Under CORE Leadership, the Chicago Teachers Union Is No Friend to Labor
By issuing outrageous demands and devouring a larger portion of tax revenue, the CTU has become an existential threat to education, city employees, and organized labor
The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is not a friend of organized labor. The union, through its outrageous contract demands, seems oblivious to the perilous financial health of the city, as it consumes and ever greater share of tax dollars without concern for the consequences on its fellow union brethren. At the same time, under the radical leadership of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), the CTU is determined to block needed changes to often failing and half empty local schools while working to deny families even public-school alternatives to such schools. This has created a financial burden on city workers who refuse to send their children to poor performing CPS schools.
The CTU has been the primary driver of property tax increases on Chicago residents and has been consuming an ever-increasing amount of city property taxes. Consider that between 1991 and 2024, according to the Civic Federation, the total amount of property taxes collected from all Chicago property owners received by CPS soared from $842 million to $3.866 billion. An astonishing 359 percent increase in school funds, this does not even include the annual TIF property tax windfall which last year provided the district an additional $200 million.
On a property taxes per-pupil funding level, this is a growth from $2,084 to $11,480, or a 451 percent increase. If city revenue from the special teacher pension property tax levy to pay off old pension obligations were included, growth becomes $13,204 or 553 percent.
Chicago's share of total property tax revenues raised by local governments in the city rose from 45 percent in 1990 to 56 percent in 2024, as Chicago property taxpayers pay the highest property taxes in the country among major cities. The school district’s share of all city agency non-capital spending combined, City, CPS, CTA, CHA, is nearly 35 percent.
Like the property tax burden, there is the added cost to city workers who send their children to private schools. The percentage of Chicago public employees who enroll their children in private schools is among the highest in the nation among major cities.
Today, among city employees who enroll their children in private schools, the highest percentage is CPS teachers at 30 percent. Of the remaining public employees, if not for securing spots for their children in district magnate or charter schools, the percentage of CPS teachers opting for private schools over failing public schools would be significantly higher.
The burden of paying for private school education in the absence of quality school choice rests solely with the CTU, which blocks any changes to improve schools that impacts its members and works overtime to eliminate even public-school choices like better performing charter schools and magnate schools. The average cost nationally for the private school education of a single child from kindergarten to 12th grade is $144,266. For high school alone it's $61,376.
One must not underestimate the impact of the circumstances at CPS has on city unions’ annual wage increase demands: It drives property taxes even higher. The large differentials between public employee salaries in Chicago and throughout the state is a direct result of the combination of the high property taxes and private school tuition cost drivers which pressures Chicago unions to seek higher pay, not out of greed, but by virtue of the cost of living in Chicago. This condition drives taxes higher.
Besides the CTU’s role in driving up the cost of living, union leaders consistently display a callousness to the needs of other union members. Nowhere was this more evident than during COVID. School closures were a yearlong exercise in anti-solidarity with fellow unions. Teachers expected first responders to protect them and essential workers to tend to their medical needs, deliver food for them, remove their trash, and literally keep the lights on — all while the union withheld real education from many of these workers’ children by forcing Chicago to cut children off from learning by shuttering schools for 78 straight weeks.
Meanwhile, CTU members worked from home enjoying healthy increases in pay and a dramatically decreased workload while its leaders and activist supporters gaslighted those seeking to resume in-person learning. Who can forget a Chicago teachers union activist’s tweet, which exemplified the degree of hysteria that teacher unions like the CTU generated in large, urban school districts.
The CTU and its national brethren also fueled the political drive for vaccine mandates for public employees that created enormous stress among other public employees. The vaccine mandates and the threat of job loss for refusal to be vaccinated wreaked havoc among first responders and essential workers, with police officers, firefighters and paramedics being particularly singled out.
Mandates divided and demoralized first responders, essential workers, and their families during some of the gloomiest days of the pandemic. Bearing in mind the CTU’s tone and bearing during the COVID period, it is fair to speculate the CTU sought to capitalize on vaccine mandates to accumulate political power and wield its newfound power to manipulate public opinion, particularly over those who did not align with the union’s ideology.
CTU’s misleading tactics affected its own members. The CTU and other teacher unions across the country deceived their own members who took issue with prolonged school closings. Recall when CTU president, Stacy Davis Gates, reacted with fury when faculty and staff at Mount Greenwood Elementary School, in defiance of her wishes, insisted on reopening during what was the union's third illegal work stoppage over COVID.
As if that were not enough damage done, the CTU became a pivotal player in the progressive movement's campaign to attack fellow public workers, the police. CTU leaders provided funding for anti-police groups while participating in rallies smearing CPD and demanding police be defunded. They consistently blamed police funding for the historic disinvestment in schools and poor communities in general, never mind the fact that five times as much money is spent on the Chicago Public Schools than is spent on Chicago Police, and School Resource Officers never cost the district more than one percent of the annual budget.
The CTU went far beyond advocating for police defunding. The union leaders and activists engaged in a campaign of police vilification, both in curriculum and ideology. They claimed that Chicago Police in high schools actively targeted black and Hispanic students. This disregards the fact over 85 percent of CPS high school students are black or Hispanic. For further evidence of CTU’s radicalism, consider with whom the CORE caucus aligns itself: The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Chicago chapter – representing six aldermen – called Chicago Police a “white supremacist” organization. In another ugly instance, a DSA alderman’s aide referred to Chicago Police as “pigs.”
The demonization of the police served to undermine police moral, accelerating the exodus of officers through retirements and transfers, forcing the city to dramatically lower hiring standards to attract new officers. The CTU’s campaign of incitement also undermined the trust between CPD and residents, especially among youth which is so critical to helping police close cases. That lack of trust has played no small part in the abysmal arrest rates that hover at five percent for violent crimes.
With the CTU’s former chief lobbyist-turned-mayor, Brandon Johnson, and socialist City Council allies at the helm, do not expect the CTU members to bear the brunt of the coming cuts and job eliminations through attrition as the city faces a $1 billion budget deficit. Chicago will do nothing to reduce its annual subsidies to the school district that exceeded $900 million last year. This is on top of the school’s 56 percent share of all property taxes, 20 percent of state and 40 percent of federal K-12 aid the district receives.
With Governor Pritzker rejecting the CTU and Mayor Johnson’s demand for $1 billion more in funding, the CTU will be pressing Johnson to capitulate and hand over more. Don’t expect Mayor Johnson to direct his appointed school board to bring efficiencies in a system that spends $30,000 per student, sends only 54 percent of its budget to schools and has one employee for every 7.3 students if it impacts CTU members job security, work responsibility or its membership numbers.
It should be clear that teacher unions like the CTU are no longer a traditional organized labor union but a fully-fledged political organization increasingly embracing the social justice goals of its far-left-wing allies. These goals are often unrelated and in many cases in open conflict with traditional organized labor as the CTU seems unconcerned about the financial impact on other unions, nor the quality of education the children they serve receive. With their allies, CTU has increased its power to advance an agenda that is about expanding benefits and protecting members at the expense of student education.
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.
