The Wall Street Journal recently posted a scathing indictment of K-12 education in Illinois, drawing on research by conservative Illinois thinktank Wirepoints. The article and research show a perverse form of “equity” in Illinois schools: across the racial spectrum, nobody can read.
Below is part II of Wirepoint’s report, slightly abbreviated. For part I, click here.
Illinois’ educational-industrial complex
How does Illinois’ education system remain intact given its many failures? The answer is simple: it’s designed to self-perpetuate.
A weave of labor laws, hundreds of districts, generous salaries, constitutionally protected pensions, powerful superintendents and even more powerful unions ensure the system is protected against criticism from parents and taxpayers. The entire $38 billion system – propped up by the symbiotic relationship between unions and lawmakers – can be described as an entrenched educational-industrial complex.
Here’s how it’s kept intact:
The labor contracts
At the heart of Illinois’ educational system are some of the most union-friendly collective bargaining laws in the country. Those laws compel – force – school district officials to negotiate with Illinois teachers unions.
What results are multi-year labor contracts that guarantee all types of protections and benefits for union members: job security, automatic raises and automatic inflation bumps, sick leave perks, pension pickups, end-of-career salary spiking, employment protections and more.
Decatur’s current contract is four years long, which is typical, but sometimes contracts are even longer. Palatine, for example, signed a 10-year long agreement in 2016.
Nobody in the private sector gets protections and guarantees like that. On top of that, the state’s labor laws allow administrators and the unions to keep contract negotiations secret from the public. Taxpayers don’t get a seat at the table and they don’t know the details until after the contracts are already agreed to.
And if the unions don’t like what a district offers during contract negotiations, they can strike. Striking is the most powerful tool at their disposal. Often just the threat of a strike is enough for school boards to give in to union demands.
Most states aren’t reckless enough to give teachers unions that much power. Illinois is one of only 13 states – and the only one of its neighbors – to legally allow strikes, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality.
Contrast Illinois’ pro-union stance to that of states like Texas, Georgia and North Carolina, which prohibit their local school districts from bargaining with teachers unions. Those states prioritize parents over public sector unions.
The big money
Illinois’ big salaries and even bigger pensions ensure that few teachers and administrators want to upend the system.
Average Illinois teacher salaries, at $67,760 for nine months of work, are the highest in the Midwest, according to the National Education Association. They are also the nation’s 11th-highest after adjusting for cost of living.
Those salaries, combined with generous pension rules, result in some of the biggest teacher pensions in the country. A 2019 study by Teacherpensions.org shows the median pension benefit for newly-retired Illinois teachers is the highest in the nation overall.
And a separate analysis by Wirepoints found Illinois’ pension formula is so generous that career teachers with 30 years or more of service retire today at an average age of 59 with starting pensions of more than $73,000.
Add up their expected years in retirement plus Illinois’ 3 percent compounded cost-of-living adjustment – one of the most generous COLAs in the country – and those career teachers will receive, on average, about $2.6 million over the course of their retirements.
Illinois’ education administrators have even more stake in the system. They earn an average of $114,000 a year, according to 2021 ISBE report card data, with 60 percent of Illinois’ 12,000-plus school and district administrators getting more than $100,000 a year.
Illinois’ highest-paid administrators are state’s hundreds of district superintendents. They receive an average salary of $165,000 a year.
Take a look at the top ten. All are paid more than $300,000 a year. Kevin Nohelty of Dolton SD 148 is paid a salary of $330,000 to manage a district where only 10 percent of students can read at grade level. Theresa Placencia gets $306,000 in Waukegan where just 18 percent of students are proficient in reading.
The numbers jump even higher when we look at superintendent pensions. The top retiree in the Teachers’ Retirement System is Laura Murray, a former superintendent of Homewood-Flossmoor.
She retired in 2008 at age 57 and received a starting annual pension of nearly $240,000. Today, thanks to Illinois’ automatic 3 percent yearly COLA, her annual pension is more than $344,000 a year. She can expect to collect about $10 million in benefits during retirement.
The entrenched bureaucracy
Superintendents entrench their power and influence through one of the most extensive education bureaucracies in the nation. Illinois has over 850 school districts – the nation’s 4th-most. Compare that to other large states with student populations with one million or more students and you’ll see what an outlier Illinois is. Florida has only 75 school districts, North Carolina, 115, Virginia, 132 and Georgia, 215.
And before you disparage the southern states for their “poor” education, know that Florida, with just as many low income and minority students as Illinois, has equal or better educational outcomes than Illinois. That’s even though Illinois spends 70 percent more per student than Florida does.
At Wirepoints, we’re major proponents of local control and for pushing decision making to the lowest levels of government possible, but any analysis of Illinois’ school district structure reveals rampant overlap, duplication and bloat. Over a third of Illinois districts serve 600 students or less. Nearly 45 percent of districts serve only one to two schools. And over half the districts in Illinois are separate elementary and high school districts, rather than combined unit districts.
Take New Trier Township. There, six New Trier High School feeder districts all lie within the same border as the high school district. All seven districts could easily be a 12,000-student unit structure that consolidates multiple bookkeepers, superintendents, curriculum heads, etc.
Instead, taxpayers must support about 140 total district bureaucrats – including seven superintendents – earning big salaries and eventually even bigger pension benefits. (Remember that the state, and not local school districts, pays teachers’ pension costs.)
The back scratching
All those laws, staffing, money and bureaucratic organization make Illinois’ education system a political powerhouse.
Teachers unions give political contributions and votes to lawmakers. In return, lawmakers and local officials pass union-friendly laws, generous pay and even more generous benefits.
That’s another key part of the system’s resilience: nobody involved wants to stop the
gravy train. So much so that Illinois politicians are more than willing to enshrine union power in the state’s constitution. Lawmakers voted to include an amendment that would vastly expand union powers on the November 2022 ballot.
If voters approve the referendum, any chance of passing structural collective bargaining reforms will be blocked.
Coming tomorrow in Part IV –
The “underfunding” myth
Despite the big money spent in Illinois, claims of an “underfunded” education system persist. Illinois state superintendents have in the past gone so far as to demand a $7 billion increase in state education funding in a single year.