How the CORE Caucus, Mayor Johnson's Education Policies Punish Chicago's Minority Students
In either intent or outcome, racism is the defining feature of Stacy Davis Gates and Mayor Brandon Johnson's education policies and minorities are hurt most
Let’s be clear, the Chicago Teacher Union (CTU) blocks any changes to improve schools that impact its members, their numbers, work load or job security. So CTU President Stacy Davis Gates blames the system’s disastrous test scores on white supremacists who she claims deliberately design tests to fail black children. Meanwhile, former-lobbyist-turned-mayor, Brandon Johnson, rejects high expectations and standards in the classroom and dismisses the significance of a grading system, asserts that school success is measured not in student performance but in massive funding increases to a failing school system.
This blame shifting from the CTU failing to prepare students to a system fueled by white supremacy is hardly surprising from the race-baiting Davis Gates. A former CPS teacher who survived a mere six years as a classroom educator before turning to union organizing, Davis Gates often resorts to personal attacks against critics or declaring systemic racism a characteristic of the schooling system to deflect from the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators' (CORE) role in Chicago’s hopelessly failing schools.
Like Davis Gate’s ally at City Hall, Mayor Brandon Johnson to frequently wields racial antagonism. A former elementary school teacher of five years who spent an additional year teaching high school social studies, Johnson followed Davis Gates career path and eventually turned to union organizing before becoming a CTU lobbyist.
With both Davis Gates and Johnson are blind to CTU’s myriad faults, it is predictable they would use racism and the excuse of underfunded schools to explain a failing system that has seen a massive exodus of students since the CORE faction took over CTU leadership in 2010. Since CORE took power, it has distinguished itself for its radicalism and frequent strikes or work stoppages.
If funding were the true measure of success, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) would be the most successful large school system in the country. Today, CPS spends $30,000 per student, budgeting one school employee for every 7.3 students and one teacher for every 15 students. Since 2019, the district has increased spending by a startling 40 percent per student and added 14.5 percent staff, despite an eight percent drop in enrollment. CPS now spends over $2,000 more per student than the Illinois average in a state that spends between 19-64 percent more per pupil than neighboring and other Midwestern states.
CTU uses race to discredit standards and accountability
CTU leadership and the national teacher’s unions are demanding states move away from standardized tests, which the National Education Association (NEA) characterizes as instruments of racism and a biased system. The NEA claims that eliminating “white supremacy” includes ending racist tests. The consequences for their students will be significant as they will just be socially promoted to the next grade level and out of high schools wholly unprepared for college coursework without the necessary marketable skills to find employment or succeed in the workforce.
CPS is already moving aggressively to a “soft” scoring and assessment system for measuring school performance rather than student performance. CPS’ new policy for measuring schools’ performance expands the metrics used to evaluate schools, placing a greater emphasis on how schools promote students’ social and emotional development. While factors such as staffing levels, curriculum, and other investments are important, diminished student outcomes in evaluations leads to social promotion.
The existence of a real disconnect between teacher evaluation ratings and student performance scores is swiftly rendering teacher evaluations meaningless. In 2023, nearly 87 percent of teachers were rated as “excellent or proficient” according to the Illinois Report Card. In both 2020 and 2021, during the height of COVID, when test scores were plummeting 98 percent, 100 percent of the teachers respectively, were rated excellent or proficient.
The CORE caucus led by Stacy Davis Gates is now demanding further reductions in teacher accountability by maintaining that the new teachers contract empower the union to force the district to temporarily close a school or group of schools after any yet-to-be-defined traumatic event. This specific stipulation would include a suspension of the teacher evaluation process. In another term CORE is attempting to dictate to CPS, union officials are insisting that Chicago accept a change to the procedure under which educators achieve a “proficient” rating. Another erosion of teacher accountability, the CTU is also pressing Chicago to reduce the frequency of official evaluations for tenured teachers from an annual exercise to triennially, while expanding opportunities for teachers to have poor performance ratings overturned.
Perhaps nowhere has the assault on standardizing testing and its consequences manifest itself more than in the Chicago Public Schools. Overall, in 2023, fewer than 26 percent of students are proficient in reading and an appallingly low 17.5 percent are proficient in math on state tests. Students across the state fared little better, with test scores revealing only 34.6 percent proficient in reading and 26.9 percent proficient in math. Yet, CPS ridiculously gloats over a graduate rate of 83.2 percent. The state, too, trumpets its highest graduation rate in 15 years at 87.6 percent. Neither the CPS nor the State of Illinois can explain the conflict between its alarming achievement scores and graduation rates. Worse, 2024 has not shown signs of any improvement: Preliminary scores show students currently below the pre-COVID Test 2019 scores.
It is plainly obvious teacher unions and their allies want to return schools to an epoch when inflated grades and social promotion disguised subpar student achievement and concealed failing schools and teachers under a veil of secrecy. For union leaders who shout “racism” to advance an agenda that strips schools of any real accountability, a return to social promotion and the diminishing of student outcomes in school evaluations is the real return to the past — specifically, the soft bigotry of low expectations.
The CTU’s racist attack on magnet schools is part of their attack on accountability
The CTU’s controlled and mayoral appointed school board’s move to shutter the Chicago Public School (CPS) magnet school program is an essential element in CORE’s campaign to dismantle standards and accountability in Chicago’s public schools. Though they are public schools with unionized teachers and paraprofessionals, the select enrollment schools are an embarrassing contrast to failing neighborhood schools that must be eliminated. To disguise their intent to keep failing schools open, the CTU and their supporters singled out failing neighborhood schools and falsely claim these schools suffer a shortage of equity.
An utterly nonsensical argument, 70 percent of CPS students are black and Hispanic, and over half from low-income families. Dealing only the race card, CORE leaders and their supporters examine outcomes at only the five top magnet high schools and dishonestly claim total enrollment at the most successful magnet schools does not reflect the districts demographic, and are therefore inequitable and discriminatory. CORE leaders deliberately ignore 33 other magnet schools and the fact that the 33 percent of white student share of enrollment matches exactly the white share of city’s population (32.9 percent).
The CORE caucus uses race to attack proponents of school choice for poor families
The attack on testing and high standards is matched by union efforts to eliminate school choice of any kind. Like CORE’s claims that white supremacists determined to fail black children are behind standardized testing and accountability, the CTU also insists white supremacists are some sinister force behind the movement for school choice. Akin to Davis Gates calling supporters of school choice “conservatives who don’t want black children the learn to read," AFT serial fabulist Randi Weingarten likens supporters of the parental right to choose their child’s school to segregationists.
Reveling in their success in defeating an extension of the Invest in Kids Act — CORE’s bid to make Illinois the only state in the country to end its support for poor parents who want to send their children to private schools — the union is determined to eradicate the city’s 114 public charter schools. One of the over 700 terms CORE has brought to the negotiating table, the CTU is demanding the new contract not only extend caps on the number of public charters schools and enrollment. CORE is also insisting additional mandates that would place severe handicaps on the independence charters depend upon to be innovative. A deliberate strategy to chip away at the flexibility charters enjoy, should the CPS cave to CORE, countless charter schools would be forced to fold.
The CTU’s attack on public charter schools reveals their true view of equity. In Chicago today, charters enroll 54,000 students, 98 percent of whom are black or Hispanic, and 87 percent of whom are low-income. Despite the popularity of charters among blacks and Hispanics, CORE leaders pull out the race card to label supporters of school choice racist.
CTU is intentionally denying poor students the option for quality education
The teacher unions have reason to fear public charter and private schools. Viewed as competitors to the CTU, students enrolled in charters and the private school system consistently outperform traditional teacher union dominated public schools. A recent study conducted by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) confirms the performance gap between students enrolled in independently run public schools in comparison to traditional public schools is widening.
The largest study ever carried out, CREDO’s examination of charter schools encompassed two million students enrolled in charter schools in 29 states. Both New York City and Washington, D.C., cities considered to have the worst public education systems in the nation, were included. The third installment in a series tracking charter-school outcomes over 15 years (2009, 2013, 2023), the conclusions are unequivocal: Most charter schools “produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population.” In both reading and math, “charter schools provide their students with stronger learning when compared to the traditional public schools.” The CREDO study also featured prominently black and Hispanic students in charter schools advanced more than their TPS peers by large margins in both math and reading.
Even more compelling is the research performed by the iconic Thomas Sowell, who in his latest book “Charter Schools and Their Enemies,” focused on more than 100 New York City schools. Part of Sowell’s work concentrated on charter and traditional public-school students who shared a building and an overwhelming black demographic. The results were striking. Students surveyed took the same English and math tests each year. The results in traditional public schools were disastrous: A dismal 14 percent of students were proficient in English and 11 percent were proficient in math. In sharp contrast, charter school students were an astonishing 65 percent proficient in English and 68 percent proficient in math.
Meanwhile private schools, in particular Catholic schools, have enjoyed extraordinary success. According to a data analysis performed by Kathleen Porter-Magee, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, “If Catholic schools were a state, they would be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests.” The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) bills itself as the “nation’s report card,” and has been handing out grades since 1969. Results show Catholic schools exceeded both public schools and charter schools by wide margins.
As for critics who claim that Catholic school scores were simply a product of a higher socio-economic status enjoyed by their students, and a selection bias favoring higher achieving whites for admission, data shows Catholic schools outperformed national, charter, and public-school averages for black, Hispanic, and low-income students as well — on all four tests, disproving claims of selection bias and the “their kids are richer!” excuses.
Private schools as well as charter schools nationally were given quite an assist from the gross underperformance of their competitors during the pandemic. As COVID pandemic ravaged the globe, the crisis also laid bare the inadequacies of the traditional public education system: Bureaucratic hindrances, outdated traditions, collective bargaining agreements, and unwarranted union interference. Rather than adapting and innovating, these institutions failed miserably, further eroding their credibility. The CTU forced the district to close school campuses for 78 straight weeks, inflicting untold damage on student learning.
The abandonment of standards and absence of school choice, not to mention three strikes and constant threats of work stoppages contributed to a large exodus of families from Chicago. Black residents have fueled this exodus since 2000 as over 266,000 black residents have fled Chicago. Most devastating is the fact black flight from Chicago has been overwhelmingly middle-income families with children. Children are overrepresented as the number of black children, age 17 and younger, fell by 49 percent from 2000 to 2020 compared to 14 percent for black adults.
For Chicago, there is no choice but school choice
The current system is unworkable, in part because it subjects low-income and overwhelmingly black and Latino families to negative educational outcomes. Under the current, union-controlled arrangement, students are trapped in a broken system. A morally indefensible position, it is time to provide poor parents and the community real school choice. This means providing “Direct Funding” for parents to use at the school of their choice. This also means empowering the community to choose local school models that best suits their needs.
Empowering parents to choose their child’s school
Despite the racially charged language utilized by defenders of the failed status quo, private school tuition support does not drain from traditional public schools. Under this specific version of choice, if a student opts to attend a private school, the state money designated for that student simply follows them to the school that educates them while taxpayers save money. This is because direct funding amounts add up to far less than the overall taxpayer support required to educate a student who attends a district school. The Fordham Institute offers a deep dive into the impact of voucher programs.
Chicago can enact its own direct funding program with City Council approval by using the annual Tax Increment Financing (TIF) windfall the district receives to create its own and dramatically expanded Invest in Kids scholarship program. The CPS can also invite state-recognized parochial and private schools to become “contract schools” allowing their students to be counted for purposes of state aid and grants. Public school districts have a long history of contracting out for private school services for students with special needs.
Empowering the community to choose their school model
Mayor Johnson should advance community choice. Nationally, a growing number of urban school districts have empowered their local communities to demand that their failing schools be reconstituted using proven successful school models. Called Renaissance or Innovation Schools, often these failing schools are replaced by successful public charter school models without displacing existing students.
These Renaissance or Innovation Schools are independent schools that are free from the district funding intercepts that divert too much money from local schools and their classrooms. The schools are also liberated from the many state and collective bargaining restrictions that undermine effective use of school time and resources. The schools have complete autonomy to select teachers and replace teachers, mandate continuous professional development, and extend the school day and school year.
Neighboring state Indiana has fully embraced school choice, making 90 percent of the families eligible for vouchers, yet there has not been a mass exodus of families from public schools as the overwhelming majority of children continue to be educated in neighborhood public schools. Indiana has also removed the obstacles to transforming failing neighborhood schools using the Renaissance or Innovation Schools model with great success, particularly in Indianapolis.
The leaders of the CORE caucus are the real racists
While some might be inclined to call Stacy Davis Gates, her CORE colleagues, and Mayor Brandon Johnson racists, if racism is measured by outcomes, then their victims are blacks and Latinos. This segment of the student population comprise an overwhelming majority of children impacted by the abandonment of accountability and denial of publicly funded quality school choices. The CTU has used race to protect a system of “education apartheid” in the quality of schools for poor families, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, determined by wealth and zip code.
Paul G. Vallas is CEO of The McKenzie Foundation and a policy advisor at the Illinois Policy Institute. Mr. Vallas ran for mayor of Chicago in 2023 and previously served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
