New teachers union leaders in Illinois call for tax shift to fund K-12, higher education

New leaders at the Illinois Federation of Teachers include, from left: Pankaj Sharma, secretary-treasurer; Stacy Davis Gates, president; Cyndi Oberle-Dahm, executive vice president, and John Miller, membership secretary. (provided by the Illinois Federation of Teachers)

SPRINGFIELD — The new leader of the Illinois Federation of Teachers says state lawmakers should consider raising taxes on wealthy individuals and corporations that have received federal tax breaks under the Trump administration to increase state spending on education and other public services.

“We believe that we should be taxing billionaires so they can pay their fair share,” Stacy Davis Gates said in an interview with Capitol News Illinois. “We believe that wealthy corporations that are receiving a benefit from the Trump administration should see that benefit manifest and put in a little more in Illinois.”

Davis Gates, who has served as president of the Chicago Teachers Union since 2022, was elected president of CTU’s parent organization, the Illinois Federation of Teachers, last weekend. She succeeds Dan Montgomery, who led the union for 15 years.

Her election came less than four weeks after the president of the state’s other major teachers’ union, Al Llorens of the Illinois Education Association, passed away. He has been succeeded by that union’s vice president, Karl Goeke. IEA’s next scheduled election will be in March.

IFT represents just over 100,000 K-12 teachers and paraprofessionals as well as faculty and staff at Illinois community colleges and universities, and public employees in several other state agencies. It is smaller than IEA, which boasts 135,000 members statewide. But IFT includes Chicago Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, which had more than 23,000 teachers in over 600 buildings in 2024.

Before becoming CTU president, Davis Gates taught high school social studies in Chicago Public Schools. She became active in the union after the school where she worked was closed as part of a program by the district’s CEO at the time, Arne Duncan, to close underperforming public schools and replace them with privately operated charter schools.

At IFT, Davis Gates will head a new leadership team that includes Cyndi Oberle-Dahm, a social studies teacher at Bellville West High School, as executive vice president; Pankaj Sharma, a history and government teacher at Niles North High School in Skokie, as secretary-treasurer; and John Miller, a faculty member on leave from Western Illinois University and current president of University Professionals of Illinois Local 4100, as membership secretary.

State Sen. Meg Loughran Cappel, D-Shorewood, chair of the Senate Education Committee and a former teacher and IFT member, said in a separate interview that she looks forward to working with the new team.

“Like anybody, we’re going to always have things that we agree on and we want to move forward with,” Loughran Cappel said. “And then there’s things that we’re going to have to work through, I think, with any organization — IFT, IEA, also the principals association, school management, superintendents, other advocacy groups — we don’t always see eye-to-eye on those things. But I think for me, my job is to make sure, what do we all agree on? What can’t we move forward with? And we’re going to move forward with those things, and we’re going to start to have conversations and work on the list.”

School funding shortfalls

In her role at CTU, Davis Gates has been a vocal supporter of Chicago mayor and former CTU activist Brandon Johnson. She and other members of the new IFT leadership team share Johnson’s view that the state is underfunding Chicago Public Schools by an estimated $1.6 billion — the difference between the district’s actual funding and its “adequacy target” under the state’s Evidence-Based Funding formula.

In the current fiscal year, data from the Illinois State Board of Education shows CPS is funded at 73% of its adequacy target, but several hundred other school districts in Illinois rank below CPS.

“The problems that Chicago is having with the underfunding is the same that unifies us throughout the entirety of the state,” Oberle-Dahm said. “In 2017 (lawmakers passed) the Evidence-Based Funding model that we were promised to have adequate funding. We’re eight years later and we’re still not adequately funded.”

Under that model, the state is supposed to add at least $300 million a year in new spending for K-12 education, with the bulk of that money targeted toward districts furthest away from their adequacy target, plus another $50 million each year for property tax relief in high-tax districts.

The eventual goal of the plan was to bring all districts up to at least 90% of their adequacy target by fiscal year 2027. But according to the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, the state is currently about $3 billion short of meeting that goal.

Oberle-Dahm said the annual increases called for under the EBF formula are no longer sufficient and the state needs to start putting in more.

“It is vastly insufficient,” she said. “The state is supposed to be shouldering the cost of most public schools, where most recently, it’s been property tax increases.”

Fixing the ‘backwards’ tax code

In a news release announcing the election of the new leadership team, IFT said one of their top goals would be “to correct Illinois’ backwards tax code, where working people pay more than billionaires.”

According to 2023 data, only about 24% of the total cost of the state’s K-12 education system came from state funds. Local property taxes accounted for 64% of the total funding. The remaining 12% came from federal funds.

Those figures also show that the highest property tax rates are levied by the poorest school districts while the wealthiest districts have some of the lowest tax rates.

For example, the Cahokia School District, in the Metro East region, is ranked as one of the poorest districts in the state, with a per-pupil property valuation base of just $29,841.77. In 2023, it had a property tax levy of just over 11.8%.

The Lake Forest Community High School District in Lake County, by contrast, is ranked as one of the wealthiest districts in the state, with a property tax base of more than $2.2 million per pupil. In 2023, its tax levy was just under 1.5%.

Oberle-Dahm said the chronic underfunding of schools in Illinois, combined with its over reliance on property taxes to fund them, are prompting many people in her region to consider leaving Illinois.

“We live very close to Missouri,” the Belleville teacher said. “There’s a lot of talk of people leaving, going into to live in Missouri, and teachers leaving to go teach in Missouri. They have a better pension system in Missouri, which sounds absolutely deplorable. What does that say about Illinois? If we want to be a leader in education, we need to do better.”

Davis Gates said the basic question of how Illinois funds its education system will be one of the issues on the table when union members converge on the Statehouse in Springfield on Wednesday, Oct. 29, for their statewide lobbying day, the next to last day of lawmakers’ fall veto session.

“We’re going to be there to begin this process of challenging our friends and to think about this moment and how they get to be a hero,” she said. “We are being squeezed in this state as public employees, as parents of public school students, as taxpayers, as pensioners.

“We want people to understand that we are your partners in every dimension. And we need our lawmakers, our governor, our speaker of the House, our Senate president. We need them to work in collaboration. This is the biggest group project we’re going to have in quite some time.”

Capitol News Illinois is a nonprofit, nonpartisan news service that distributes state government coverage to hundreds of news outlets statewide. It is funded primarily by the Illinois Press Foundation and the Robert R. McCormick Foundation.