Rauner's petulance cost Illinois public shool students

In an unexpected, but still unexplained, action Illinois Gov. Bruce Rauner took an amendatory veto to ensure that the $75 million dollar scholarship program, that many are calling a voucher for lower income students to attend Catholic and Independent schools, does just that as he quibbled over terminology that he feels will delay the program for about three dozen private schools.

According to the Chicago Tribune, “Rauner’s issue centers on language that would require nonpublic schools to be “recognized” by the board of education to participate in the tax program. He says that eligibility should be expanded to schools that are “registered” with the board.

While it all seems semantic, it also has delayed the new funding formula from going to the neediest students and schools across the state, that were impaired under the old formula, and the funds that they have received have been from the previous and woefully inadequate one used for decades and that gave Illinois the reputation for the most inequitable per pupil funding in the nation.

The State-Journal Register reported that “Making this adjustment to this bill will maximize the number of schools eligible to participate, and therefore the number of students who may benefit,” Rauner said. “Inclusivity was the spirit of this legislation to begin with, and we simply must ensure that we follow through with the appropriate language to get the job done.”

State Sen. Andy Manar, D-Bunker Hill, the chief architect of the school funding bill, said the governor’s veto of the simple trailer bill creates potential “chaos” for every Illinois school that stands to benefit from long-overdue funding reform.

Democratic gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker noted Rauner is “once again using Illinois children as pawns in his political games.”

$36 million dollar pledges were made when the tax credit became available on Jan. 2. The move was widely seen as part of the compromise needed to pass the bill along with intensive lobbying by Cardinal Cupich, of the Chicago archdiocese.

In strong language the Chicago Teachers Union Vice President Jesse Sharkey condemned the move, and said, in a press statement: “Bruce Rauner has a weird notion of fairness. First, he vetoed the state’s budget for the 2018 fiscal year, which included additional funding for public schools, and also vetoed revenue to end the budget crisis. He attacked the bill on school funding reform—which would drive dollars to districts and students that need them the most—and called it a ‘bailout,’ even though students in Chicago are among the neediest in the state with some of the highest class sizes, ratios of students to social workers and fewest enrichment opportunities. And when he took too much political heat for holding the state’s more than two million public school students hostage for his anti-worker, anti-woman agenda, he said he would support changes only if they included a scam that funnels public dollars to private schools and massive tax breaks to billionaires like himself.”

“In his latest take on fairness, the governor has held up a technical bill—that his own appointed Illinois State Board of Education needed to implement the new funding law—to ‘save’ three dozen additional private schools by giving them a crack at the public money trough. It’s no surprise that he’s running more nauseating television commercials touting this scam as his signature achievement. I guess in the governor’s mind, nothing can be saved unless he’s able to destroy it first.”

Adding further delays are even more problematic, but “according to Jackie Matthews, spokeswoman for the Illinois State Board of Education, the agency does not yet know when it will be able to implement the new funding model, and that the delays were based on the figures used --- in other words, the old “attack the methodology” tactic

.

Before the veto superintendents were told it could go into effect in December, but the Illinois State Board of Education pushed it back to April, and now she says that “implementing a new funding formula is a complicated process that takes time. The evidence-based funding law fundamentally changed how the state distributes increases in state funding,” Matthews said. “ISBE is a little over four months into our work to implement the historic new law. Implementation requires that new systems be built, new data be collected and verified, and additional communication and collaboration streams be established within and outside of the agency.”

Addressing school superintendent concerns, Matthews said, “the models produced were based on unverified data generated for the specific purpose of helping policymakers evaluate the various funding reform proposals.”

Just to make a point, say some, this move is to say that he’s still in charge, despite earlier claims that he wasn’t, but that Speaker of the House Michael Madigan was, a remark that he later regretted, say others; but this petulance now robs the neediest students of their right to a decent education.