The allegedly bluestate of Illinois, the one with a Republican governor (who hates public schools) and a Democratic legislature (which is supposed to support public schools) passed a school funding deal with a generous voucher package.
According to the script, everyone was supposed to declare the deal a “bipartisan compromise,” not a victory for Betsy Dezvos and privatization.
But Peter Greene points out that DeVos didn’t get the memo. She celebrated her victory.
“Oh, no, Secretary! You forgot to call this a compromise. You forgot to say that these “savings accounts” aren’t really back door vouchers! You forgot to say what a great funding victory this was for public schools! You forgot to pretend that this bill helped ALL schools through its awesome compromisiness. You could have called it a victory on many sides… on many sides.
“Part of the deal in Illinois was supposed to be that voucher fans (of all parties) would refrain from doing a victorious happy dance, that they would avoid saying out loud “We are one step closer to replacing public schools.” But no– there’s DeVos, down in the end zone, doing her victory dance and spiking the ball and hollering, “In your FACE, public schools!!” Next time someone better make sure she gets the memo.”
Diane Ravitch's blog 
So the Secretary of Education says “We are one step closer to replacing public schools.” Let that sink in! Please take back your country ASAP.
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Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Education and commented:
That is because she is clueless. She couldn’t even buy a clue with all her money.
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She might be able to buy a clue, but there is absolutely no chance she would know what to do with it once she had it.
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I agree.
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For such a huge “victory” for public schools it is amazing how public schools were never mentioned. The vouchers and the additional funding for charters was the ENTIRE story.
That bill had 550 pages, most of which probably concern public school families.
No one bothered to analyze it at all, because who cares, right? It’s not like any of these public employees actually WORK for public school families.
The vast majority of families in Illinois could be getting a nasty surprise when they find out what’s in the bill, in a year or two. I suggest they immediately read that bill, the language, not the spin by ed reform.
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It’s like the food pyramid, 21 servings of grains, who cares, what’s the 1 serving of meat or dairy?
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This wonderful bill that screws all children who have special needs. There are good private schools out there that serve kids with special needs, but what keeps getting shoved under the rug is that students have no rights to services under IDEA if they choose to go to a private school. Unless they choose one of the specialized schools that contracts with the public schools there is no guarantee of services. I know there are private schools that would love to serve more of these students, but there is no money. Exactly, I say! It is hard enough to provide services through pooling resources in public school systems without having those funds diverted to lots of little operations too small to provide them, and we certainly don’t need to fund dual systems large enough to compete for those scant dollars. We are way under-funding schools as it is. Illinois provides approximately 26% of the funding for schools. Local districts fund about 66% and federal dollars the remaining 8%.
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Well stated! What you mention is the stark reality. If we keep cutting the pie into smaller and smaller pieces, soon nobody gets much pie. Public schools stretch dollars further by consolidating and cooperating with other districts. With regard to special education, public schools are a clear better “choice.” Students have rights under IDEA, and teachers have training to work with the population they serve.
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IMO one driving force with Reform is a back-door avenue to eliminate or severely weaken student’s rights under IDEA. I have previously posted links about our local cost to educating students with special needs. It appears that these Reformers don’t want to pay or appropriate the increasing funds it takes to educate these students. Obviously, it’s not politically correct to state that they don’t want to fund this mandate so it’s easier to destroy the public system that educates these students. Control the rhetoric wth vouchers, charters and choice . But quite frankly as stated above parents lose IDEA rights under these choices. The Ed Reform discussion should be about how the Feds should be funding this mandate at 100% so the local districts have the funds to adequately service these students. What happens too frequently is local districts have to borrow funds from their regular education budgets to fund the cost of their special ed students who represent a small percentage of their total population. Or districts have to make difficult choices and only service the most needy students.
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IMO one driving force with Reform is a back-door avenue to eliminate or severely weaken student’s rights under IDEA. I have previously posted links about our local cost to educating students with special needs. It appears that these Reformers don’t want to pay or appropriate the increasing funds it takes to educate these students. Obviously, it’s not politically correct to state that they don’t want to fund this mandate so it’s easier to destroy the public system that educates these students. Control the rhetoric wth vouchers, charters and choice . But quite frankly as stated above parents lose IDEA rights under these choices. The Ed Reform discussion should be about how the Feds should be funding this mandate at 100% so the local districts have the funds to adequately service these students. What happens too frequently is local districts have to borrow funds from their regular education budgets to fund the cost of their special ed students who represent a small percentage of their total population. Or districts have to make difficult choices and only service the most needy students.
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Yup.
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How do elected lawmakers justify ignoring 90% of the families they supposedly serve?
How is this possibly something other than ideology and personal preference?
The Republicans from rural areas are the most surprising. They’re literally at war with their own voters. You can’t attack public schools without harming the millions of kids IN public schools. That’s ridiculous. This phony distinction they’re making between public schools and public school students is just nonsense. It has no real world relevancy.
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I’ll take a stab, Chiara. Could it be because 90% of their funding comes from a pitifully small number of plutocrats who push The Reform Agenda?
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well said
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“In your FACE, public schools!!” Got a chuckle out of that.
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I just sat that Betsy was on Fox & Friends this morning. Guess she wanted to get a sense of what type of adult would be the result of the policies she’s championed. Couldn’t bring myself to watch the clip. I can’t subject myself to that kind of nonintellectual torture.
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The Illinois voucher plan clearly violates the state constitution.
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Yup.
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“a victory on many sides, on many sides”
LOL
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I’m as opposed to vouchers as others who comment here (and to charters, too, for that matter), but the situation in Illinois was a lot more nuanced than has been picked up on by national ed writers – regrettably but understandably so, because the funding bill was extremely complex, Illinois politics is a morass, and the last-second add-on (tax credits) got all the attention.
The actual purpose of the bill (SB1 original form; SB 1947 revised form) was to alter, radically, Illinois’s method of school funding and to transform it from the least-equitable in the U.S. to one of, if not the, most progressive and equitable formulas in the country over the next decade. Assuming the state can find the funding (a big “if”), this will be accomplished by the new formula.
The bill was the result of 30 years’ discussion among education experts and state officials, four years of active engagement, and a year of drafting and revision. It’s the most significant education bill in the last half-century for the state.
In many ways it’s a shame that all the attention was grabbed by the tax credit add-on, which none of the bill’s sponsors had envisioned. The tax credit has a sunset provision (5 yeas), and if a Dem is elected next year as governor, it will almost certainly be allowed to die. Given Illinois’s history/demography, it turns out that it is basically a bail-out for Chicago’s under-attended Catholic schools; Chicago suburban /downstate/rural public schools will be only marginally affected (if at all). While in spirit tax credits contravene Illinois’ Blaine Amendment (Il Constitution Article X, Section 3), such cases have been brought in the past before the courts and have proven impossible to win; an entirely new strategy is required, and given the composition of SCOTUS at present, even then the chances of winning such a case would be slim to nil.
The bill was supported by the Illinois Association of School Administrators, and there were many open meetings and town halls across the state (these continue, btw), where the bill’s sponsors and local school superintendents explained in detail how the funding bill will operate. Schools in rural and poor urban districts, including but certainly not limited to Chicago, will receive a tremendous boost from the bill’s new formula.
For those interested, actual details on funding changes are available at fundingilfuture.org.
I had posted at length here on a previous post: https://dianeravitch.net/2017/08/30/mike-klonsky-voucher-deal-shows-democrats-stand-for-nothing/#comment-2727775
and have written about it within the context of Illinois politics on numerous occasions at the linked blog.
Note to Chiara, above: I plan to read significant parts of the 550-page bill; unfortunately there is no executive summary, and reading it is very hard going. Even the state’s most experienced and knowledgeable education writers had difficulty getting through it.
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Vouchers get pushed as affecting only a small group, a little thing. The camel’s nose in the tent. Even though few children want them, the political power of the choice crowd will make them permanent, unless there is a referendum.
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How were state funds distributed to schools and how did that change?
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So: In terms of funding its schools, Illinois ranked #50, providing only around 26% of school funding. This had resulted over time in astonishing inequity, with districts spending between $7000 (poor, downstate, rural) and $32,000 per student (Chicago North Suburbs).
The new formula, which is referred to as the “EBM”, evidence-based-model, considers each of IL’s 852 school districts as a separate entity, calculates what the district can provide for schools (based on property taxes and federal aid), what is needed (using a state-wide baseline of about $12,200 iirc and incorporating all special characteristics of each district), and then separates schools into four Tiers, 1-4. The lion’s share of state funding will go to Tier 4 school districts, followed by Tier 3 (there are mathematical formulas involving percentages here), Tier 2, and Tier 1 (no state aid, deemed more than adequate). Determination of funding levels is based on 27 separate criteria (derived from, but not identical to Odden & Pincus’s model) and sensitive to the fact that different schools/districts may have different student profiles and thus, funding needs.
If all goes as planned: no district will ever lose money from the previous year (this is the famous “hold harmless” clause); all districts will gradually converge towards equity in public education resources; individual districts may, if deemed at 110% adequacy, choose to reduce property taxes, and each district’s state funding will be determined by its actual, evidence-based needs.
The bill’s chief sponsor in the Illinois Senate is to my mind a hero – very few people apart from the authors and the state’s superintendents of schools have understood how ground-breaking this bill is. For many districts–including the one where I was raised (poor, urban, downstate)–this will entail a near-reversal of funding percentages from what obtained previously.
The whole voucher thing–never wanted, never intended, not in the original version of the bill–has to do with unfortunate events in state politics over the summer. The original version of the voucher amendment – it was an ALEC bill, tweaked for Illinois – was weakened in the final version: yearly limit of $75 million (instead of $100 m) (and thus theoretically available to around 10,000 out of Illinois’ 2,000,000 school-age children, or one-half of 1%); 75% credit (instead of 100%); no year-over-year increases (instead of an automatic increase of 25% per year); tight regulations/audits by an independent outside auditor (plus spending cap of 10% for non-education activities such as advertising), and a sunset provision for automatic repeal at the end of 5 years unless it’s reintroduced as separate legislation.
It’s the job of public education advocates in Illinois to make sure that it isn’t re-introduced as a standalone bill – Illinois has no provision for referendums for Article X of its constitution (“Education”), so let’s hope the (national) public education advocacy groups assist Illinois’s own group (RaiseYourHandforIllinois)–and let’s hope that advocacy group gets on top of this, and stays on top of it, for the next five years so that it’s DOA in 2024. This is a big challenge, because we can lose sight of longer-term threats in the heat of day-to-day crises, of which Illinois has more than its share.
During the months I followed the issue in both the political and education press/blogs, I discovered that (a) even top political writers in the state didn’t understand vouchers, and absolutely refused to understand how “tax credits” were a specially-crafted form of voucher for states with some version of the Blaine Amendment, and (b) it was nigh-on impossible to attract the interest of national-level education writers to what was about to happen–thus, most of the national-level coverage came after the fact, when it was too late to do anything.
That’s why sites like this one are so vital – they allow us to remain current with what’s happening in states other than our own, so that we can be alert when something similar is afoot at home.
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That’s interesting that the state only has to provide 26% of the cost of education and education is a local responsibility. That is miraculous that the state actually tried to level the playing field. So kudos to them.
In Washington state the constitution says education is 100% state. Basic ed was increasingly funded by local levies, but a court case forced the legislature to raise state property tax while decreasing some local levies, the levy swap. The net result being that property rich areas have more burden to fund education in districts where it was underfunded by the state.
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Illinois is supposed to be the major source of funding. They just ignore it, so don’t give them any credit. What they say they will do and what they actually do has always been two different realities. Dbrka is right to applaud the attempt to at least equalize funding on paper, but that is as far as it will go. The bill promises not to reduce anyone’s funding and takes $75 million out of the pot, so how they plan to engineer this funding formula is a bit of a mystery. I don’t think that there is a promise anywhere to increase the state’s funding above the abysmal 26%. I attended a talk recently by an advocate for special ed students who has worked for both parents and school districts. This lawyer’s reading of the law (all 500 pages of it) supports my comments about the reduction in funding for special ed. Perhaps that is how they intend to finance their grand scheme–shuffle funds. They are also cutting the amount of P.E. districts are required to provide and providing for contracting out driver’s ed giving districts a little more leeway in how they choose to allocate their funds.
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The teachers who comment re: Diane’s blog are honest and competent and more knowledgeable (in light years) than those in charge. And the current yahoos know this deep down inside. We threaten them. Thus the shenanigans and twists.
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