Gov. JB Pritzker on Tuesday signed into law a new state budget that modestly increased state spending on K-12 education and related costs.
Yet most headlines ignored a more consequential education narrative — not one of how much is flowing to classrooms, but how much money never makes it there in the first place.
Pritzker’s budget allocates nearly $10.8 billion for K-12 education.
It also includes $7 billion for K-12 pension costs.
In 2000, the state spent about $705 million on K-12 pensions.
That’s not a typo.
Even after adjusting for inflation, Illinois’ spending on K-12 pensions has skyrocketed by roughly fivefold since the turn of the last century, ballooning to nearly 10 times the raw dollar amount spent in 2000.
For every dollar Illinois spends on education, it spends another 65 cents on pension obligations. Imagine how much more schools could do with even a sliver of that money.
These numbers help explain one major reason why costs continue to climb even as Illinois’ student population goes down. New data show Illinois lost more than 100,000 public school students in just the five years since 2019, more than twice the rate of decline for the Midwest as a whole. The state educates roughly 206,000 fewer public school students today than it did in 2000.
Yet total education spending continues to grow, though not necessarily in the best way for current and future students.
Every dollar going to yesterday’s promises is a dollar unavailable for today’s children. The gap between what we spend on K-12 pensions versus classroom spending is closing — and closing quickly.
“Illinois will never truly achieve equitable school funding unless it fixes teacher pension funding,” former Illinois Senate President John Cullerton wrote in our pages back in February.
And that’s the real elephant in the room when we talk about state-level investments in education. Simply put, Illinois’ pension obligations force us to pay for the past at the expense of our future.
Teachers did their jobs and retirees earned their pensions, and we’d never argue otherwise. The scandal here is that politicians have completely mismanaged these promised benefits, allowing annual costs to balloon out of control alongside unfunded liabilities that continue to grow. The Teachers’ Retirement System, Illinois’ largest pension system, has $83 billion in unfunded liabilities, accounting for over 57% of Illinois’ $144 billion unfunded pension debt, according to the Commission on Government Forecasting and Accountability.
Unsurprisingly, Illinois spends a larger share of its budget on pensions than almost every comparable state, according to the Civic Federation.
Meanwhile, the Civic Federation notes that the percentage Illinois spends on education is “well below that of peer states and the national average.”
In other words, Illinois spends enormous sums on education-related costs, but an unusually large share of those dollars are consumed by pension obligations rather than current educational services. This is not a healthy dynamic and it can’t continue.
In the recently signed $55.9 billion state budget, Illinois’ education costs aren’t just the $10.8 billion spent on K-12 operations, they also include roughly $7 billion in teacher pension obligations. Combined, that’s about $17.8 billion — nearly one-third of the entire state budget.
Excluding pension costs from discussions of education spending can produce a misleading picture of what Illinois taxpayers actually spend on education.
Illinois cannot have an honest conversation about education funding without first speaking frankly about its pension problem. As long as billions of dollars are consumed by obligations from decades past, taxpayers will keep spending more while students see less of the benefit.
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