CTU’s opposition to school choice combined with its assault on public school standards and accountability has created an apartheid school system in which poor families, overwhelmingly black and Latino, are trapped in failing schools
Apartheid was the brutal system of racial segregation and discrimination enforced in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The term is synonymous with deliberate separation and systemic disadvantage.
By that definition, in places where teachers unions control the schools, those public education systems are de facto state-sanctioned apartheid vehicles. In their determination to maintain an ironclad monopoly, the unions deny poor families — overwhelmingly Black and Latino — access to quality educational options. This is racist, if not by intent, but certainly in outcome.
Nowhere is this apartheid-style control clearer than in Chicago. The Chicago Teachers Union’ (CTU) leadership is determined to strengthen its monopoly over education — not only by eliminating private school options for poor families, but also by targeting public school choice. The CTU is actively working to eliminate both charter and magnet schools, which highlight the stark performance gap between those schools and severely underperforming neighborhood schools. By eliminating options, the CTU imprisons poor families in failing, half-empty schools, reform be damned. Meanwhile, they work equally hard to expand their member’s benefits and numbers, all the while protecting them from accountability.
Why the CTU fears school choice
The CTU played a leading role in the demise of the Invest in Kids tax credit scholarship program. The reason is obvious: Private schools, particularly Catholic schools, have achieved extraordinary success. They reopened to in-person instruction the school year after COVID began, while teacher union-controlled district schools remained fully or partially remote. Catholic schools saw no degradation of academic performance, in contrast to traditional public schools whose test scores plummeted and are yet to fully recover.
As Kathleen Porter-Magee, an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute, noted, “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) — known as the “Nation’s Report Card” — shows Catholic schools far outperform public schools, especially for low-income and minority students.
When Governor J.B. Pritzker and Democrats in the Illinois General Assembly forced Invest in Kids’ funding to lapse, at least 15,000 children across Illinois lost access to tuition assistance. The end of Invest in Kids relegated students formerly benefiting from the program back into failing public schools. The ripple effect of the end of Invest in Kids also forced several private schools to close.
Nevertheless, the CTU’s war on school choice is far from over. Not satisfied with the elimination of private school choice in Illinois — in contravention of the majority of states who are increasing options for parents — it is equally determined dismantle public school choice. Public charter and magnet schools, especially are in the union’s crosshairs, with devastating consequences for the very families the CTU purports to represent.
Those urban families, of course, are mostly low-income families of color — the families who most benefit from public school choices. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) recently released its third study of charter schools that analyzed data from more than 2 million students in 29 states over 15 years. The conclusion: Charter schools produce superior academic gains, despite enrolling a more challenged student population.
CREDO found that Black and Hispanic students in charters made significantly greater progress in math and reading compared to their peers in traditional public schools. Economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell reached the same conclusion in his 2020 book, Charter Schools and Their Enemies, which examined more than 100 New York City school campuses shared by both charter and traditional students.
Sowell’s findings were staggering: Just 14 percent of traditional public-school classrooms had a majority of students proficient in reading. In math, the number dropped to 10 percent. In contrast, in 65 percent of charter school classrooms, the majority of students were proficient in reading, and 68 percent were in math.
The evidence is clear: School choice works. Make no mistake, CTU is acutely aware that school choice is a success, which is precisely why it and its union brethren prioritize the destruction of school choice.
The drive to eliminate public charter schools
The CTU’s attack on public charter schools is a well-documented, years-long campaign to destabilize and ultimately eliminate them. Today, 111 charter schools operate in Chicago, serving nearly 54,000 students — approximately 16 percent of all CPS students. Yet these schools have been systematically denied equitable funding, starved of resources, and face growing district encroachment under union pressure.
Despite giving tens of thousands of children a better-quality education, charters receive $8,600 less per student than the district average. Charter schools have also been barred from leasing any of the 50 vacant CPS buildings shuttered under Mayor Rahm Emanuel. Though serving 16 percent of CPS students, charters have received less than 3 percent of the district’s capital investment.
The CTU’s last two contracts imposed a moratorium on charter expansion and capped enrollment — a clear effort to choke off growth. The new contract pending rank-and-file approval requires that charter enrollment remain frozen at 2023–2024 levels through 2028 — a measure designed to starve the sector into irrelevance.
The CTU’s strategy, however, doesn’t end there. It’s now embarked upon a campaign to unionize charter school staff and impose the same costly, rigid work rules that have long hobbled traditional CPS schools. That strategy decimates the autonomy that once allowed schools to be student — rather than adult — centered, a characteristic attractive to parents. Shrinking flexibility, declining enrollment, and expensive CTU contracts are resulting in charter school closures or forced absorption into the district — with Acero Charter Schools’ as the CTU’s latest victim.
The drive to dismantle magnet schools
The CTU’s attack on school choice is not limited to charter schools. Part of a its broad plan to control the entire education system in Chicago extends to magnet schools. Magnets are selective-enrollment schools that admit students based on academic merit rather than ZIP code. These schools are among the last remaining ladders of opportunity for low-income students. The union, however, has long viewed them as threats, almost entirely because they highlight the failures of neighborhood schools.
It’s clear the union and its allies want to return to an era when inflated grades and social promotion masked poor performance and protected failing schools. Union leaders cry “racism” to evade any accountability, but the real agenda is a return to the soft bigotry of low expectations.
CTU racial rhetoric paints magnet schools as elitist and divisive, and it falsely claims they drain resources and exclude low-income or minority students. In point of fact, CPS’ website lists just 29 magnet schools in a district of 514 traditional (non-charter) schools, and on average, they receive less per-student funding than neighborhood schools. Their student bodies are more representative of the city than many CPS schools: More than 70 percent of pupils enrolled in magnets are minority students, and more than 50 percent are low-income.
The CTU’s pending contract instead includes a massive expansion of the district’s so-called “Sustainable Community Schools” (CSC) model. The staff-heavy CSC model (read: Increased union membership = increased CTU revenue) funnels 20 percent more funding per student into failing schools, with factually documented substandard results in math, reading, and graduation rates. The new contract mandates expansion to 70 CSCs by 2028. Meanwhile, magnet schools are being targeted for elimination — despite offering a desperately needed alternative for struggling families.
Chicago’s poor children are CTU hostages
Mayor Brandon Johnson proudly claimed that for the first time in 15 years a new teacher contract had been reached without a strike or strike vote. Despite the mayor’s bluster, under the militant Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) that has controlled CTU since 20210 — and of which former union lobbyist and now-Mayor Johnson was an enthusiastic member — the CTU has walked off the job five times in the last 13 years and frequently threatened work stoppages.
Because the CTU’s ruthless tactics have been so successful in quashing quality school alternatives, the children of Chicago’s poor families have become virtual hostages. During the Lightfoot administration alone, the CTU walked out three times — twice to protest returning to in person teaching, after it became indisputable that remote learning was a disaster for students. This, after CTU won the most generous contract in CPS history, which made its members the highest-paid in the nation amongst comparable districts.
The last two walkouts violated both the union contract and state law, which prohibited strikes for non-economic reasons. The union also forced CPS to keep schools closed for 78 weeks — far longer than the vast majority of districts nationwide — devastating working-class families, of whom only one in six could work from home. The academic and social toll is also indisputable: Record drops in student academic performance and a spike in violent crime involving school-age youth.
Chicago’s educational apartheid
The CTU has created an educational apartheid system — one in which wealthier families can opt for private schools or flee to the suburbs, while poor, overwhelmingly black and Latino children are trapped in failing, under-enrolled district schools. These schools often lack rigorous academics, accountability, or meaningful oversight. The demonization of standardized testing and the district’s decision to stop ranking schools by academic performance reflect a deliberate effort to erase the evidence that CTU’s last priority is minority children who are every bit as deserving of a decent education as their wealthier peers.
Meanwhile, the district’s bloated, centralized bureaucracy — tragically, cemented in the new contract — remains a wall between local communities and any power to improve their schools. Local School Councils and principals have no authority over budgets, staffing, calendars, or curriculum. No matter how well-intentioned, they are powerless to adopt better school models or lengthen the school day or year.
By killing off charters, capping enrollment, and eliminating selective-enrollment schools, the CTU is imposing educational redlining — locking the city’s poorest families into the worst schools with no way out. To put it bluntly, it’s segregation. Maybe not by design, but certainly the consequence of CTU’s mandates. As Thomas Sowell once warned:
“The most dangerous form of racism is not the kind that comes with a hood or a noose… It is the kind that comes with an eraser —erasing opportunities.”
School choice is the civil rights fight of our time, and Chicago’s black and Latino families are on the front lines. Chicagoans must wake up before it is too late. The CTU’s grip on the city’s education system has already inflicted incalculable damage on two generations of children. Every family deserves the right to choose a better future — whether through public charters, private scholarships, or magnet schools.
The union’s monopoly on failure must end.
