Vallas: What the Acero closures signify about CTU’s power grab
The plan to close 7 of the 15 Acero Charter Schools is the latest maneuver in the Chicago Teachers Union’s campaign to solidify its monopoly by destroying even public school choice.
The plan by Acero to close seven of its 15 charter schools by year’s end is a product of the Chicago Teachers Union’s efforts to strengthen its monopoly by wiping out all public school choices.
Most affected by the closures will be poor families, overwhelmingly Black and Latino. Combined with Chicago Public School’s systematic degrading of its selective enrollment schools, the quality of the educational system is now wholly defined for poor families by their income and zip code.
The union is right to fear charters. The latest study shows that these independently run public schools are pulling further away from their traditional public school competition in delivering stronger student performance. Stanford’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) report is the third in a series (2009, 2013, 2023) tracking charter-school outcomes over 15 years. The study is one of the largest ever conducted, covering over two million charter students in 29 states.
The conclusions are unequivocal: Most charter schools “produce superior student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population.” In both reading and math, “charter schools provide their students with stronger learning when compared to the traditional public schools.” The CREDO study also pointed out that Black and Hispanic students in charter schools advance more than their traditional public school peers by large margins in both math and reading.
Charter schools are an increasingly popular education option, showing significant enrollment growth nationwide since COVID. Traditional public schools, burdened by restrictive union contracts and unwieldy bureaucracies, demonstrated their inability to adjust to meet the needs of students and families during the pandemic. During the 2022-2023 school year, charters saw ten times the growth of traditional schools. This is meaningful growth as charter schools only serve 7.5% of the nation’s public school students.
The union’s strategy is simple: Eliminate the charter schools by imposing mandates that undermine their ability to engage in the type of innovation that has made them far superior to the traditional public schools while diminishing the level of support provided those schools and creating obstacles to their renewal. These schools currently educate 54,000 students in Chicago. This is 25% of all high school students, 98% of whom are Black and Latino, 86% of whom are low-income.
In negotiating the past two teacher contracts with Chicago Public Schools, CTU demanded a moratorium on the growth of charter schools. The recently expired contract features a cap on the number of charter schools, limiting even the opening of state authorized charter schools for young adults to reclaim the tens of thousands of young adults who dropped out. Charters were allowed no more than 1% growth in the expired contract and the new CTU contract demands a complete freeze on enrollment growth.
The cap has been accompanied by the enactment of state and school district mandates on charters that undermine their ability to innovate, which is so essential to their effectiveness. CTU seems determined to pull charters down to the level of mediocrity and failure that has characterized the vast majority of CTU-dominated public schools.
CTU hampered the autonomy of charter schools when it lobbied in favor of and got Gov. J.B. Pritzker to sign a union neutrality bill. It requires charter school operators to, in effect, support a union’s attempt to organize its staff, making it easier to unionize charter schools. But charter schools were originally designed to combat union demands and improve public education while maintaining autonomy and exhibiting a capacity to innovate.
The unionization of charter schools not only restricts innovation but also invites the same disruption that has characterized the CTU’s Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators leadership – which has gone on strike three times since 2010, threatened to strike many other times and forced the district to keep school campuses closed for dozens of weeks straight during COVID. Many who had fled the restrictions and disruptive behavior of the CTU in public schools are once again subject to the union’s whims.
Chicago charters were historically spared the militant tactics and extreme demands of CTU. But CTU merged with the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff in 2018, forcing CTU’s agenda onto charter schools. That year, CTU organized the first charter school strike in the nation and Acero’s schools cancelled class for more than 7,000 students in 15 charter schools, with more than 90% of students Hispanic. There have been dozens of other strikes since.
The gradual unionization of charters and the implementation of mandates to impose the same obstacles to innovation that undermine the quality of traditional public schools has been accompanied by the deliberate underfunding of public charter schools. Public charter schools receive approximately $8,600 less per pupil than the district average and little capital support with only 2.3% of the district’s multi-billion-dollar capital spending on charters.
Under pressure from the union the school district has barred charters from leasing any of the 50 near-empty schools closed during former mayor Rahm Emanuel’s tenure. Over a third of the campuses are less than half full and 20 schools are at less than 25% capacity. Manley High School on Chicago’s Westside has capacity for 1,296 students but just 70 students are enrolled.
As if the combination of enrollment caps, unionization, increasingly burdensome mandates and deliberate funding inequities were not enough, the district has imposed a renewal process that will force many charters to close. This is just the latest in a sustained line of attack. More recently, the CTU began pressuring the school district to require public charter schools to seek renewal, or permission to operate, more frequently than in years past.
Previously, the school district would renew charter school programs for standard five-, seven-, or even 10-year terms. In September, CPS granted shorter two- or three-year contracts to 22 charter schools for the first time. Two years ago, none of the 28 charter schools up for renewal received a five-year extension. Requiring renewal every 2-3 years is the CTU’s strategy to destabilize charter schools in Chicago, fostering anxiety among faculty and charter school families.
This move undermines the schools’ efforts to recruit and retain staff and students alike. More frequent renewals divert staff time, energy and resources from educating children. Additionally, the short renewal period makes it impossible for charters, who are denied the use of empty or near empty public school buildings, to raise the capital needed to finance improvements. They are left with educating students in substandard and deteriorating buildings.
The union is obviously preparing for the ultimate shut-down of charter schools in Chicago. CTU is currently demanding the school board adopt a clear transition procedure for closed charter and contract schools to be reabsorbed. The seven Acero schools are just the beginning, as CPS addresses its own failures by eliminating an educational option that the rest of the nation is embracing. The CTU’s solution to plummeting traditional public-school enrollment is enrolling more migrants and closing charters.
Crisis tends to bring out both the best and worst in people and, yes, in organizations. The teachers unions’ sad conduct during the pandemic was visible for parents to see. They refused to respond to this historic national emergency in a way that put children first, and their unending fight to maintain the public education status quo, even when it’s been starkly revealed by that emergency to be inadequate, showed a willingness to let children suffer the consequences. Especially children from families who lack access to alternative educational options.
While the unions have wrapped themselves in the flag of the progressive movement, preserving a dysfunctional status quo is, by definition, antithetical to progress. Those well versed in civil rights history can surely see their attack on elements of public-school choice as tantamount to Education Redlining. The quality of schools for families is now determined by zip code and income, relegating poor families, overwhelmingly Black and Latino, to inferior schools because of their location and socioeconomic status.
Parents should be able to enroll their children in a school that best fits their needs. Charter schools offer Chicago families a free public school alternative. Chicago should expand access to public schooling options by eliminating the cap on the number of charter schools and expanding the number students these schools can enroll. That requires standing up to a teachers union that under its present CORE leadership has consistently and deliberately worked against parents’ interests in pursuit of its own financial and political goals.