When school districts outside of Chicago negotiate contracts, they do so with the assurance that the state will pick up the tab on pensions. To control growing pension costs, lawmakers capped salary bumps at 6 percent in 2005. This year, the cap tightened to 3 percent. Illinois' teachers unions have collected more than 15,000 signatures on petitions urging state lawmakers to reverse that measure.  

One of the biggest changes Gov. Bruce Rauner proposed in today's budget address is making local school districts bear the costs of teacher pensions. The idea has been kicked around by both parties for years, most recently in Rauner’s bipartisan, bicameral school funding reform commission.

Thanks to a new state pension law, school districts will now have to pay new teacher pensions. But Governor Rauner's amendatory veto cut the part of SB 1 that would've recognized those pension payments as part of a school's cost of doing business.​

The last time the General Assembly tried to make school funding more equitable across Illinois, the legislation got derailed largely due to a fight over teacher pensions. Now pensions have cropped up again, this time in a bipartisan commission working to overhaul the school funding formula.