2008-09-02 School Funding

Talk of attempting to enroll Chicago Public School students in New Trier high schools due to some perceived racial and funding injustice is infuriating.

School districts which take in enough property taxes to support themselves receive the bulk of their funding from local real estate taxes, with some additional funds coming from state and federal tax sources. Districts which are property poor or have low school tax rates wind up having a smaller portion of their funding come from local property taxes and a large percentage of their funding from state and federal tax sources.

Districts have some local control by holding referendums allowing the residents to decide whether or not to increase their property tax rates to support additional buildings and construction projects as well as to support staff salaries, and occasionally other services like school buses. Local residents get to choose whether they want to support these initiatives with their tax dollars or not.

For a variety of reasons, district residents make choices to build or not build new schools, to provide buses or not, and whether or not to pay more taxes for additional staff and raises. These decisions should not be made at the state level. The taxpayers in the New Trier district have, within their rights, made the choice to spend a tremendous amount of money per student on their children’s education.

My children and thousands of others are receiving an excellent education in Indian Prairie School District 204. The operational expenditure in our district is approximately $8600 per student. This is approximately half of what New Trier spends per student. For starters, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison because New Trier is a high school only district and high school students are more expensive to educate than elementary students. But even if it were, it turns out that kids can be provided a top-notch education for $8600 per year and I do not feel there is any injustice being done to the children in 204. I do not feel that we need or deserve a $17,000 per student education just because someone else has decided to fund their district at that level.

Then there is Chicago. People are complaining bitterly that their schools are funded at only $10,400 per student. I don’t understand the problem. They have more money per student than the average for the state of Illinois ($9488) and if they can’t manage to properly educate their students with that level of funding, then they should be looking into what the real problems are rather than looking at some perceived financial injustice. Is someone looking into whether those dollars are being spent wisely? Are the Chicago Public Schools distributing their funds equitably within their own district? What accounts for variance in student performance from one of their own schools to another?

Even worse, a large amount of the funding for Chicago Public Schools is not coming from their local property taxes. This means that residents of 204 who pay high property taxes for our local schools also get to pay (via income and sales taxes) for Chicago and other districts that can’t support themselves through their own property taxes.

I highly doubt it is money spent by the schools that accounts for the difference in success of students between one school district and another. More likely it has to do with the home life of the students, including the support that parents and community members put forth toward their education. In District 204 and probably most districts that are performing well, there are numerous parent volunteers taking care of a myriad of things. Most parents of successful students make sure that their children go to school every day and have the necessary resources and supplies. They know what’s going on at the school and in their children’s classes. They have met the teachers. They show up at school activities, check their students’ backpacks for homework, fliers, school newsletters, etc. Why are the overall test scores for Chicago students low while the schools are funded at levels higher than higher-performing districts? That is what they should be looking into.

I hope that a district as large as Chicago’s is using some of its vast resources to fund an excellent curriculum tailored to the needs of its students, many of whom come from impoverished households and many of whom may not arrive at kindergarten as prepared to learn as children who have been exposed to colors, number, letters, books and rich language from an early age.

Much more than I can write here can be learned about schools and districts in Illinois from reading the school report cards. I discovered that the latest numbers available (2004) show that the Equalized Assessed Valuation of property per student in the Chicago Public School district and Indian Prairie School District is almost the same! Yet at that time 204’s tax rate per $100 of EAV was 5.00 while Chicago’s was only 3.28. The per pupil spending for 204 was $8639 while Chicago was $10,409. 204’s schools are over 80% funded by local property taxes. New Trier is almost 90% funded by local property taxes, while the Chicago schools are only receiving 44% of their funding from local taxes! What right do they have to complain while they keep their school taxes lower and drain money from other sources? This is a huge amount of money. The New Trier district in 2004 had expenses of around $84 million for an enrollment of 4200, while Indian Prairie’s total expenses were $258 million for just over 28000 students and Chicago’s expenditures were well over $4 Billion for 390,000 students (more recently they have topped $5 billion).

Every proposition for Illinois school funding reform which I have seen appears that it will cost more money for residents of those districts that are mainly self-sufficient now, while sending more of that money out of the district. A tax swap of slightly lower property taxes for greatly increased income taxes leaves many of us paying a lot more money without our districts receiving any benefit for it. I don’t know what the answer is but I pray this is not what eventually happens.

There are many factors that contribute to whether a child will reach their potential in school. All children deserve a quality education and the level of funding does not seem to be what makes the difference in a student’s success. Local property tax support for school districts should motivate local governments to promote growth that will bring in tax dollars to their districts and allow residents continue to have a voice in how their tax dollars are spent. I wish that those who are complaining about the inequity of it all would put their energy into volunteering at their neighborhood schools and ensuring that their own children take advantage of the free public education that is available to them.