(chiming music) (lively rhythmic music) - Welcome to "Capitol View" on WSIU.

I'm Jeff Williams, sitting in this week as we take a look at what's making news in Illinois politics.

To help us guide the discussion this week are John Jackson, visiting professor with the Paul Simon Public Policy Institute, and Alex Degman, State House reporter for WBEZ, and also for our Illinois Public Radio stations.

Gentlemen, welcome, thank you for being here.

- Glad to be with you.

- Thanks, pleasure.

- So, the calendar says it is almost April, which means things are starting to, usually, get a little more interesting in Springfield, under the Capitol dome, and I want us to kind of delve into that, we'll take a closer look at that as we go on during the program, but first, I'd like to begin with at least one national headline, and how those events may impact Illinois, and actually, the entire country.

As we've witnessed over the past few weeks, the Trump administration has begun, I guess, what you would call a systematic dismantling of the Department of Education.

The president has said that it would not impact like, federal student loans or other forward-facing national programs for students in schools, but John, if we remove the political rhetoric on both sides and kinda look at the nuts and bolts of this thing, what kind of impact is the potential here if we start to see the downsizing or dismantling of the Department of Education?

- Well, I think the impact would be huge and I think it would be K through 12 as well as colleges and universities.

Interesting that this is one of the few things that Trump may have adopted from Reagan, because Reagan really advocated doing the same thing when he first became president, and he made some effort at it.

He not only failed at getting rid of that, and I think the Department of Energy that he wanted to get rid of, but he added, actually, to the list at cabinet level, so he went the opposite direction, ultimately.

But Trump has issued an executive order, and he's also had somebody introduce the bill in the Congress, and it's a real threat, no question about it.

This is fundamental for funding at the federal level and some control at the federal level, because this goes all the way back to Lyndon Johnson and the Great Society.

Title I and Title III, for example, are Great Society, Lyndon Johnson kinds of things, and what it does at the K through 12 level, among other things, is sort of equalize funding, especially for those districts that don't have the property values that they can tap for property tax support of the schools, and it would have a huge impact on rural schools, and it would have a huge impact on the inner-city schools in a lot of urban areas.

It would also have a huge impact on those who are less well-off economically, and ironically, many of those areas, particularly those urban areas, are the very areas that voted solidly for Donald Trump.

Most of the funding already actually comes from the state and local government.

It's not like this is the biggest clump.

It's an important clump, but it's not the biggest clump.

A lot of federal help is needs-based, and those schools are needy schools, by and large, that are advantaged.

Trump says, though, he wants to get the federal government completely out of the business, and he wants the states and local governments to control it.

He objects to them teaching critical race theory and all kinds of other left-wing stuff that he doesn't like, and I must say, history teachers, for example, are really quite concerned about what would that mean.

In conclusion, at the university level, it would have a huge impact if they do what they have already.

I think a executive order produced a dictate that the overhead recovery rate on grants would go to no more than 15%.

Columbia University, for example, would lose $400 million, and Columbia is also involved here because they had that Palestinian student that was quickly deported over what he had done in terms of demonstrations.

So dabbling into curriculum and dabbling into money at the university level is a place that should make universities and colleges very nervous.

- Yeah, Alex, are you hearing anything from state leaders, state education leaders, and lawmakers at the Capitol, yet, on this?

- Well, state lawmakers are pretty concerned generally about the state of federal affairs, and I think what they're doing with the Education Department is playing a wait and see, kinda like they're doing with a lot in terms of Medicaid and other parts of the federal budget for which the state hasn't received money, and if the Education Department is dismantled, what does that mean for local districts, and we're already hearing from some local districts kinda anecdotally that are around the Capitol, that this would be devastating.

We would lose hundreds of thousands of dollars, and as a small district, like, we could not afford that.

So as this continues to work through the courts, and that's another thing, it seems as though whenever there's an executive order signed to do something, it gets challenged, and the Education Department executive order's no different.

So again, it's just kind of a wait and see.

Let's wait for the chaos to settle a little bit.

- Yeah; John, obviously, this has to go through the, will evidently eventually go to the courts.

Obviously, Congress has control over the Department of Education, we don't know exactly what would happen with the bill that's been introduced there, is this something that you think is imminent, or is it, it may not happen immediately, that this is just kind of a warning shot across the bow for states to be prepared?

- I think it's more than a warning shot.

They can cut the overhead recovery rate pretty substantially without any help from the Congress, would be my understanding.

That landmark decision giving the president unparalleled power indicates that there are lot of threat here, and I think it bears watching, and I think it bears educators to get involved at the state and local level, ideally.

- Wanted to shift in gears a little bit.

Senator Dick Durbin has been making the rounds, and he's been talking about a lot of these issues, and I think he was, he talked about the future of Medicaid funding and the potential impact that that might have, not only on rural healthcare and other aspects.

Alex, I think you were following our senior senator around a little bit What's the story there?

- Yeah, Senator Durbin was making the point at rural hospitals that if Medicaid is cut the way that he thinks it will have to be if this budget resolution is to be believed, then the rural hospitals are the ones that are gonna get hit most.

He's talking about hospitals in communities like Taylorville, Carlinville, Macomb, these hospitals that serve Medicaid populations, but they're in rural areas, and they just don't have a whole lot of source of funding.

So he was making the point at Taylorville Memorial Hospital and administrators were around him, also, that, you know, it's not just funding for healthcare that we're talking about here.

We've got a facility here that also generates hundreds of millions of dollars in economic output for the local community.

These are a lot of jobs that are gonna be affected in communities all across the country, and as John mentioned earlier, like, a lot of these areas are particularly Republican voting areas, so he's trying to make the point that, "Hey, you guys, this is going to affect you, too."

And he also did it at a point when, and this was just after he sided with Minority Leader Schumer on the continuing resolution, so it was a really interesting juxtaposition to hear him talk about Medicaid cuts in the wake of, you know, a really, really uncertain budget picture.

- Yeah, yeah, well, Senator Durbin is not the only one making the rounds.

Governor JB Pritzker has his Stand Up for Illinois tour that is underway, so, I guess, John, is he or isn't he running for president?

- Well, I guess nobody really knows but the governor himself, and maybe his wife, but every indicator is that he's running and making the kinds of early moves that one would expect out of a candidate that's going to be a serious contender.

He has to decide first about running for a third term in '26, and that would make him a sitting governor at the time He would be, and has been, a sitting governor in one of the major states, and I think you can argue he's been very successful in those first two terms.

My term for the governor is I think he's a pragmatic progressive, and I think he's working out exactly what that means.

He's been making a lot of news, getting on all the national talk shows, and most of the reviews have been favorable.

If you remember, he really started out opposing Trump from the get-go.

I remember there was an early meeting where the governors were invited to dinner at the White House, and he made headlines then by standing up and berating the governor, or the president, for some of the things he was doing.

So he's been at this a long time.

I thought the real tip-off here, for me, was the State of the State and the State Budget address, because, if you watched that, it was really two different addresses for two quite different audiences.

It was about the nuts and bolts of state government, it was about the state budget, and then it was a whole different speech with a different audience, where he vigorously defended democracy, defended freedom of speech, and all the First Amendment, defending, basically, the kind of government we've had, certainly since Franklin Roosevelt, and I thought it was really remarkable how he wove those two together.

So that, to me, indicates the governor's probably running.

The only question, will he be the sitting governor or will he decide to take a year, year and a half to just run for governor?

And I predict that he will run, and I think, actually, I think he will probably be in the top tier, because he's got a lot to offer, and already, the four, five, or six people getting the most attention is our governor.

- Yeah, so Alex, I was gonna say, what does this mean for the governance of the state and the governor's legislative agenda if there's this focus on will he or won't he go on this presidential run?

- Well, I think the focus on this legislative agenda is, I guess that really depends on how well the Democrats and the legislature can work to get that done.

Right now, it seems like at least some of his ideas are kind of stalling out a little bit, and I don't know if that's necessarily because he's not there working it, or because everything is just kind of, just generally in chaos at the Capitol around this time of year, but I guess that really remains to be seen.

I think it's really interesting with Governor Pritzker, because he is notably focusing on national issues around this time, definitely more so than he has in all of his other years as governor, and I think it's really interesting to note that, John's right, it's really, like, nobody ultimately knows, except for him, and maybe MB, whether he's gonna run, but I would be shocked, at this point, if he didn't, because if you look at what he's doing, he's forming a lane, he's even forming a lane early on in these early conversations about who's even gonna run in 2028.

For example, you have California governor Gavin Newsom starting a podcast, having on what some people might call, you know, these incendiary right-wing figures, like Charlie Kirk, and Steve Bannon, and people like that, and that made a lot of Democrats angry.

So what does Governor JB Pritzker do?

Well, let's go to California.

I'm going to keynote the Los Angeles Human Rights Commission dinner, and I'm going to go to Gavin Newsom's home state, and I'm gonna do something really progressive, and I'm gonna speak very forcefully for progressive ideals like protecting immigrants and protecting transgender people.

So I think, like, just everything that has gone on up to this point, and including that, it would be, it would be shocking if he didn't run.

The question is, again, is he going to seek a third term for governor and run for president while he's a sitting governor.

- Yeah, so Alex, as you alluded to, this is a hectic time at the State Capitol.

The legislation is dancing around, and around, and around.

One of the bills that was also part of the governor's legislative agenda for this session is, I think, kind of stalled at the moment, and that's a bill that would allow community colleges to offer four-year degrees in that regard.

Kind of where is that one right now?

- Well that's an example of something that has stalled at the moment, because one of Governor Pritzker's big things, really, for his entire tenure has been making higher education more accessible than education in general, more accessible to people and more affordable.

He's very big on grants for trade schools, he's big on, you know, boosting education funding every year as, I mean, and some people think it should be more, but I digress, but another one of the things that he wants to do is make four-year degrees more accessible to people who might not be able to afford attending a university or attending, you know, you know, 'cause we all know what's happening to the cost of four-year universities in, like, in recent decades.

I don't even wanna think about how much it's gone up since even I've been in college.

But that's really, I mean, that's really the crux of this, but there are big problems with that, because the universities, as I'm sure John will be able to talk about, have been screaming from the rooftops that, "Hey, we haven't been getting level funding for 25 years.

What about us?"

And to be fair, like, I gotta couch that, because, you know, adjusted for inflation, when you consider what universities were getting in the year 2000, what they're getting now, it's not matching up.

So they have been getting increases, but not keeping up.

That's ultimately what I mean.

So right now, that bill has, for people who follow politics in Illinois, it's gone back to the House Rules Committee, which, depending on the time of year, that can be where bills go to proverbially die, but this time of year, really anything could happen.

I imagine that if this is something that the governor wants to happen, we're gonna see this language pop up in a shell bill at some point, a bill that has already passed committee but doesn't have anything in it right now.

- Yeah, John, you're no stranger to higher education administration, you've been around the block with this one before.

How do the universities look at this, more access and more power to the community colleges as opposed to our four-year senior institutions?

- Well, as you indicate, this goes way back to the late 1980s, 1990s.

The community colleges have, for a very long time, wanted to get into the four-year degree-offering business, and as they've more vigorously pursued students, as have we at the university level, that conflict, I think, probably has grown.

The universities have historically been much opposed to this.

We have one of the most fleshed-out and extensive community college systems in the country, and got into that business very early, and the original deal was you do the two-year stuff and the non-degree-granting stuff, and we'll do the four-year and up to the PhD graduate stuff, but they began to argue about this.

The Community College Board, once headed by a gentleman in this end of the state named Harry Crisp, got very aggressive about it, and basically, the universities won the argument, pretty much, but it comes back around now, and the governor behind it is a whole different situation.

The interesting possibility here, however, is for a compromise between those two positions.

I watched the president of John A. Logan, which is our local community college, very effectively talking about this last week, in a newscast, and he laid out the fact that this, in their view and the way they are touting it, would entail a very narrow band of four-year degrees, and the language is the degree would fill an unmet workforce need, and that, of course, is pretty close to the mission of the community colleges.

However, (chuckles) the devil is in the detail, and the devil is in the wording of the legislation, and that's what held up this current bill, as I understand it, because universities won the first round, they got it at least not put through immediately, and it got sent back to consider what that language would mean, because you have to spell out that fairly vague language and get to something more precise, or you're gonna have mission creep from the community colleges all over the place, and that's what the universities are afraid of.

The universities, on the other hand, have got to win this argument, if they win it, very diplomatically, because ultimately, they do not want to alienate the governor, and they don't even want to alienate the community colleges, so the question is, can both sides hammer out legislation that would basically define this so it still leaves the community college in a fairly narrow curriculum base, and that is the challenge, and that's why you don't have a bill that can pass yet.

- Yeah.

John or Alex, both of you, I think I read a recent study and it may have come out from the Illinois Community College Board, that enrollment for spring of 2025 was up 9%, and year over year, that's the highest increase since the 1990s.

Is there a paradigm shift on the horizon?

Is this just a reality that we're seeing more enrollment at junior institutions, that there may eventually have to be a slightly different mix in how higher education coexists in Illinois?

- Well, I think it's a trend that's been underway for a good while, and that is, whether you get liberal or conservative, the Biden administration was very big on community colleges, and on getting practical degrees, and on getting certificates that can be earned in six months, and get people into the job force, and that's why universities have had to scramble to make their own way through that thicket that is politically somewhat stacked against them right now, and the universities are not ignorant of this.

We have, at SIU, some of the most practical degrees that you can get, aviation, and automotive, and all kinds of healthcare things come to mind.

You can get jobs out of all those fields.

And we were doing those in the '50s and '60s, so we actually were out front, to some extent, most universities didn't have that, but other universities and SIU have got to keep deciding how much of that they're going to do, and how much are they're gonna oppose the community colleges competing with them for that turf.

- All right, all right, Gentlemen, we got about four and a half minutes or so left.

Alex, I want to take an opportunity to just kind take a quick look at what is going through legislatively, and what's happening, things that we may wanna keep an eye on.

- Well, as long as we're talking about education, why don't we talk about homeschooling?

There is a bill, and I'm gonna preface this by saying there's a lot in this bill, so if you wanna write this down, House Bill 2827, if you wanna follow along, this would create the Homeschool Act, and essentially, a lot of people are upset about this, people who homeschool their kids are upset about this, because it's regulation.

Homeschooling in Illinois, right now, is largely unregulated, and this is an attempt by, well, really it's an attempt by local school districts and the state board to keep better track of kids who are being homeschooled.

A lot of this comes down to truancy.

They wanna make sure that kids are getting the education that they're supposed to be getting, and also, aside from truancy, there's also the idea that some kids in homeschool situations are being abused, unfortunately, and because they're being homeschooled and it's largely unregulated, there are opportunities there, and there were people that testified in committee that yes, this has happened to them, and this bill would have prevented that, at least, it would've tried to prevent that.

So the homeschool folks, though, are against this, because, you know, we homeschool our kids because we don't want the public schools to be involved in our lives, we want minimal government interference.

So basically, this would require parents to basically let their local school districts know that they have kids and that they're being homeschooled.

It would require them, if they wanna participate in theater, or sports, or anything like that, to have immunizations on file, it would require homeschool administrators to have a high school diploma and be able to prove that, you know, things like that.

But the thing that I found really stunning about this was the way that people were demonstrating against this, 'cause I've covered a lot of rallies at the Capitol, and, you know, the scene, it's lots of signs, lots of chanting, lots of standing outside the chamber door, like, "Let us in," you know, stuff like that, But this day, when I walked in, excuse me, this day when I walked into the Capitol, there were signs, yeah, but there wasn't really, there wasn't any shouting, there wasn't any chanting, but there was this noise.

I heard this noise, and I'm like, "What is that?"

I couldn't quite figure, it sounded almost like crickets, like, "What is this noise I'm hearing?"

And then as I walked in the building, I found out that it was hundreds of people watching their smartphone, watching the committee hearing that they couldn't get into.

So these people are very interested in this, and they're very well educated on the topic, so it got a really heated debate for about three and a half hours, and it did make it out of committee, but they did something that's called a, let's hold it on second, and that means that they're not going to advance it unless they do more work on the bill to satisfy some of the opponents.

So that was really, that's probably one of the more interesting pieces of legislation I've covered so far this year.

- Mm-hmm.

About a minute or so left, Alex.

No-knock warrants, what's the status on that?

That one made it through, right, is that- - It did; so this is called the Anjanette Young Act, and it would basically not disallow no-knock warrants, but it would curtail their use and kinda tell police when they can and can't, and how they can.

So for example, you wouldn't be able to handcuff or restrain a child in the home if you do a no-knock warrant unless they actually present a danger, and things like they can't enter the home unless they're there for 30 seconds, unless there's a reasonable danger.

But again, there are so many things in this bill that still have to be worked out.

Again, if you're following along at home, House Bill 1611, if you wanna go read all of the details, but essentially, Anjanette Young is of the mind that, well, first of all, I'll tell you who she is She was the victim of a no-knock warrant in 2019 by Chicago police, but it was the wrong address.

She was getting ready for bed, she was in a compromised position, she was handcuffed that way, and it was just not a good situation, so she's been trying for years to get something passed, and her idea is, "I don't wanna make the police not be able to do their job, I just wanna make sure that they're doing it correctly, and that I'm actually protected."

- All right; Alex, I'll let you have the last word.

Gentlemen, I thank you very much for your time this week.

We're out of time for this edition of "Capitol View," so for Alex Degman and John Jackson, I'm Jeff Williams.

Thank you so much for joining us this week on "Capitol View."

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