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.