"Education First" Is Education Farce

On April 9, local voters will decide whether to
invest in maintaining the integrity, function, and life-span of our high school
campuses.  To a point, our community has assumed
the responsibility to maintain schools over the years.  But when we have structures and facilities
that are 100 years old and well past their useful lives, it is time to
acknowledge our own neglect in certain respects.

In remedy, diverse members of the community,
Township employees, and relevant experts carefully and transparently labored
the last 18 months to produce a plan that resolves facility needs in a
long-term manner.  That plan emerged with
broad support among the representative stakeholders before reaching us, the
voters.

Yet the plan’s opponents, most vocally Education
First, attack the plan with false statistics, empty slogans, and outright
slurs.  They have aggressively worked to preempt
any honest debate with misrepresentations.

Even Education First’s chosen name and brand lie
somewhere between inconsistent and dishonest. 
I’d expect a group that calls itself “Education First” to demand more,
i.e. some, support for education.   Has anyone seen or heard Education First advocate
a single thing to advance education? 
Anything at all?  New technology
resources, maybe?  More teachers?  Nothing. 
Rather, Education First single-mindedly attacks the referendum as a
pocketbook issue.  They obsessively decry
spending on schools and equate it with mismanagement, decadence, and high property
taxes themselves.  Yet, all of Education
First’s outrage really misses the mark. 
The proposed referendum and school construction projects in general have
only a fractional connection to property taxes—in this case, about a mere
percentage point.  Moreover, if Education
First members understood that their property taxes stemmed from the State’s
meager education funding in their community, not excessive local spending, they
would likely redirect their cynicism away from school officials and toward Springfield. 

In the first instance, spending hawks should know
that the State of Illinois sets what is referred to as an educational
foundation level—the minimum level of spending per pupil deemed necessary to
meet prescribed education standards—and funds school districts
accordingly.  These folks should also
know the State’s Education Funding Advisory Board recommends an annual
foundation level (spending per student) of more than $8,600, while the
legislature has arbitrarily set the foundation level much lower at $6,119.  At that mark, the State manages to send most Illinois
school districts thousands in funding to meet the prescribed figure—up to $5,500
per enrolled pupil based on local resources. 
But a handful of districts lack such support.  Districts 112 and 113 receive a flat rate of
just $218 per student, leaving local taxpayer’s to make up the difference (and
then some) to reach our community’s educational standard.  The sliding scale presents striking
asymmetries:  107,000 students living in
flat rate districts receive $23 million from the state annually, while the same
number living elsewhere in the State receive $407 million.  The State’s allocation of resources is, I
suspect, surprising.  For certain, it
shifts a lot of costs onto residents like us. 
But should the community reject our own standards simply because the
State has abandoned its responsibilities?

Despite its burden of massive funding shortfalls,
our districts are furthermore limited by law in how much property tax they can
assess.  Therefore, the schools here face
a considerable squeeze:  dramatically
less in State support than a typical district on the one hand, and restricted
access to gap-filling revenue on the other. 
Ed. First insinuations of prodigal spending and fiduciary breaches are
plain silly in this light because they literally don’t add up.  When Education First conflates property tax
fatigue with long-overdue school construction projects, they either
misunderstand the basic economic limits facing our schools, or desire to
mislead and antagonize the public for political purposes.  Either way, the first thing we need to do as
voters is educate ourselves on the facts.