Is School Funding in Illinois Discriminatory?

I read with interest a recent e-mail newsletter from the State School News Service. Before reading the article, consider that while Berwyn elementary schools spend thousands less per pupil than neighboring suburban districts, our minority population rate is much higher.

State Board soon to be busy with Urban League suit
By Jim Broadway, Publisher, State School News Service

Not much has been written about the Chicago Urban League's suit challenging Illinois school funding system since a circuit judge gave the go-ahead last week allowing the litigation to proceed. The major Chicago newspapers gave the story just four paragraphs each online. A writer for the Chicago Catalyst (a school reform publication) provided more detail. Was last week's ruling a big deal?

As we told you last August when the suit was filed, it has the potential to be a major deal statewide. Last week's ruling, allowing the challenge to proceed as a civil rights action (in contrast with past failed attacks on our school funding system) raises that potential considerably. We'll know more on May 5, when lawyers for the Urban League and for the Illinois State Board of Education gather for a "status hearing" and argue over what's "discoverable" in this dispute.

Here's some background. In 2003, the legislature passed HB 2330 (now Public Act 93-0425) prohibiting the state, any county or unit of local government from discriminating against any "person or activity" on the basis of race, color or national origin. The more significant paragraph of that law makes a governmental entity vulnerable to charges of such discrimination if it uses "criteria or methods of administration that have the effect of subjecting individuals" to such discrimination.

The "method" ISBE uses to implement school funding policy is prescribed by law. The question will be, does that method "have the effect" of discriminating against those on whose behalf the Urban League has filed the suit - African-American and Hispanic citizens? The disparities of resources from one school to another - and the fact that property taxpayers in poorer communities pay far higher tax rates for education than are paid in more affluent communities - are points of contention.

It is not ISBE's fault that Illinois' communities of abject poverty are not racially heterogeneous, nor does the ISBE control the law on how schools are funded. Those issues are not in question. But if the court finds ISBE's methods discriminatory and orders the agency to stop using them, what would happen? No schools would get any state funding until the legislature enacts school policy that does not have the effect of being discriminatory.

As Catalyst writer John Myers reported last week, the ruling by Circuit Judge Martin Agran has stimulated some legislators to action. Rep. David Miller (D-Dolton), one of the more active school funding reform advocates in the legislature, is trying to get the issue on the 2009 agenda. The suit "puts pressure on the legislature to do the right thing," he told Myers. Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago), who chairs the Senate Education Committee, is taking similar action in his chamber.

Immediate policy change seems unlikely. Lawsuits drag on. Resolution of this one may be two years away. Whatever remedy the court would order would be a radical change in the status quo. Legislatures tend not to want to make such changes. Most probably believe they have enough "tough" decisions to make this year already, with a budget deficit of historic proportions staring them in the face, mounting deficits and calls for "ethics reform" in their own chambers.

But this lawsuit is one to be watched. Even Judge Agran has observed effects of the current school funding mechanism that might be considered discriminatory. The Chicago Urban League has the momentum now, and it is represented pro bono by some of the nation's most credible lawyers.