Look at who they have to deal with

The budget that CPS produced is not without its flaws but CPS Chief Administrator Tim Cawley at least managed to display a certain bedraggled graciousness – too tired to be strident – as he walked the audience of 200, mostly CTU partisans, through the board’s handiwork. By contrast, the union members and their allies in...

The budget that CPS produced is not without its flaws but CPS Chief Administrator Tim Cawley at least managed to display a certain bedraggled graciousness – too tired to be strident – as he walked the audience of 200, mostly CTU partisans, through the board’s handiwork. By contrast, the union members and their allies in the audience were remarkably rude, frequently interrupting with boos, hisses, and diversions that revealed more about the union mindset than any flaws in the CPS spending plan.

As the meeting went on numerous themes emerged. First, the CTU and its backers are sure that the $665 million hole in the budget, that the school board intends to cover by draining its cash reserves, is easily plugged and in fact may be manufactured by CPS: “my biggest worry”, said one commenter, “is that you use all of these reserve funds and you hit zero next year so that you use that rationale to say ‘we don’t have any more money'”.

Now using the cash reserve is not without its dangers. The district is staring at a shortfall of a cool billion next year.  Barring a miracle or a bailout the cuts will be brutal next year regardless of whether teachers receive raises of two percent or 20 percent. But the union’s backers had two easy answers that will not work:

• Get rid of Charter Schools. The union claims that eliminating charter schools would allow the district to balance its budget. The problem with this is that most of the children who attend charters would need to attend other schools within CPS. CPS would get to keep the money, but would need to keep more buildings open and hire more teachers. Overall savings are speculative at best.

• Get rid of TIFs. Tax Increment Financing districts limit taxes available to the district by effectively freezing property tax assessments. But according to a University of Illinois white paper the state’s per-pupil funding formula is set up so that state funding cancels out the losses from the TIF. There are lots of good reasons to oppose TIFS. This is not one of them.

These facts did not prevent the union’s backers from repeating these simple solutions over and over again: “charter schools have resources while public schools are slashed” says the Chicago Teachers Solidarity Campaign, while “$250 million in TIF money is taken out of our schools each year to fund the projects of the wealthy.” An elementary school teacher  teacher argued that the district should try to get TIF money back from Penny Pritzker, Miller-Coors, and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. Amisha Patel, the Executive Director of the Grassroots Collaborative said that the budget “leaves hundreds of millions of dollars on the table and continues to underresource Chicago neighborhood schools at the expense (sic) of charter and magnet schools” and alleged that “Every year CPS continues to allow tax increment financing funds to divert critical resources away from schools”.

And on and on it went. Then there was the plain old rudeness. When Cawley attempted to explain the workings of TIFs, which have a lot of working parts, the audience could not restrain itself from groaning and interrupting, and when he offered his compliments to a representative of SEIU the audience booed. Cawley could not even acknowledge the hard work of CPS teachers without retorts from the audience.

Now “good faith” is a subjective thing, but certainly it includes a minimal level of courtesy, a willingness to listen, and the discipline not to keep pushing the conversation down dead ends. One likes to think that the union is sophisticated enough to understand that eliminating charter schools or doing away with TIFs won’t automatically balance the CPS budget. One wishes they would explain these things to their members, rather than filling their heads with false hopes for solutions that will not work.