In October 1996, the Illinois Supreme Court affirmed lower court decisions and dismissed a lawsuit claiming that the state's public school funding system violated the Illinois constitution. This decision ended a six-year battle to reform the state's school funding system. The courts found no constitutional issues in the case because education has…

This monograph contains five presentations delivered during the course of an attempt made in November 1992 to amend the state constitution of Illinois in such a way as to make education a fundamental constitutional right. The effort failed to garner the 60 percent of the vote required to pass the amendment. These presentations made a strong…