Mayor Brandon Johnson is ready and willing to do whatever the Chicago Teachers Union wants.
With the Democratic National Convention taking place in Chicago, it’s best to understand Chicago’s mayor, Brandon Johnson, not as a Democrat but as an extension of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).
The city’s school district is running a deficit of about $500 million, and the union is demanding more spending. Johnson was an organizer for the CTU before becoming mayor. So it should come as no surprise that he wants to give the CTU what it’s asking for.
The Illinois Policy Institute estimates that the CTU’s contract demands would cost at least $10 billion for 2025 through 2028, and that’s based on only part of what the union wants. Some of the requests have little to do with education:
CTU wants massive pay raises, stipends and additional personnel – all of which are within the traditional scope of bargaining. It also wants the city to create new housing, levy new taxes, construct new parking garages, undertake new environmental initiatives, divest pension funds from fossil fuels, fully fund infertility and abortion care for members, subsidize weight-loss surgery and drugs such as Ozempic, add new members to the bargaining unit, offer free CTA passes for all students and employees, among many other things.
CTU president Stacy Davis Gates (whose son goes to private school) said her union’s contract requests “will cost $50 billion and 3 cents. And so what? That’s audacity. That’s Chicago.”
Indeed, it is.
Johnson is so tight with the CTU that the Chicago Sun-Times has reported that he is looking for a way to oust Pedro Martinez, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Martinez rejected two CTU-supported proposals from Johnson in July.
“Martinez’ administration said CTU demands were ‘unaffordable’ after finding just 52 of CTU’s over 700 contract demands would create a $2.9 billion deficit for the district next fiscal year and $4 billion hole by 2029,” wrote Patrick Andrieson for Illinois Policy. “The entire CPS budget in FY 2024 is $9.4 billion.”
Andrieson notes that firing Martinez could be challenging because he still has the support of the Chicago Board of Education. But if Martinez is removed, Johnson is rumored to be considering installing his current chief of staff as the new schools CEO.
The current average teacher’s salary in Chicago is $93,182. (The mean annual wage for all workers in the U.S. is $65,470. The mean annual wage for teachers in the U.S. is $68,890.) The CTU wants the average salary to rise to $144,620 by 2028.
That would come despite Chicago public schools’ losing students every year from 2011 to 2022. In 2011, 404,000 students were enrolled; today, there are 323,000. In that same timespan, Chicago’s education budget has increased by more than 50 percent.
Education outcomes are atrocious. Hannah Schmid wrote for Illinois Policy last year:
Among third- through eighth-grade students districtwide in 2022, just 20% could read at grade level and 15% could perform math proficiently. Chicago students on average are scoring about 10 percentage points below the state average in reading and math.
Among 11th-grade students, only 21% could read or do math at grade level on the SAT, which measures proficiency for high school students. On average, Chicago 11th-grade students scored 9 percentage points below the state average in reading and 8 percentage points lower in math.
Districtwide, there were many schools where no students in some grades could read or perform math at grade level.
Given that performance, it makes sense why the CTU is so involved in politics. There’s no possible way they could actually earn pay and benefits as high as they receive, and hope to receive, if judged based on their accomplishments. But accomplishments don’t matter if a union controls the politicians who pay it.
If this works out for the CTU, it will be worth every penny of the money it spent to get Johnson elected. This isn’t a case of a politician being bought off; Johnson is ready and willing to do what the CTU wants. It’s a case of a public-sector union, freed from any restraints, doing what public-sector unions do: bankrupting governments with progressive politics.