Fully funding Illinois schools a step toward King's dream
April 4, 2018, marked the 50th anniversary of the assassination of noted civil rights activist Martin Luther King Jr. Because he was a minister, King infused his activism with appeals to morality, values and common decency. King fought for everything from voting rights to eliminating racism and alleviating poverty.
Of the many causes King championed, one - universal access to a quality public education for all children - has grown significantly in importance since the 1960s. In fact, over the last 30 years, those states which funded K-12 education at the highest levels had a statistically meaningful advantage over all lower spending states in median and mean annual wage growth. Indeed, there's a greater statistical correlation between a person's education and economic prospects now than ever.
However, when it comes to whether America actually provides the equitable access to a high quality public education King envisioned, the evidence is decidedly mixed. For instance, the black-white achievement gap in reading and math on the National Assessment of Educational Progress narrowed between 1965 and 2015. This shows progress, but it doesn't tell the whole story. For while the achievement gap declined, the drop occurred primarily through the mid-1980s. The gap began to widen again thereafter. This unfortunate turn of events corresponded with a growth in public schools becoming more segregated. So much so, that today 80 percent of Latino children and 79 percent of African American children attend highly segregated schools - which is worse than 1968. Meanwhile, the achievement gap between high- and low-income students is 30-40 percent worse - depending on the state - among children born in 2001 than it was for kids born 25 years earlier.
One reason for the reversal in educational progress along income, racial and ethnic cohorts since the 1980s has been the design of school funding systems at the state level. Illinois provides a prime example of how this problem manifests.
Currently, Illinois ranks 50th among the states in the portion of K-12 funding covered by state-based tax revenue and first in reliance on local property taxes to fund schools. Obviously, this ties the quality of public education a student receives to the local property wealth of the community in which that child lives. Hence, affluent Illinois communities generally have world-class public schools, while poor, low, and middle income communities are left behind. How far behind? Well, before the state rejected its old school funding formula in 2017, the wealthiest and highest achieving districts in Illinois - which were dubbed "Flat" and "Alternative Grant" under the old formula - on average spent $4,666 more per student than did "Foundation Formula" schools, which educated most - as in over 75 percent - of Illinois' children.
Illinois' old funding system also created racial inequity. Why? Because those high-spending, high-performing school districts happen to be 70 percent white, 21.8 percent Hispanic, and only 6.8 percent African American. Meanwhile, fully 84.5 percent of Illinois' black, and 73.4 percent of its Hispanic students, attended the poorest Foundation Formula schools, where 50 percent or more of the student population was low income. Bottom line: by over relying on local property taxes, Illinois' highly segregated school system singled out low-income children generally, and black and brown kids specifically, for disadvantage.
The good news is, Illinois took a huge step toward fixing its structurally classist and racist school funding system, when decision-makers enacted the Evidence-Based Model of School Funding in 2017. Under this new formula, school funding is tied to the cost of implementing educational practices, which the research shows enhance student achievement, for the specific student population each district serves. Which is great - but as it stands today, Illinois is some $7 billion plus short of funding it. Making that investment would not only fund schools to the level the evidence indicates is needed - but would go a long way to helping Illinois realize Martin Luther King's dream.
Ralph Martire, rmartire@ctbaonline.org, is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a bipartisan fiscal policy think tank.