Blazing New Trails - Connexions

276 CRITICAL ISSUES IN SCHOOL IMPROVEMENT
vs. Edgar, 1996). In a similar case, decided in 1999, the court rejected the plaintiff’s attempt
to distinguish its 1996 decision from their “adequacy” claims and stated that it would not
enter in to the arena of Illinois public school policy (Lewis E. vs. Spagnolo , 1999). In August
of 2008, the plaintiffs in Chicago Urban League vs. State of Illinois filed a complaint asking
the court to declare Illinois’ current school funding system unconstitutional. In this case, the
plaintiffs stated that the Illinois finance system was in violation of the provision of the state
constitution guaranteeing all students a high quality education and that it also discriminates
against families based on race in violation of the Illinois Civil Rights Act of 2003. While the
Cook County Circuit Court dismissed four of the five claims made in the complaint, it did
find that the plaintiffs had met their burden to allege facts demonstrating that minority
students have suffered injury from the discriminatory, although unintentional, effect of the
implementation of the Illinois school funding system (Chicago Urban League, et.al. vs. State
of Illinois, 2009). The Court’s opinion highlighted some of the more startling facts from the
complaint concerning Illinois’ inequitable school funding system. These are explicated below:
Students who attend schools in property-poor communities do not receive an equal
educational opportunity. Illinois ranks 49 th in the nation in the size of per-pupil
funding disparity between its lowest and highest poverty districts.
The EAV [Equalized Assessed Valuation] per pupil in the top five wealthiest districts
ranged from $1.2 to $1.8 million, while the EAV per pupil ranged from $7000 to just
over $24,000 in the five districts with the lowest property wealth.
The disparity existed despite the fact that low property wealth areas generally pay
much higher property tax rates than areas with higher property wealth, and yet they
still generate less local funding for their schools. The tax rate in the districts with the
lowest property wealth was more than six times higher than the tax rate in the highest
poverty districts.
As just one example, Illinois School District Unit 188 in Brooklyn, Illinois, ranked
386 th out of a total of 395 consolidated [K-12] school districts in EAV per student in
2007, 97% of Brooklyn’s students came from low income households in 2007, and
almost 100% of Brooklyn’s students are African-American or Hispanic. (Chicago
Urban League, et.al. vs. State of Illinois, 2009, p.1)
The plaintiffs are considering an appeal to the Illinois Supreme Court on the rejected claims.
However, the plaintiffs believe that this ruling paves the way for them to receive relief that
was sought when the case was originally filed. This relief would essentially be a revision of
the Illinois system of financing its schools (Chicago Urban League, et.al. vs. State of Illinois,
2009, p.1).
The most recent Illinois court case related to the funding of schools was filed on
March 24, 2010 in the Circuit Court of the Seventh Judicial Circuit, in Sangamon County,
Illinois (Carr vs. Koch). In this case, known as Carr vs. Koch, the plaintiffs were Paul Carr, a
high school counselor who resided in Chicago Heights, Illinois and who owned property in
the Homewood-Flossmoor Consolidated High School District 233, and Ron Newell, a retired
teacher, resident and property owner in Cairo Unified School District 1, in Cairo, Illinois. The
plaintiffs filed this suit under the Equal Protection Clause of the Illinois Constitution because
they claimed, “In short, the State education funding system imposes substantially greater
burdens on taxpayers who reside in property-poor districts than it does on similarly situated