Hours after the social media giant Meta agreed last Wednesday to settle a case brought by 47 state attorneys general and implement reforms to protect children from social media harms, the Illinois Federation of Teachers issued a demand that all of Illinois’ portion of the $17.1 billion settlement — $768 million — be designated “to address the funding crisis for school districts across the state.”
“The Governor has said he supports more funding for education but didn’t know where it would come from,” said IFT president Stacy Davis Gates in the release. “The settlement with Meta just made that answer even easier. Schools from Peoria to Belleville to Chicago are counting on the Governor and the General Assembly to prioritize students the way we’ve seen them prioritize big tech and billionaire stadium owners.”
The Chicago Teachers Union, which is part of the IFT, is demanding that the state come up with $165 million during the upcoming fall veto session to prevent layoffs at the Chicago Public Schools. A statewide package that helps Chicago and the rest of the state would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars more.
But the $768 million from the settlement is obviously not a permanent revenue source. So, I asked the IFT why the state should use temporary money to fund long-term education funding. After all, CPS got itself in big fiscal trouble by using short-term federal COVID-19 funding to pay for long-term school spending. That fateful budgetary decision brought the school district directly to the brink it faces today.
“Permanent solutions of course are better,” conceded an IFT spokesperson, pointing to work being done by progressive legislators and stakeholders to find permanent state revenue sources. However, the spokesperson said via email, “if the state is receiving $768M for the harm big tech companies have done to children, sure makes sense to put it toward the educational institutions that serve them.”
Except underfunded schools is not the problem that the settlement money is designed to address.
According to the settlement terms, the cash is supposed to be used for “remedial or restitutive purposes.”
Those purposes include: Youth crisis intervention services; after school or summer programs; digital awareness public education funds; implementing phone-free school zones; hiring digital literacy counselors; digital mental health programming and “grants to school districts or other local government entities to accomplish any remedial purpose encompassed here.” The money is also supposed to be used to reimburse the attorney general’s office for costs associated with bringing the lawsuit.
The Children’s Funding Project in partnership with the Afterschool Alliance has even developed model legislation designed to help states spend the money to directly address the harms done by Meta under the auspices of its Fund IRL coalition. A statement from the group said it and its coalition partners “will continue to work to ensure that every available dollar intended to repair harm to young people is tracked, and that state leaders hear directly from young people and the organizations serving them as decisions about those resources are made.”
Attorney General Kwame Raoul’s office emphasized to me that the money should mainly be used for remediation of the harms done to children by Meta and other large social media companies.
Raoul’s office also insisted that the money cannot be used for General Revenue purposes, but should instead be treated like the massive opioid settlement for targeted remediation of the harms caused by the industry, instead of the way the legislature and previous governors used the tobacco settlement money to temporarily patch state budget holes back in the day.
The point here is that the IFT and CTU shouldn’t be pouncing on every bright, shiny nickel that bounces into the playing field. The union absolutely must have the support of progressive legislators if it has even a little hope of eventually finding a funding solution. Demanding the Meta money be diverted from other significant progressive priorities for its own purposes will only undermine its goals. This ain’t rocket science.
I really think sometimes that the CTU and the Bears are operating from the same flawed, secret playbook. Both have legit cases to make at the statehouse, but both constantly step on their own messaging and alienate people who should be their friends.
The Meta settlement will provide some money to CPS and all other school districts. But if the IFT sticks to its guns and insists that the legislature ignore the settlement terms and give them all of the cash, things could get really ugly.
Rich Miller also publishes Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter, and CapitolFax.com.