The Chicago Teachers Union sends a lot of young people to prison, but to find out why you will need to read on.
And that’s something too many youngsters cannot do after attending Chicago Public Schools.
The U.S. Department of Justice has drawn a clear line between illiteracy and incarceration: “The link between academic failure and delinquency, violence and crime is welded to reading failure. Over 70% of inmates in America’s prisons cannot read above a fourth-grade level.”
By the time a student reaches 11th grade in Chicago, that student’s reading ability is terribly low. Last year, only 22% of high school juniors could read at grade level. Only 19% could do math.
And for the city’s Black students, the education they had been handed after 11 years left just under 12% of them with the ability to read proficiently.
So why blame CTU? Well, what other group is yielding such poor results at such a high cost – with teacher salaries among the nation’s highest – and blocking any of the changes the city’s children desperately need? Who is threatening to again make it all worse?
CTU is threatening, possibly by April, to strike – its sixth work stoppage since current leadership took over in 2010. The most recent teacher walkout in 2022 gave parents just hours in the middle of the night to figure out where their children would go in the morning.
“To force our hand to take a strike vote is a very cruel and mean joke,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said Jan. 23. She said the strike is coming because an arbitrator is legally limited about what can be considered about the union’s demands, which she claims will doom that arbitrator’s findings in the eyes of her members, leading to a strike.
Funny. Back in the fall, Davis Gates said an arbitrator and the fact-finding process would help prevent a strike. Now she essentially says it will cause a strike.
She doesn’t like public law. She doesn’t like how the union’s demands can be evaluated, meaning comparing it to salaries in the nation’s 10 largest school districts and assessing the district’s ability to pay what CTU seeks – meaning what taxpayers will be forced to shell out. She promotes a fact-finding process, then claims it will force CTU to strike.
No one is being forced to strike. Choices are being made that impact Chicago’s children, with little concern for whether those children’s futures will be spent in houses they own or in houses of correction.
Since 2012, spending in the Chicago Public Schools has nearly doubled as proficiency in reading has dropped 57% and math declined 77% for third through eighth grades. Chicago taxpayers are paying more and getting less.
Again, why blame CTU for poor results? Well, it is expected to produce young people capable of contributing to society and supporting families. All evidence is that CTU is failing.
But the union goes far beyond worrying about what is happening in the classroom.
CTU refuses to allow near-empty schools to close, creating a financial drain that costs every student. Chicago’s classrooms average 1 in 3 empty seats. The worst is Douglass Academy High School, where it cost $93,787 last year to educate each of the 35 students in a building designed to hold about 900.
Talk about unnecessary overhead and illogical stances.
There were 50 schools closed and 2,000 education workers laid off in 2013 when former Mayor Rahm Emanuel was trying to close a $1 billion CPS budget gap caused by a prior CTU contract. CTU’s next set of demands stopped school closures and denied CPS from leasing those 50 shuttered schools to any of the city’s 122 public charter schools.
CTU also got teacher accountability blunted, and its new contract demands do more to stop teachers from being graded by the academic proficiency demonstrated by their students. CTU’s 700 demands include 14,000 new staff with a price tag of $10 billion in new costs – which would double the entire district budget.
CTU’s worries about an electric bus fleet, affordable housing and other social justice demands mask their basic goal of doubling the spending on Chicago schools, meaning what taxpayers are forced to give up. There’s not a whisper about how CTU will do better at Job No. 1.
And it is a shame there is even a need to say it, but someone needs to tell CTU’s leaders that Job No. 1 is to educate students. Job No. 1 is not to increase CTU membership, keep schools empty, double costs, decrease work and decrease accountability.
Giving in to CTU will guarantee more illiterate young adults at an ever-higher cost. If the union were truthful, it would admit its acronym should stand for Crime Through Underachievement.