Stacy Davis Gates sends her own son to private school while leading efforts to deny Illinois families the same opportunity.
Stacy Davis Gates sends her own son to private school while leading efforts to deny Illinois families the same opportunity.
C hicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates received tremendous backlash earlier this month after it became public she had taken her son out of Chicago Public Schools and placed him in private school. She said it was so he could “live out his dream” of playing soccer and have a curriculum that meets his needs.
Her action comes despite her earlier claim, “I can’t advocate on behalf of public education and the children of this city and educators in this city without it taking root in my own household.”
Clearly, that stance changed when faced with doing what was best for her own son.
Yet Davis Gates is still advocating an end to similar dreams of thousands of low-income students and their families.
There are currently at least 9,600 students in private schools thanks to the state’s Invest in Kids scholarship tax-credit program, which uses donor funds to provide the means for low-income families to choose the schools that fit them best. One estimate is for every child who receives a scholarship, about five children are waiting for one.
Those waiting include high-school freshman George Kokuro, who has a message for the Illinois General Assembly: “I want lawmakers to know that some people out here don’t have enough money to better themselves. . . . I feel like the scholarship should be kept so people can do better for themselves, do better in the future and hopefully succeed in life.”
But those scholarships will end altogether — and dash students’ dreams — if Illinois lawmakers fail to extend the program beyond 2023.
CTU and Davis Gates want to kill the program “for good.”
Is it mere hypocrisy? Or is there something more at play here?
Ending the program is not what is best for kids. Student proficiency in Illinois’s public schools is in decline. Among low-income students in third through eighth grade, just 16 percent were proficient in reading in 2022 and 11 percent were proficient in math. That’s a drop of nearly seven percentage points in reading and six percentage points in math since the 2018-2019 school year.
Ending the program is also not what the majority of Illinoisans want, with 64 percent of Illinoisans supporting school choice and 63 percent specifically supporting the Invest in Kids program.
And contrary to Davis Gates’s claims, the program hasn’t taken any money away from public schools. The scholarships provided to low-income families are privately funded by individuals who are incentivized to donate by the tax credits they receive under the program. None of that money is diverted from Illinois’s education budget, which actually has received nearly $2 billion in additional funds since the scholarships started.
When every metric points to the benefit of the Invest in Kids program, why is CTU fighting so hard against it? Why fight against the fellow students of Davis Gates’s son, just because their families have less money?
For one, it’s an admission of failure. Students fleeing CPS and other public schools means parents don’t want what teachers unions are peddling.
But power is likely even more important than pride, and teachers unions see school choice as a threat to that power. School-choice programs take away their monopoly over education. The power plays they frequently use to get what they want — such as strikes, which are allowed in Illinois — would lose their potency when parents have other options.
Unions such as CTU have built a political empire on that power. CTU itself has funneled more than $17 million to Illinois political committees since 2010, with more than $1.25 million flowing to current lawmakers in the Illinois General Assembly. Teachers unions in general have funded over four of every five Illinois lawmakers.
Teachers unions also helped push through a state constitutional amendment giving them even more power. Illinois’s Amendment 1 provides government unions more power than in any other state — including the ability to override state and local laws by writing contrary provisions into their contracts.
And recently, it was teachers union money that propelled Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson into office. Nearly 83 percent of his political funding has come from unions, with more than half of that from teachers unions.
That means CTU not only controls CPS and is guaranteed extreme power through the Illinois constitution, but it also controls City Hall. Former Chicago mayor Lori Lightfoot predicted that goal in 2021.
“I think, ultimately, they’d like to take over not only Chicago Public Schools, but take over running the city government,” she told the New York Times.
And yet, it’s still not enough. CTU wants to control parents’ choices as well.
As long as its leaders still make the big bucks and can do what’s best for their own kids, CTU doesn’t care if its agenda is stripping opportunities from thousands of less-fortunate kids.
CTU and its power aren’t just an Illinois problem. It brags about taking its militant tactics to other states, proudly displaying a 2019 Vox article on its website claiming CTU was behind a rash of teacher strikes between 2012 and 2019. After its own strike ended in 2012, “Union leaders planned town halls in other cities across the country, in New York and Cleveland, San Francisco and Tampa, to spread the new gospel” of putting “things on the table that hadn’t been on the table before.”
Government unions in other states — including California and Pennsylvania — are pushing amendments similar to Illinois’s Amendment 1.
And candidates in other large cities hope to mimic Brandon Johnson’s rise to office. Recent Philadelphia mayoral candidate Helen Gym, who like Johnson is also a former teacher, tweeted after Johnson’s election, “Elections change everything. From Philly to Chicago, a movement of educators fought against decades of austerity, anti-teacher, school closing policies and now we are remaking our cities. Joyful for Chicago. We got next Philly!”
What happens if CTU is successful in killing Illinois’s only school-choice program? It will incentivize teachers unions in the other 32 states with school-choice programs to try the same.
Illinois is a bedrock of union power. What happens here is taken to other states.
Unions are denying children progress so they can keep pulling the levers of power in Illinois and beyond. Parents beware.