Gov. George Ryan is looking hard at overhauling the State Board of Education to give the governor more direct control of the Illinois school bureaucracy and the $8 billion it controls.
Ryan is considering proposals to restructure the Board of Education in much the same way the legislature gave Mayor Richard Daley oversight over the Chicago Public Schools–by putting much of the school bureaucracy under his direct authority with a CEO-type leader over day-to-day operations, according to a source familiar with the proposal.
The source said the governor has come to no conclusions.
A spokesman for Ryan would not say if the governor is considering such a proposal.
“The governor will make his proposals known in his [Feb. 21] budget address,” said Dennis Culloton, Ryan’s spokesman. “He wants to continue to focus on education [and] make the State Board of Education accountable to parents and families.”
To make a major overhaul, a raft of state laws would have to be changed, including one that hampers a governor’s ability to reorganize the Board of Education.
House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) predicted a major overhaul could be a “slippery slope” because the Board of Education was established separately in the Constitution to “provide some insulation” from the governor and the legislature.
“I would think it’ll bring on substantial opposition from the educational establishment,” Madigan said.
Nevertheless, Ryan began sounding out state Schools Supt. Max McGee and Ron Gidwitz, chairman of the state board, in Springfield this week and asked them to return next week with their own ideas. Gidwitz refused to comment, saying it was a “typical budget meeting.”
“We exchanged some information with the governor, and he exchanged some information with us. That’s all it was,” Gidwitz said. “I thought the meeting went well. We were happy when we walked in, and we were happy when we left.”
One goal of Ryan’s overhaul, if fully executed, would be to give the governor more authority over the activities of an agency run by McGee and the Board of Education. The board is appointed by the governor but is an independent body–and sometimes acts that way.
Last year, for example, Ryan supported sending taxpayer grants to parochial schools, a plan that the board and others successfully opposed.
Like Gov. Jim Edgar before him, Ryan has believed that a governor who takes the credit or the blame for school performance should have more authority over the agency.
In trying a different tactic, Edgar failed to change the Constitution so the Board of Education would report directly to the governor.
Ryan’s review comes as the Board of Education was conducting its own efficiency review and after Ryan raised the idea of conducting annual tests of schoolchildren to measure progress.
The board has about 800 positions, with plans to reduce its workforce. Even so, Ryan is thinking about lowering the number to between 560 and 600, which could be accomplished by shifting jobs to other agencies, attrition and outright cuts in staff, a source said.
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The idea of creating a top operating officer or possibly a secretary of education would be similar to the model of Chicago Public Schools, where Paul Vallas is chief executive officer and there is a separate board.
The Ryan administration is studying how to better divide the state board’s policy and financial sections, reduce redundant positions and possibly cut more than 100 positions over the next fiscal year.
Another idea is to beef up the duties of the state’s dozens of regional superintendents, elected officials who sometimes oversee multiple counties, possibly with the idea they would focus on school accountability.
Ryan also is seeking ways to take advantage of modern technology to streamline some of the functions of the office that are labor intensive. Any savings, likely to be in the millions of dollars, would be plowed back into educating children.