By Cole Lauterbach/Illinois Radio Network
SPRINGFIELD – There’s a new proposal in the House to reform the long-debated school funding formula, but one state lawmaker says it’s only throwing money at a problem and offering little that will actually improve schools.
The bill’s sponsor, state Rep. Will Davis, D-East Hazel, said it provides a target level of adequacy for various categories of education.
“It is a behemoth effort … but it’s one that’s necessary,” Davis said. “I can’t think of anybody that doesn’t talk about the need to change the way we fund schools. This is an effort to do so.”
State Rep. Jeanne Ives, R-Wheaton, said the measure tells school superintendents how to spend certain dollars, removing local decisions on where resources should be spent.
“They can tell superintendents how many janitors they need per square foot. Now, if that’s not central planning on steroids, I don’t know what is,” Ives said.
Instead, there needs to be an expansion of charter schools and tax credits for school choice, Ives said, as well as other efforts to produce competition and better results to boost outcomes.
Ives said Davis’ bill simply spends more money on schools and does little in the way of offering solutions that would improve educational outcomes.
“This system doesn’t [address results],” she said. “It says we need to spend $3-to-6 billion more to fill all these adequacy targets. Now that’s just wrong.”
Ives said the bill takes away local school districts’ flexibility to spend education dollars as they see fit.
She also says it gives Chicago Public Schools a block grant with no accountability and doesn’t address unfunded mandates.
The bill could morph into the Senate’s so-called grand bargain where if one bill fails, they all fail.
The measure remains in committee and could be the subject of a hearing next week.
