By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
How is it that Illinois spends nearly $7,000 more per student on K-12 education than Florida does, and yet students in the Sunshine State perform the same or better on national testing?
The same question can be asked regarding Illinois’ neighbor Indiana, which spends about $6,000 less per student and also outperforms Illinois on testing.
Those questions matter because Illinoisans are struggling under the nation’s 2nd-highest property taxes, nearly two-thirds of which goes to education. A decrease in Illinois’ $16,200 per student spending to Florida-like levels of $9,600, would mean a reduction of $12.8 billion in yearly education spending – the equivalent of a 40 percent cut in Illinois’ $32 billion annual property tax haul.
That reduction in spending would help bring Illinois property tax rates much more in line with what Floridians and Hoosiers pay. Florida’s average property tax rate on a median home is just 0.86 percent and Indiana’s is 0.81 percent – far lower than Illinois’ rate of 1.97 percent.
You won’t hear many Illinois lawmakers tell you this, but Florida and Indiana show that lower property taxes and better student outcomes can both be had at the same time.
Illinois vs. Florida and Indiana
Wirepoints focused on Florida and Indiana because they have had the nation’s slowest per student spending growth since 2007, 13 percent and 16 percent, respectively.
In contrast, as Wirepoints documented in its recent Special Report: Illinois education spending soars while outcomes flatline, Illinois’ per student spending grew by 70 percent, the nation’s biggest increase. That’s according to 2007 and 2019 data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau.
As a result, by 2019 Illinois was spending 56 percent more than Indiana and a whopping 68 percent more than Florida. With Illinois spending so much on education and Indiana and Florida spending far less, one might expect Illinois’ student achievement to significantly surpass both states.
An examination of National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) test scores shows that’s not the case. Illinois’ results were largely the same or worse than Indiana and Florida’s over the entire 2007-2019 period.
Illinois officials may try to argue that Illinois’ testing situation is more difficult due its concentration of poor and minority students – but Indiana has the same share of low-income students as Illinois. And Florida actually has an even greater share of minority and low-income students than Illinois does.
If higher spending was so necessary to boost student achievement of low-income and minority students, then Illinois’ scores should be far better than Florida’s – not similar or worse.
Of course, there are many factors that go into understanding student outcomes – far more than just per student spending. And Florida and Indiana are just two states out of 49 to compare to. But the fact that both states have grown their spending so little, and spend so much less than Illinois overall, warrants the comparison.
An upcoming look at Illinois education spending will reveal that much of Illinoisans’ property tax dollars are funding hundreds of overlapping, duplicative school districts, a bloated administrative bureaucracy, overgenerous retirement perks, a regressive pension funding system and multimillion-dollar lifetime pensions.
Audio and summary 
A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.
Audio and summary
The NAEP is a terrible metric that isn’t taken seriously in academia. Illinois’ students’ composite ACT and SAT scores are both higher than Florida’s.