Share the article: ICYMI: “House has final chance to treat schools equally”

Madigan’s Democrats “threw the idea of equity out of kilter and sent millions of dollars more to Chicago”

From the Journal Courier Editorial Board:

There’s still a chance for legislators to get it right for the majority of school children in Illinois.

We hope they demand fairness and fix a broken system that for too long has left many downstate scrambling for scraps.

Realists recognize, though, that school funding has dangled for such a long time on the rope of party politics that change is a long-shot.

There was an admirable effort made to right past wrongs when state Sen. Andy Manar, a Bunker Hill Democrat, presented a sound plan that moved the state light years toward equity.

Had that plan survived unadulterated, it would have been a great step. But a last-minute revision inserted provisions designed to absolve Chicago Public Schools of the financial mess allowed to fester over unfunded pensions. That change once again threw the idea of equity out of kilter and sent millions of dollars more to Chicago at the expense of almost every other school district in the state.

The architects of that revision know what they were doing. They also knew how outrageous the idea really was, sitting on it for two months before sending it to the governor’s desk.

An independent — that’s an important word here — review by the State Board of Education of what would happen without the pension bailout clogging up the funding shows 97.5 percent of all schools in Illinois would receive more funding if the amended funding reform plan was allowed to stand.

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