Second in a series: the answer to Illinois’ troubles is not a money spigot.
It’s a refrain we hear over and over again: to improve education, we need to spend more money. Much more money, in fact.
But in reality:
Illinois already spends significantly more than average and has little to show for it.
School districts are calling for more money from voters or the state without prudently spending the money they have.
The legislature has passed multiple laws and the state executive branch has established multiple policies in recent years which have driven up costs without corresponding benefits, have the prospects of worsening education, or both.
We’ve learned that “experts” have repeatedly had and continue to espouse failed ideas.
And despite all this, Pritzker and the Democrats oppose alternatives such as private schools or homeschooling.
Don’t believe me?
Here are the facts:
First, school spending
Here’s how Illinois ranks in education spending: in terms of actual dollars, Illinois ranks 8th, at $21,800 per year. As a share of taxpayer income, Illinois ranks 5th, at 4.5%.
But compare this to our test scores: they are solidly middle-of-the-road, based on the NAEP, the self-titled “nation’s report card.” According to the organization, we are “not significantly different than the National public” for grade 4 math and reading scores. Only in grade 8 scores are we above average, ranking 9th for reading and 16th for math. But even here, all is not well, as the scores appear positive only in comparison to other states. In comparison from year to year scores have declined. In reading, 77% of 8th graders were basic or above, and 36% proficient or better in 2017, but in 2024, only 70% and 33% are. The same is true in math: 68% and 32% were at/above basic and at/above proficient respectively in 2017, and the “basic plus” level dropped down to 62% (only the “proficient in math” percent stayed the same). Simply put: only one-third of Illinois students are proficient in reading and math.
Yet evidence of failure to spend wisely is all around us.
Among suburban districts, High School District 214, which overlaps considerably with House District 53, has in recent years built new or expanded existing pools and theaters (including adding a second, little-used theater at Rolling Meadows High School), yet now have told the public that in the meantime they have failed to attend to basic needs, such as heating systems on their last legs, and require “$850 million in needed improvements that are not cosmetic [but] necessary to keep our students and teachers safe, warm and dry.”
In Chicago, Wirepoints regularly reports of Chicago public schools which operate at a fraction of their capacity, with the smallest being Douglass High School, with a capacity of 912 students, an enrollment of 28 students and a teaching staff of 27 – yet despite the nearly 1:1 ratio, none of its students were proficient in reading in 2024. Altogether, the 20 most-empty schools were operating at 14.6% of their capacity, with 3,161 students in buildings with capacity for 21,600, and with 11% of those students proficient in reading. And 1/3 of CPS schools operate at less than half their capacity — which drives up costs for staff and for keeping buildings heated and maintained.
Second, new legislation
In recent years, in the name of “equity” the state has passed a flurry of new laws and regulations.
In February 2021, a legislative committee approved the “Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards,” which require teacher education programs in Illinois to train teachers to be “culturally responsive.” And, to be clear, this isn’t as simple as being responsive to students’ various family/cultural home life/backgrounds, but teachers are being called on to promote “student advocacy” and “prioritize representation in the curriculum” and call on teachers to ” work actively against . . . systems of oppression” — in other words, calling on teachers to create politicized classrooms.
In March 2021, Pritzker signed House Bill 2170, which included multiple new mandates. These include a requirement that students must have two years of a foreign language to graduate, which was promoted as ensuring all students meet the admission requirements for UIUC, but in fact will drive up costs as schools must hire new teaching staff and take away existing student elective opportunities, e.g., for a student at a school which offers two electives, and is now enrolled in fine arts and a career education class, the next cohort would have to drop one of those. For students whose “elective” time is spent with additional learning time needed for the core curriculum, the harm would be worse. Students will also be required to have a year of “computer literacy” instruction (not defined in the law).
In addition, the bill required that all students who are deemed to “meet or exceed state standards” are automatically enrolled in an “honors” class in the subject, with the option given to parents to choose to enroll in the “regular” class — and after this law was passed, just this past August, Illinois changed its “cut scores” to increase the number of students being defined as proficient. The only foreseeable outcome of these two changes will be for the rigor of so-called “honors” classes to be dropped down to accommodate the students now being enrolled into them, either through explicit changes in the curriculum or through grade inflation.
And grade inflation (or the indirect grade inflation of labelling as “honors classes” courses that offer simply regular grade-level curriculum, then giving plus-ups to the GPA for those classes) will have added harmful effects when combined with the elimination of standardized tests (SAT, ACT) for college admission and the state’s new Direct Admissions program, in which students will be notified of their “admission” to schools without formally applying. At present, Illinois already offers a “One Click College Admit” program in which public colleges (other than UIC and UIUC) provide the GPA required for admission with no other information needed: GPAs as low as 2.75 at SIU – Carbondale, 2.50 at NEIU and Chicago State, and 2.0 at Governors State.
And once those students arrive on college campuses, they will take placement tests to see if they are actually ready for college level writing and math classes, and here, too, HB2170 makes changes in its Developmental Education Reform Act. The law is complicated in terms of what precisely it mandates but the idea is to mandate or strongly push colleges to move from stand-alone remedial classes to “co-requisite” classes for students who are not prepared to do college level work in reading/writing and math, and to expand the standards for placing a student in college-level classes. There is no clear data on the impact of this law, especially given the significant increase in students in remedial classes in general (see p 10 of the 2025 report), but demands by the legislature that a particular method of instruction be implemented universally risks doing far more harm than good.
Another form of educational malpractice has been the rejection of phonics-based instruction for reading, in favor of the so-called “three-cuing” method, in which children are told to guess words from the context or from pictures. The 2022 podcast Sold a Story exposed the failures of this method, widely adopted and promoted by Lucy Caulkins of Colombia University as “balanced literacy.” In 2023 Illinois passed legislation mandating the state create a comprehensive literacy plan and in 2024 that plan was unveiled, which is perhaps “better late than never” but it’s still appalling that until this late date students were being taught to read with a failed method — a method about which it’s been said that even intensive tutoring failed because the tutors also told students to guess at words, memorize sight words, and so on! And if you’re scratching your head wondering why this would be, the general explanation seems to be that it’s a mix of phonics instruction having been promoted by Republicans, and consequently rejected by the “education lobby” for partisan reasons, and teacher perceptions that teaching phonics is too “boring.” It was only after certain Deep South states began to post impressive improvements, labelled the “Mississippi Miracle,” by a curriculum reform beginning in 2013 which began to be recognized in 2023, that we saw the turnaround in Illinois and elsewhere.
Now Illinois is planning to implement a Comprehensive Numeracy Plan, but the initial draft has a multitude of red flags. In the same manner as phonics was abandoned in part because teachers wanted the shortcut of reading “engaging” books rather than tedious practice with letter sounds, the new plan, in line with the self-proclaimed “expert thinking” now in vogue, discards or minimizes memorization or direct instruction by teachers, in favor of student “problem-solving” of “real-world” problems (for example, having students “discover” how division works by solving the problem of dividing up snacks). It calls for the dismantling of tracking, that is, ending advanced classes for higher-achieving students. It calls for “cultural responsiveness” and including “diverse ways of knowing” and includes footnotes referencing “ethnomathematics” and other buzzwords which have played out elsewhere as a curriculum which uses politicized “word problems” and classroom time spent on the Mayan numbering system, for example.
Finally, SEL or social-emotional learning, is being promoted heavily in schools and school legislation, most recently with new legislation this year mandating annual mental health screening in schools. This sounds appealing — who wouldn’t want students to have improved mental health? — but in reality such screening has as high as a 50% false positive rate, which subjects students to “treatment” that can do more harm than good.
What’s more, the ability of families to escape public schools was curtailed when the Invest in Kids scholarship program was ended, and Governor Pritzker has hinted that he will choose to opt Illinois out of the scholarship opportunity in the “Big Beautiful Bill,” even though there’s no cost to the state. On top of that, Nicolle Grasse was one of the sponsors of a bill, the Homeschool Act, which would have overregulated homeschooling, enabling local school districts to demand “portfolios” and deem a homeschooled child truant by claiming the portfolio was insufficient. It might seem foolish for a school to bring on added costs for themselves by pulling more students into their classrooms, but some schools get such a large allocation of state and federal money that it more than covers the added expense of an additional student, and pulling in students who would otherwise have been homeschooled would be an easy way to boost test scores as well as keep union teachers employed.
I’m throwing a lot of data out. I know that not many people will have made it this far. But for those who have, please recognize the fundamental bottom line that improving education is not a matter of simply spending money.
Good legislation can help improve learning, but bad legislation can actively do harm. And having sound teaching practices and administering schools well matters much more than a money spigot.
