National Review Online
Tuesday,
October 08, 2024
The city
of Chicago’s public-school system has been in a state of educational collapse
for decades now; it’s accumulating debts outstripped only by the increasing
amounts of money poured into the system and the plummeting test scores of its
students. The responsibility for this disaster can be spread around but
primarily lies — far more so than with any elected politicians in the city —
with the Chicago Teachers Union, America’s most infamously powerful and radical
public-sector union, “Local #1” for Randi Weingarten’s national American
Federation of Teachers. And on Friday afternoon, it became grimly clear what happens
when a union as powerful as the CTU manages to get one of its own lobbyists
elected mayor.
The
CTU has been preparing for years to renegotiate its contract with the city, and
as part of the preparations, last year it funded the mayoral campaign of one of
its own paid lobbyists and organizers, Cook County commissioner Brandon
Johnson. Johnson won the narrowest victory in Chicago history and has proceeded
to govern strictly for the union’s benefit. The CTU’s demands contemplate,
among other things, Chicago Public Schools assuming $150 million of
pension-debt obligations for non-teachers in the CPS system — at a time when
the system already has an unprecedented half-billion-dollar budget shortfall.
When Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez refused to sign off on a $300
million high-interest loan that the CTU (and Mayor Johnson) wanted him to take
out to fund these new demands, Johnson began publicly pressuring his own
school-board members to fire him.
Instead,
the entire seven-person membership of the city’s Board of Education —
personally selected by Johnson when he began his term in office — resigned as a
group rather than accede to the unacceptable pressure. Johnson announced a
replacement slate of school-board appointees on Monday morning, seven people
presumably selected for their greater responsiveness to the mayor’s demands.
The new board is almost certain to vote to fire Martinez, allowing Johnson to
replace him with an appointee who will rubber-stamp the union’s demands. The
Chicago Teachers Union looks likely to win everything it is asking for, which
is precisely why its members elected one of their own as mayor.
And
as a result, Chicago will sink further into debt as its tax dollars are
increasingly captured by a select and privileged group of public-sector union
members. Educational outcomes and test scores will not increase, but then that
is not the point: Johnson has explicitly argued that school success should be
measured by money spent per student rather than crude metrics such as literacy.
By that measure, or any other than that of actually teaching students, the
Chicago Teachers Union has won. Pity the residents of Chicago, who were never
even offered a seat at the table in what is shaping up to be an act of corrupt
self-dealing notable even in the history of a city famous for it.
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