Eight years after implementation, including seven that included New Tier Funding, or new year-over-year funding, Illinois' funding formula for K-12 Education—the Evidence Based Funding for Student Success Act, or EBF—has worked towards its promise of closing the drastic funding gaps between school in property-rich and property-poor districts, as well as between schools in predominantly white communities and schools that serve predominantly Black and Latinx students. The formula, which replaced an approach that was based on a one-size-fits-all "Foundation Level" of per-pupil funding that was both inadequate in amount and inequitable in distribution, has put the funding responsibility on the state to ensure equity for districts with less local resources. The EBF accomplishes this by distributing new K-12 funding to those districts that are furthest away from having adequate resources, and furthest away from hitting their respective "Adequacy Targets" --which is the amount the research indicates is required to provide the level of education the students they serve need to succeed academically.
Now, eight years later, while the EBF has overall drastically changed public education funding allocation and has worked to close Adequacy Funding Gaps for students across all regions of the state and from all demographics by continuing to increase the state level investment each year, in FY 2025 the statewide Adequacy Gap—the total of all negative district Adequacy Gaps—has grown for the first time since implementation of the formula. This is due primarily to fluctuation of the Corporate Personal Property Replacement Tax, a local tax revenue that school districts collect, as is outlined in the Report.