Illinois Residents Face Inequity in Education Funding


John Heintz, an education and legal consultant based in Chicago, previously served as the chief legal officer and assistant superintendent for operations at Niles Township High School District 219 in the Chicago suburb of Skokie. John Heintz is a committed voice to transforming education. His work leading secondrail.com has been a key means by which he has proposed broad-based solutions to major challenges like the Illinois education funding crisis.

Despite ranking fifth in the nation for gross state product, Illinois has the nation’s lowest percentage of state funding directed toward K-12 education. This underfunding comes from an outdated funding model that relies on local property taxes as the primary means to fund Illinois schools. Reliance on local property taxes means teachers and administrators in wealthy areas are among the highest paid in the country, regardless how they perform. High performance is typically gauged by the satisfaction of students and parents with post-secondary success. Given that the wealthiest districts in Illinois spend almost three times what poorer districts spend, performance observers look to see three times the results in the wealthy areas. 

John Heintz and the Second Rail team analyze the myriad reasons for wildly different funding and results. Labor unions historical distrust tying pay to performance. Parents place disproportionate faith in teachers and schools and rarely hold schools' feet to the fire on performance results. Pensions are high and underfunded by two sides of the labor negotiation table, and Illinois has a long history of non-collaborative confrontations as the means to addressing labor challenges. The result is that lawyers make a lot of money sorting out the contradictions in law, policy and practice. Those same business, labor and non-profits individuals and groups shift from problem solving to advocacy and place students last. 

Second Rail both seeks to get to the bottom of that posturing and those contradictions while offering workable solutions.

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