* Mary Ann Ahern on SB 1, the school funding reform bill that hasn’t yet been sent to the governor…

Sources tell NBC 5 that the governor may opt not to veto all of it, but may instead choose to use an amendatory veto on provisions involving a pension fix for the city of Chicago.

While House Speaker Mike Madigan was able to corral the votes, including numerous Republican defectors, to override Rauner’s veto of the budget bill, doing so on SB-1 may be a much harder sell.

If he just vetoed the Chicago stuff, it would, indeed, make an override more politically difficult. I think they’re looking at other options.

* There are other problems, including these…

The Democratic plan would provide more money to all school districts, with CPS getting at least $286 million more for pensions and general state aid. The competing Republican plan would take away grant money going to CPS and spread it to suburban and downstate districts, with city schools seeing either a $38 million funding cut or $177 million in additional money, depending on whether pension help materializes.

Adding to the complicated dynamics: Rauner’s recent decision to replace his senior staff with people from a conservative think tank that opposes the underlying concept of both school funding formula bills. That means the governor’s office could end up being an incubator for a third competing plan, albeit one that would have the greatest difficulty winning buy-in from lawmakers at the Capitol.

* The Pritzker campaign dug down a bit…

With an influx of new radical staff coming directly from the Illinois Policy Institute, it’s worth taking a look at where the right-wing propaganda machine stands on this bill.

A March 2017 post on their website declares, “evidence-based education funding doesn’t work.” After the bill passed, they posted another article urging Rauner to veto the bill and perpetuating the myth that it is a Chicago bailout.

Rauner and the new far-right members of his administration staunchly opposing SB 1 — legislation that will allow schools to open in the fall — leaves the state on the verge of a new crisis. .

…Adding… I forgot to post this comment by Chris Kennedy…

“When you have a track record as bad as the governor’s, you need to create something to alarm people,” Democratic gubernatorial candidate Chris Kennedy said. “He’s taking a page out of Donald Trump’s book, a page of divide and conquer and hatred. He wants to separate our state and say that downstate is against Chicago.”

*** UPDATE 1 ***  From Emily Bittner at CPS…

Rich:

Three points on the Trib’s stories on ed funding this morning.

1 - The state increased funding for downstate and suburban teacher pensions by $500M this year alone and no one in Chicago called that a “downstate bailout.” The VAST majority of this money is going to the state’s unfunded liabilities, i.e, making up for the State’s own past skipped payments, which were more severe than Chicago’s.

From TRS on next year’s increase for downstate and suburban teacher pensions: “The total projected employer contribution for 2018, including State, Federal, and School Districts, is $4.72 billion. Of this amount, $1.05 billion, or about 22%, is for the employer portion of the normal cost and 78% is for unfunded actuarial accrued liability. The required State contribution for 2018 is $4.56 billion, an increase from $3.99 billion for 2017.”

In other words, 78 percent of this underfunding is directly because of past underfunding from the state – exactly what the Republican objection to funding Chicago teacher pensions is. Pretty hypocritical to fund suburban and downstate unfunded pensions but not fund Chicago’s lesser liability.

2 - Downstate and suburbandistricts are feeling tremendous pressure and uncertainty about whether they’ll open on time and stay open. I want to reiterate the mayor’s point that CPS is opening on time and staying open.

3 - Deep in the main bar on SB1 is this important point: if school funding were treated equally, Chicago students would get about $500M more from the state.

From the Trib: Republicans count only general state aid and grant funding, which includes the extra $250 million for CPS. Viewed through that lens, CPS gets 23.6 percent of all the money the state provides for K-12 education, even though the district’s nearly 382,000 students represent just 18.8 percent of Illinois public school students.

But city school officials say that calculation is misleading because it fails to include what the state spends on teacher pensions. That’s $4 billion, about a third of the total education pie. Include that money, and CPS gets just 15.3 percent of state education dollars.

CPS CEO Forrest Claypool said he’d gladly give up Chicago’s extra grant money if the state covered his district’s pension costs the same way it does for other school districts.

“Pension subsidies are no different than general state aid or any other form of educational assistance,” Claypool said during a recent interview. “They all go to the same thing, primarily paying for the salaries and retirement benefits of teachers.”

That Claypool would make that trade is not so surprising. The math shows that CPS would have received about $500 million more from the state during the last school year. (emphasis mine.)

This single point cuts through the confusion and clutter on education funding – if you add up all the sources of funding and treat all the districts the same, Chicago students are getting dramatically shortchanged by $500 million. This is grossly unfair, but all the more pernicious because of its racial implications–which are at the core of CPS’ civil rights lawsuit.

Thanks,

Emily

*** UPDATE 2 *** From Adam Collins in the mayor’s office…

We’ve known for a while that the governor didn’t care about the social safety net for those living in poverty around the state, but we hoped he might still care about the education of black and brown children living in poverty around the state. Guess that’s out the window now too as Rauner pivots from the right-wing to the far right-wing.