Combine that relic of a system with the lingering economic aftershocks of the Great Recession and you get an increasing number of rural and urban schools cutting back on the educational opportunities they offer students because the state isn’t keeping up with the costs, and there’s simply not enough resources locally to meet the needs. These cutbacks further hamper economic opportunity in the lives of children that live in poverty.

Meanwhile, across Chicagoland, growing suburban schools increasingly turn to local homeowners and their property taxes to foot the bills the state won’t pay.

It’s a tragic situation that only serves to widen the economic and educational fissures that plague our system of public schools.

Just about everyone agrees that it needs to be changed, that is until someone actually puts pen to paper. You see, when you start changing the formula it starts changing who gets how much. And when you do that, people, who for years have demanded the system be overhauled, suddenly start defending their slice of the status quo.

The status quo in inequitable.  The status quo is not acceptable.

Making our system even more flawed is the fact that the state hasn’t been adequately funding it. State government currently only provides 89 percent of the dollars promised to school districts.

Some argue the first step to fixing the system is to fully fund it.

I am not one of them.

That added 11 percent worth of funding would cost taxpayers half a billion dollars. If we’re going to invest that amount of money into our public school system, let’s put it in a modern system that addresses the issues rather than exacerbates them.

And that’s what I’ve spent much of the past two years trying to do – taking input from educators, experts and parents to come up with a system that is fair for both students and taxpayers. Because regardless of how much the state spends on our children’s education, whether it is $1 billion or $10 billion, that money is not currently being directed to the schools and children that need it most.

Our state’s economy will never reach its full potential until our system of public education reaches it full potential first.  That calls for bold action on addressing both the inequity and inadequacy that exists today in Illinois’ public schools.

Make no mistake; the pending legislation – Senate Bill 16 – is far from perfect. That is why I’ve welcomed constructive criticism, because no one person has a monopoly on ideas.

The Senate did its due diligence by carefully studying the issue for months and advancing a workable solution to the House last spring. But this is far from a done deal.

This is a problem that we can solve.

I anticipate incorporating more changes to SB 16 that we know are needed and eventually passing a bipartisan overhaul next year that is fair to all public school children in Illinois, regardless of their ZIP code.

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