Although school officials might not consider this story breaking news, I’m happy to report that Illinois lawmakers, including state Sen Andy Manar, Democrat of Bunker Hill, have declared that the state’s funding formula for schools, last revised in 1998, isn’t working anymore, and they want to change it, the Peoria Journal-Star reports.
“The state has changed dramatically in 17 years,” the paper quoted Mr Manar as saying. “The circumstances that face public education in Illinois have changed, but the law has failed to keep up.”
As a result, disparities in property tax revenues have not been narrowed and are, in fact, growing wider, and while funding may have kept pace with inflation, it has not kept up with changing student needs. Other states have had corrections in place for a while, and Illinois now ranks last in terms of the state’s contribution to P-12 funding. See the full report, through Fiscal Year 2014, here, published by the Illinois State Board of Education.
Lawmakers feel some urgency about this issue, as shown by the unanimous vote Mr Manar’s proposal to create the Education Funding Advisory Committee received in the senate’s Education Committee last spring.
After the vote, the State Journal-Register quoted him as saying, “You could take any school district in this state and do a comparison of where that district was (in 1998) with (property tax revenue), with enrollment, with test score outcomes, poverty count, average daily attendance rates, all the things that go into the formula. I would venture to say it’s much different than it is today.”
Under the current system, where only 41 percent of the state’s dollars go through the primary funding formula and each program has its own set of rules and paperwork, about two-thirds of the state’s 863 school districts spend more money than they receive from their funding sources.
In announcing EFAC’s report earlier this month, Mr Manar said it “provides a solid step forward to be the basis of legislation this spring for the first time in nearly two decades to change how we distribute money in this state to the schools.”
The recommendations would put almost all state education funding—about 96 percent of it—into one pot, and districts’ ability to cover their own funding needs would be considered in hopes of aligning the state’s resources a little better.
Resources on the Internet