(The Center Square) – A school choice advocate says recent comments from the president of the Chicago Teachers Union underscores the need for parents to have options.
Monday in front of the City Club of Chicago, Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates quoted James Baldwin that “the children are always ours.”
“And what comes next is ‘CTU think your children are its children,’” Gates said. “Yes we do. We do. We do.”
Jonathan Greenberg with Empower Illinois advocates for school choice.
“If you don’t want your kids learning social studies, U.S. history from people who hate our country, if you don’t want them learning from people who think your children belong to them then you should be empowered to make different choices,” Greenberg told The Center Square Tuesday.
Davis Gates told the City Club of Chicago Monday there’s an effort to strip public education of funding.
“Trump has picked his side and he’s spelled it out in ‘Project 2025,’” Davis Gates said. “He is here to win the re-litigation of the civil war and finish the work of the Confederacy.”
Greenberg said that kind of rhetoric is meant to agitate and divide. It doesn’t help children, he said.
“None of that helps a family make better choices for their kids. All it does is try to get people who disagree with them to shut up, to be scared of them, to be scared to be called a racist,” Greenberg said.
Greenberg said the so-called “big, beautiful” bill working through Congress could have a 100% federal tax credit for school choice scholarships, more generous than Illinois’ Invest in Kids program that Illinois Democrats allowed to sunset at the end of 2023.
