The CTU got a raise, the taxpayers paid the bill, and students lost again
If there is any good news in the Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) new contract with the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), it’s that despite intense political pressure, CPS CEO Martinez maintained a firm stance against the union on the four biggest issues: Modest pay raises, limiting additional staff increases, protecting existing instructional time, and protecting the current evaluation system. The bad news, however, is that this new contract will cost Chicago’s taxpayers $1.5 billion while doing nothing to remove obstacles CTU has set in place to block public school choices for parents or improve schools.
Let’s look at the four biggest issues.
1. The contract cost: The CTU’s original demands would have cost Chicago $10 billion over 4 years. The cost of the agreement, which mirrors Martinez’s contract offer six months ago, was settled at $1.5 billion. This total matches the previous record setting contract CTU was awarded in 2019 and similar to the contract five years ago; it arrived with no CTU concessions.
2. The pay raise: CTU had initially demanded nine percent annual raises. An absurd request, the union eventually accepted an annual four percent first year increase followed by five percent increases, with a higher pay hike for veteran teachers. However, this is in addition to the step-in-lane increases which, for the majority of teachers, will almost double their annual salary increases.
3. Staff increases: CTU had first demanded 13,900 new staff; CPS wanted to maintain current staffing levels. In the final agreement, the CTU was limited to 800 to 900 additional staff in targeted areas, primarily Special Education and Bilingual services. This comes after the district added over 9,000 full time budgeted positions, most of which they filled since 2019. The district currently has one staff member for every 7.6 students.
4. Instructional time: From the outset, CTU had insisted on additional prep time at the expense of instructional time, but the district held fast. However, for the second straight contract cycle, the district agreed to spend $1.5 billion on a deal that did not add one minute of instructional time despite it being the most effective way to improve student performance.
4. Evaluations: The district did not cave to CTU demands that teacher evaluations be watered down and less frequent. An evaluation system in which the bar is already near bottom, the current evaluation system is virtually meaningless as there is no connection between evaluation and student performance and no consequences for not only poor teacher evaluations, but few consequences for misconduct.
The CPS’ new contract with Chicago is effectively an expensive $1.5 billion status-quo agreement. Under the new contract, the terms negotiated do nothing to slow the district’s movement away from high standards and accountability or remove CTU contract mandates that prevent elected Local School Councils and their principals from controlling their budgets and selecting more effective school models. Worse, the new contract does not prevent the CTU’s mission to eliminate public school alternatives such as charters and magnets to failing neighborhood schools.
Continued abandoned of standards and accountability
Under this new contract, CPS will continue moving 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 greater emphasis on how schools promote students’ social and emotional development. Diminishing academic outcomes in evaluations is the institutional partner to grade inflation for students.
The mayoral-controlled Board of Education (BOE) has voted to end the ranking of schools by performance is part and parcel of a campaign to halt the practice of keeping academic scores and to eliminate embarrassing contrasts in school performance. Given mandates set by the State of Illinois, the district will continue reporting standardized test results at the school level, but those results will no longer be part of the district’s own assessments of schools.
The CTU has long been a fierce opponent of standardized testing. In August 2024, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates went on Chicago radio station WVON to decry standardized testing as a holdover of “white supremacy.” Schools were once ranked and labeled under CPS’ School Quality Rating Policy, which ranked schools based on how students performed on state assessments, attendance, and graduation rates. The district is effectively abandoning ranking schools based on student outcomes.
While the contract does little to further diminish teacher evaluations, as was demanded by the CTU, the district has already abandoned rigorous teaching standards as evidence in teacher evaluations. For example: Despite the dramatic drop in student proficiency scores, CTU walkouts, and union-forced remote learning, CPS teachers were “evaluated as excellent or proficient” at a rate of 99.0 percent. A rise from 98 percent in 2020, 91.4 percent of teachers were evaluated as “excellent or proficient” in pre-COVID 2019 and 85.6 percent in 2018. There is a deep disconnect between teacher evaluation and students test performance.
Obstacles to improving neighborhood schools
The CTU boasts the teacher contract’s expansion of its so-called “Sustainable Community Schools” model, with the district’s new school funding formula allegedly based on need, not enrollment. The CTU’s “needs-based” formula is a smokescreen to protect union jobs at severely under-enrolled schools. For example: Manley High School, built to accommodate 1,000 pupils, enrolls 78 students and spends $45,000 per student. Frederick Douglass High School, built for over 900 students, enrolls 35 and spends over $68,000 per student. By contrast, fully enrolled Northside College Prep spends just over $16,000.
More perplexing is the number of underused school buildings. Today, CPS maintains 163 half-empty school buildings, a full third of all of its buildings. At least 20 CPS’ buildings enroll fewer than 25 percent of the students they were built to serve. Most of these schools, if not all, are failing to educate the students that remain. The new contract and the new funding formula, along with the mayor’s continued control of the school board for at least two more years, will only strengthen the obstacles to closing or consolidating near empty schools.
The “Sustainable Community Schools” model that the new contract mandates is an unmitigated disaster. Under the new contract, the plan is to expand Sustainable Schools from 20 to 70 schools. According to data gathered from the Illinois State Board of Education and Chicago Public Schools, sustainable community schools lag far behind selective enrollment schools and other traditional Chicago public schools by most measures. Yet, this is the same model the CTU and its national union are trying to sell the public while laboring to deny them even public school alternatives to their failing schools.
This of course begs several questions: Why isn’t every school a community school? Why isn’t every school inviting outside groups to help expand learning opportunities, health, and social supports and services, or family and community engagement? Why aren’t all schools opening their campuses in the early morning and keeping them open through the afternoons, evenings, weekends, holidays and into the summer?
Meanwhile, the new contract along with the district's centralized command and control bureaucracy will remain an impregnable obstacle to the elected Local School Councils and their school principals improving their local schools. Effectively powerless, this means neither LSCs nor school administrators are able to exercise any discretion over their local school funding or staffing model. No power to lengthen the instructional day and year. No ability to select a better school model.
Further efforts to eliminate even public-school choice
The CTU was instrumental in killing the Invest in Kids tax credit private school scholarship program. When the program ended, at least 15,000 pupils around the state were left stranded without scholarships, and multiple private schools closed completely. However, the CTU is determined to eliminate public school choice as well by ultimately closing or converting public charter and magnet schools. This will have devastating consequences for poor families, overwhelmingly Black and Latino.
The last two CTU contracts put a moratorium on charter school growth and limited enrollment to 101 percent of the capacity those schools were at in 2019-2020. CTU’s new contract demands continue limiting the number of students enrolled in charters by the 2027-2028 school year to the same capacity as enrolled during the 2023-2024 school year.
The CTU’s ultimate aim is the elimination or absorption of charter schools. Determined to destabilize and discredit charters, the CTU pressed CPS to limit the length of charter school contracts to two to three years, as opposed to the 10-year standard under state law. A shorter contract will reduce the number of charter renewals as it makes it far more challenging to plan or invest and makes the school less attractive to staff or students who realize their school may not exist in a few years.
The CTU claims that school choice takes away needed funding from traditional public schools, but this is a widely circulated untruth. In contrast, Chicago public charter schools receive on average $8,600 less funding per pupil than the district average and charters receive almost no facility support. Despite less funding and no support elsewhere, charters in Chicago enroll over 54,000 of Chicago’s public school children, which constitutes 10 percent of all elementary school students and 25 percent of all high school students.
The teacher unions and their supporters have reason to fear public charter and private school competition. Recent studies show charters pulling further away from their traditional public school competition in student performance. Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes released its third report that tracks charter school outcomes over 15 years, covering over two million charter students in 29 states. CREDO’s conclusions are unequivocal: “Charter schools produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population.”
The fact remains that for poor families, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, public charter, magnet, and state private school scholarship programs offer the only alternatives to often failing neighborhood schools. Racism festers in the absence of school choice. It festers when poor communities are unable to successfully demand fundamental changes and are denied the ability to seek alternatives to their failing schools. It may not be racist by intent, but it is certainly by outcome.
CPS CEO Pedro Martinez must have been as shocked as anyone by the CTU and mayor’s efforts to fire him. Martinez fully honored the last CTU contract, which made their members the highest paid among large districts. As CEO, Martinez swelled CTU membership ranks by many thousands. Martinez also advanced the CTU’s agenda to keep near empty schools operating, supported the CTU’s demand the district shy away from teacher and school accountability, and strengthened the CTU’s monopoly by effectively capping and undermining public charter schools.
Martinez's late heroics in blocking the district’s clearly outrageous demands are to be applauded. However, we should not be led astray from the damaging side of the new contract. This contract is a perpetuation of the status quo. It is a continued strengthening of the CTU dominated school system that has systematically degraded schools by abandoning standards and accountability while denying poor families alternatives to their failing neighborhood schools and denying the community the ability to select better school models. And it comes with a cost of $1.5 billion to boot.
