It’s no secret that Chicago is a city with an abundance of woes. For example, Chicago has a massive pension debt and a forecasted $538 million budget shortfall for 2024. The cost of living in Chicago is 14% higher than the national average. Worse, violent crime, including assault, battery, violent robbery, and sexual assault, collectively rose in Chicago by 11.5% in 2023, making it the city’s most violent year in a decade, with an 18% increase since 2013.

The leadership in Chicago is clueless. While the city hasn’t done much to lower the murder rate, a task force was formed by Mayor Brandon Johnson to determine whether and how the city should pay reparations to Chicagoans who are the descendants of enslaved African Americans.

Perhaps Chicago’s most scandalous problem is the abject failure of its public schools. According to the 2022 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), just 15% of Chicago’s 8th-grade students are proficient in math, and 21% are proficient in reading. Also, data show that 22 Chicago schools had zero students who could read at grade level, while 33 reported the same for math.

Public schools are so bad in Chicago that parents are abandoning them at very high rates. As of October 2023, one-third of Chicago’s 473 public schools were at less than 50% capacity.

Lack of funding is hardly the problem, as Chicago Public Schools (CPS) spends about $29,000 per student. A recent analysis by the Illinois Policy Institute found that CPS has doubled its per-student spending since 2012, while reading and math scores have dropped by 63% and 78%, respectively.

Additionally, Chi-town teachers aren’t suffering; a rookie teacher makes $64,000 a year and eventually can earn up to $122,000 per year—not including generous pension and healthcare perks.

Many of the city’s dismal education issues can be laid at the feet of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which literally runs the city. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is a former labor organizer and member of the CTU. Current CTU boss Stacy Davis Gates has laughably asserted that conservatives who criticize the union “don’t want Black children to be able to read,” and “that is literally a part of the oath that they take to be right-wing.”

In reality, it is the “right-wing” that wants black children to be able to escape failing schools via privatization measures so that they learn to read and do basic math. It is worth noting that the hypocritical Ms. Gates doesn’t send her own son to a CPS school but rather to a private school.

In June, the school district’s collective bargaining agreement was up, and the CTU laid out its new demands, none of which have anything to do with improving student outcomes. The union asked for 9% annual raises, 10,000 new affordable housing units, and extensive rental assistance for teachers, totaling up to $4.7 billion. The union is also insisting on full funding for infertility and abortion care, weight-loss treatments including Ozempic, and other extensive health services. Electric school buses and proposals for carbon neutrality by 2035 are also on the list.

In Chicago, teachers pay $1,403 a year to be union members. However, the Illinois Policy Institute reports that just 17% of Chicago Teachers Union spending is dedicated to representing its members, with most of the dues money going to support candidates and causes that are in line with the union’s radical political agenda.

But exactly where are the union dues being spent?

Hard to say, as the Liberty Justice Center reports, because for more than four years, “CTU has failed to publish mandatory audited financial reports—an obligation intended to maintain transparency and trust between CTU leadership and its members. This lack of transparency raises serious questions about how union dues—paid by educators from taxpayer-funded salaries—are being spent.”

The union’s lack of transparency has led four union members to file a lawsuit to compel CTU leadership to produce the missing audits.

The local school board also has misplaced priorities. In September, Chicago Public Schools voted unanimously to pass a 5-year strategic plan that vows a “renewed focus on equity” and moves away from ranking schools based on student outcomes. The district claims that the approach is to “define student success more holistically,’ which is typical edu-blather used to cover up for a failing school system.

In September, Mayor Johnson, realizing that the city could not come close to being able to afford to pay for the CTU’s demands, decided that the school district should take out a $300 million loan to cover it. However, because CPS has a junk credit rating, Johnson’s loan would end up costing the school district, i.e., taxpayers, around $700 million.

When Johnson was asked about opposition to his loan scheme, he dodged the issue and instead played the slavery card. “When our people wanted to be liberated and emancipated in this country, the argument was, you can’t free black people because it would be too expensive. They said that it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate black people. And now you have detractors making the same argument of the Confederacy when it comes to public education in this system.”

CPS CEO Pedro Martinez thinks Johnson’s borrowing scheme is absolutely atrocious. So, earlier this month, the mayor pressured the school board to fire Martinez, and on Oct. 4, the entire board resigned in protest. Not wasting any time, Johson appointed a new board three days later.

During a news conference at a South Side Church, Johnson introduced six new school board members and said he’d name a seventh at a later date. He explained that although the new members are temporary, they could remain after the board triples in size in January and goes to a hybrid model that will include 11 mayoral appointees and 10 elected members. In the meantime, his new appointees will be working on the collective bargaining agreement with the CTU.

Johnson’s equating his opponents to slavery defenders is reprehensible, especially since he and his union cronies do what they can to keep children trapped in a terribly-run school system.

Chicago has been dubbed a “helluva town.” But these days, it is more accurately a town that is going to hell. Very rapidly.

***

Larry Sand, a retired 28-year classroom teacher, is the president of the non-profit California Teachers Empowerment Network – a non-partisan, non-political group dedicated to providing teachers and the general public with reliable and balanced information about professional affiliations and positions on educational issues. The views presented here are strictly his own.