The launch of the Illinois Department of Early Childhood presents a significant opportunity to address one of the state’s most persistent challenges — childcare deserts.
As the Sun-Times recently reported, families seeking childcare, preschool and other early childhood services have often been required to navigate multiple agencies and programs. By bringing these services under a single department, Illinois has the potential to streamline access and make it easier for parents to understand and locate resources.
Equally important, the new department’s focus on data and coordination could help create a more complete picture of where childcare is available — and where critical gaps remain. In many communities, particularly rural areas and underserved neighborhoods, families struggle to find licensed childcare close to home or work. Long waitlists, lengthy commutes and limited provider options create challenges for working parents and can hinder workforce participation and economic opportunity.
Addressing childcare deserts requires more than identifying unmet demand. It also requires supporting the small-business owners who meet that demand. Childcare providers need access to capital, technical assistance, licensing support and reliable information about community demand. Better data can help policymakers, providers and community organizations work together to expand capacity in areas facing the greatest shortages.
While it will take time to assess the impact of Illinois’ new department, consolidating early childhood services under one roof has the potential to benefit both families seeking quality care and providers working to serve their communities. Building a shared understanding of childcare needs and opportunities is an important step toward ensuring that more Illinois families can access the care they need to thrive.
Yvonne Villalpando, director, Childcare Business Programming, Women’s Business Development Center
Aisha Ahrens, managing director, Program Innovations, Women’s Business Development Center
Using TIF funds beats borrowing for public schools
Chicago Public Schools faces a $732 million budget deficit, and the choices we make in the coming weeks will have lasting consequences for students, classrooms and taxpayers.
For the last year, CPS leaders, board members, parents, educators and community partners worked with state leaders and advocated for additional education funding. While the General Assembly approved modest increases for education, no meaningful new funding was secured to address the immediate CPS fiscal crisis.
Let’s be honest about why. Despite our collective efforts, Mayor Brandon Johnson’s approach in Springfield failed. Rather than building legislative consensus, Chicago’s chief executive and advocate arrived late in the session with demands and blame. Many Democratic legislators and the governor publicly called out his failed strategy.
It produced few wins for Chicago and none for CPS.
That leaves one responsible funding option available now: a substantial tax increment financing surplus.
Johnson proudly celebrated last year’s $1 billion TIF surplus, which returned more than $500 million to CPS. According to city documents and public reports, TIF districts generate roughly $1.5 billion annually, meaning that surplus has already been replenished. Yet this year, the mayor’s administration has instructed CPS to assume only a $200 million TIF surplus, providing just about $100 million to our schools.
That is simply not enough.
By law, when the city declares a TIF surplus, CPS receives roughly 52% of those funds.
These are local property tax dollars intended to serve the public. Returning more of them to taxing bodies is not a bailout or a giveaway — it is a responsible use of public resources.
The alternative is continued borrowing. CPS already spends more than $200 million annually on debt service from previous borrowing, and it is money that should be supporting students instead of paying for yesterday’s obligations. Borrowing again would only deepen the structural problem and shift today’s costs onto tomorrow’s classrooms.
If Johnson truly intends to be the “education mayor,” this is the moment to prove it.
Declare a substantial TIF surplus, protect classrooms, avoid reckless borrowing and provide our schools with the resources they need while CPS builds a truly responsible long-term financial plan.
Chicago’s students deserve honest leadership, responsible planning and a City Hall that puts public education first.
Angel Gutierrez, member, Chicago Board of Education
Panic over student achievement, tech skills overblown
The recent op-ed headlined “America’s schools are producing a generation of techno-peasants” begins and ends with insulting historical ignorance. The very notion of a “techno-peasant” is at once self-contradictory, anti-historical and derogatory to students and young workers today.
Peasants worked on the land. Some were land owners and prosperous; many were poor. They labored in a world of low technology, mainly working by hand with wooden tools. Very few had any formal education. Most were nonliterate, although many thrived in oral cultures.
Authors George W. Bohmstedt or Edward E. Gordon, who lack direct educational or higher education experience, generalize in ways that mislead readers, promoting an exaggerated sense of crisis. They confuse sometimes wild employment guesstimates, very different educational institutions, different kinds of students and past-present-futures. For example, there are more than “two labor markets.”
I note one author’s affiliation with the National Assessment of Educational Progress, one of the poorest measures of educational achievement by grade level. From its inception, it has ignored expected differences in student repeatable knowledge on standardized tests. That is only one, relatively limited form of comparative assessment.
Even more, the National Assessment of Educational Progress radically exaggerates expected changes in reading ability by never acknowledging the so-called “reading wars.” Their shifts from phonetics to phonics and back again ignore that children learn with their own distinctive combination of reading pictures, sounds, phonics, phonetics and more.
I suggest these authors return to the classroom and the library.
Harvey J. Graff, professor emeritus of English and history, Ohio State University, Lincoln Park