The Policy Shop: How the Chicago Teachers Union lobbies for failure

This edition of The Policy Shop is by policy analyst Hannah Schmid.

If you were given $68,000 per student and two staffers for every three students, what do you think the result would be? National Honor Society graduates with Ivy League schools clamoring for their presence?

Well, not if you gave that money to the Chicago Teachers Union. You’d get zero 11th graders able to do math or read at grade level. Worse, 86% of those students would read at the lowest level.

This is a reality in Chicago at Douglass Academy High School. It has only 35 students in a school built for 900. It is only open because the CTU in its wisdom refuses to let Chicago Public Schools consolidate it or any of the other vastly underutilized buildings: one-third of Chicago schools are less than half full.

Douglass has 23 staffers to teach those 35 students. CTU wants to compound all that inefficiency by adding eight more staff positions at Douglass.

The current demands by CTU are for $1.7 billion in new spending on eight new staffers at each of Chicago’s 623 schools. If former CTU lobbyist, Mayor Brandon Johnson, gives his buddies what they want, Douglass and the other schools would each get a librarian, librarian assistant, social worker, newcomer liaison, case manager, restorative justice coordinator, reading specialist and interventionist (elementary schools), three elective teachers (middle schools), technology coordinator, “Climate Champion,” and gender support coordinator and/or LGBTQ+ lead/specialist and option to expand LGBTQ+ faculty support teams at each school.

So that would give Douglass 31 staffers to manage the educations of 35 students.

With fewer than 10 incoming freshmen each year, it’s hard to imagine what Douglass’ newcomer liaison would do each workday or how much assisting an assistant librarian could do.

Chicago’s taxpayers can see the results when you spend over $68,000 per student. That’s a generous amount to spend on a top-notch college education, but it’s an abomination to yield teens who can’t read at grade level.

Too bad Douglass is not the only indictment of CTU’s ability to educate Chicago’s children. About three-quarters of students in CPS can’t read at grade level and even fewer can do math. The only thing rising in the district are costs, which means CTU’s getting fatter on failure.

If anything, the numbers show the more Chicago spends on public education, the worse the academic results. And CTU is demanding Chicago spend a whole lot more on public education.

For perspective, the current CTU contract added $1.5 billion in new costs. The costs that can be estimated for CTU’s new set of demands comes in at between $10.2 billion and $13.9 billion. Plus, there are likely billions more in costs for the demands without obvious price tags such as climate justice, student housing, fixing racial disparities in health care and providing new teachers with free housing.

Over $14 billion in new costs could be added in a district already projecting a nearly $400 million deficit in the upcoming school year.

CTU seems determined to make something worse from the trainwreck, but maybe in a byzantine way they are doing Chicago’s schoolchildren a favor. Drive up taxes to unaffordable levels for failing schools and parents will find a way out. Maybe then they can find a decent education and future for their children that doesn’t cost $68,000.