The Fate of Pedro Martinez Notwithstanding, It Is the CTU, Not Funding, Which Is the Major Obstacle to Quality Education in Chicago

As long as the CTU commands the levers of power over CPS, minority students will suffer most

Mayor Brandon Johnson and Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates’ latest gambit is to ratify a contract that will induce the complete collapse of CPS finances and thus force the state to intervene and provide Chicago the billions needed for CPS to dig itself out of the rubble. This is a rosy vision, but it will never materialize. Even if willing, with the state facing a budget deficit of $3.2 billion next year, Springfield does not have the money to provide schools statewide with the over $4 billion needed to get the $1 billion Johnson and Davis Gates are demanding. Furthermore, Pritzker has no intention of asking his allies in the General Assembly to raise taxes to pay for a bailout for the CTU’s outrageous contract.

It is time to realize that the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) does not have a revenue problem but a CTU problem. The fact remains the CORE-led CTU has been largely responsible for denying poor children, overwhelmingly black and Latino, a quality education. The CTU and its former lobbyist-made-mayor, Brandon Johnson, remain the greatest obstacle to the district spending its $10 billion, the equivalent to $30,000 per student, in ways that ensures quality school choices for all Chicago children, regardless of income or zip code.

Today, CPS is perhaps the best funded big city school district in the nation, boasting the highest paid teachers and one of lowest staff-to-student ratios among large districts. It receives an astonishing 56 percent of all city revenues and over $1 billion in city subsidies, including a separate dedicated property tax levy to fund its teacher pensions. Since 2019, per-pupil funding has increased 43 percent despite a 9 percent drop in enrollment. During the same period, the district added over 9,000 new staff and today has one full-time staff for every 7.6 students.

Despite CPS’ swollen budget, the academic performance among students is abysmal on both state and national tests. While CTU claims graduation rates have soared since 2017, high school SAT scores have plunged across all demographics, the most significant decline among black and Latino students. For example: Only 11 percent of black students are at proficiency in reading and only a mere 8 percent are proficient in math in the college entrance SAT. For Latino students, scores are only marginally better with only 18 percent proficient in reading and 15 percent in math.

The Chicago School District 299 has lost 111,000 students over the last twenty years, a debilitating drop of 26 percent of total enrollment. The decline in enrollment has been overwhelmingly driven by a reduction in black attendance — down by about 115,000. The fact that the crime pandemic continues undeterred in the city, and all but a small percentage of poor families are provided alternatives to their often failing and seriously under enrolled neighborhood schools are driving families to depart the city.

Since 2000, over 266,000 blacks have left Chicago, an overwhelming majority of whom are middle-income families with children. Children are overrepresented in the black population decline. The number of black children age 17 and younger residing in Chicago fell by 49 percent between 2000 to 2020, compared with 14 percent for black adults. A startling development, this phenomenon continues to worsen even as Democrat leaders loudly proclaim Illinois as a progressive model of success for the nation.

Mayor Johnson, his far-left supporters, and CORE leaders have declined to address the conditions in Chicago that are driving residents and businesses away — failing schools, high crime, and excessive taxes. Instead, they see the solution in unlimited migration. It is no coincidence the CTU’s contract demands are filled with proposals to attract migrant families. The City of Chicago has spent over $450 million to provide for migrants and, according to Wirepoints, the CPS has spent anywhere from $210-400 million to accommodate migrants in schools.

The Chicago Teachers Union and its national brethren such as the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) perennially demand more funding and less accountability for traditional public schools. At they submit their demands, they work tirelessly and clandestinely to roll back school choice for low-income and minority families. That they do so serves one purpose: Providing parents — especially those of modest means— free or subsidized alternative education options creates accountability for traditional public schools.

The CTU lobbied successfully to end the state’s modest private scholarship program for poor families and dedicates itself to eliminating public school alternatives to failing neighborhood schools. The union has done so by forcing the district to cap the number of charter schools and charter school enrollment while working assiduously to undermine charter schools or absorb them into the district, as they are currently doing with the Acero schools. Unsatisfied with gutting only charter schools, the CTU is waging a similar war against magnet and select enrollment schools. In the pursuit of "educational equity," CTU is laboring to dismantle specialized programming at magnet and select-enrollment schools and pressures the Board of Education to reduce funding to both.

At the same time the CTU pushes to end school choice and thwarts legislation to provide state-funded scholarships for tuition to private schools, the CTU also exercises its considerable political influence to oppose empowering principals and their elected Local School Councils (LSC) to make any changes, regardless of the need, to improve schools and to select superior school models. Allowing school administrators and LSCs a broader range to govern schools would infringe on CTU membership, benefits, workload, and job protections the union seeks to protect. The CTU’s actions are depriving the poorest families in Chicago the right to attend better performing schools.

The teacher unions and their supporters have good reason to fear public charter and private school competition. Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes CREDO’s conclusions are unequivocal: “Charter schools produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population.” Moreover, “black and Hispanic students in charter schools advance more than their [traditional public school] peers by large margins in both math and reading.”

Meanwhile, private 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.” Results show Catholic schools exceeded public schools by wide margins across all demographics.

Contrary to what the teacher’s unions claim, government funding is not exclusive to public education programs as there are a plethora of government programs that support private education services. Take, for example, the Head Start program, Federal Pell grant, or the GI Bill, which helps veterans pay for private or public school or training. Illinois’ own Monetary Award Program (MAP) is a grant program administered by the Illinois Student Assistance Commission (ISAC) and funded by Illinois. MAP provides payment toward college tuition and mandatory fee costs at Illinois institutions participating in the program. Currently, 57 percent of students who attend private universities have federal student loans.

The CTU also asserts that even public-school choice takes away needed funding from traditional public schools. A deeply misleading claim, both charter and magnet schools provide better educational opportunities and require less funding. In Chicago, charter schools receive on average $8,600 less funding per pupil than the district average and almost no facility support while magnet schools on average receive far less funding per student than the district average.

The fact remains that for Chicago’s poorest families — overwhelmingly black and Latino — public charter and magnet schools and the Invest in Kids Act offered the only alternatives to often failing neighborhood schools. Yet, for all Mayor Johnson and Stacy Davis Gates’ talk about race, inequality, and academic impoverishment damaging poor families, they are determined to deny them these choices as the CTU spends a fortune to uphold a destructive monopoly that consigns children from poor families to subpar neighborhood schools.

CPS does not suffer from a revenue problem but a spending problem. At the very center of CPS’ financial problem is what the district spends its budget dollars. Unfortunately, school district leaders have long collaborated with the CTU to preserve the status quo. The administration seeks to sustain its resource consuming bureaucracy and maintain control over local school resources. CTU leaders need the central administration to enforce its contract which increases its numbers and members' pay and benefits while limiting accountability and protecting the unions education monopoly.

There is a pathway to address the current financial crisis and dramatically expanding quality school choices. This requires not only tying a contract to available revenues but also by radically decentralizing the school district, allowing the majority of funding to flow directly into local schools. It also requires empowering school principals and their elected LSC’s to determine how best to spend education dollars. This would include the authority to select the best school model and determine the best uses of the school facility.

It is time for Governor Pritzker to intervene and revive the Chicago School Finance Authority (SFA), similar to the panel established in 1985, which kept the district from financial collapse, to exercise financial control over and furnish financial guidance to the Chicago Board of Education. The goal should not only be to approve budgets and contracts to secure financial basis for continued operation of the schools but to also strengthen local school autonomy and expand public school choices for all families.

Simultaneously, school reform advocates, who are fighting to keep the CTU from controlling the elected school board, should push for a Federal Consent Decree that will end an education system that sees poor overwhelming minority families in Chicago confined to failing schools by virtue of their income and zip code. The objective would be to ensure that the money follows the students, parents are empowered to select the best school for their child, and local school leaders are empowered to select the best model to for their community.