Eaton: School choice long overdue in Illinois

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Fran Eaton

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Updated: January 25, 2012 5:22AM

While state Sen. James Meeks (D-Chicago) and former state Rep. Kevin Joyce (D-Chicago) normally held positions opposite conservative Republicans, there was one issue on which they agreed — school choice.

The two Democratic leaders had key roles in the 2010 legislative effort to provide a way for students to escape failing Chicago Public Schools. Although Meeks succeeded in getting his bill through the Senate, Joyce fell a few votes short in the House.

One reason why Meeks and Joyce failed is that the Illinois Education Association’s political action committee (IPACE) dumped thousands of dollars into the campaign funds of key Illinois House and Senate members.

IPACE sees its job as protecting public schoolteachers’ jobs, pensions, health care and working conditions. That means keeping lawmakers’ campaign funds well financed through donations and the legislators indebted to it.

And who ends up ultimately losing? The kids in failing schools and their parents. And also taxpayers.

It’s too bad that Meeks is retiring after this term and Joyce previously did so. They had enough clout with House Speaker Mike Madigan (D-Chicago) and Senate President John Cullerton (D-Chicago) to get school-choice legislation to advance as far as it did in 2010. With their departures, hope for meaningful, across-the-aisle school reform is dashed for now.

But there’s a movement that continues to percolate among frustrated parents and taxpayers. Property tax bills are rising fast, largely because of school districts’ need to pay for teacher unions’ demands.

Which brings us to School Choice Week, which is being marked nationwide this week. It’s timely because there’s an urgent need for the spotlight to finally be on what’s best for the kids.

It’s time that parents and taxpayers demand their neighborhood schools raise test scores, graduation rates and prepare their students better to lead productive lives.

And if public schools cannot produce significant change, it’s time that Illinois expands school-choice options.

Monday night in Deerfield, nationally renowned political pundit Juan Williams told parents and taxpayers at a School Choice Week event, “The public education system is too often set up to benefit teachers and administrators, not children.” He said the “power of education unions is an impediment to improvement and competition.”

In a new video, “A Tale of Two Missions,” Williams contrasts Chicago’s expanding charter-school movement with Chicago Public Schools teachers picketing against longer school days and more demands on them — despite failing test scores and a miserable 56 percent high school graduation rate.

“If they put as much effort into improving as protesting, their schools would be a different place,” Williams says in the video.

David From of Americans for Prosperity-Illinois, which co-hosted the Deerfield event, said school choice is not a partisan issue.

“Over the past decade, the entrenched education establishment in Illinois, the teacher unions, has pushed for more and more education funding, yet they vehemently resist attempts for increased accountability or competition in public education,” From said. “Republicans in Illinois need to wake up to what Democrats like Rev. James Meeks and Juan Williams have been saying. Competition through school choice will introduce real accountability in our education system and give more children a chance at a quality education.”

Indeed, school choice is not a partisan issue — Republicans and Democrats have their hands out for teacher unions’ campaign contributions. The House Republican floor leader, Rep. Roger Eddy, of Hutsonville, for example, has received $60,000 from IPACE in the past two months alone. Eddy led his downstate GOP colleagues against Joyce’s school-choice experiment in 2010.

Despite rewriting the bill to carefully maintain downstate school funding, lawmakers said they were afraid their school funds would go to subsidize Chicago private schools if the Meeks-Joyce legislation passed.

But caring parents are determined to keep the pressure on. Non-union charter schools are filling up quickly, and they’re excelling. Six of the top 10 Chicago high schools are in the Noble charter schools network, which has about 3,000 students on its waiting lists as parents seek to get their kids out of Chicago’s failing public schools.

No one doubts that school choice will be a long and hard battle in Illinois. As long as teacher unions can donate so heavily to political action committees, their power in the Legislature will be formidable.

Ask your lawmaker how he or she voted in 2010 on Meeks’ school-choice bill before you decide how to vote in your House and Senate races. And ask those legislator wannabes where they stand on school choice.

Let’s hope that one or two of them decide that he or she will assume a leadership role in turning around Illinois’ education system so it’s finally concerned mostly about the students.

Fran Eaton is a Southland resident who co-founded and edits the conservative political blog, illinoisreview.com