Vallas: Johnson will hand Chicago Teachers Union its demands, regardless of cost

As the Chicago Teachers Union continues negotiating with the former employee it got elected mayor, expect the union to get its way and city taxpayers and city services to take the hit.

Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson will do whatever it takes to get his cohorts at the Chicago Teachers Union the unaffordable and egregious contract it wants, and it will be just the beginning of ruining city finances.

The mayor’s failed efforts to allow his office to make loans and grants to the school district through his infrastructure proposal, much like his renewed pressure on the district to borrow $242 million for pensions, is but a prelude to the efforts he will undertake to pay for a new teachers contract that is unaffordable. It will raise property taxes and force the city to cut services.

The last record-setting contract made CTU members the highest-paid workers among large school districts and added over 9,000 new staff, all while adding $1.5 billion in new spending. That lucrative contract did not stop the CTU from engaging in two illegal work stoppages, effectively forcing the district to keep schools closed during COVID with devastating consequences.

The increased spending didn’t improve student outcomes in Chicago Public Schools: five years after the 2019 contract negotiations, 41% of students are chronically absent and fewer than 1 in 3 students are proficient in reading and even fewer are proficient in math.

The CTU’s original demands for its next contract exceeded $10 billion. However you cut it, the new contract will force Chicagoans to pay substantially more for bad outcomes.

The damage the CTU plans to inflict with its new contract goes far beyond new costs. CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said the union wants to spur a “cultural transformation” of CPS and the city. The union has already managed to remove police from schools, but they have indicated their agenda includes:

• Further diminishing public school choice by pushing against selective enrollment, magnet and public charter schools, thus forcing low-income students – overwhelmingly Black and Latino – to attend failing public schools.
• Further reducing instructional time and giving teachers even more opportunities to be absent.
• Ending accountability metrics, such as the use of standardized testing in evaluating student, school and teacher performance.
• Encouraging the district to use social promotion of students – moving them up to the next grade despite them failing to demonstrate they are ready.
• Expanding the number of “sustainable community schools,” which will sink more resources into nearly empty, often failing schools – from 20 at present to over 200.

CTU’s vision for the district will hurt families and students. This time, there won’t even be any limited opposition in the mayor’s office to slow them down.

The school district is already spending $30,000 per student. Since 2019, they’ve received an additional $1.3 billion in property tax revenues from the city’s tax increment financing surplus.

Davis Gates and Johnson had hoped to get the additional funding needed from Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker to pay for the contract, but the governor is not sympathetic. He correctly pointed out the district squandered $2.8 billion in federal COVID-19 relief. Not only did the district increase staffing by 20% since 2019 – permanent positions financed in large part by temporary COVID funds – but the number of students dropped by over 10.5%.

With no state bailout coming, the CTU will press the city and its former lobbyist-turned-mayor to solve the worsening financial situation. That will destroy both the school district’s and the city’s budgets.

The vicious cycle continues: CPS consumes an ever-larger share of the city’s tax revenues, the absence of quality school choices is contributing to population loss and lack of new investment, and that dries up revenues.

To fix this, the district must balance its priorities in the budget and wean itself off the city’s subsidies.

This requires:

1. Tying the contract to existing, available revenues. The last contract was the most expensive in history, and CTU members are the highest paid. Now we must align spending on the next contract with available revenue.
2. Radically decentralize the school district and allow most of the funding to flow directly into local schools. Only half of CPS’s $10 billion budget finds its way into the schools. They must also return staff to pre-COVID levels.
3. Empower principals and their elected local school councils to determine how best to spend education dollars, to select the best school model for their students and determine the best uses of the school facility. That includes deciding whether to close or consolidate schools or lease them to charter schools.
4. Expand school choice. Illinois charter schools receive $8,600 less per pupil than traditional public schools. Magnet schools mostly receive even less.
5. Close or consolidate under-enrolled schools and allow charter schools to lease or share them. One-third of CPS’s traditional, stand-alone public schools are less than half full or worse. The 10 least-utilized schools in CPS were at just 12% capacity on average.

The Chicago Public Schools does not suffer from a revenue problem. It has a spending problem. Unfortunately, school district leaders have long collaborated with CTU to preserve the status quo.

Unless someone stops Johnson, Chicagoans will likely be forced to pay big time for the next contract. Giving CTU the contract they want will worsen the city’s own financial crisis, force the city to raise taxes even further and cut critical services such as public safety.