The governor's attack on a constitutional
entity was unprecedented

by Charles N. Wheeler III

Amazing. Unbelievable. Incredible. Take your pick — all aptly describe Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s second State of the State address, a performance unlike that of any other governor in recent memory.

Not just its 90-minute length, nor its single-minded focus on a single subject, but even more astounding was the sheer ferocity of his attack on the State Board of Education, a jeremiad against a constitutional entity by a chief executive unprecedented in its viciousness.

Likening the board to “an old, Soviet-style bureaucracy,” Blagojevich argued the agency stands in the way of better schools and should be replaced by a Department of Education under his control, which he said could perform all the state board’s duties with 40 percent fewer employees and at 20 percent less cost, freeing up $1 billion over four years to reinvest in classrooms.

Taking the hour-long diatribe at face value, a gullible listener might conclude the board and state schools Superintendent Robert Schiller posed a greater threat to Illinois’ future than the New Madrid Fault and Al Qaeda taken together.

Unfortunately, though, intellectual honesty is not a hallmark of this administration, so a thoughtful citizen would be well-advised to take the governor’s rant with a huge dose of skepticism. Consider, for example, three of his main allegations:

• The board is not accountable. True, state board members and the appointed schools superintendent are not directly answerable to the governor as are department directors and agency heads, including whoever would be running Blagojevich’s education department.

In creating a state education board, though, the framers of the 1970 Constitution hoped to insulate education from partisan politics. Delegates envisioned an independent entity advocating for Illinois schoolchildren, not board members and a schools chief compelled to parrot a governor’s party line, as must department directors who don’t want to be looking for a new job.

Moreover, because the governor appoints board members and the legislature sets the board’s budget, ultimately the agency is accountable to elected leaders.

• The board spends only 46 cents of each dollar of education funding on direct instruction; the rest “never makes its way into the classroom.”

That’s partially true, according to statistics the state board compiles from local school districts, but extremely misleading.

Direct instruction did indeed account for 46 percent of education spending in the 2001-2002 school year, for which the most recent data is available. But direct instruction includes only the costs of teachers and classroom assistants, not other expenses most parents would consider essential to a child’s education.

For example, another 31 percent of local school district expenditures went for support services, such as school nurses, counselors, librarians, cafeteria workers, janitors and bus drivers, as well as the costs of lighting and heating the buildings, supplying the cafeteria and similar outlays. Another 18 percent went for capital costs — building new classrooms, repairing old ones and paying off money borrowed to finance similar improvements in the past.

General administration, including the costs of the state board, the regional education offices and local school administrators around the state, accounted for only about 2.5 percent.

Moreover, more than 90 percent of administrative costs are local, whereas school district budgets — including superintendents’ salaries and bureaucratic headcount — are set by locally elected school boards. In fact, the state board’s proposed budget for next school year asks for $16.5 million for its operations and $23 million to fund regional services offices, less than half of 1 percent of the total $8.7 billion general funds request.

• The board’s “penchant for constant interference, its ever-changing rules, its ever-growing number of regulations, the crushing amounts of paperwork, handcuffs our educators and ... shortchanges our children.” The governor claimed board rules tally more than 2,800 pages, though a review showed many pages with just a few lines of text or a single paragraph.

Numbers games aside, however, a more salient point is that not a single one of the rules was promulgated by the board unilaterally. All were adopted to comply with state law, federal directives or court mandates.

Besides marveling at the vituperation of the governor’s screed, one inevitably wonders why. What motivated such vitriol? Was it just another example of the governor’s modus operandi, choosing a new straw man for the ongoing marketing saga of Rod the Reformer against entrenched evil, be it embodied in state workers, judges, public universities, fellow constitutional officers, lawmakers?

“It’s our turn,” said Schiller, the state schools chief, after the address. “Today, because I’m the CEO of the state board, I had the bull’s-eye on my back.”

But equally plausible is the notion that the governor simply reacted as politicians often do when faced with a tough question — change the subject to divert the public’s attention.

How the boxes line up on the organization chart is not the real issue facing Illinois schools. Instead, as study after study has documented for decades, the fundamental problem is the way the state funds public schools. Relying too heavily on local property taxes leads to wide disparities in per-pupil resources among districts and leaves some with-out the money needed to provide an adequate education for local youngsters.

But the governor has made clear his opposition to any increase in income or sales taxes, as would be needed to underwrite any significant shift away from local property taxes to state funds. Thus, the State of the State smokescreen, blaming faceless apparatchiks in a monolithic bureaucracy for what in fact has been the chronic failure of Illinois leaders to address the issue squarely.

Blagojevich is not the first to duck the issue, of course, but no one else has done so with such mean-spirited gusto. Truly, a memorable moment.

Charles N. Wheeler III is director of the Public Affairs Reporting program at the University of Illinois at Springfield.

Illinois Issues, February 2004

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