Those who have interested themselves in the problem of garbage disposal in Chicago are agreed on this proposition: The dumps must go. Dumps poison the air for miles around; and if ground made by dumping is dug up years afterwards it is found still putrid. Dumping is a barbarous anachronism for a twentieth century city.”

The dumps were littered all over the city, many amid residential areas.

Patterson documented how New York, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh dealt with municipal trash. He recommended the council adopt the method of “reduction,” which involved pressing liquid out of solid trash to make it better suited for burning or dumping.

While a 2011 Wall Street Journal article points out that Chicago currently uses three workers per garbage truck, the 1905 report called for a garbage teams of up to five workers per wagon. Each used about four horses. The report, with entries by the Assistant Superintendent of Streets, indicated that a typical team averaged two loads per day, with a ward employing between 8 and 19 garbage teams.

By 1914, a similar report indicated that burning trash was more commonplace and newer methods of transportation such as street cars were used to transport ashes. By this time, waste management began adopting barges and transfer stations to move garbage to a centralized location away from densely populated areas.

But even as new technology and transportation options took root, management was still handled by ward offices.

As the city's population grew in the early half of the 20th century, so too did its political apparatus, with European ethnic groups settling into defined enclaves.

Ethnic identity was a major part of Machine politics, which sometimes capitalized on poor English skills of immigrants to function as a middleman between communities and the government. Those service jobs were often taken care of by precinct captains.

In Chicago, each ward elects a party committeeman, who would recruit precinct captains charged with getting out the vote.

A survey, published in the 1937 study by Harold Gosnell titled Machine Politics: Chicago Model outlined services rendered by captains from 1928-1936. Among the services rendered were brokerage for streets and alleys, as well as providing legal aid, help with weddings, providing coal and handing out Christmas baskets.

By this time, concrete structures began to pop up in the alleys of Chicago. The structures are still visible on many Chicago homes, with most forgetting their original purpose.

These were generally used as trash receptacles, and up until the ‘70s were in use by many residents to burn garbage and leaves.

As the concrete receptacles fell out of use, residents switched to steel garbage cans.

Tim Samuelson is a cultural historian for Chicago’s Department of Cultural Affairs.

“Years ago in many neighborhoods, you requested a new garbage can from the alderman or the neighborhood Streets and Sanitation office. It was typically a recycled oil drum - sometimes repainted and stenciled with the politician's name on it,” he said.

Then a shift to the plastic carts began in the 1980s, under the watch of Mayor Harold Washington. He began to more aggressively roll out and replace the city’s steel cans in 1985, according to a report by the city’s Department of Planning issued that year.

“When there was the change to uniform plastic carts, many local politicians were unhappy that this ages-old tradition of providing a garbage can to constituents was over,” Samuelson said.

That however, still did not stop some politicians from playing favorites, with some homeowners managing to secure multiple bins for for their homes throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s.

Now, all that seems to have changed, with even aldermen acknowledging that it makes more sense for garbage to be handled by the city.

“As a former Chicago Department of Streets and Sanitation ward superintendent, I have first-hand knowledge of the city’s refuse operations and of some of the unique challenges each community can present,” said Ald. Michelle Harris (8th). “I’m pleased the department has developed a thoughtful system that meet the needs of residents while making smarter use of our resources.”

The sentiment was echoed by fellow Alderman Anthony Beale of the 9th ward.

“The ward-based refuse collection system is outdated and inefficient,” Beale said. “By transitioning to the grid system we can eliminate waste and redirect those valuable resources to support other service areas.”

While it remains to be seen how much the city will save off the new grid, much of the city’s attention has been focused on Chicago’s long-delayed recycling program, which floundered under Daley’s administration with the now defunct blue-bag system.

But one thing's for sure: ward-based garbage in Chicago has been trashed.

Elliott Ramos is a data reporter and web producer for WBEZ. Follow him at @ChicagoEl

Documents

1905 Report to the City Council on Garbage Collection and Disposal by Chicago Public Media

1914 Report of the City Waste Commission of the City of Chicago by Chicago Public Media

1985 Report from Chicago's Department of Planning

City tech wonks add toys to Emanuel’s utility belt

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:33:00 -0500

Chicago and Google increasingly have something in common. It’s not that the two share equal prowess in search engine design, or that they outdo one another in swapping cute logos on their core websites. No, the similarity is more philosophical, and it has to do with how they use data.

The city’s archiving and storing data at a breakneck pace and utilizing mapping software to tie disparate city records into new applications. Like Google, which seeks to change how we make personal decisions, the city’s tech trust is seeking to change how officials govern Chicago.

Brett Goldstein, the chief data officer for Chicago’s Department of Innovation and Technology, spoke at the kick-off event for the Urban Sciences Research Coordination Network. This new group includes the city of Chicago, the University of Chicago, the Urban Center for Computation and Data, the Computation Institute and others who seek to use “Big Data” to address social problems ranging from juvenile corrections to energy-use and employment.

Held in February at the hall at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the room was packed with tables of data analysts, urban planners, sociologists and developers who sought to use city data to decrypt social problems.

While there, Goldstein touted several projects his department has initiated. Many were in testing stages, amounting to Chicago’s own version of Google Labs.

Within the the walls of the Daley Center, Goldstein’s department creates tools, utilizing the mountains of data to inform city managers about the inner workings of the city — sometimes in real time.

The project names are whimsical, but their use could very well alter the way city departments respond with services, perhaps pre-emptively.

Among the tools: Project Unicorn, which was recently renamed Chirp, on a submission to the Knight News Challenge. The city seeks to use that program “to act on city service issues identified via social media — eliminating the need to visit City Hall, call 311, or download special applications,” according to the project submission.

The tool, currently being tested by Goldstein’s department, would allow the city to monitor location-based Tweets and then respond to requests such as street-light outages or graffiti removal.

The city’s also testing Project Falcon, renamed on another submission to the Knight News Challenge as Scout.

About the grant submission, Goldstein said Scout would “aggregate data sources based on location ... Applications built using this interface will enable residents to interact with data in a way that’s structured around their day-to-day lives.”

This is above and beyond the SmartData Platform, a separate program developed with funds from the Bloomberg Mayors’ Challenge, according to a spokesperson from Goldstein’s department. The platform’s purpose is allow City Hall to analyze millions of lines of data in real-time and, according to the city, make “smarter, earlier decisions to address a wide range of urban challenges.” The city won $1-million prize from Bloomberg Philanthropies to spend on the project.

Another effort aims to better visualize data using unconventional techniques. This one, dubbed Project Batman, will utilize an immersive, multi-display system called “The Cave.”

The Cave, housed at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has already been used by researchers to visualize environments or biological models.

The display is reminiscent of the computer used by Tom Cruise’s character Chief John Anderton in the 2002 movie Minority Report. That movie is often cited for its near prescience in predicting the touch-and-swipe interfaces common to iPhones and iPads.

Going on the ‘Grid’

Goldstein cited a need for city officials to get information on an area for planning purposes — or need a handle on what’s happening in real time such as updates during the NATO protests.

Goldstein said he reached out to a group with experience in handling large, location-based databases: Foursquare.

Foursquare handles massive archives of location-based data when its users check in to venues. The system that powers it, MongoDB, is used by the likes of Craigslist and bit.ly to maintain “scaleable” databases.

After some creative programming, Goldstein created an in-house system that would tie together incoming information to a defined area like a street block or neighborhood. The resulting project was dubbed: WindyGrid.

“It tells me what is happening now,” Goldstein explained. “I create my polygon over an area and say this is what I want to know about this point in time going forward. So, say I want to watch 911 priority-1 calls and Tweets ... If [you] were to call to 911, it would should up [on the grid] within 30 seconds.

“The design of WindyGrid is to allow you to have historical deep dive. So when the COO or chief of staff tells you that we have something popping off at 121 N. LaSalle, here’s a history. It’s there.”

The Department of Innovation and Technology did not comment on which city departments, if any, were currently using WindyGrid.

“You can create conditions to watch, and what we’re rolling out now is automatic notifications,” Goldstein said.

He cited an example of power lines being downed, which a 911 call would result in a cop staying on the scene until staff from the department of streets and sanitation arrive.

“Now, the system accelerates information distribution. This is not complicated. This is just thinking outside of the box.”

Follow Elliott Ramos on Twitter @ChicagoEl email:eramos@wbez.org.

The ‘hoodies’, the ‘suits’ and others behind Chicago Government 2.0

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 17:23:00 -0500

If you’re the type bent toward more sunlight on governmental decision-making, you’ve probably been smiling a bit lately.

Over the past two years, the city’s released names of lobbyists, government contracts and receipts by the millions.

If you’re so inclined, you can now peer into the inner-workings of government exchanges, including gifts, which would be as seemingly insignificant as cookies or bath salts. Or, you can peruse the following: food inspections, overtime expenditures, salaries of every city employee, building permits, building violations, and ridership numbers for trains and buses, among other things.

And headlines confirm the trend’s continuing. Last month, Chicago won a $1-million prize from Bloomberg Philanthropies to help build a “real-time analytics platform.”

According to a statement released by the city, the project will create the “SmartData Platform,” a tool that aims to provide City Hall the ability to analyze millions of lines of data in real-time, to make “smarter, earlier decisions to address a wide range of urban challenges.”

All this indicates a city deepening its commitment to what’s called “Big Data,” as well as another term that’s bandied about: Gov. 2.0.

The movement’s got friends in Mayor Rahm Emanuel and some aldermen, but — as with nearly all Chicago political trends — there are community groups pushing the agenda, too. And you can meet these folks yourself, at least if you don’t mind sitting through tech banter and jazzed-up Power Point slides.

The ‘hoodies’ in Chicago’s volunteer data army

At the close of a recent event known as a “hack night,” someone asked Tom Schenk “Who’s deciding how to spend the million?”

Schenk’s in as good a position as anyone to say who should spend the $1 million Bloomberg Philanthropies purse, but as director of analytics for Chicago Department of Technology and Innovation, he came to this coders’ meet-up to hear suggestions.

This is the kind of informal work that goes on at weekly hack nights hosted by Open City, a group of volunteers that creates apps with publicly accessible data to “improve transparency and citizen understanding of our government,” according to the group’s website. This particular event, held on the 12th floor of the city’s Merchandise Mart building, doubled as a potluck, so Schenk could talk directly to coders, hackers and civic groups over wine and beer — and the occasional dip of pita into hummus.

Other attendees included: urban planners, computer scientists, web developers, transportation experts, economists, Ph.D. students, analysts, physicists, engineers, musicians and health-care workers. An astronomer from the Adler Planetarium even came by —as did reps from the Illinois Department of Transportation and the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Rayid Ghani, the chief data scientist for President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign presented how he analyzed the networks and interactions between the president’s supporters.

Open City sets the stage for these events, and then allows participants to chat each other up and present updates on new data sources, digital maps or Web applications.

Schenk’s presence reveals how close the ties are between City Hall and the local open government movement; before he was hired by the city, Schenk was a regular hack night attendee himself. And identifying talent — for City Hall and beyond — is still a priority.

“Who else do we need to be able to change Chicago that is not in this room?” he asked people. “What other skill? Who else?”

Walking through the hack night crowd, you could start putting faces to some of the digitally-driven trends in Chicago government; some of these folks — sometimes collectively, sometimes on their own — built software that made it easy to look up lobbyists or interpret zoning maps. Those apps were made possible by Open City’s Paul Baker, Derek Eder, Chad Pry Nick Rougeux and Juan-Pablo Velez.

Eder, Velez and University of Chicago student Forest Gregg also built a site that allows parents to determine which school they should register a child.

Hack night attendee Jeanne Marie Olson takes a particular interest in school data. She runs a blog called CPSapples2apples, and (with help from Josh Kalov) she co-developed schoolcuts.org, a website meant to help parents determine if their school was one of the 54 that were recently slated for closure.

Many of these attendees did this work for free.

It’s little wonder, then, that the group followed Schenk closely through the night and laughed after he closed another speaker’s presentation. Projected behind him, a wild-eyed cartoon peered at the crowd and exclaimed ‘RELEASE ALL THE DATA.’

“Chicago has the best, the best, open government community in the world,” Schenk beamed. “There’s no doubt about it, there’s no evidence I’ve seen that says otherwise.”

The “suits” in Chicago’s volunteer data army

The SmartData Platform is just one project initiated by the Department of Innovation and Technology, which was formed after Emanuel issued an executive order mandating city agencies release public records in a manner decided by that department.

Emanuel assigned Brett Goldstein as leader. Before making his way into the mayor’s office, Goldstein had helped ramp up CPD’s electronic records. Before that, he was a street cop. And before that, he was a programmer.

In February, Goldstein addressed an event held at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The hall was filled with a crowd not unlike that of hack night, but with fewer hoodies and more suits-and-ties.

“What we’ve done over the past 20 months is probably turned [the data portal] into the biggest open data program that exists,” Goldstein said.

Goldstein delivered his hour-long speech to a packed crowded, which included analysts, developers, officials, academics and scientists.

He outlined how his office streamlined workflow processes to ease the public’s access to information. At the same time, he said, those efforts made departments’ own communication more efficient.

While open data has increased government transparency, the city’s taking this path for another reason: time and money.

Goldstein touted the city’s use of open-source software, which can be cheaper than high-end business solutions peddled by the likes of IBM and Hewlett Packard. The latter, he said, can run in the millions. Streamlining databases allows city employees to quickly search and cross-check records for day-to-day functions.

Goldstein told the crowd that city departments sometimes request information from other departments, only to experience delays thrown up by nondisclosure agreements, among other things.

“How do we deal with this?” said Goldstein. “I can just release data via the portal. It's then classified as 'public' and it's released.”

This, Goldstein told the crowd, is a “whole different Chicago as it pertains to Daley,” referring to Emanuel’s predecessor.

Compared to the hack night, the SAIC event was very heavy with the suits-and-ties crowd. It served to kick-off the Urban Sciences Research Coordination Network, a group that includes the city of Chicago, the University of Chicago, the Urban Center for Computation and Data, the Computation Institute and others who seek to use Big Data to address social problems ranging from juvenile corrections to energy-use and employment.

“There are some pretty impressive sets in here,” Goldstein said referring to the data portal site. “One of the ones I’m most proud of is the crimes data set.”

The Chicago crime set Goldstein touted was the only known set of records that lists nearly every reported crime in a major U.S. city, going as far back as 2001 until present.

“So far as I know, this is unprecedented,” he said.

Most municipalities, such as New York, recently profiled by the New York Times for its dive into Big Data, release those records one at a time through a PDF file. This basically holds the data in place. In Chicago, data are released in “machine-readable” formats, so websites, mobile apps and other tools can sip from the sources.

Dan O’Neil, executive director of the Smart Chicago Collaborative and a co-founder of the now-shuttered EveryBlock website, praised Chicago’s crime reporting and didn’t mince words when describing New York’s reporting method — something he contended with while at EveryBlock.

“New York is horrible,” O’Neil said. “They get a lot of credit for broken windows and data-oriented policing, but [not] when publishing information.

“They publish by precinct, a PDF of [only] seven different crime types. They overwrite the file every week. ...[EveryBlock] was the only canonical source of historical crime information in the city of New York because they overwrote the file with the precinct name.”

(Editors’ note: WBEZ is a media collaborator with the Smart Chicago Collaborative.)

Over the past year Chicago media organizations and researchers used city data to scrutinize violent crime trends and compare them across all sections of the city. The dataset includes crime categorizations, descriptions, dates, times and location coordinates and more, which is a dramatic contrast to that of New York or Los Angeles, which list recent crimes, but not older ones.

Goldstein's department stated that it’s striving to automate the process of issuing records from city agencies via a public data portal.

“We put all the data into one place,” Goldstein said, listing off the methods Chicago employed to fulfill Emanuel's campaign of transparency. “People are surprised when I tell them that the data is not vetted before it goes out the door.”

He got a rise out of the crowd, with an aside: “... And I’m not from Chicago, so I can make these types of jokes. They expect that there's a little dude in the basement of city hall who sits there and checks it line by line and is like, ‘Oh ... we got to redact that one. That’s naughty.’ It isn’t. It’s automated.”

Open Data vs. transparency

City Hall is quick to tout the benefits of a new, data-driven approach to governance. The “City that Works,” as they say, can work even better — and good data will be the lynchpin.

In a recent statement, a spokesperson for the Department of Innovation and Technology wrote, “Data is an integral piece to two priorities outlined by Mayor Emanuel since day one: making government more accessible, transparent, and accountable to taxpayers and making government smarter, in how it operates and how it delivers services to residents.”

But Mayor Emanuel has detractors when it comes to the issue. They don’t criticize open data, per se, but they challenge whether the city’s only talking a good game when it comes to “Open Gov” or “Gov 2.0.” The gist is that there’s a difference between a government that uses open data and a government that acts transparently.

Mick Dumke, a senior writer for The Chicago Reader, often uses data in his investigative work. He grabs whatever open data he can, but he’s also had to wrangle information from a clinched fist. In one story, he detailed how hard he worked to follow the trail of whom Mayor Emanuel met with after he arrived at City Hall. Dumke’s often resorted to making requests through the state’s Freedom of Information Act, a route that can be tedious, expensive and unfruitful.

“If you want anything that really zooms in on a particular issue, you have to FOIA , you have to go through the research and development department of the police,” he said referring to the crime dataset.

“As great as it is that the city is doing it [issuing open data] ... It’s a limited snapshot. It doesn’t tell you anything that’s official.”

According to the data portal’s own disclosure, “The Chicago Police Department does not guarantee (either expressed or implied) the accuracy, completeness, timeliness, or correct sequencing of the information and the information should not be used for comparison purposes over time.”

“I think it has incredible limitations,” Dumke said. “Some of the financial stuff they have is helpful, but there’s a lot of lag time and some of the stuff is out of date.”.

The bottom line?

“It is by no means the case we have a completely open government in Chicago,” Dumke said. “We’re not even close.”

Other seasoned journalists and watchdog groups are considering City Hall’s data rhetoric, too.

Andy Shaw, the current Executive Director of the Better Government Association, is a tad more measured, giving high marks on posting of contracts, bidding documents and the like.

“Let’s give Mayor Emanuel a lot of credit for making more government data available than almost any public official in the country,” Shaw said. “He made this a top priority and they have put up millions of documents online which here therefore were unavailable in an easy manner. To that extent, he gets high marks.”

Still, Shaw said, there’s a surprising amount of tech work left to be done on the city’s website and other tools. “It’s fair to say there needs to be an effort to make it [data] easier to find it, even when it’s there,” he said.

But even Shaw says there’s a distinction between access to data and transparency, and it applies to the mayor’s office as much as anywhere else.

“The criticism that still remains about transparency is that we don’t have any way of knowing how decisions are made,” he said. “It’s very hard to figure out what the mayor does on a day to day basis. It takes FOIAs and a lot of time to get his schedule.”

Follow Elliott Ramos on Twitter @ChicagoEl email:eramos@wbez.org.

How much demand is there for Chicago charter schools? No one knows.

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 05:00:00 -0500

Updated 2:30 p.m. with additional data.

Charter schools are expanding in Chicago, even as the district is closing schools due to declining enrollment.

Chicago Public Schools officials explain the seeming contradiction by citing a large demand for charter schools. Charter advocates and even the Chicago Tribune editorial board say 19,000 kids are on charter school waiting lists in the city.

There’s just one problem with that number: it’s not accurate. It significantly overstates demand.

A WBEZ analysis found the 19,000 figure counts applications, not students, meaning if a student applies to four schools, he or she is counted four times. It includes kids who have turned down charter seats and are now enrolled in other schools.

Perhaps the most startling finding is that a significant chunk--about 3,000--are high school dropouts applying for alternative schools. What’s more, saying that 19,000 students are on waiting lists to get into charter schools ignores another figure: there are between 3,000 and 5,000 available seats in charter schools right now, according to charter advocates.

The waiting list number comes from a biennial report compiled by the Illinois State Board of Education in 2012. The figure is roughly calculated from a chart in that ISBE report that compares numbers for how many applications a charter school received with to the number of available seats. The numbers are from 2010-11, the most recent available.

But 19,000 applications is not the same as 19,000 students.

Andrew Broy, the executive director of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools (INCS), is cited as the source for the 19,000 figure in the Tribune’s editorial and also wrote his own opinion piece that ran in Crain’s Chicago Business on March 27.

But that same morning, Broy admitted during a briefing arranged by INCS to give reporters more context on charter school concerns that the waiting list number is off.

“These numbers are not precise and no one has exact numbers and they’re moving all the time,” Broy said.

Waiting lists are not an accurate measure of demand, according to Neil Dorosin, executive director of the Institute for Innovation for Public School Choice, which designs centralized application systems for large urban school districts.

“If a kid’s on a waitlist at your school but they picked it as their eighth choice, to me that’s a meaningless number,” Dorosin said. “Those kids could also be on six other school’s waitlists and they might prefer those other schools.”

Charter waiting lists: even schools don’t know how many kids apply

By state law, charter schools are required to hold a lottery if demand for their school outstrips supply--if there are too many applications, and not enough seats.

Namaste Charter School, an exercise- and nutrition-focused charter in McKinley Park, held its lottery last Thursday. It received 430 applications for 67 available seats, mostly at the kindergarten level.

That sounds like a lot of demand, but Allison Lipsman, Namaste’s development director, said it's not as straightforward as it might seem.

“Parents want to hedge their bets as much as possible,” said Lipsman, adding that many families apply to lots of schools. She said a “decent number” of families turn down their offer from Namaste in favor of one of CPS’s popular gifted or magnet schools.

The operations director at Legacy Charter School, a high-performing, single-campus charter on the city’s West Side, said sometimes families with multiple children turn down an offer because not all their children win seats in the lottery, and it’s logistically difficult for them to have children enrolled in multiple schools.

Because Chicago charters run their lotteries independently and admit students without any oversight from the school district, there is no way for CPS to centrally figure out how many individual students submitted those 19,000 applications.But some charter networks do keep track of unique applicants within the schools they operate.

Urban Prep is one such school, according to Tim King, the network’s executive director. He said 1,294 students submitted 1,797 applications for the 450 seats available this fall in Urban Prep’s three schools.

However, other charter school networks, including the city’s largest, Chicago International Charter School, say they don’t have admissions systems advanced enough to figure out how many actual kids have applied to their schools.

CICS spokeswoman Kate Proto said they received 5,701 applications for 1,922 open seats across 16 schools, leaving 3,779 on waiting lists. Proto said not every student chosen in the lottery accepts a seat at CICS. She estimated that CICS will have to pull 1,700 more kids off the waiting list to fill its empty seats.

There are other indicators demand may not be what advocates claim. For the last two years, Perspectives has leafleted neighborhoods to advertise available space in its five schools right up until the first day of school.

And last September, when CPS students spent seven days out of school due to a teachers strike, INCS, UNO and other charter groups boasted that about one-third of the city’s charters had open seats. Charters remained open because their teachers are not members of the Chicago Teachers Union.

“Just because there’s a sector-wide waitlist, doesn’t mean that every individual school has a waitlist,” Broy said last week. He estimated there are 3,000 to 5,000 openings at charter schools this year.

Parent Diana Juarez has two daughters at Rowe Elementary and said two years ago, she walked right in and signed her kids up.

“Since they were a fairly new school there was still space for kindergarteners. And then there were a few spaces available in first grade, so I was able to immediately apply and put them in.”

Juarez says the charter school has grown more popular, and now holds a lottery.

“I was very, very lucky. Because I have also heard people who have applied to millions of schools and they haven't been able to get into any of them,” she said.

Illinois State Board of Education spokeswoman Mary Fergus said the 19,000 figure taken from its 2012 report should not be misconstrued to mean that 19,000 kids are waiting to get into charters. She said there is no way for the state board to determine waiting list numbers.

99,031 applications for CPS magnet and selective elementary schools in 2013

CPS may not have charter school numbers, but it is able to determine the number of students vying to get into one popular set of schools.

That’s because the central office collects and tracks data on how many unique students apply to its magnet and selective enrollment programs.

Data provided by CPS shows that 13,105 children applied for 1,865 spots in selective enrollment programs this year. Because parents apply to multiple schools, they filed a total of 51,150 applications.

The same data is collected for magnet programs. This year, 13,725 students applied for 3,697 spots in magnet schools; 47,881 total applications were filed. CPS officials said there may be overlap between the two pools of applicants.

The numbers are even higher at the high school level. More than 18,000 students submitted 80,285 applications for spots in the district’s 10 selective enrollment high schools this coming fall.

Dropouts counted in 19,000 figure

Included in the INCS calculation is a group of alternative schools that do not compete for kids in the same way most charters do.

According to the ISBE report, Youth Connections Charter School had 6,889 applications and 3,885 open seats, generating a “waiting list” of 3004 students.

But Sheila Venson, executive director of YCCS, said the alternative schools, which can enroll about 4,000 high-school dropouts at a time, should not be lumped in with other charters when calculating waiting lists.

“I doubt if they’re enrolling kids the way we’re enrolling kids,” said Venson.

In 1997, YCCS was created by consolidating the city’s alternative high schools for dropouts. Demand for these types of schools has been historically high.

Venson said she has no idea where the numbers in the ISBE report came from—or why her schools would be included in the numbers used to prove demand for charter schools. That’s because YCCS has two official enrollment periods—one in September and one in January--and the schools essentially build up their waiting list and “purge” them it at the start of every semester, Venson explained.

A single application?

Though Andrew Broy from the Illinois Network of Charter Schools has insisted that 19,000 children are on waiting lists for Chicago charter schools, he now says he believes the real number is around 65 percent of that. He could not provide any basis for that calculation, other than to say he had done “spot checks with schools.”

He could not explain how any individual campus would be able to determine the number of unique applicants to charter schools system wide.

Broy admits that “no one has exact numbers on this, which are unknowable unless we move toward a single enrollment system.”

CPS had planned to move all high schools to a single enrollment system last fall--regulated by the district--with elementary schools following this year.

But when former schools CEO Jean-Claude Brizard stepped down, the plan was put on hold.

Neil Dorosin of the Institute for Innovation for Public School Choice said single-application systems are better able to gauge school popularity and demand, because every student’s preferences are collected in one place.

Education Reporter Linda Lutton contributed to this report.

Charter school lottery/admissions data (ISBE)
Charter school	Grades served	# of schools	lottery used?	# of apps received for 2010-11	# of students selected for 2010-11	"waitlist" (difference between applications and students selected)
Academy of Global Citizenship	K-3	1	yes	310	22	288
Alain Locke	PK-8	1	yes	474	20	454
Amandla	5,6,7	1	no			0
ACE Tech	9,10,11,12	1	yes	196	150	46
Aspira	6,7,8,9,10,11,12	3	yes	685	435	250
Betty Shabazz	K-12	3	yes	242	150	92
Bronzeville Lighthouse	K-8	1	not reported			0
Catalyst-Circle Rock	K-8	1	yes	471	196	275
Catalyst-Howland	K-8	1	no			0
CICS	K-12	14	yes	2167	967	1200
CMSA	6,7,8,9,10,11,12	1	not reported			0
Chicago Talent	9,10	1	no			0
Chicago Virtual	K-12	1	yes	314	102	212
EPIC	9,10	1	yes	561	150	411
Erie Elementary	K-6	1	yes	102	54	48
Galapagos	K-8	1	yes	380	95	285
Henry Ford Academy	9,10,11	1	yes	573	150	423
KIPP Ascend	K, 5,6,7,8	1	yes	644	24	620
Kwame Nkrumah		1	not reported			0
LEARN	K-8	4	yes	425	288	137
Legacy	PK-7	1	yes	254	168	86
Namaste	K-7	1	yes	368	64	304
Noble	9,10,11,12	10	yes	6304	1428	4876
North Lawndale	9,10,11,12	2	yes	1164	250	914
Passages	PK-7	1	not reported			0
Perspectives	6,7,8,9,10,11,12	5	yes	4956	754	4202
Polaris	K-5	1	yes	166	63	103
Prologue-Johnston	9,10,11,12	1	yes	178	89	89
Providence-Englewood	K-8	1	yes	200	130	70
Rowe Elementary	k-3	1	no			0
UCCS	PK-12	4	yes	1074	411	663
UNO	K-11	9	no*	4565	4565	0
Urban Prep	9,10,11,12	1	yes	324	135	189
Urban Prep - West	9,10	1	not reported			0
Urban Prep - Bronzeville	9	1	yes	281	135	146
YWLCS	7,8,9,10,11,12	1	not reported			0
YCCS	10,11,12	22	yes	6889	3885	3004
TOTAL				34267	14880	19387

*UNO disputed this and said they held a lottery.

SOURCE: Illinois State Board of Education, biennial charter school report, 2010-11 data as reported by individual charter school operators.

Selective Enrollment Elementary School Programs
School Name	Total Applications	Seats Available	"Waitlisted"
Beasley	2171	54	2117
Beaubien	1205	37	1168
Bell	2534	37	2497
Carnegie	840	49	791
Coonley	3032	35	2997
Decatur	3002	79	2923
Edison	4207	37	4170
Greeley	289	44	245
Harlan	356	31	325
Keller	1881	37	1844
Kenwood	962	167	795
Lane	2167	135	2032
Lenart	3082	28	3054
Lincoln	979	32	947
Lindblom	914	198	716
McDade	1842	30	1812
Morgan Park	731	90	641
Nat’l Teachers Academy	832	60	772
Ogden	882	45	837
Orozco	282	30	252
Poe	1647	48	1599
Pritzker	2824	57	2767
Pulaski	183	31	152
Skinner North	3939	69	3870
Skinner West	4746	95	4651
South Loop	1873	36	1837
Taft	1020	140	880
Young	2728	134	2594
TOTAL	51150	1865	49285

SOURCE: Chicago Public Schools, 2012-13 application cycle for Fall 2013 admission.

Elementary School Magnet Programs
School Name	Total Applications	Seats Available	"Waitlisted"
BEASLEY	1204	187	1017
BLACK	1114	70	1044
BURNSIDE	371	132	239
DISNEY	3185	530	2655
DISNEY II	3241	64	3177
DRUMMOND	2763	51	2712
FRANKLIN	2122	43	2079
FRAZIER PROSPECTIVE	506	225	281
GALILEO	1118	69	1049
GALLISTEL	66	20	46
GUNSAULUS	289	80	209
HAWTHORNE	2889	62	2827
INTER-AMERICAN	1461	90	1371
JACKSON, A	3436	58	3378
JENSEN	187	197	0
KERSHAW	138	324	0
LASALLE	3333	64	3269
LASALLE II	1784	85	1699
MAYER	2491	80	2411
MURRAY	2123	61	2062
NEWBERRY	1730	87	1643
OWEN	888	46	842
PERSHING	381	60	321
RANDOLPH	62	155	0
SABIN	243	114	129
SAUCEDO	275	208	67
SHERIDAN	1600	65	1535
STEM	1540	63	1477
STONE	1366	86	1280
SUDER	1827	49	1778
THORP, O	1087	113	974
TURNER-DREW	547	83	464
VANDERPOEL	1417	71	1346
WILDWOOD	1097	5	1092
TOTAL	47,881	3,697	44,473

SOURCE: Chicago Public Schools, 2012-13 application cycle for Fall 2013 admission.

UPDATE: CPS said a number of its neighborhood schools run waitlists throughout the year. The following is a list of schools CPS officials said have accepted more than 100 applications from families outside their attendance boundaries for seats next fall. The district collects these applications centrally and conducts lotteries for open seats after neighborhood students have enrolled.

Neighborhood Schools with 100+ applications
AGASSIZ	CHOPIN	IRVING	PORTAGE PARK
ALCOTT ES	CLISSOLD	JAHN	PRESCOTT
ARIEL	COLUMBUS	JENSEN	PRITZKER
ASHBURN	COONLEY	KELLMAN	PRUSSING
BARNARD	COURTENAY	KELLOGG	PULASKI
BATEMAN	DEVER	KIPLING	RAVENSWOOD
BEAUBIEN	DIEGO	MCDOWELL	RAY
BELDING	DIXON	MCPHERSON	REINBERG
BELMONT-CRAGIN	EARHART	MITCHELL	SABIN
BLAINE	EBINGER	MOUNT GREENWOOD	SAYRE
BOONE	EDGEBROOK	MURPHY	SHOESMITH
BUDLONG	EVERS	NATIONAL TEACHERS	SOLOMON
BURLEY	FARNSWORTH	NETTELHORST	SOUTH LOOP
BURNHAM	GOETHE	NORWOOD PARK	SOUTHSHORE
BURNSIDE	GOUDY	OGDEN	SUTHERLAND
BURR	GREELEY	OGDEN HS	TALCOTT
CAMRAS	HAINES	OWEN	WARD, J
CARNEGIE	HAMILTON	PEIRCE	WATERS
CHAPPELL	HARTE	PETERSON	WOODLAWN
CHASE	HITCH	PIRIE

Becky Vevea is an education reporter for WBEZ. Follow her @WBEZeducation.

Chicago startup sees big energy savings in big data

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 05:00:00 -0500

In the age of big data, it pays — or, in this case, saves — to put your nerdiest foot forward.

Matthew Gee co-founded Chicago startup Effortless Energy, where his business card reads “Chief Nerd.”

“I swim in this stuff,” he says, mocking up a probability distribution on a whiteboard in the company’s offices in Merchandise Mart tech incubator 1871. Gee, a third-year PhD student studying computational public policy at the University of Chicago, started the business in 2012 with a fellow University of Chicago student, Claire Tramm.

They want to be a one-stop shop for residential energy efficiency retrofits. Simple upgrades like air sealing can save American homeowners energy and money — sometimes as much as 50 percent on their energy bills. For low-income residents, who typically pay between one quarter and one third of their income in energy costs, the savings can be powerful. Cumulatively these retrofits could make a serious dent in our carbon footprint; the U.S. residential sector is nearly as large a source of carbon emissions as transportation.

Gee and Tramm think they have an answer for the question that dogs every energy saver who sings the praises of efficiency: If it’s so good, why isn’t everyone doing it?

For many families, it can be difficult to finance an effective retrofit. And in a highly technical market, good information tends to be in even shorter supply. Like Illinois’ own stimulus-funded energy efficiency program, Effortless Energy fills in that gap.

Their product is called a Home Energy Efficiency Service Agreement, and it works like this: The company pays for its customers’ energy audits and certain retrofits, sharing in the energy savings until the investment pays for itself. The customer pays less, even after its monthly installments to Effortless Energy. If Illinois were to adopt an on-bill repayment policy like the one California has, it could streamline this process by combining the two bills.

The default rate for utility bills is under 2 percent, lower than for credit cards or mortgages. Gee said the company estimates 8-9 out of 10 customers will pay back the loans in full.

CEO Claire Tramm conceded their business model might also benefit from a region with higher energy prices, such as California. “But if it can work here,” she joked, “it can work anywhere.”

And they are careful about which homes they target. Roughly 60 percent of Chicago’s housing stock is bungalows. A partnership with DNR Construction, which is well-versed in bungalow renovation, could help them tap into a $230 billion U.S. market, Gee said.

Their proprietary algorithm shares DNA with the code that powers investment banking, but Gee likens it more to retirement savings — they’re in it for the long haul, he says. It works by quantifying the variance in a slew of home energy efficiency metrics, such as a building’s insulation value and draftiness, and optimizes for the best returns. That means they know with what level of certainty any given improvement, such as installing a new heating and ventilation system, will return a certain amount of savings each year.

“We’re viewing each home as part of an investment portfolio,” Gee said. Their system works best in homes with smart meters, thanks to those digital device’s more robust data. Typically energy audits result in a hard-line recommendation: Install a new heating system and save $1,000 per year, for example. But for many customers, Gee said, that implied certainty is hard to believe. Instead Effortless Energy projects a range of savings.

“No one is building uncertainty into energy models, but we need that uncertainty,” Gee said. “When we’re making an investment decision, we’re not just looking at the mean, but the spread.”

Gee’s PhD research uses computational modeling to analyze energy use and consumer behavior, anticipating a day when an integrated smart grid would use big data to optimize energy efficiency nationwide.

Wells Fargo no longer offers its energy efficient mortgages, and "Property Assessed Clean Energy" loans have met the same fate. With traditional catalysts for energy efficiency retrofits on the outs, Effortless Energy hopes to gain a foothold in a massive, still largely untapped market.

They have done 7 or 8 home tests validating their model, and will soon begin a pilot program on 20 homes in Oak Park, opting for the West Side suburb because of its renewable power bonafides. Oak Park became the first municipality in the state to pursue an "all-green" power program that favors wind and solar power, and purchases credits to offset any nonrenewable sources.

Gee may bill himself as Chief Nerd, but he knows it isn’t numbers that ultimately close deals. Energy efficiency, he says, has an emotional appeal: it could save money and energy, but when it saves you from reaching for a winter blanket, the investment has paid off.

App will help parents, kids map routes to new schools

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 05:00:00 -0500

'ATTENDING A NEW SCHOOL COULD BE A DANGEROUS PROSPECT.' As Chicago prepares for its largest-ever round of school closings, Tom Kompare, a member of Chicago's vibrant Open Government Chicago programming movement, has created a new Web application called "Go to School!" -- to help families across Chicago gauge "their travel options." That includes, as he explains in an email to the group, "locations of police stations, fire stations, and hospitals."

He says it started out as a selfish exercise: "I sometimes get to work from home and get to pick up my daughter after school. I need to hop on the L do so, and was wondering when I had to leave in order to get there on time."

The app's up and running now, with maps showing which schools are closing or relocating. By this fall, he expects to add so-called "safe haven" businesses and crossing guard locations. It works on smartphones or desktop browsers. Check it out at cps.go2school.org.

Meanwhile, Kompare is making the source code available here to anyone who wants to adapt it for use by other school districts.

* Student protests escalate, along with fear over violence.
* Chicago putting more cops on foot patrol along dangerous blocks.

Suggestions for this blog? Email anytime.

A MILLIONAIRE AT 17. British teenager Nick D’Aloisio has sold his news-reading app, Summly, to Yahoo for a figure reportedly in the tens of millions of dollars. And how was your Monday?
* Spotify targets Netflix, HBO with streaming video, including original content.
* Facebook finally adds "Reply" option to comments.
* Facebook founder Zuckerberg creates organization to promote immigration reform.
* Mayor Bloomberg seems to suggest Rupert Murdoch stay off Twitter.

'HI, IN THE PAST 2 YEARS, YOU HAVE ALLOWED ME TO KILL 70,000 PEOPLE.' The Onion makes fun of Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad. Or is it making fun of everyone else?
* UN pulls staff out of Syria because of deteriorating conditions.

NFLer OUT OF THE CLOSET? CBS Sports reports a current NFL player is considering coming out publicly. His main concern, the report says, is that he'll be in jeopardy from homophobic fans.

ANNOUNCEMENTS.
* Get this blog by email, free. Sign up here.
* Follow us on Twitter: @WBEZ and @Meyerson.
* Looking for the most recent WBEZ Meyerson News Quiz? Here you go.

Chicago-area population grows at snail’s pace

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 07:15:00 -0500

The Chicago region has the slowest population growth of the nation’s 10 biggest metro areas, according to estimates released Thursday by the U.S. Census Bureau.

By last July, the population of the region’s 14 counties had edged up to 9.52 million — about 0.28 percent more than a year earlier.

“We’re a big exporter of population,” Chicago-based demographer Rob Paral said. “The only thing that offsets it is immigration. Indeed, if the economy spurred even more native-born people to leave the area, it would take [the] flat growth into negative territory.”

As defined by the bureau, the region includes the Illinois counties of Cook, DeKalb, DuPage, Grundy, Kane, Kendall, Lake, McHenry and Will; the Indiana counties of Jasper, Lake, Newton and Porter; and the Wisconsin county of Kenosha.

Most of those counties hovered slightly above zero population growth for a second consecutive year. The number of Cook County residents increased by 0.33 percent to 5.23 million.

Two counties in the region actually lost residents. The Indiana counties of Lake and Newton saw population drops of, respectively, 0.31 percent and 0.62 percent.

Kendall County led the region with a population increase of 1.19 percent — a far cry from that county’s double-digit growth as recently as 2007.

Some distant suburbs that were counting on fast growth have taken desperate steps. Yorkville, a Kendall County city 50 miles southwest of Chicago, on Tuesday extended an offer of $10,000 to anyone who buys a new single-family home there.

Lynn Dubajic, executive director of the Yorkville Economic Development Corporation, calls the program a success. “We’ve done nearly 60 permits since its inception about 14 months ago,” she said.

But some experts warn that exurban towns won’t attract hordes again unless gas prices drop. As for the Chicago region as a whole, they say quicker population growth would depend largely on jobs.

Follow Chip Mitchell on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

NOTES: These charts stem from WBEZ analysis of U.S. Census Bureau intercensal estimates for July 1 of each year. The 2000 and 2010 estimates reflect bureau adjustments based on the decennial census. Those adjustments distorted the Chart 2 visualization for 2010. Chart 3, therefore, replaces each 2010 estimate with an average (2009 estimate plus 2011 estimate, divided by two). Chart 4 displays metropolitan statistical areas in order of their population growth rate.

Parents put off retirement to pay for kids' college

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 15:51:00 -0500

Patty Halajian is a seamstress in Lake Zurich, Ill. Mostly she sews costumes for local theater shows. She’s never been rich, but always made ends meet.

Halajian has two daughters. Her husband died of a heart attack right before their oldest daughter graduated high school. When it came time to pick a college, her daughter was still mourning. So when she got in to Butler university, everyone was relieved to have some good news.

But her daughter's student loans couldn’t cover the cost. So Halajian borrowed $14,000.

“I mean you’ve nurtured them their whole life," Halajian said. "They get to the goal line it’s finally they are going to graduate from H.S. and go to a great college. And you know if you do this for them they are going to have a great life. You do it. You just do it.”

The loan Halajian took out is called a PLUS loan. Nearly a million parents took out these loans last year. On average, they borrowed $12,000.

The loan is federally distributed, but has higher interest than a student loan: 7.9 percent.

Parents can borrow an enormous amount of money--up to the full amount of tuition--with no regard to for income or other debts. So it’s easy to get in over your head.

Often these decisions are the last hoop to jump through to get to college. The decision is fast. And often no one is there to explain the consequences.

“I didn’t understand it all," Halajian said. "I was adrift at sea.”

Jason Delisle is the director of the Federal Education Budget Project, a non-partisan organization that provides research on education spending.

“I call it predatory lending," Delisle said. "You got someone in a vulnerable situation. They don’t want to say no. You just sign on the dotted line"

PLUS loans were put in place to help poor and working class kids go to college. Student aid advocates have pushed for a long time to make loans simpler and easier to get. But now advocates say these PLUS loans may be hurting the people they intended to help.

“These are essentially sub prime loans," Delisle said. "Only it’s not the government that’s being predatory, it’s the institution of higher learning."

AARP recently examined data on people between age 50 and 65. They don’t know exactly how many of them had PLUS loans, but one in 10 still had some sort of education debt. The average amount was just over $28,000.

That education debt is nearly impossible to erase through bankruptcy, and can be garnished from social security payments. PLUS loans can't be turned over to the student, making a parent responsible until it's paid off.

That’s forcing some parents like Halijian to put off retirement. She is 60 and still working as a seamstress. She owes $8,000 dollars on a PLUS loan and will likely still be making payments into her 70s or 80s.

“I am just going to sew until I can’t sew anymore,” she said.

She never expects to retire, but Halijian doesn’t regret taking out the loan.

“I’d do it again," she said. "If she needed college I would have walked through fire for her.”

Explore PLUS loans in Illinois
(Data via Chronicle for Higher Education)