Our lawsuit (Chicago Urban League, et al vs. State of Illinois, et al) came in response to more than a decade of political gridlock in Springfield which has left the General Assembly and Illinois State Board of Education unable to act to solve the education crisis gripping our state. Year upon year, for hundreds of thousands of children of color, Illinois has failed to provide adequate financial resources to give them the high quality education they need and deserve.

As our lawsuit noted, African American and Latino students commonly attend schools that receive the lowest funding, are saddled with the least qualified teachers, have crumbling walls and leaky ceilings, and chronic shortages of computers and new books. 82% of minority children attend schools that are predominantly minority, while 90% of whites attend schools that are majority white. On average, minority districts have $1,154 less annually to spend per pupil than do majority white districts.

Worst of all, these sad realities create a corrosively low morale inside the classrooms that cripples teaching and learning. Our lawsuit argues that Illinois' property-tax based school funding system as administered by the Illinois State Board of Education disparately impacts poor and minority children, violates the Illinois Civil Rights Act of 2003, and must be changed.

The historic neglect we see in these majority-minority schools can be devastating. A new study by the Schott Foundation for Public Education reports that in Illinois 36% fewer black males graduate high school than do whites. The immediate future looks threatening. Chicago Public Schools, the state's largest system, now faces a budget crisis of unprecedented severity that has triggered layoffs of teachers and other staff, necessitated increases in classroom sizes, delayed crucial facilities maintenance, and created a sinking, Titanic-like atmosphere inside CPS' Clark Street headquarters.

Last spring Chicago Urban League published a policy statement we call the Opportunity Compact: Education, a blueprint that proposes inexpensive but effective strategies to address some of the problems besetting Illinois public schools. Although the Compact recommends that these strategies be implemented in conjunction with fundamental changes in the state's education funding system, the policies are also appropriate in this time of austerity -- delivering lots of bang for the educational buck. Among them: promote and expand early childhood programs to bring in larger numbers of Latino and African Americans; build closer partnerships between schools and communities; raise standards and expectations among parents, students and schools; overhaul the broken teacher tenure and evaluation process; reward high performing teachers for working in low-performing schools; and close or turnaround chronically low-performing schools.

Critics may ask how can Illinois afford to reform our funding system in the midst