I couldn’t help but laugh as I read the Chicago Tribune editorial on the prospect of the State of Illinois assuming control of the Chicago Public Schools:
Chicagoans with long memories can hear echoes of the past in the growing crisis around finances at Chicago Public Schools.
It was just before Christmas in 1979 when CPS, frozen out of debt markets and with state government unwilling to bail the district out after several such rescues in the 1970s, couldn’t pay its workers. Vendors wouldn’t provide services for fear of going unpaid.
In January 1980, Gov. Jim Thompson hammered out a deal with the city, Chicago Teachers Union and CPS to have the state essentially take over financial decision-making for Chicago’s public schools. The state was able to borrow on the schools’ behalf and collected new property taxes to finance the debt. The School Finance Authority, created to oversee CPS’ finances, assumed control of CPS budgets and contracting.
Here’s their bottom line:
A school board and a mayor that jack up teacher salaries and openly talk of taking on more junk-rated debt during a period of deficits well into the hundreds of millions have relinquished their right to determine CPS’ future. There assuredly will be painful conditions attached to whatever assistance the state provides — if indeed a cash-strapped Springfield even summons the will and the means to help. A meaningful, enforceable school consolidation plan, perhaps? Limits on contracting authority maybe, including future negotiations with CTU?
The bottom line: If you can’t manage your own business, you’re in no position to complain when others force concessions from you in return for fixing what you’ve broken.
So much has changed over the last 45 years it’s hard to know where to start. Illinois’s population has grown by 8% even as the U. S. population has grown 45%. Chicago’s population has declined by about 300,000. It’s now lower than it has been in a century.
Jim Thompson was the powerful Republican governor; Jane Byrne was mayor. Now the governor is a Democrat who has been unable to get any of his key proposals enacted into law and the mayor is Brandon Johnson, a former CTU labor organizer. That state’s credit rating was AAA; the city’s A. Now the state’s is A and the city’s roughly junk status. Illinois was considered a highish tax state; now it’s tax burden is arguably the highest in the nation.
Among the things that haven’t changed is that Illinois was considered one of the stingiest states with respect to K-12 funding then and it still is.
What really needs to happen are major changes education and its funding in the State of Illinois, something for which there is little if any prospect for happening.
