In the year since Rod Blagojevich took office, the Illinois governor had not had a meaningful conversation with state Supt. of Education Robert Schiller. The governor never responded when Schiller asked to talk, and a miffed Schiller avoided Blagojevich’s designated education czar.
So Schiller should hardly have been surprised last month when Blagojevich used his State of the State address to lob a grenade at the state’s education bureaucracy. Even so, the school chief was stunned by Blagojevich’s unbridled contempt.
The board, Blagojevich charged in an attack that consumed more than half of his 84-minute speech, was a bloated, inefficient “Soviet-style bureaucracy” that undermined educational progress and deserved evisceration.
And so was born a caustic turf battle over control of the state’s multibillion dollar education machinery that will consume the legislature in coming months. And it will figure prominently in Blagojevich’s annual budget speech Wednesday as he lays out spending priorities for the next year, of which education consumes the most state tax dollars.
Blagojevich says his request to take direct control of schools is motivated by a desire to improve accountability and efficiency in education and redirect more money to classroom spending. But there is far more to the story than that.
Interviews with dozens of officials from the State Board of Education and the administration, as well as key lawmakers, reveals a collision course in the making for more than a year that was driven by petty slights, personal animosities and competing egos.
Blagojevich cut the board’s budget; the board did an end run around the governor and got the legislature to restore some of the money. The board prodded Blagojevich to spend more on education than he was prepared to spend in the midst of a budget crisis. The governor hired a fired board lobbyist to be his top education aide and demoted the board’s Republican chairman by sending him a fax.
Instead of working together to fix a long list of problems in public education, the governor and school bureaucrats acted like spoiled members of rival playground cliques, charged Sen. Miguel del Valle (D-Chicago), chairman of the Senate Education Committee.
“They all should be sent to the principal’s office,” del Valle said.
Some of the tension between the governor and the board is by design. Illinois governors appoint the board’s nine members, but the panel was established in the state constitution as an independent agency that does not answer to the governor. The purpose was to insulate the administration of education from politics.
The arrangement creates a predicament for Blagojevich just as it has for many of his predecessors, several of whom also contemplated gutting the board. Governors have to come up with billions of dollars a year in school spending, but then the board oversees the money.
All of the board’s current members were in place when Blagojevich took office. One slot has been open for months, and he has failed to fill it. In addition to overseeing an $8 billion annual budget, the board sets broad educational policies on student testing, teacher certification and curriculum matters. It also hires the superintendent.
The relationship between the board and the administration got off to a bad start when board members hired Schiller in 2002 even though Blagojevich, then a candidate for governor, suggested they should wait until after the election to allow the winner some input.
Last February, only one month after Blagojevich took office, the education agency openly defied him by refusing his demand to cancel a $240,000 contract with a Washington lobbying firm run by a prominent Republican. The governor said it was a waste of money. The board said it brought back $5 million for schools.
“The easy thing would have been to simply roll over and do what the governor told us to do,” said board member Greg Kazarian. “But we weren’t about to do that … and we took heavy political heat because of it.”
In March, Blagojevich made public a list of state workers he claimed had “gamed the system” by accumulating thousands of dollars in unused vacation and sick days, including a much-admired board employee who had recently died of cancer. Asked at a news conference whether that might seem disrespectful, Blagojevich responded with a flip comment about how she should have taken more vacation days.
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`Band-Aid on bullet wounds’
Tensions were further strained in April when the governor presented his budget, which called for boosting elementary and secondary education spending by about $200 million. Blagojevich sought praise for increasing school spending in tough economic times. But Republican Ronald Gidwitz, then the board’s chairman, called the proposal “a Band-Aid on bullet wounds.”
Gidwitz’s comments incensed the administration.
“What is irritating about Schiller and Gidwitz is all they talk about is funding, saying, `Oh, poor schools, we need more money,'” said Brenda Holmes, Blagojevich’s deputy governor for education. “Well, fine, get out there and tell us how we are going to find this money.”
A week later, the governor’s office faxed Gidwitz a letter replacing him as chairman. Janet Steiner, a board member and a Democrat, was elevated to the position. She said she found out about her promotion by reading it in a newspaper.
As the budget battles raged, the board and the administration butted heads over personnel. The governor instituted a hiring freeze across all state agencies and asked the board to abide by it. Even so, his staff sent Schiller more than two dozen resumes of “individuals that may be interested in a position” with the agency. The board declined to hire any of them.
With tensions running high, the governor’s staff launched a series of internal meetings in June to develop a major education policy initiative. Quarterbacked by Deputy Governor Bradley Tusk, the meetings included Blagojevich allies, Rep. Jay Hoffman (D-Collinsville) and a variety of Cabinet officials, including budget chief John Filan.
Absent from the discussions was Schiller or any member of the board.
“We wanted to do something that was fundamental and meaningful, something that could improve education and went beyond single issues,” Tusk said.
In August, Blagojevich hired Holmes, who worked for the board for 13 years before being fired in 2000. Neither side would say what led to her termination, but Holmes had tangled with Gidwitz in her role as an agency lobbyist.
Holmes met with board officials a few times during the summer, but both sides acknowledge a strained relationship.
When Schiller had major education issues to discuss, he wanted to talk to the governor, not Holmes. Holmes, on the other hand, rarely spoke to board officials and did not attend board meetings, where critical education decisions were being made.
“The bottom line is this man [Schiller] has not called me,” Holmes said. “If he had been willing to discuss things with me, he might have had a better chance getting to the governor.”
Schiller counters that if Blagojevich truly cared about public education, he would have made time to meet with the agency that oversees schools.
“On behalf of the state board, I am their spokesman, and I should have access and be able to communicate with whomever I need to communicate with, whether it’s Filan, Tusk or the governor,” Schiller said. “You can’t be on the team if you are not in the dugout.”
As the two sides spent the summer freezing each other out, Blagojevich used his veto pen to slash $21 million from the state board budget.
In response, the board eliminated a program that oversees private business and vocational schools and one that monitors some non-public schools. The board also doubled fees for high school equivalency tests and closed a teacher certification office in Chicago.
Board members publicly blamed the governor for forcing their actions, triggering an angry response from the administration.
“They could have shifted their priorities and made cuts that were less harmful to students, but they refused to make the tough decisions that every other agency was making,” said Becky Carroll, spokeswoman for the governor’s budget office. “They made it clear to us in the beginning that they were not going to play ball.”
As relations continued to splinter, the agency was barraged with bad press. Release of the annual School Report Cards, which analyze test scores and spending by districts, were repeatedly delayed after a board contractor failed to deliver the data on time. When released, the report cards were riddled with errors.
In October, the board was blasted by teachers and lawmakers after the agency disclosed that it had not approved training and mentoring programs that educators need to continue teaching, leaving 7,000 in the lurch.
Such problems helped convince the governor’s education task force that just pouring more money into schools would not improve education as long as the board controlled it.
“As we look at it further, all points led to the State Board of Education,” said Hoffman. “What’s driving it is the abysmal failure of the state board. … It’s like a bad movie.”
Prodding the governor to seek dramatic change were the state’s teachers unions, who gave his campaign more than $1.2 million–the largest amount from any special interest bloc.
The Illinois Education Association and the Illinois Federation of Teachers have had a prickly relationship with the board for years. But the bitterness deepened further as the board began ratcheting up teacher licensing requirements.
The two sides also have been at loggerheads over control of the Illinois Teacher Certification Board, the 19-member panel that advises the board on teacher licensing issues. The unions want an independent board, something the governor proposed last month during his attack on the education agency.
Another source of tension between the agency and the board was what board leaders contend was Filan’s attempt to steer leaders of the state teacher pension fund toward more conservative investment strategies. The Teachers’ Retirement System, whose president is Schiller, stuck with its own strategy.
An analysis by the retirement system showed it pulled in $507 million during the first six months of this fiscal year, an 11.7 percent return on investment.
The retirement system estimated that following what it interpreted as Filan’s more conservative investment strategy would have yielded about $53 million, a 1.2 percent return.
The animosity reached a crescendo during a November meeting between Holmes, Schiller and Steiner.
Holmes was irritated about a flood of complaints her office received over the board’s decision to cut programs and hike fees in response to the governor’s budget reductions. Holmes told board leaders she could save the programs by transferring them to other state agencies.
But Schiller and Steiner declined. A few days later they persuaded lawmakers to restore the funding.
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“We gave the state board some time to come around to our point of view, and we were a bit surprised they rejected our suggestions,” Holmes said. “It was becoming clear to us that they were not going to cooperate with us on anything.”
Loophole to squelch panel
Blagojevich’s inner circle considered seeking a constitutional amendment, a cumbersome and less than surefire process. Then, on a Saturday morning in December, Hoffman was surfing the Internet in his Collinsville office when he called up the state constitution and determined it contained a loophole that would let the governor seek legislation to strip the board of virtually all its powers.
Hoffman contacted Tusk, and the move to usurp the board gained momentum. “In mid- to late December, Rod decided to pull the trigger,” Tusk said.
A few weeks later, Holmes met with union officials to go over the plan.
“They were part of the governor’s campaign, and we wanted some feedback,” Holmes said.
At about the same time, Schiller said he was repeatedly trying to schedule a meeting with Blagojevich.
“There was nothing but silence on the other end,” Schiller said. “In hindsight, I guess he didn’t want to meet with me because he didn’t want to tell me to my face what he was planning to do with the board.”
Blagojevich to propose closing a series of corporate-tax loopholes. SEC. 2, PAGE 1