Beginning with hearings during the spring legislative session, the leaders of multiple statewide education associations announced Friday that they hope to work with state officials over the next several years to pass legislation aimed at improving K-12 public education across Illinois.
Representing school boards, superintendents, and principals statewide, the educators gathered Friday to launch a set of objectives, billed as Vision 2030, aimed at increasing students’ opportunities to succeed in the modern economy and explore potential careers, including the trades.
By promoting “future-focused” learning, Kimberly Small, executive director of the Illinois Association of School Boards, said in a media briefing that Vision 2030 is devoted to “reshaping our schools and classrooms and redefining student success to reflect and prepare students for all the different ways that the world and the economy have changed.”
Accomplishing that will require the state to continue increasing its annual funding allocation to public schools, as a 2017 funding reform has prescribed – despite potential shortfalls ahead, the educators said. ,.
Governor JB Pritzker has long touted his administration’s investments in education. But with a $3.2 billion deficit projected for the fiscal year beginning in July, the planned hearings to kick off Vision 2030 lobbying efforts could come at a time when the governor is facing hard choices, though Pritzker has said he’ll be proposing a balanced budget in February.
Gary Tipsord, executive director of the Illinois Association of Regional Superintendents of Schools, one of the groups involved, said the consortium of educators behind Vision 2030 expects extensive conversations with the governor’s office, as well as members of the General Assembly and the Illinois State Board of Education, will be in order.
But, with the skills students need to succeed rapidly changing, “We must prioritize future-focused learning and meet this moment with smart strategies around funding and accountability,” Tipsord said in a press release.
Predictable funding
Vision 2030 is the second such effort to drive legislation to improve public schools statewide. A sweeping 2017 reform to the formula used to allocate state funding to schools stemmed from the plan’s forebear, Vision 2020, according to the education leaders involved.
Known as Evidence-Based Funding or EBF, the legislative reform required lawmakers to increase statewide public school funding by at least $350 million per year. The state didn’t do so in 2021, amid the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, but lawmakers have increased their annual K-12 allocation as mandated every year since.
“We know we might be facing some leaner budget years than we have the prior two or three years…We understand that there’s not enough resources to go around,” Kristopher Monn, executive director of the Illinois Association of School Business Officials, told the Tribune regarding the state’s projected deficit.
Amid scarcity, Vision 2030 aims to reaffirm increased public school funding as a priority, to ensure resources continue to be directed to the state’s most underfunded districts, he said.
Some advocates, particularly the Chicago Teachers Union, have lobbied the state to contribute more than the minimum, with sizable gaps remaining among some districts between the amount of funding the state determines local students need and the amount of funding it ultimately provides.
The 2017 reform gave lawmakers a decade, until 2027, to fully fund all Illinois schools – a deadline that won’t be met by increasing the state allocation by only the minimum amount per year, according to an analysis by the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a nonpartisan think tank.
Rather than seeking greater increases, Vision 2030 simply aims to ensure that Illinois stays its current course. “If it can only be the minimum investment, just maintain and protect the minimum investment,” Monn said, heralding what the Evidence-Based Funding reform has accomplished so far.
In the first year the new funding model was launched, more than 160 districts had less than 60% of the funding needed to adequately serve their students. “Now I believe we have zero districts statewide that have less than 60% of adequacy,” Monn said. “The work is not done…the costs of adequacy continue to rise, as we see inflation and other costs throughout the state going up.”
With federal funding making up 10% of Illinois school funding on average, the administration of President-elect Donald Trump may further upend school finances.
Trump repeatedly promised on the campaign trail to dismantle the Department of Education and change funding priorities toward private schools. Linda McMahon, Trump’s nominee to lead the Dept. has echoed the President-elect’s promises to return educational decision-making to the states.
Tipsord, the head of the regional superintendents association, said the election results didn’t inform the Vision 2030 release. “We enter anything with the assumption of the best intentions,” he said of the incoming administration.
“There’s a variety of funding that needs to flow to states and if revenues are there and they’re localizing that and that’s the intention, for states to be able to make decisions, then we can deal with that,” he said. “We’ll let things sort out in Washington, DC and we’ll deal with that when we get to that point.”
The statewide educator groups will also be seeking a solution for districts to finance facility improvements in often aging schools, particularly to improve school safety, without upending budgets that already tend to be overstretched.
A 2020 Government Accountability Office study found that more than half of public school districts across the country needed updates to multiple building systems, with crumbling infrastructure and lacking funding widespread. Nearly all districts surveyed, 92%, named improving security in their facilities as a top priority.
“We have to acknowledge that students learn best and educators teach most effectively when they feel safe and connected to one another in their communities. This is something that we really need to consider, not only in our instructional approach, curriculum and student support services, but also our facilities,” said Small.
