Chicago Public Schools leaders heaved a legal long shot this week to extract more education money from Springfield.
The Chicago Board of Education sued Gov. Bruce Rauner and the Illinois State Board of Education, accusing the state of operating "separate and unequal systems of funding for public education in Illinois." The suit, filed Tuesday in the Cook County Chancery Division, alleges Illinois spent 74 cents to educate CPS’ predominantly minority children for every dollar it spent on the predominantly white children outside of Chicago in 2016. The suit claims CPS received 15 percent of Illinois’ 2016 school funding, despite having nearly 20 percent of Illinois students.
"…The State treats CPS’s schoolchildren, who are predominantly African American and Hispanic, as second-class children, relegated to the back of the State’s education funding school bus," the lawsuit says.
That’s an explosive charge. CPS CEO Forrest Claypool hopes a judge will fast-track the district’s request to bar the state from dispensing aid in a way that discriminates against CPS students. He hopes that will bring more dollars to CPS and prevent more school budget cuts. "The clock is ticking for our schools and our kids, and for CPS," he said.
Two thoughts:
- Chicago Public Schools leaders and Mayor Rahm Emanuel have long claimed the state funding formula has cheated CPS students, mostly low-income and minority, of their fair share. That claim has just as loudly and often been disputed by Republican lawmakers in Springfield, who’ve trotted out charts and graphs to retort that CPS students receive more than their fair share. Calculating how much — or how little — Chicago Public Schools children get compared to other students statewide is a long-running political shell game. If a judge finally resolves this confusing numbers game, good.
- That clarity likely won’t come soon. Claypool warns that CPS is "on the brink." The district needs the $215 million in state funds it banked on in its fiscal 2017 budget. But complex lawsuits tend to creep, not sprint, through the courts. Case in point: A pending Chicago Urban League lawsuit argues that minority children in Chicago get cheated because of the over-reliance on local property taxes to fund schools. That suit, which, like the CPS suit, alleged violation of the Illinois Civil Rights Act, was filed in 2008.
CPS leaders surely would welcome the sort of legal thunderbolt that Connecticut Superior Court Judge Thomas Moukawsher delivered last year in a wide-ranging decision declaring much of his state’s educational system unconstitutional. The judge demolished how Connecticut divides money among districts, sets education standards for children, and evaluates and pays teachers.
But that decision capped an 11-year court battle. And the fight still isn’t over, pending a state supreme court decision.
So, no, the CPS lawsuit likely won’t rescue the district’s precarious finances this year. CPS is on the brink because it deferred teacher pension payments, recklessly borrowed to the hilt and overspent to maintain an oversized real estate footprint even as student population plummeted.
You’d think that CPS could count on a major legal assist from the Chicago Teachers Union because CTU President Karen Lewis has long made similar claims about inequities in the system. But Lewis says she is unimpressed by the district’s lawsuit. She characterizes it as "a fake fight between Rahm and Rauner."
"It’s difficult to support CPS in anything because CPS has proven that it cannot be trusted …" Lewis tells us in an email via the union’s spokesman. "But if the district is sincere about finally making the argument that the CTU has been making for years — that school funding is unequal and unfair to minority students — sure, we’ll testify and go on the record that Rauner’s school funding formula is racially discriminatory." In other words: CPS, you’re on your own. And note the dig at Rauner, who didn’t write Illinois’ school funding formula, rather than at the legislative leaders who’ve had many years to fix it.
CPS is on the brink, perilously close to a topple into fiscal insolvency. Springfield likely won’t save the day, absent a grand budget bargain among Rauner, House Speaker Michael Madigan and Senate President John Cullerton.
The rest of CPS’ school year — aka budget year — is short. The district’s finances are gravely out of whack. And a huge teachers pension payment comes due at the end of June. This is ugly.
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