disaffection with both political parties that stems from war fatigue and the national economic crisis that has compounded Illinois’ fiscal instability. “Prosperity comes primarily from the private sector,” Tillman says, pointing to jobs and charities funded by businesses and individuals as the way to solve social problems. “Right now, the private sector is not successful and people are worried about that.”

Besides continuing to produce regular reports, the Institute is planning a bus tour of rallies and speeches in Illinois cities and villages, where Tillman hopes to mobilize everyday people to tell their lawmakers that free-market is the way to go. To highlight its philosophies, the Institute posts blogs on its website using clips from the movie Zoolander and a photograph of what looks like a double KFC Double Down sandwich to discuss what it considers the senselessness of targeted taxation. It also references basketball player LeBron James’ decision against signing with Chicago to emphasize Illinois’ tax rates, which the Institute considers high.

Appearing at Tea Party gatherings this spring, Tillman rallied the crowd with talk of a kind of revolution – to take back Illinois government, bring in a new slate of leaders and bring prosperity back to the state.

Taking a more traditional approach, the Institute hosts regular luncheons and forums to which it invites the public to hear ideas and experiences of statewide and nationally known lawmakers, authors and activists who can speak to the organization’s agenda.

Affecting education

One of those luncheons held this spring featured a man who, in light of his perception of the Institute as a Republican-leaning organization, makes for an unusual partner in policy.

Chicago Democratic Sen. James Meeks, the leader of the state’s largest black church, and the Illinois Policy Institute were working together to bring school vouchers to Illinois. The measure the coalition was pushing would have allowed children at the lowest performing elementary schools to transfer to private schools.

The money the state pays for the students’ education would follow the student.

“Families who receive school vouchers do better than would otherwise be the case and public schools get better through increased competition,” says Springfield native Collin Hitt, the Institute’s director of education policy.

“We’ve tried some things in Illinois and they haven’t worked, but there’s a lot of stuff we haven’t tried and school vouchers is one of those things.”

Meeks says the Institute’s research on the legality of vouchers, in terms of separation of church and state, was a major force behind moving the legislation through the Illinois Senate, he says, adding that he was confident enough in the quality of Hitt’s research that he relied on him for committee testimony.

The measure failed in the House, where Meeks says lobbying from teachers’ unions likely played a role. The Illinois Education Association cites the spending of public funds on private schools as inherently wrong. The IEA’s Charles McBarron says that failing schools perform poorly because they are underfunded and that diverting dollars away from those schools to private schools would only perpetuate the problem. “Weakening them so they can’t deliver quality education is not how this state is going to move forward,” McBarron says.

While Meeks says his partnership with the Institute in support of vouchers was a good fit and he’s interested in working with the Institute on other issues, he adds that the Institute wasn’t advocating for his constituents. It was advocating for vouchers and used Meeks’ issue as an opportunity to promote such a system, he says. “It’s almost like we came over to them. … They didn’t pick the issue that affected the African- American community and come over to it. We came over to them.”

Meeks says the Institute, through the voucher issue, has made a good start at showing it’s nonpartisan but still has work to do before it can “deem itself as an honest broker that crosses the aisle.”

The Institute also supports charter schools, which receive public money and are connected to a local school district but operate under many of their own rules, and lauded Gov. Pat Quinn’s signing of legislation last year that raised the state’s cap on the number of charter schools from 60 to 120, a measure that some lawmakers hoped would give Illinois a leg up in competition for federal education funding.

The Institute continues to pursue charter school initiatives and last year served on a charter school task force, co-chaired by Chicago Democratic Sen. Heather Steans, who says the institute was an asset to discussion. “You can be an obstructionist or you can help move people toward a consensus,” she says, pointing to the Institute, in that instance, as the latter.

Budget talk

Steans’ remarks are less complimentary, however, when it comes to another one of the Institute’s major issues – the state budget.

During the 2010 spring legislative session, when the state expected a $13 billion budget gap, the Illinois Policy Institute issued “2011 Budget Solutions,” the organization’s first attempt at offering an alternative budget. It eliminated programs such as meal delivery to seniors and breast and prostate cancer screenings as well as entire agencies, including the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency and the Illinois Arts Council. It also zeroed out the state’s deficit.

House Republican Leader Tom Cross, responding to the fact that no one bothered to turn the plan into legislation, says he sees the Institute as an idea-generator expanding the General Assembly’s dialogue. “We don’t think

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