More Money, Fewer Students: What the State Pays Per Student Is Soaring

Here’s a number every Illinois taxpayer should sit with: in 2019, the state of Illinois put about $6,700 per student into education. Today that figure is roughly $9,700. In just seven years, the amount the state pays toward each student has jumped about 44 percent.

You might assume an increase like that means we’re teaching more kids. We’re not. We’re teaching fewer.

Since 2019, total state education spending — counting the teacher and university pensions the state pays — has climbed from $16.4 billion to $22.4 billion, a 36 percent increase. Over that same stretch, the number of students across our schools, community colleges, and universities fell by about 130,000. More than four of every ten dollars in the entire state budget now goes to education, and that slice keeps growing even as the classrooms empty out.

So where is the state’s money going, if not to more students? A growing share of it isn’t reaching classrooms at all — it’s going to pensions. The bill for retired educators’ benefits climbs every year, crowding out the dollars meant for the kids actually sitting in desks today. We are, increasingly, paying for the education system of the past rather than investing in the students of the present.

And no one is louder in demanding those ever-bigger checks than the teachers’ unions. Year after year, the IEA, the IFT, and the Chicago Teachers Union march into Springfield insisting on more spending and richer pensions, and just as reliably, they fight nearly every attempt to measure whether students are actually better off for it, or to give a parent any choice when a school is failing their child. They have perfected a tidy trick: every new dollar is treated as a floor, never a ceiling, and every question about results is branded an attack on teachers. The children make the perfect talking point. The institution cashes the check.

None of this is an argument against funding schools, or against the good teachers who show up every day and do the work. But taxpayers are entitled to a simple question: what are we getting for nearly 44 percent more in state dollars per student? If the state’s spending has surged while enrollment has shrunk, those dollars should be buying dramatically better results. Illinois families deserve to see that return, in plain numbers, before the next budget asks for more.