VIDEO: IEA Endorses Dillard; Conservative Reformers Endorse Proft

January 18, 2010

In this campaign I have been honored and humbled to receive the support and assistance of so many thoughtful individuals and organizations dedicated to our shared values of free minds, free markets and a free society.

I have been endorsed by government reformers such as former State Senator Steve Rauschenberger, the former Senate Republican Appropriations Chairman who served with many of my opponents in this race but who considers my proposals to be not only achievable, but absolutely necessary.

Former Illinois Republican Party State Chairman Gary MacDougal, Sen. Peter Fitzgerald’s former Finance Chairman, also signed on to support my campaign. Rauschenberger and MacDougal are longtime advocates for a conservative reform agenda who both paid steep political prices for standing up to a GOP establishment that had been complicit with Chicago Democrats. They were practitioners of “policy revolution” long before I happened on the scene.

Business leaders like Dick Uihlein (Uline), Bob Douglass (Lexington Steel), Pat Ormsby (Bimba Manufacturing), Karen Trzaska (Stanley Machining) and myriad others have joined our campaign because I am the only candidate proposing structural tax cuts to reward work and investment and statutory spending caps to restrain the public sector from crowding out private sector investment. In other words, I’m the only candidate proposing policies that will keep these businesses in Illinois and attract new ones to locate here.

I have dedicated my campaign to them and to the broad array of serious, productive persons and businesses in Illinois who understand that nothing short of a complete rethinking and reordering of the big-ticket systems in state government will get Illinois back to economic growth and financial solvency.

These supporters know what they’ll get from Dan Proft: policy revolution from a street-fighter with the political know-how to turn Springfield upside-down.

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This weekend, the Illinois Education Association (IEA) endorsed Sen. Kirk Dillard for governor, and they know exactly what they’re going to get from him too. They’ll get exactly what they want: the status quo—with one minor exception, the IEA wants a permanent income tax increase and Kirk Dillard, the candidate who has called anti-tax pledges “pandering”, will most assuredly give that to them.

There are no bigger obstacles to educational reform in Illinois than the teachers’ unions, yet Sen. Dillard and others happily accept their donations, do their bidding, and accept their checks with a little gold star at the top.

Today, I called on Sen. Dillard to renounce the IEA endorsement, but I know he won’t. He’s taken $120,000 in campaign cash from the teachers’ unions over the past 15 years to defend a status quo that serves them at the expense of the children under their charge. Why would he stop now?

Nothing will improve for children trapped in our state’s failing schools until we have a Governor prepared to stand up to those who stand in the way of reform. And that man is not Kirk Dillard, or frankly anyone else running for governor in either party.

I am the only candidate proposing a statewide K-12 opportunity scholarship program for children from low-to-moderate income families who are disproportionately relegated to schools we know will fail them.

I am the only one who understands we must change how the money flows and change who gets to make spending decisions if we want to make the fundamental changes needed in K-12 systems throughout Illinois. That means we stop funding centralized bureaucracies and we start investing directly in children by empowering their parents with the resources that provide choice.

And I am the only one who has pledged to no accept public employee unions’ money, and I’m the only candidate who will take the fight to them on behalf of taxpayers and children.

Today we celebrate Martin Luther King’s life and legacy and yet in Chicago and urban school districts throughout Illinois, the promise of Brown v. Board of Education has gone unfulfilled.

We tolerate a system that discriminates against children based on their address and their household income. The IEA flat out endorses such a pernicious system.

If the Republican Party ever wants to be a majority party in Illinois again, we might consider aligning our agenda with the interests low-to-moderate income families have for their children vis-à-vis the schools they can attend.

Some example of what the monopoly system run the teachers’ unions has wrought:

• 40% high school graduation rate in Rockford

• 50% high school graduation rate in Chicago; and only 6 in 100 Chicago Public School freshmen will go on to get a bachelor’s degree by the age of 25—in a system of 400,000 children

• It is a similar story in the Quad Cities, Peoria, Decatur, Springfield, Cahokia, East St. Louis

And here is what Kirk Dillard and his friends at the IEA won’t tell you:

• In the last 20 years, state spending on K-12 has increased by 32% (in real terms) and yet test scores are stagnant and graduation rates are declining

• 40% of Chicago Public School teachers send their children to private school—I wonder what they know?

• The Chicago Public School system spends $22,000 per high school graduate per year, more than twice the state average

• Average Chicago Public School teacher salary:  $80,000.  When you include the guaranteed pension, the average CPS teacher costs IL taxpayers $125,000 annually

• The reason your property taxes go up even while your property values decrease is to fund teacher pensions, not the education of young people

You have a choice in this election.

You can sign up for go-along-get-along approach Kirk Dillard has employed for the past 15 years in the General Assembly.

Or you can help the GOP usher in a new era where we stand up for families whose children are being cheated and, for once, we decline to take the campaign cash and instead resolve ourselves to take the fight.