The Chicago Teachers Union is attempting to use the election of President Donald Trump to mobilize support for its budget-busting and taxpayer-gauging demands. CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said that there is an urgency to approve the contract. “We have a real, clear and present danger staring at us,” Davis Gates said about the incoming Trump administration.
Not to be outdone, Mayor Brandon Johnson joined in the fearmongering stating that Trump’s threat is not just towards new arrivals and undocumented families, but also against Black families. “He (Trump) has a vision to destroy public education,” Johnson said at a news conference.
If there is a danger posed to public education in Chicago, it’s not from Trump but from the Chicago Teachers Union’s radical leadership and the mayor. If you come from a poor family in Chicago, you’re most likely held hostage to a school system dominated by a union that’s become a de facto political party. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
The CTU is trying to use Trump’s election to rally support for a contract that has more than 700 proposals, ranging from 9% cost-of-living raises to adding thousands of more staff. If the district’s offer of 4-5% raises is accepted, the contract would still cost more than $3 billion over the four-year span of the next contract, the Tribune reported.
Its last contract was the most expensive collective bargaining agreement in city history, made Chicago teachers and support staff the highest paid nationally among large districts and provided some of the lowest student-to-staff ratios. It gave 24-50% raises over five years, added thousands of additional school staff and increased funding per student, a Wirepoints analysis found. Currently the district spends approximately $30,000 per student and has one employee for every 7.6 students.
Yet, it didn’t stop the CTU from engaging in two work stoppages, using COVID as an excuse to force the district to keep schools closed with devastating consequences. It also didn’t improve teacher performance as teacher absenteeism soared to over 41% last year, the Tribune Editorial Board wrote. And it hasn’t improved student performance either. While the district boasts record graduation rates, its academic performance on both state and national tests is abysmal. Since 2017, high school SAT scores have collapsed across all demographics and is significantly worse among Black and Latino students, according to an Illinois Policy Institute analysis.
Meanwhile, the CTU has used their considerable political muscle to eliminate competition — both public and private — and harm families. They lobbied lawmakers to end the state’s tiny private scholarship program, which helped thousands of Chicago’s low- and middle-income families. It’s also worked to end selective enrollment schools and conceal failing schools by eliminating school comparisons. The school board ended ranking schools based on performance.
They’ve also systematically changed state laws to limit and undermine public charter schools, which educate 60,000 students including 25% of all CPS public high school students, 98% of whom are Black or Latino — all for a much lower cost per pupil. The old CTU contract capped the number of public charter schools as well as student enrollment. The new contract seeks to do the same. Meanwhile CPS has given charters far shorter renewal periods, fostering great anxiety among faculty and charter school families and making it difficult to retain and recruit both.
The seven charter schools closing in the Acero network is a prime example of the CTU’s efforts to destroy even public school choices for poor families. The strategy is to unionize charter school employees, undermine the school with strikes and deny the school leadership the flexibility to innovate by subjecting them to the same type of expensive and restrictive collective bargaining agreements.
Let’s be clear, if the second Trump administration poses a threat, it’s not to families who will benefit from the administration’s support for parental choice, it’s to teachers’ unions, who fear losing their destructive monopolies over public education.
CPS has strong policies in place — separate from any union contract — to protect minority groups who might be the target of a Trump administration, as unlikely as that is, including immigrant students and their families and LGBTQ+ students and staff. The mayor-appointed school board reaffirmed those policies last week. The state likewise can protect public school students and Gov. JB Pritzker and the Democratic legislative supermajorities have signaled their determination to do so.
Sadly, there is institutional racism in public education, if not by intent then by outcome. It festers when communities, particularly in large urban school districts, are unable to successfully demand fundamental changes in their failing local schools. It flourishes because teachers unions like the CTU spend fortunes to preserve their destructive monopoly dooming children from low-income families, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, to educational redlining in which school quality is determined by income and ZIP code. A second Trump administration poses a fundamental threat to that monopoly.
Paul Vallas is an adviser for the Illinois Policy Institute. He ran for Chicago mayor in 2023 and in 2019 and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
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