Welcome to our blog! The Advance Illinois Blog provides readers an opportunity to hear from the Advance Illinois staff and partners on education policy issues affecting Illinois students and beyond. The first entry is authored by our very own Robin Steans where she celebrates Illinois’ ranking as the top state in reporting school-level spending as required by ESSA reporting requirements. Take a look!

LEADING THE NATION IN CRITICAL FUNDING INFORMATION, LET’S MAKE THE MOST OF IT

As the new school year gets underway, with COVID-19 still presenting serious challenges, it is nice to share some good news. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) requires all states to disaggregate and publicly report school-level spending data. This is a big deal in that it has the potential to shed light on whether dollars are making it to schools in a way that equitably support students with greater learning needs.  

The Education Trust, a national civil rights organization which focuses on educational excellence and equity, recently released Going Beyond ESSA Compliance: A 50-State Scan of School Spending Reports, which takes a look at how well states were doing in reporting school-level spending. While they were interested in whether states were complying with the new ESSA reporting requirements (spoiler alert – only 41 are), they were really looking to see whether states were presenting that information in a way that truly “generate(s) insight about spending equity and promote(s) action.” They developed five equity-oriented principles and assessed every state’s reporting against them. What did they find? Illinois leads the nation and was the only state to earn a 100% rating.

The report explains the process ISBE undertook to develop such thoughtful data transparency (special shout out to the agency and to Sara Shaw, who led this effort), and it is clear the authors believe Illinois makes school-level spending data available in a way that allows readers to both understand and interrogate district and school resource decisions. 

School finances can seem boring, dry, and often, impenetrable. The reality is that how we spend our dollars is critical. We have worked incredibly hard as a state to “fix the formula” and ensure that more funding goes to districts who are serving students with greater need…and we are making serious progress.

The next logical step is to understand what happens at the school level: are dollars in fact making their way to the students who need them most? As importantly, given the ongoing level of underfunding, does our state report card help parents and others understand overall school and district performance and spending in the context of available funding?  We may wish to see more variation in spending at the school level by student income, for example, but when we see that a district is at 61% of funding adequacy, it impacts our understanding of what is possible, even as it may raise questions for leaders and advocates to wrestle with.

Congratulations to ISBE and Illinois for leading the nation in making critical funding information available in such clear and powerful ways and for putting school and district performance into context by pairing that information with funding data. Parents, policy makers, educators, and advocates, the ball is in our court to put this information to use.  

Below, check out this quick tutorial that highlights just how phenomenal a leader Illinois is when it comes to reporting school-level spending:

• First, go to the Illinois Report Card homepage 

• Next, pick a school you’d like to know more about.  For purposes of illustration, I’m picking Guilford High School in Rockford (Go, Vikings!):  

  • You’ll see that the initial landing page provides basic information about the school, including per-pupil spending at the school ($12k), how that compares to average per-pupil spending in the district ($13k), and how well-funded the district is generally (Rockford is at 61% of adequacy, or full funding).  So, at-a-glance and right up front, you not only get a clear picture of school and district finances, but you see them in relation to graduation rate, chronic absenteeism, teacher retention and more.

• Then click on School Environment and go to School Finances:   

  • Here, you’ll not only be able to review school and district spending over time, but if you scroll down, you’ll get an easy-to-read breakdown of the students the school serves, with information on the kind of needs that should drive spending.  You’ll see information on enrollment, English Learners, low-income levels, and the percent of students with IEPs.  You’ll also see how those percentages have changed over time and how they compare to the district’s demographics overall.  Reviewing this, you’ll readily see whether the school has higher or lower need than the district as a whole, and whether their level of funding reflects that. [NOTE: Higher need should mean higher per-pupil spending.]

• If you click on “Full District” you’ll see how per-pupil spending at a school compares to that of every other school in the district. Let your cursor hover, and you get details on every school in the chart.

If that’s not helpful enough, click on “Scatterplot” and you can get a quick visual on how every school’s spending compares by income, performance and more.