The price of spending less on schools than on prisons

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Lincoln Park High School senior Nidalis Burgos leads a rally front of City Hall June 10. Dozens gathered to protest the effects of the state’s budget impasse on CPS school. | Lou Foglia/Sun-Times

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Last Monday, Gov. Bruce Rauner referred to the school where I work as a “crumbling prison.” I guess that makes our teachers prison guards and our principal a warden.

Rauner’s analogy is way off base. Illinois prisons receive substantially more funding than Chicago schools. In fact, according to a  2012 Vera Institute of Justice report, each year in Illinois we spend three times as much to incarcerate a prisoner as we do to educate a child in Chicago Public Schools.

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CPS also receives less funding than other schools in our state. According to CPS CEO Forrest Claypool, Chicago receives 74 cents to every state education dollar spent on the rest of Illinois’ children. Claypool repeatedly has made the case that Chicago’s children ought to have their education funded at the same level as their counterparts across the state.

Rauner and many state lawmakers contend that any investment in Chicago would be mismanaged, so Chicago shouldn’t get any money unless the city’s system is dismantled and reconfigured. It’s a classic case of two politicians talking past each other. As long as the adults fail to agree on anything, the casualty will continue to be nearly 400,000 Chicago children.

It is our responsibility as citizens to keep our leaders honest and hold them accountable for funding our schools adequately and equitably. If our school doors do not open on time in September or we are forced to open with far fewer teachers and resources, it will harm not only students in Chicago, but our city and state’s future.

Leaders as far back as Plato have pointed out just that. He argued that public funding for education should be prioritized for students who most need it, saying that underserved youth should receive the lion’s share of a society’s educational investments in an ideal Republic, as they are in the best position to maximize that investment for the good of society. To put it another way, how will Illinois fare economically, socially and culturally if we fail to educate the next generation of leaders in our state?

I teach math at Douglass Academy High School on Chicago’s West Side. Our school is one of many Chicago high schools that serve students from some of the toughest neighborhoods in the city. We are caught in the crosshairs of the state’s public education funding crisis, which is magnified by a financial crisis within CPS.

My school doesn’t even know how long it can keep its building open, and we continue to fight for scraps of state funding. My classes are packed with students engaged in a constant struggle for their own personal security and identity. My students deal with childhood gun violence, abject poverty and truly bleak opportunities. Yet I see awesome potential developing in these young students. As their teacher, I need the resources to develop that potential into the next generation of leaders.

Seventy-four cents on the dollar for those who already have the least among us is preposterous. We must begin be investing more in Chicago’s students now so we aren’t spending three times as much to lock them up later.

These levels of funding are necessary to nurture children in an area of the city where traditional nuclear families are rare. Relationships with fathers and other reliable role models, taken for granted in many communities outside of Chicago, cannot be relied on in my school. I often find myself filling in gaps for parents, and acting as a social worker, a counselor, a coach and a pastor before I can focus on academics.

Although I embrace the challenge of being all these things, I feel like a soldier who has run out of ammunition on many days. Teachers are only human. When we expend so much energy addressing social and emotional needs, there is less energy left for intellectual development — ours and that of our students. Massive investments in human capital are needed if we are truly interested in educating our urban youth.

If Chicago’s students were funded at the level of Illinois’ prisoners, we could make sure that our children were picked up and dropped off every day. We would have restorative justice officers in addition to security guards in all of our schools. We would have multiple teaching assistants and mentors for our students. Our classroom counselors would have the capacity to make home visits to our students. There would be a trauma specialist available in every school, and teachers would do what they are best at — we would teach.

Without question, Illinois is at a crossroads. What kind of state to we want to be?

I pray that our elected leaders will have the foresight and the resolve to make the critical investments in our students necessary for the benefit our state for decades to come.

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Steven G. Fouts, Ed.D., is a Chicago Public School teacher and a member of Educators 4 Excellence, a teacher-led education policy organization.Follow the Editorial Board on Twitter: Follow @csteditorials

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