Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates said this about the leak of CTU’s contract demands: “That part of our messy democracy is that things get out that are not ready to be read out.”
In case Davis Gates isn’t aware, that’s called transparency. Shouldn’t the public know that, like during the last contract, the union is pushing for more members, more pay, more benefits, less work and less performance accountability, while offering nothing that would improve the quality of instruction?
The current teachers contract cost Chicago Public Schools an additional $1.5 billion and made CPS teachers among the highest-paid in the nation — while not adding any instructional time. The monster deal didn’t prevent the union from engaging in two work stoppages. Its actions forced CPS to close its campuses longer than necessary during the pandemic with devastating consequences.
The union also pressured the district to limit public school choice by capping the number of public charter schools and their enrollment, and it pushed for the state’s tax credit scholarship program Invest in Kids to sunset, further hurting school choice. This followed the CTU pressuring the district to block charter schools from renting any of the 50 schools closed by Mayor Rahm Emanuel that could have kept many buildings open. In the new contract, the union wants to reduce charter school enrollment altogether.
The CTU’s objective in the new contract is more of the same. Yes, there are the social service demands that go far beyond the mission of good schools. Take the outrageous demand that teachers receive housing subsidies. Or tongue-in-cheek comments by Davis Gates at the City Club that “it will cost $50 billion and 3 cents.”
These are likely diversions to make the CTU’s real objectives appear as reasonable compromises. Don’t be fooled.
The CTU objectives are more teacher union members, less classroom instruction, less accountability for teacher performance and higher salaries. More members mean more dues. More dues mean more money to advance the union’s political agenda. CPS’ full-time positions already grew 18.7% the past three years. CPS now has 45,159 full-time positions budgeted for 2024 for more than 322,000 enrolled students — that’s one full-time employee for every seven students.
The CTU, by its behavior, seems to believe that it’s impossible to improve student outcomes unless most of the city treasury is funneled into the schools. CPS spends nearly $30,000 per student, receiving more than half of all Chicagoans’ property taxes and nearly 25% of state K-12 funding. The district saw its budget grow by almost 40% from 2019 to 2023, despite a drop in enrollment.
Despite the massive investment in public education, test scores remain abysmal, with 1 in 4 students meeting the state’s reading standards and 1 in 6 meeting math standards. Rather than using school funding in ways that improve school performance and expanding quality school choices, the CTU demands more funding and less school choice.
The CTU is determined to lower standards and minimize testing in evaluating student, teacher and school performance. That’s how the district gets an 84% district graduation rate, despite abysmal test scores. Last year, 79% of Black students graduated, despite only 16% meeting state standards in reading and 8% in math. The next part of this effort is the union’s drive to end the selective-enrollment and magnet school programs.
Meanwhile, the school district cries poor. Projecting a $628 million budget deficit in 2025, the district claims it has 75% of the public funding needed to adequately serve its students.
Davis Gates is right. Inequity and injustice exist in our schools. But they are perpetuated by our antiquated teachers union-dominated public school system, which denies a quality education to families that can’t afford alternatives to their failing schools. Our deficient neighborhood schools are the fault of CTU leadership. The union has effectively blocked any changes that would improve our public schools if those changes in any way affect CTU members’ job assignments, workloads or job security.
Institutional racism festers in Chicago because low-income families, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, are denied quality schools and are blocked by the CTU from securing fundamental changes needed to improve their often-failing local schools. It flourishes because the CTU spends a fortune to preserve its monopoly, dooming children to educational redlining as low-income families are subjected to whatever quality the public school in their ZIP code provides.
The city cannot survive a school system that is such a failure academically while being such a drain financially. Addressing these issues requires decentralizing the school district so the money truly follows the children, enabling low-income families to select the best schools — whether public or private — and empowering the community to demand better school models. These actions would help address the inequality and injustice that the CTU leadership decry. That would be true transformational change.
The CTU will have none of it. It will stand in the way of any action that increases members’ responsibilities and accountability or reduces its power and size.
Paul Vallas is an adviser for the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank. He ran for Chicago mayor in 2023 and in 2019 and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.