Chicago provides less property tax money per pupil for its public schools than any other community in Cook or Du Page Counties, a Tribune analysis of tax and school records has found.
Even when funds from the state and federal governments are added in, the city`s school system has to operate on about 15 percent less money per student than schools in the average suburb, the study determined.
But a Tribune Poll found that Chicagoans are so concerned about how bad the schools are that a majority say they would be willing to pay more in taxes to make them better. A separate Tribune survey of 68 top executives of a broad range of major employers in the city and its suburbs also found substantial support for higher school taxes.
The findings of the study and the poll and survey, undertaken as part of The Tribune`s seven-month examination of the schools, rebut the repeated assertions of politicians.
For years, powerful city and state politicians have opposed increased funding for the city`s schools, contending that voters would not approve a tax increase and that the school system did not need more money.
But the city`s schools, which have far and away the most difficult job of any school district in Illinois, are chronically money-starved. Caught in the cross fire of political skirmishing, Chicago schools are routinely short-changed both in City Hall and in the Illinois General Assembly:
– In Chicago, political leaders, who exercise indirect control over the school system, keep the property-tax rate for the schools lower than those of nearly every community in the metropolitan area. They do this to permit other taxing bodies, such as the city government, to raise more from property owners without risking a voter backlash.
But the combination of that low school tax rate and Chicago`s low property wealth means that city schools receive only $1,447 per student per year in property tax revenue. That`s less than half of the $3,208 per student that an average suburban district gets in property-tax money.
And in many sections of the suburbs, the gap is even wider. For example, the Tribune study found that the combination of high school and elementary school tax levies imposed last year within Niles High School District 219 brought in an average of $5,555 per student, or nearly three times more than the $1,447 raised in Chicago.
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– In Springfield, state legislators-enmeshed in regional conflicts among the city, suburbs and Downstate-manipulate the state school aid
”equalization” formula to benefit affluent suburban districts at the expense of Chicago and other poor communities. They do this even though the stated purpose of the formula is to help tax-poor districts and schools with hard-to-teach children from low-income families.
In refusing to provide more money, city and state politicians argue that the school system is a financial sinkhole, that it wastes money now and would waste more if it had more.
”How is more money going to solve it?” asks State Senate Minority Leader James ”Pate” Philip, chairman of the Du Page County Republican Party. ”We`ve given them more money and more money and more money, and the system seems to get worse. What they`re doing is not working and has never worked. Why should we fuel the system? It`s a bottomless pit.”
Yet, the problems of Chicago schools cannot be blamed entirely on bad leadership.
No other district in the state has as many hard-to-teach children. Chicago`s 595 public elementary and high schools have only about a quarter of the state`s total public school enrollment, but more than half of all low-income students in Illinois. In addition, nearly four of every five Illinois students with limited proficiency in English are in Chicago Public Schools.
Such children need more individual attention, but city schools don`t have the money to provide it.
This lack of money has been a major component in the failure of the school system to educate its students, and, over the decades, this failure has short-changed millions of children.
Continued failure will mean not only a bleak life for more generations of children, but also a growing social price to the entire state in welfare costs, crime, lost taxes and a threat to the metropolitan economy because of a projected shortage of young people educated well enough to get jobs in the modern workplace.
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Chicago`s public schools live in poverty.
In the 1985-86 school year, the system had total revenues from state, local and federal sources of $3,957 per enrolled student-nearly $800 less per pupil than the average suburban community.
Financial support is also low when compared with other large districts across the country.
Among the 10 largest school districts in the nation, Chicago ranked 7th in total revenues per pupil for the 1986-87 school year. In that year, Chicago raised $3,928 per pupil, nearly $2,000 less than New York City.
Chicago was also behind Fairfax County, Va., a suburb of Washington, D.C. ($5,633); Philadelphia ($5,236); Detroit ($4,126); Dade County, Fla., which includes Miami ($3,964); and Broward County, Fla. which includes Ft. Lauderdale ($3,940). It ranked ahead of Los Angeles ($3,642); Dallas ($3,623); and Houston ($3,178).
A major reason for Chicago`s low financial ranking is the heavy reliance in Illinois on the use of property tax revenues to finance education.
This means that a district with a wealthy population, or with lots of valuable industrial or commercial property, has a relatively easy time raising money for its schools while a district serving a poor community, such as Chicago, must struggle to get by.
The state school aid formula is supposed to even out such inequities by giving more money to tax-poor districts and more money to districts with children from poor families, according to Michael A. Belletire, associate superintendent for finance and support services for the State Board of Education.
”Chicago has had to bear a burden that no other school district has had to bear,” Belletire said of the city`s poverty population.
”The state`s role is to recognize the fact that it`s a lot easier to educate kids from similar backgrounds with a relatively high socio-economic background. Therein lies the justification for the state to step in and act as broker.”
But, because of the politics of the state and the state legislature, the aid formula falls far short of its stated goal.
According to one measure (federal census data), 45 percent of the 419,537 students enrolled in Chicago schools are from low-income families. According to another (the number of children eligible for the federal school meal program), the figure is 68.1 percent.
But the state aid formula pretends that only 22.6 percent of the city students are from poor families. In fact, it pretends that no school district in the state has a low-income enrollment that is more than 22.6 percent of the total student population.
This artificial limit ends up costing Chicago schools as much as $121 million a year-about $280 per pupil-in state aid that they would receive if the formula were to function freely, according to a Tribune analysis.
That $280 per student would reduce the funding gap between the city and suburban schools by about a third, but the city schools would still have about $520 less per pupil than the average suburban district.
The distortion of the state aid formula is done by the General Assembly and the governor so that Chicago schools get slightly less than a third of the total state budget for elementary and secondary education-the arbitrary limit that has been in effect for years.
”They beat on the formula until it comes out the way they want it,”
says David Chicoine, an agricultural economics professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, and an adviser to Downstate legislators on the school aid formula.
This school year, Chicago schools will get $718.8 million from the state, or slightly more than a third of the system`s $1.8 billion budget.
That money, the bulk of which is allocated under the aid formula, represents 30.8 percent of all state funds for elementary and secondary education.
Many legislators contend that 30.8 percent is a very generous figure because the Chicago school system has only 23.6 percent of the state`s public school students.
They tend to overlook the fact that Chicago has 54.2 percent of the state`s public school children from low-income families.
”If you`re interested in providing equity of schooling, then you want the kids with the most needs getting more dollars,” says G. Alfred Hess, executive director of the Chicago Panel on Public School Policy and Finance, a citizens group that studies city school issues. ”Chicago should get more money.”
It`s not just the artificial limit on low-income students that strips money from Chicago and other poor districts. There`s also the flat grant.
No matter how rich a school district is, the formula gives it a flat grant per pupil. This year, the guaranteed flat grant is $144.
Thus, a wealthy district, such as Lake Forest High School District 115, which raised more than $7,000 per pupil in property taxes last year, can still receive about $200,000 in state aid under the flat grant provision.
What this means is that rich districts get thousands in state money for which they have little need, and that leaves less state money available for poor districts, desperate for financial help.
”It`s basically a political decision,” says Hess. ”The theory was that everybody should get something so they`d be for higher taxes.
”The theory`s false. Those suburban district representatives are the worst of the no-more-money-for-the-schools people. Giving them a flat grant hasn`t helped.”
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Chicago schools are poor because the city itself is poor.
Despite the economic strength of the downtown area, Chicago has much less property wealth than the suburbs, as measured by equalized assessed valuation. This is the value of property as it is assessed for tax purposes and modified so that assessment levels throughout Illinois are relatively equal.
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Taken together, the suburbs of Cook, Du Page and Lake Counties have an equalized assessed value of property of $69,483 per public school student.
In Chicago, the figure is $38,390.
This means that, overall, suburban tax rates have to be only about half as large as Chicago`s to raise the same amount of money.
In addition, the Chicago schools have a lot more competition for property tax dollars than do those in the suburbs.
The total property tax rate in Chicago is just over $10.35 per $100 assessed value, one of the highest in Cook County, but only about 36 percent of that goes to schools. (If one includes the tax rate for the School Finance Authority, set up to issue bonds to pay off debts that resulted in the Chicago school system`s financial collapse in 1979, the school figure rises to 40 percent.)
In the suburbs, school tax rates make up an average of about 60 percent of the total property tax rate.
”We pay a fantastic amount for police and fire protection in Chicago,”
says Hess. ”People in the city expect to have health clinics where they can send indigent people.
”This city is in the cruel box of having to decide which services to provide to poor families. The schools are the service that`s currently being short-changed. We`re providing so many basic-need services to enable these people to live that we`re not giving them the services requisite to escape the situation.”
School Supt. Manford Byrd Jr. says: ”It doesn`t take a genius to know we`re all operating off the same tax base. It`s a matter of who gets there first.”
Nonetheless, the financial and educational problems of the city`s schools have gotten so bad that a small number of officials, such as State School Supt. Ted Sanders, are suggesting a Chicago property tax increase.
There is, however, a practical limit.
If the city increased school tax rates by 22 percent, so that they equaled the average suburban tax rate, an additional $138 million a year would be raised, or $325 more per student.
That would still leave a large gap between the city and suburban schools. For Chicago to equal the suburban average of $3,208 in property tax revenues per pupil, city school tax rates would have to more than double, to $8.36 per $100 assessed value. That would increase the city`s total tax rate to more than $14.93, higher than anywhere in Cook County except a section of south suburban Chicago Heights.
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Many people outside of Chicago recognize the need to improve the city schools.
”For the state, there is absolutely nothing as important as public education,” says State Rep. Mary Lou Cowlishaw (R., Naperville), a member of the House Primary and Secondary Education Committee. ”I don`t think there is anyone-at least, any reasonable person-who would not give almost anything to decisively improve the Chicago schools.”
The Tribune poll, conducted in mid-February, found that two of every three suburbanites believe that the well-being of Chicago has an effect on the suburbs, but there was a catch.
By a 9-to-1 ratio, suburban residents oppose any effort to get them to pay more for city schools, and only a third of the suburbanites think a lack of funds is a major city school problem.
Suburban legislators echo those sentiments. ”The city of Chicago chose to have that system,” says Rep. Jane Barnes (R., Palos Heights).
State Sen. Philip agrees, and he has gone so far this year as to propose legislation, dubbed ”a reverse Robin Hood bill” by opponents, that would take money away from school districts with low achievement-test scores, such as Chicago, and give it to districts with high marks, such as those in Philip`s home Du Page County. The bill could eventually cost Chicago schools $45 million a year in state aid.
But not all legislators are in the Philip camp.
State Sen. John Maitland (R., Bloomington) says: ”This is one Downstater who is not going to try to take money away from Chicago. Chicago needs more money.”
He notes that his stand is somewhat unusual. ”People Downstate say,
`Enough is enough. We can only do so much.` Some Downstaters believe we should just take money from Chicago, East St. Louis, Danville, and pass it around,” Maitland says. ”There are going to be some who are going to be anti-Chicago no matter what we do.”
But those legislators from outside of Chicago who recognize the need to help the the city schools are hamstrung, Maitland says, by the failure of Chicago leaders, particularly school officials and House Speaker Michael Madigan (D., Chicago), to make a strong push for more money.
Last spring, Madigan, who represents a mostly white district on the Southwest Side and whose children attend private schools, blocked Gov. James Thompson`s attempt to increase the state income tax to raise more money for schools.
”Downstate legislators who would have been willing to support a tax increase weren`t willing to be out in front,” Maitland says. ”Why should they stick their necks out if Madigan wasn`t going to support it?”
Steve Brown, a spokesman for Madigan, contends that Madigan wasn`t responsible for the failure of the tax increase, but he adds, ”Madigan remained unconvinced of the need for a tax increase because there were other available revenues that could have been used for education.”
Supt. Byrd says the needs of the public schools simply got lost amid conflicting political agendas.
”It had to do with politics beyond the school system,” Byrd says. ”The school system was just one ploy in the whole thing. The reason it didn`t happen down there had to do with some politics beyond the politics of the board of education. We were the victims.”
But the real victims are the children.
”I bet most of (the state legislators) picture our schools as places where gun-crazy gang-bangers chase around pregnant teenagers and spray graffiti all over the place,” says Zakiyyah S. Muhammad, a security worker at the Coleman Elementary School on the South Side.
”We have a lot of problems. We are not trying to say that we don`t. But that doesn`t mean that they should turn their back on us.
”It doesn`t mean that our children don`t deserve an education.”
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The consequences for Chicago`s economic health if the schools don`t improve.