The Chicago Teachers Union claims that Chicago Public Schools’ lack of Black teachers is, in part, the result of an evaluation system that discriminates against them — specifically singling out Recognizing Educators Advancing Chicago’s Students, or REACH.
Let’s be clear. This latest invocation of race is a political move by CTU President Stacy Davis Gates and her Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE). With union elections approaching, this is an effort to rally their base and bolster the union’s broader campaign against standards and accountability.
The CTU’s criticism of REACH is misleading. The evaluation system is designed as a tool to help teachers improve — not as a means to penalize them. In fact, CPS does not penalize teachers for low REACH scores. There’s virtually no teacher accountability for poor academic outcomes.
In Chicago, you would be hard-pressed to find more than a handful of teachers fired for poor performance despite abysmal student test scores and 40% of teachers being chronically absent in 2023.
The CTU has made it a mission to eliminate meaningful teacher accountability. Last year, the school board — backed by CTU allies — voted to stop ranking schools by academic performance. Rather than confront poor student outcomes head-on, the union aims to redefine success by emphasizing metrics unrelated to academics, downplaying testing and reviving policies such as social promotion.
This is how the district can tout record graduation rates while fewer than 1 in 3 students meet grade-level standards in reading — and just over 1 in 6 in math on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness standardized test. Since 2017, SAT scores among high school graduates have plummeted across all demographics. Meanwhile, CPS is retreating from teaching standards altogether, as evidenced in its evaluation practices.
Despite attacks on REACH, consider how CPS teachers were rated the past two years. According to the Illinois Report Card, 93.4% of CPS teachers in 2024 were rated “excellent” or “proficient.” That’s up from 86% in 2023. Clearly, there is a major disconnect between teacher evaluations and student performance.
Now, the CTU wants to weaken evaluations even further. A version of the union’s contract demands leaked last year includes extending evaluations for tenured teachers rated “excellent” or “proficient” to once every three years. Other tenured teachers would be evaluated annually. They also propose reducing the number of classroom observations from three to two per cycle, with a third only conducted if both the teacher and observer agree.
The CTU would have the Black community believe that CPS is discriminating against Black teachers in hiring and evaluations. But this claim doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. For instance, 44% of all CPS principals were Black in 2019-20, far exceeding the proportion of either Black teachers or students. By comparison, 45% of CPS teachers are white and 20% are Black. If discrimination were at play, it would imply that Black administrators are somehow complicit — a claim that’s hard to take seriously.
The actual reason for the decline in Black teachers is part of a broader national trend: Fewer students are entering the teaching profession, and there’s been a significant increase in Latino teacher candidates. In the 2019-20 academic year, U.S. colleges and universities conferred 85,057 bachelor’s degrees in education — just 4% of all degrees awarded. That’s down 19% from 2000-01 and a staggering 50% decline since 1970.
Over the past decade, the percentage of Black teachers in CPS has dropped from nearly 50% to 20.6% — even as Black students now make up about 34% of enrollment. However, this decline isn’t due to white teachers replacing Black teachers. The percentage of white teachers has remained steady. Instead, Black teachers have largely been replaced by Latino teachers, whose share of CPS’ teaching workforce has grown alongside the city’s growing Latino population.
Today, 25% of CPS teachers are Latino, while Latino students make up 47% of enrollment.
If the CTU truly wants more Black teachers in the classroom, it should focus on expanding the overall pool of teacher candidates — in number and quality. This isn’t rocket science. A serious recruitment strategy should include:
- Teacher ambassadors: Incentivize current CPS administrators and teachers to assist with recruitment, onboarding and mentoring of new hires.
- HBCU partnerships: Forge relationships with historically Black colleges and universities, including through the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education, to recruit Black teacher candidates.
- Teach for Chicago: Launch a district-run version of Teach for America to recruit top minority college graduates from non-education majors.
- Alternative certification: Establish a CPS-led program to help professionals from other fields transition into teaching.
- Troops to teachers: Fully use the federal program that helps veterans, many of whom are Black, become certified teachers.
- Student teacher incentives: Pay student teachers as aides, integrate them into after-school and tutoring programs and allow them to substitute teach within limits.
- Future teachers pipeline: Partner with City Colleges and area universities to create a pathway for CPS high school students interested in teaching careers.
- Teacher villages: Expand supportive housing communities where new teachers can live and connect with peers during their probationary years.
These are the basic elements of a comprehensive plan to significantly grow the pool of qualified teachers while also increasing the number of Black teachers, especially Black men. The shortage of Black teachers is not the result of discrimination — it’s a result of far too few Black students entering the teaching profession.
CPS and the city can, and should, take concrete steps to change that.
Paul Vallas is an adviser for the Illinois Policy Institute. He ran for Chicago mayor in 2023 and 2019 and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
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