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Fun with numbers

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Illinois

* Champaign News-Gazette editorial…

The governor speaks of large increases in state aid to schools, and he’s right. The state’s current spending plan increases K-12 funding by nearly $379 million. But that money isn’t necessarily going to pay for education costs, including increased salaries.

Adam Schuster, director of budget research at the Illinois Policy Institute, reports that a large share is going for teacher pensions, not salaries.

He reports that “in the coming school year, 36 percent of the money the state allocates to education will” be used for “required pension payments for retirees.”

The K-12 increase mentioned above is going to schools as a direct result of the education funding reform law passed in 2017. It mandates at least a $350 million increase per year. The state exceeded that a bit this fiscal year.

That’s not to say the state won’t be paying more for teacher pensions next year. It will. My beef is not with Schuster or the Illinois Policy Institute here, it’s with an editorial board that mistakes need-based education funding for pension spending.

School districts in the suburbs and Downstate are only on the hook for pension contributions if their employees have negotiated it through their collective bargaining processes. Otherwise, the state itself picks up almost all of the employers’ costs, including legacy costs.

Oh, and by the way, the new K-12 funding will give lots of poorer schools more money, and those tend to be the ones which are having the most trouble paying their teachers a decent wage. The editorial was about the new state mandate for a $40,000 minimum teacher salary over time.

posted by Rich Miller
Monday, Aug 26, 19 @ 12:24 pm

Comments

The $379 million increase is going to schools through the funding formula, not TRS. TRS is getting their own increase. Yet Schuster claimed that a large share of the $379 million increase is going for pensions (at least according to the News-Gazette), which is simply not true. So why is your beef not with him and the IPI when they are lying? Especially when they have joined in on a law suit simply because some of their donors made a bad bet on credit default swaps and are making one last hail mary attempt to cash in.

Comment by Juice Monday, Aug 26, 19 @ 12:43 pm
===Yet Schuster claimed that a large share of the $379 million increase is going for pensions (at least according to the News-Gazette)===

I don’t think Schuster made that claim.

Comment by Rich Miller Monday, Aug 26, 19 @ 1:23 pm
Unfunded pension obligations are really just back pay obligations. To the extent the unfunded pension obligations are for teachers, the notion that increasing contributions to the pension fund is somehow diverting money from teacher salaries is nonsense on its face.

Comment by Whatever Monday, Aug 26, 19 @ 3:47 pm