In the final days of the session, lawmakers stripped more than $500,000 from the proposed budget that was intended to help implement Senate Bill 7, a sweeping education overhaul that would streamline the process of firing poorly rated teachers. By eliminating the money at the end of May, lawmakers put a crimp in the bill they had approved overwhelmingly a few weeks earlier and which Secretary of Education Arne Duncan had praised as a national model.
Mr. Quinn included the money in his budget, but the House erased it and the Senate agreed.?
“It’s not that the House doesn’t care — they do care — but it was just a question of priorities and having to make cuts,” said Jessica Handy, spokeswoman forStand for Children, an advocacy group that helped write the bill.
The money is not significant compared with the state’s overall operating budget of $34 billion, but it would have allowed the state to move forward more quickly with a private firm to overhaul public teacher and principal evaluations.
Now the bill’s supporters, including Mayor Rahm Emanuel, are turning to?Race to the Top, a federal grant program that rewards states for innovative education policies. In June, federal officials announced an additional $700 million in Race to the Top money, with $500 million earmarked for early childhood education. The remaining $200 million is available to nine states that did not receive anything in the previous two rounds of grants, including Illinois.
School-reform proponents are confident that they will win enough grant money to cover Senate Bill 7’s costs, Ms. Handy said. The grants are noncompetitive this year.
“A lot of it depends on Race to the Top,” she said. “I think we’ll be getting it this time.”
?Under S.B. 7, evaluation of Illinois’s public school teachers would be tied to student performance, and those measures would be uniform throughout the state. Ms. Handy and Illinois State Board of Education officials said the money dropped from the bill was essential to finance the training of principals, deans and department heads in the new evaluation system.
Race to the Top winners will be announced this fall with grant awards totaling $10 million to $50 million, according to the United States Department of Education. A grant would be more than enough to finance S.B. 7 fully, Ms. Handy said.
If Illinois is snubbed again, Ms. Handy said her group would ask lawmakers for a special appropriation.
Kristen McQueary covers state politics for The Chicago News Cooperative and Chicago Public Media. kmcqueary@chicago
newscoop.org
Rebecca Vevea contributed reporting.
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