Blazing New Trails - Connexions

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274 CRITICAL ISSUES IN SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT Change (liberalize) the manner in which the child poverty count was to be calculated in the general state aid formula; Encourage, through fiscal incentives, the consolidation of small school districts and mandate that K-12 districts should have no high school smaller than 250 students; and Reduce the reliance upon local property taxes in the state aid formula by seeking other revenues sources, such as increasing the level of the state income tax. (Education Funding Advisory Board, 2002) Although the EFAB report had recommended a foundation state aid level of $5665 per student for fiscal year 2003 (FY03), the legislature voted for a funding level of $4810, which constituted an increase of $250 per student over the previous year (Fritts, 2008). While very minor adjustments were made in the child poverty calculation and consolidation incentives, nothing major was done regarding a change in funding mechanisms. In April of 2005, a second EFAB report recommended a foundation level of $6405 for FY06 (Education Funding Advisory Board, Illinois Education Funding, 2005). The actual allocation was $5164 per student (Fritts, 2008). Over the subsequent years since FY06, the foundation level of the Illinois general state aid formula has crept up to a level of $6119 for FY10 (ISBE. Funding: General State Aid, 2010). The General Assembly had not sent a final budget for FY11 to Illinois Governor Pat Quinn by the time this article was completed, but school districts have been told to expect a foundation level of less than $5000 for FY 11. The purpose of this chapter was to show that not only is there a disparity of funding between and among states, but also within school districts in individual states. Illinois and Colorado funding levels were examined to show that those school districts with the highest concentrations of minority and low income students are the most likely to be inadequately funded by the state. This leads to fewer resources to employ the most qualified teachers and administrators. The social justice implications of this situation are addressed later in the paper. Illinois School District Structure One of the recommendations of the previously cited original EFAB report was to encourage the consolidation of school districts. Illinois is a populous state with a public school enrollment of 2,035,211 students in the 2008–2009 school year (Illinois State Board of Education, 2009). These students were educated in 869 school districts utilizing a triad of organizational structures. Some school districts in Illinois are K-12 unit districts. These tend to predominate in rural and downstate Illinois. Another type of district is the K-8 elementary district. Finally, there are also grades 9–12 high school districts in Illinois. The reason that Illinois has so many school districts dates back to the Land Ordinance of 1785. It had several key purposes, but “one of its key provisions was to divide the land acquired from Great Britain following the Revolutionary War, primarily in the Midwest, into six mile square townships, each composed of 36 one square mile blocks”(Kersten, 2009, p. 6). At one time in the mid-twentieth century, Illinois had over 10,000 school districts. Virtually every school was a separate school district. While many school district consolidations occurred in the last century, and even periodically occur today, Illinois residents are protective of their local schools. In the words of Kersten (2009),
The Social Justice Implications of the Deteriorating U.S. Economy on Public Schools 275 To understand how the township system still impacts Illinois public schools, let us use Niles Township as an example. The township is composed of the following elementary (K-8) school districts: Golf School District 67 Skokie School District 68 Skokie School District 69 Morton Grove School District 70 Niles School District 71 Fairview School District 72 East Prairie School District 73 Skokie School District 73 ½ Lincolnwood School District 74. With the exception of a small portion of Golf 67 that was annexed by the Glenview School District 34 in the 1980s, all school district boundaries are coterminous (same boundaries) with Niles Township High School District 219 which is the public high school serving all township students. (p.7) While this is a highly populated region of the state, one township has ten public school districts within its boundaries. Kersten (2009) stated that virtually all of the territory of the nine elementary districts was contained within the borders of the one high school district. This type of situation makes it more likely that the curriculum is coordinated among the elementary and high school districts. However, there are many situations in Illinois where the elementary and high school districts are not coterminous, and students from one elementary district may move on to two more separate high school districts. The problem with the large number of school districts in Illinois does not generally fall within the property rich suburban areas of the state, such as the Niles Township area. Rather, the EFAB call for consolidation was generally directed toward the less wealthy districts in the more rural and downstate portions of the state. These are the districts that are spending closer to the $6000 level per student, which is considerably less than their northern Illinois counterparts. In its 12 th annual comparison of educational practices in the 50 states, the Editorial Projects in Education’s report titled Quality Counts 2008 rated Illinois 43 rd among the states in a key component called the “Wealth Neutrality Score”(Educational Projects in Education Research Center, 2008). This score measures the ratio between district funding and local property tax wealth. Only seven states showed a less equitable ratio than Illinois. In another equity measure in the same study, Illinois ranked 40 th in actual spending as the % of the amount needed to bring all students to the median level (Educational Projects in Education Research Center, 2008). Legal Challenges There have been legal challenges to the Illinois school funding formula. Even though the Illinois Constitution contains a strongly worded education clause, giving the state primary responsibility for funding the schools, the Illinois Supreme Court has twice rejected challenges to the state’s finance system, based upon the separation of powers principle. In the first case, heard in 1996, the court held that the process of school funding reform must be undertaken in a legislative forum rather than in the courts (Committee for Educational Rights
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20 NCPEA 11 BLAZING NEW TRAILS: Pre
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NCPEA EXECUTIVE BOARD 2010-2011 Pre
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NCPEA HONOR ROLL OF PRESIDENTS, 194
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TABLE OF CONTENTS Contributing Auth
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Betty J. Alford, Stephen F. Austin
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xii Yearbook Reviewers Kenneth Rasm
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INVITED CHAPTERS PART 1
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4 PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE (3) The fed
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Shadows and Images II 7 LIVING LEGE
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Shadows and Images II 9 see little
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Shadows and Images II 11 settings,
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Shadows and Images II 13 into the m
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16 INVITED CHAPTERS Purpose of the
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18 INVITED CHAPTERS do not recogniz
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20 INVITED CHAPTERS Research Proced
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22 INVITED CHAPTERS Political maneu
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24 INVITED CHAPTERS CONCLUSION This
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26 INVITED CHAPTERS Johnson, R. B.,
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Complexities in the Workload of Pri
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47 CRITICAL ISSUES IN SHARED LEADER
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Professional Learning Communities:
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Special Education Director Burnout
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Superintendent Decision-making and
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CRITICAL ISSUES IN CRITICAL ISSUES
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Administrative Functions The Admini
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The Administration of Special Educa
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CRITICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTING ACADEM
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The Effective Practices and Beliefs
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Qualitative Data Service to the Pro
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