By The Editorial Board | Chicago Tribune
Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday signed into law a new state budget that modestly increased state spending on K-12 education and related costs.
Yet most headlines ignored a more consequential education narrative — not one of how much is flowing to classrooms, but how much money never makes it there in the first place.
Pritzker’s budget allocates nearly $10.8 billion for K-12 education.
It also includes $7 billion for K-12 pension costs.
In 2000, the state spent about $705 million on K-12 pensions.
That’s not a typo.
Even after adjusting for inflation, Illinois’ spending on K-12 pensions has skyrocketed by roughly fivefold since the turn of the last century, ballooning to nearly 10 times the raw dollar amount spent in 2000.
For every dollar Illinois spends on education, it spends another 65 cents on pension obligations. Imagine how much more schools could do with even a sliver of that money.
These numbers help explain one major reason why costs continue to climb even as Illinois’ student population goes down. New data show Illinois lost more than 100,000 public school students in just the five years since 2019, more than twice the rate of decline for the Midwest as a whole. The state educates roughly 206,000 fewer public school students today than it did in 2000.
Yet total education spending continues to grow, though not necessarily in the best way for current and future students.
Editorial continues here.
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