Strive for better return on school funds

Now that the final chapter of our School Finance 101 series has been written, the difficult part remains -- determining what has been learned and what can be done to improve a system that quite obviously does not deliver as much of a return to students or taxpayers as any of us would like.

It must be noted that taxpayers cannot be accused of playing Scrooge. In the years from 1996 to the present, taxpayers forked over about $200 billion for education, increasing the per pupil layout from $8,300 to $12,670, an increase more than double the rate of inflation during that time.

Certainly, some chapters of the series, most notably those on teacher and administrator pay, touched off firestorms of comment from readers. What can be said in the aftermath is that teachers aren't as underpaid as they claim when generous benefits are included, nor as overpaid as many taxpayers think, either. The same goes for administrators whose salaries seem exorbitant until one discovers their salary per pupil is quite small compared to someone with a smaller salary in a much smaller district.

Surely, school districts could do better day-to-day financial management and look for less costly debt instruments than they do now. But the bottom line really is that Illinois has spent billions of dollars on its education problems over the past decade and the lack of concrete benefit for that spending should be an eye-opener for all of us.

Only a fifth of the state's seniors are deemed college-ready. And while some schools -- usually those with more affluent families, engaged parents and fewer problems to overcome -- routinely put out students who succeed in college, the vast majority didn't fare so well.

Half of the students in our readership area need a remedial class before they can start freshman classes at area community colleges. Only about a quarter of graduating seniors in our suburban readership are deemed college ready and area employers say that goes for work-readiness as well.

This is not to be taken as an indictment of all schools, many of which have a record of excellence in education. But those vast expenditures analyzed against the performance results would suggest that spending more money on the system as it exists is not a solution unto itself.

To change those performance numbers, all expenditures must be tied to accountability. Giving more and more money to teachers without evaluating if they are good teachers makes little sense. Just as our schools need to be cautious about investing too much in administrators who have little classroom contact.

But the only way that will happen is if readers and voters and taxpayers and school leaders take the information learned in School Finance 101 and demand better performance for their investment. Voters must choose school board members and legislators who don't pay lip service to accountability, but find a way to quantify it and enforce it, rewarding those who succeed and cutting away those who don't.

A bureaucratic system never changes on its own. The only people who can change it are those who control the money. In this case, that's taxpayers, who must be willing to demand a better return on their investment in the next 10 years than they got in the past 10.