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Illinois State Senate Candidate Bill Gentes
Education
The Issues:
- Nearly 1,000 schools in the state failed to meet federal academic standards in 2007.
- 80% of school districts have budget deficits and the number on the financial watch list has doubled in the past year.
- Illinois ranks in the bottom 10% among states in the amount of funding the state provides for education.
- The state provides about 30% of the cost of educating a student. The national average is slightly over 50%.
- Illinois is 49th in the per pupil spending gap between wealthy and poor school districts because of reliance on property taxes as the major funding mechanism.
- The attrition rate for new teachers is 40% over the past five years.
- New York City spends more than 10 times the amount Illinois spends on new teacher mentoring with only 3 times more teachers.
The Impacts:
- If we don’t strive for high performing quality schools, workforce capabilities may be reduced causing businesses to not locate or expand in Illinois, the tax base will be negatively impacted, unemployment will rise and social service programs will be further impacted.
- A growing shortage of quality teachers.
The Actions:
- Provide adequate facilities and resources. Most districts are struggling financially for both instructional funding as well as funding for construction of facilities.
- We need to re-evaluate how we determine student progress. Emphasis should be on incremental improvement rather than relying on a single test score to determine performance. There needs to be recognition that progress will vary between school districts based on resource availability, classroom size and other factors that impact the teaching process.
- We should evaluate if it is possible and, if so, how a performance based pay system can be implemented for teachers. In order to retain the best teachers, we should work with teachers, administrators, unions and school boards to determine if a workable and fair incentive program can be developed that would provide performance focused salary increases for the best teachers in addition to a base increase for all retained teachers.
- Affordable education beyond high school is the single most important factor to assist those who are at the bottom of the economic ladder. The inter-generational cycle of low income and limited job opportunity cannot be broken without educational opportunity.
- We need to provide more funding for mentoring programs for new teachers as well as well as for students. There is strong evidence that both mentoring programs are highly beneficial to teacher and student retention and performance.
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