For over 20 years now, advocates have been caterwauling for Illinois to get its act together and reform how it funds schools. Inevitably, these calls for reform include both enhanced funding—statewide—coupled with additional accountability metrics covering everything from school district fiscal practices to teacher induction and mentoring. Just as inevitably, the process stalls and ultimately comes to a crashing halt over the call for enhanced funding —because that would require a tax increase. Not just any increase, but a relatively significant one approaching $2 billion just for schools.

The magnitude of the tax increase needed to fund education statewide is such that, it begs an obvious question: Would this investment be worth it? If you’re willing to strip away all the partisan and ideological rhetoric that generally surrounds school funding reform efforts, and instead consider only facts, the answer to this question is just as obvious: Yes, the investment is not only worth it, but absolutely essential. Here’s why. Today in Illinois, educational attainment is the absolute key to economic security. The data on this point is beyond compelling.

Start with employability. If you don’t have at least decent academic credentials, chances are you don’t have a job. The unemployment rate in Illinois for whites who don’t have a high school diploma is almost 10 percent. That unemployment rate drops to 3.5 percent for whites with a college degree. If you’re black, the numbers are eye-opening. African Americans in the state who haven’t graduated high school have an astronomical unemployment rate of almost 23 percent! But for those blacks who go on to earn a college degree, the unemployment rate drops to just 4.5 percent.

Of course, once you get a job, educational attainment works dramatically to boost wages. There was a time, in America generally and Illinois specifically, when a person could graduate high school and go get a good job. A job that paid enough to put a car or two in the garage and a kid or two through college. That time is most decidedly over. Over the last 26 years, Illinois workers who stopped their education when they got a high school diploma, saw their real, inflation adjusted incomes decline by about nine percent. In fact, from 1980 through 2006, the only workers who experienced any real increase in wages, were those that actually obtained a college degree. Everyone else saw their wages decline.

The importance of education to personal economic security could not be more evident. But the worker’s perspective is only one side of the economic coin—the employer’s perspective is the other. See, what business is telling policymakers in Illinois is simple, in a global economy, employers have a lot of choices when it comes to making business location and expansion decisions. The high-end businesses, those that pay good wages and provide decent benefits, like manufacturing or information technologies, demand a highly numerate and literate workforce. If a state’s public education system isn’t up to snuff, high-end businesses will either locate or expand elsewhere. Specifically, in those states or countries that can provide a quality, skilled workforce.

Illinois’ ongoing failure to make adequate investments in K-12 education has in fact told business to go elsewhere to find skilled workers. Again, the proof is in the data. As recently as 1990, manufacturing employed more workers than any other sector in Illinois, accounting for a little more than one out of every five workers in the state. But over the last 16 years, the state has lost 26 percent of those jobs—a rate of loss worse than the nation or Midwest.

For more information about Illinois’ economy, obtain a copy of the “State of Working Illinois” report, available online at http://www.stateofworkingillinois.niu.edu/swil/index.html.

And Illinois isn’t replacing those good manufacturing jobs with high-end service jobs, like in information technologies. The state’s losing those jobs as well. The reality is, most job growth in Illinois is coming in the low-wage service sector. So much so that today the low-end service sector is the state’s top employer, accounting for over 30 percent of all workers.

Now, there certainly are multiple reasons for these economic changes. That said, one of the key reasons is a lack of adequate investment in public education. The state has effectively told high-end businesses that Illinois won’t fund education to the point where we’ll satisfy their demand for skilled workers. Not surprisingly, business has listened.

Ralph Martire is executive director of the Center for Tax and Budget Accountability, a bipartisan fiscal policy think tank. rmartire@ctbaonline.org