“I think the political will is there,” state Sen. James Meeks, D-Chicago, said at a Feb. 8 news conference spotlighting identical pieces of legislation that he and Rep. David Miller, D-Lynwood, were sponsoring. Senate Bill 750 and House Bill 750 aimed to help schools and included provisions to raise Illinois’ individual and corporate income tax rates, expand the state sales tax to cover consumer services and provide property tax relief.

Meeks wasn’t alone in his optimism, which was noteworthy because lawmakers have debated for years about overhauling the state’s school funding system, yet they have been unable to agree on exactly what to do.

That’s still the case, as the General Assembly heads into a second month of legislative overtime. The scheduled adjournment date was May 31.

“What is said at the beginning of legislative session is not always what occurs at the end,” said Norm Durflinger, co-director for the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University and an assistant professor who teaches about school finance. “It could be more at the beginning and less at the end, or less at the beginning and more at the end.

“But there’s no question, I think people had their hopes up this time,” Durflinger added. “They thought this might be the year.”

It still might be, said state Sen. Kimberly Lightford, a Maywood Democrat who chairs the Senate Education Committee.

She has been working for the past few weeks on a new legislative proposal that still is being drafted but outlines more than a dozen initiatives, such as increasing per-pupil spending to $6,058 (from $5,334) and authorizing “merit pay” for teachers if school districts and teacher unions agree to it.

The plan’s price tag is $1.5 billion, she said, and much of the funding would come from an expansion of Illinois’ gambling industry. One plan to expand gambling already won Senate approval but stalled in the House.

“The good thing about us being here late is that members are still hopeful and many of us are still standing strong,” Lightford said. “I think what many of us hoped for was that this is the year for education reform. We were all excited about it. Hopefully, if nothing else, we can get more money and some reforms into our school districts.”

The heads of two teachers’ unions, the Illinois Education Association and the Illinois Federation of Teachers, also think lawmakers still could address school funding before they close the book on the 2007 spring legislative session.

“It’s still there. It’s a possibility,” said Ed Geppert, who just resigned his seat on the Illinois State Board of Education to take over as IFT president. “It’s not over with yet.”

IEA President Ken Swanson, pointing out his paraphrase of baseball legend Yogi Berra, added: “It ain’t over till it’s over, and we don’t believe that the fight is over.”

“This is a decades-old problem now that has reached an absolute crisis stage in this state,” Swanson said. “We can’t wait any longer.”

Geppert and Swanson said one of the stumbling blocks for school funding reform this year has been the state’s electric rate crisis, which unexpectedly consumed a lot of lawmakers’ attention and energy, leaving them with less time to focus on other issues.

Ralph Martire, executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, believes the main reason for the lack of movement on school funding this year is Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s pledge against hiking income and sales taxes, “coupled with the big distraction over the gross receipts tax and health care.”

The governor proposed in March to use a new “gross receipts tax” on businesses to fund near-universal health care and to provide more money for pre-kindergarten-through-12th grade education. Martire said the plan — especially the GRT and health-care components — caught policy-makers by surprise, and that the governor failed to “prime the pump” by letting lawmakers know about it ahead of time.

School funding reform, by comparison, has been “bouncing around” for decades, Martire said.

“People are pretty comfortable with the need,” he said. “They’re getting more and more comfortable with the reform, and now they’re kind of ready to act.”

Martire said a frequently repeated misconception in the media “is that this is all about money, and that the reform community just wants money, money, money, money.”

That is incorrect, he said, citing research that shows Illinois falls $2 billion short on the amount of money needed to provide a “quality education in an efficiently operated school district.”

“What has been developed is a school funding reform tied to changing test scores, tied to academic achievement,” Martire added. “We’ve never had that before.”

But not everybody thinks the legislature needs to revamp school funding this year.

“If you show me that money will make a difference, and not just on the margins but will really change the system and improve it, I think most of my members would say more money is a good thing to jump up and down about,” said Jeff Mays, president of the Illinois Business Roundtable. That organization examines various state issues, including education and economic growth.

“We don’t want to see education measured in dollars,” added Mays, a former state lawmaker who served in the 1980s. “We want to see it measured in results. And there’s too few people talking about what are we doing with the dollars that we’re getting, and how are those dollars being maximized to drive student improvement.”

Nevertheless, various self-described education advocates plan to keep pushing for school funding reform.

“We still believe that Illinoisans have such a deep and clear commitment to both children and fairness that we’ll continue to press forward, even as things look fairly grim right now,” said Jerry Stermer, president of Voices for Illinois Children.

“It’s our obligation as advocates to encourage our own groups, as well as the political leaders, to keep the conversation alive,” Stermer said. “As long as we’re in session, I believe we have hope that something very significant can come.”

Adriana Colindres can be reached at 782-6292 or adriana.colindres@sj-r.com.

State lawmakers this year have considered different ideas to boost school funding, although no plan has garnered widespread legislative support. To date, the two main plans are the so-called “tax swap” and Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s gross-receipts tax proposal. Here is a capule description: