Is the Illinois backdoor voucher program about to end?

The Illinois Senate passed the state budget yesterday. The Illinois House will pass it this weekend and then Governor Pritzker will sign it.

I read that a bill creating the representative districts for an elected Chicago school board was put off for another day.

Elections for half the seats on new school board are scheduled for November, 2024.

The eventual elected board, as created by Democratic Party state senator Robert Martwick, is an awful and unwieldy mess of 21 seats.

Martwick’s original proposal weighted the number of districts to be a majority white.

Chicago’s population is 33% white, 29% Latino, and 29% Black, but the school district’s student population is 46.5% Latino, 36% Black, 11% white, and 4% Asian American.

Push-back by those communities forced the Illinois legislature to delay any action on the elected school board district map.

What is not included in the Senate version of the budget that was sent on to the House is an extension of the Illinois private school tax credit.

The backdoor voucher program is probably dead and done for.

The end to the tax credit for private and parochial schools is a definite win for public education in Illinois.

In 2017, when Chicago’s Cardinal Cupich and Mayor Rahm Emanuel conspired to get the tax credit passed, Illinois became the 18th state to adopt a “backdoor voucher.”

By injecting a middle layer into the government’s support of private school tuition, tax credits helped avoid some of the legal and political obstacles that had dogged efforts by parochial and private school advocates, like Trump Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, to promote so-called school choice through vouchers at the federal level.

In Illinois, with Emanuel’s backing along with the support of the Catholic Church, the bill passed but with a 2024 sunset.

The attempt to include the tax credit in the current budget wasn’t helped by the release of a report from Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul that accused the Catholic Church of covering up for Catholic priests molesting over 2,000 children.