Why Won't Blago Do It?

"The biggest opportunity for social and economic progress is raising the state's 3% income tax and with the extra three billion or so buying better educations for the hundreds of thousands of children in poor neighborhoods who suffer from poorer schools and worse teachers," according to this post from Illinoize (A new chance for children in poor schools).  "There has been no significant progress on this front in at least a decade in the state, and the predictable result of kids dropping out from poor school districts and robbing them of the American promise of equal opportunity has blighted another generation."

Why won't Blago do it?  He has to realize that he's not going to be President.  Hell, he might not even make it through his second term.  He's OK with other lefty ideas like raising the minimum wage.  He just won re-election.  Too much of a win for Emil Jones? Worried about someone else coming at him from the right?  I don't know.

Comments

[a parent]

I am a parent, looking for information. Could someone please tell me where all of these poor school districts are. I am trying to understand this issue. Could you list a few

Looking at the unit districts that fail to meet the NCLB benchmarks in their general student population, all of them spent above the median unit district's cost per pupil. There are many districts that spend below $6,000 and get far better results than the highest spending districts. The highest spending unit district ($28,235 per student) has the lowest percentage of students meeting the reading standards. My local newspaper claims that low equalized assessments per student doom the students to academic failure, even though some of the districts with the lowest EAV/student are in the top ten in operational spending per student.

[Andrew Martinek]

None of these factors can be expected to work miracles. However, there is a serious funding gap in our present formula. The small rural districts as well as the City of Chicago, are sorely underfunded. Granted,
Chicago could alleviate many of its problems by eliminating waste in the bureaucracy. They have buildings full of middle managers that they just don't need and much of their grant money gets eaten up by administrative costs. The real crime is when you look at school by school funding and see some lower performing schools receiving more funding per student than higher performing schools. What the stats often don't show, is that much of the funding in lower performing schools comes from federal sources to offset the disadvantages of poverty. Take that away, and you have a much different story. This is one of many reasons why most magnet schools have more resources than they know what to do with and neighborhood schools have to scramble for everything. This year, my school was lucky. Because of several other neighborhood school closings, we were able to raid their bookrooms and actually provide textbooks for most of our students. I see very little waste in our classrooms where the education of children takes place. However, every time I go to a conference the good people at CPS have the need to buy us all tote bags or some other useless trinket at the same time they hit us with staffing cuts and a few hundred additional students. Perhaps,if they put the money in the classrooms where it belongs, Springfield would be more receptive.

[a parent]

Thank you Andrew. I still don't totally understand this issue and continue to do research and I appreciate your response.

I agree that Chicago schools are underfunded, mainly due to the higher cost of living and some schools with high percentages of students living in poverty than other parts of the state (cutting waste would help as you've said).

I have trouble agreeing that my local high school district (rural northwestern Illinois) is underfunded when their superintendent earned $256,380 for the 2005-06 school year and the high school principal received a 32% salary increase. With only 645 students their salaries are taking resources away from the classroom. I can find many rural districts that are struggling due to wasteful spending; but I can't find very many that are struggling due to lack of funding (there are a few, but very few).

I don't see how changing the funding formula will help those few districts without giving the low-spending efficient districts money that they obviously don't need.