Bankruptcy doesn’t just happen, there are usually reasons for it. Read this and you’ll have a better idea why Illinois teeters on the abyss. From Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner at wirepoints.com:
Listen to education officials’ demands for more money and it’s easy to believe Illinois grossly underspends on K-12 education. A $7.2 billion funding lawsuit to double state contributions to classroom spending, a $40,000 minimum wage demand for teachers, and lawmakers’ rejection of limits to school district borrowing might bolster that impression.
But the truth is Illinois already spends a lot on education – more than any other state in the Midwest. It’s just that much of the money is going to all the wrong places.
At $14,180 per student, Illinois spends far more than its neighbors on education – 44 percent more on a per student basis than Kentucky and Indiana, 22 percent more than Michigan and 21 percent more than the national average.
The problem arises when all those dollars are doled out. Billions of dollars are being siphoned away from the poorest districts by the state’s burgeoning education bureaucracy.
Just look at the facts:
- Illinois’ non-teaching staff has ballooned by 50 percentin the past two decades, while student enrollment has grown just 11 percent.
- Illinois has more school districts than the nation’s four most efficient, big-population states (Florida, North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia) have, combined. That means thousands of excess administrative and non-teaching staff in Illinois.
- Pension costs have grown so quickly they’ve devoured nearly 50 percent of the state’s contribution to downstate education in recent years. In 2017 alone, the state spent $11 billion on education for downstate districts – $5 billion of that went to pay for downstate teacher pension costs.
Illinois is spending billions on district offices, administrators and multi-million dollar pensions instead of providing more classroom funding. That isn’t fair to poor districts like Taylorville CUSD 3, which only spends $7,400 per student and is one the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
Illinois’ high per-student spend shows why the state doesn’t need to hit up Illinoisans for more education money. Instead, the state just needs to redirect the money it already has to the places and students that need it most.
The education establishment knows there isn’t enough money to both preserve their system and fund Illinois’ neediest districts. But officials don’t want to give up the system they benefit from.
So, they mislead Illinoisans into thinking more money is the only solution. The $7.2 billion lawsuit is the most egregious example of that – it’s all about the self-preservation of Illinois’ education bureaucracy.
To continue reading: Administrators over kids: Seven ways Illinois’ education bureaucracy siphons money from classrooms
