Opponents call it the “blank check amendment.” Proponents say the proposed amendment to Section 1 of Article X of the Illinois Constitution–a change generally known as the Education Amendment–will make school funding fairer, by forcing the state to pick up at least 51 percent of the tab instead of making local property owners foot virtually the entire bill. They claim it will improve the quality of education in Illinois, where funding for education, they say, has lagged badly behind other states’. Opponents say the amendment will drastically raise state income taxes while providing for no property tax relief, and will throw matters that are properly in the purview of the General Assembly into the courts. And they say there’s a lot of evidence that, popular mythology notwithstanding, there is no particular correlation between spending money on schools and educational achievement.
Article X of the Illinois Constitution now reads: “Section 1. Goal–Free Schools. A fundamental goal of the People of the State is the educational development of all persons to the limits of their capacities.
“There may be such other free education as the General Assembly provides by law.”
Judy Baar Topinka, Republican from North Riverside, is a moderate who generally takes a commonsense approach to legislative matters. She thinks the Education Amendment is a rotten idea, for a lot of reasons. For one, the language is vague, so the amendment is destined to land in the courts–meaning that the courts will end up doing the legislature’s job. “This is bad precedent,” she notes. For another, she says, the amendment has never had any kind of public hearing–the usual procedure for so far-reaching a change. “All efforts to amend the amendment to show its fiscal impact were killed” in the Illinois House, she complains; the fact that a large tax increase will be needed is not reflected in the amendment itself.
But statistics vary according to who’s compiling them. According to a Census Bureau study, Illinois did even better in terms of spending–seventh. (This figure includes federal, state, and local moneys.) The higher-spending states did not do better in terms of SAT scores.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In a lawsuit it filed in 1990 to force equity in school funding, a coalition of public school officials used the neighboring Illinois school districts of Byron and Mount Morris as “obvious” examples of “the direct effects of the differences in local wealth on educational services.” Byron has a Commonwealth Edison nuclear power plant that in 1990-91 had an assessed valuation of $545,927,180, and the town has a “local wealth per pupil” of $461,463. Mount Morris’s wealth per pupil at the same time was a niggardly $41,852. Byron, with low property taxes, spent $10,085 per student, and offered a host of nifty courses that Mount Morris, at $3,483, could not match. “The students at Mount Morris have been their poster kids,” says Hetland. “But if you check the ACT scores for the two districts, Mount Morris is performing better than Byron. I don’t know what Byron’s kids are learning for their extra $6,500 per student.”
