Chicago Mayor Does Democrats No Favors by Catering to the Teachers Union New Policy Flies in the Face of Public Opinion at Every Level
By Tressa Pankovits
In eight months, Chicago will host the 2024 Democratic National Convention, where delegates will nominate for re-election the most union-friendly U.S. president in recent memory. President Biden’s support for union workers is laudable when applied to the private sector where profits and the bottom line are the raison d’etre. Collective bargaining agreements ensure employers don’t mistreat workers in their quest for cash.
The picture changes, however, when public sector unions are taken into account. Public organizations — schools, police departments, post offices, and so on — exist to serve taxpayers and their families, not to build investors’ wealth. That mission doesn’t always neatly dovetail with unions’ eternal goal of increasing membership, and subsequently, the union dues that flow into their coffers.
When it comes to public sector unions, none are as powerful as the two national teachers unions and their local affiliates. Just four public unions together spent almost $709 million on politics in the 2021–2022 election cycle. One was the National Education Association (NEA); another was the American Federation of Teachers (AFT). Combined, the NEA and the AFT spend more money for the sake of political power in Illinois than any other state.
A just-released study just released by the Commonwealth Foundation found that public sector unions spent almost $30 million in Illinois’ 2021–2022 election cycle. Larger and more populous California trailed Illinois in second place; no other state even comes close.
It’s not just “where” public unions spend that creates impact ¾ it’s also “on who.” According to the Commonwealth Foundation, the politician who collected the third highest amount of union PAC money nationwide is Illinois Speaker of the House Emmanuel “Chris” Welch. The fourth-highest winner? Leapfrogging over state governors and U.S. senators is Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson. In fact, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and the national teachers unions spent roughly $5.6 million to install Johnson ¾ a longtime CTU official ¾ in Chicago’s city hall.
Not surprisingly, Illinois, especially in Chicago, has now become one of the most hostile places in the country to public charter schools. Charter schools are free, public schools, open to all. Most are not unionized, so teachers who choose to work at public charter schools mean fewer dues-paying members for the local teachers union.
Chicago was an early adopter of school choice. Public charter schools were an integral part of badly-needed education reform there. The reforms were so impactful that President Bill Clinton in 1997 declared, “I want what is happening in Chicago to happen all over America.”
Those days are long gone in the Windy City. The state’s charter schools are grossly underfunded and enrollment is strictly capped in Chicago by the union’s collective bargaining agreement. A few years ago, the Democratic-controlled legislature passed and Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a bill abolishing the Illinois Charter Commission, thus erasing the only “court of appeal” for charter schools harassed into closure by local districts.
The Commission’s presence is missed. An all-boys, 100% minority high school serving students in high-need neighborhoods was forced to take the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) to court when it threatened to close the school and enroll its students in traditional public schools. Never mind that Urban Prep charter school churns out roughly 300 college-bound graduates each year, or that its graduation rate for Black male students is 91% compared to 61% in CPS. Last summer, a judge ruled in Urban Prep’s favor. Undeterred, CPS defied the court’s order for six months. Threatened with contempt of court, the Chicago School Board finally signed Urban Prep’s charter extension contract just last week.
Also last week, Mayor Johnson’s appointed school board voted to “move away from ‘privatization’ and to instead focus on ‘neighborhood schools.’” That is political code-speak for eliminating school choice, killing off charter schools, and forcing parents to send their children to the school the Chicago Public Schools decrees they should attend.
This is tone deaf, at best, at a time when parents’ desire for school options other than CPS, including public charter schools, has dramatically increased because CPS students are so far behind grade level.
But eliminating charter schools and school choice has long been the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) goal. Naturally, Johnson is doing CTU’s bidding instead of listening to parents — the CTU bought him his seat.
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) also worked hard to elect Johnson. Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) even traveled to Chicago to stump for him. Johnson rewarded the DSA by handing five city council committee chairmanships to members of the council’s socialist caucus and so far has given the CTU everything it has demanded, even though CTU doesn’t begin contract negotiations with the city until next summer. Some conjecture that the CTU is really running the city.
Given all that, Republicans are likely to make hay out of the deeply unpopular Johnson administration’s extreme left-wing policies when Chicago is at the center of the Democrats’ political sphere next summer.
The Progressive Policy Institute (PPI) firmly believes that Democrats need to reinvigorate the center-left wing of the party. That should be not only in an effort to reclaim its historical working-class voter base, but to also resolve the discontent that has driven so many voters to choose conservative ¾ and even nationalistic ¾ candidates over Democrats.
Public education was a divisive topic in the last election cycle and it will be again. That’s why PPI included school choice in a new poll of working-class voters (broadly defined as those without four-year college degrees) conducted by YouGov on PPI’s behalf.
Just 6% of those surveyed said that local school boards, rather than parents, should decide which schools their students attend. Yet, Chicago’s school board just voted to force its will on parents by accelerating the demise of public charter schools and school choice. The CTU and the city’s extreme left-wing agitators should take note: nationally, working-class voters see right through your kind. Asked whom public schools serve most, respondents said activists (31%) and unions (31%). A mere 29% think students are the priority and a negligible 10% agree that traditional public schools serve parents.
Working-class voters aren’t the only voting bloc discomfited with the left’s education policies. Much was made of the youth vote pushing Johnson to victory in Chicago’s mayoral race, but young voters — even within the Democratic Party — aren’t a monolith, and some organizations are trying to change that narrative. The Center for New Liberalism (CNL) is a relatively new and unique community that serves as the grassroots arm of New Democracy, an organization that serves as a home base for center-left Democrats. CNL originally started as an online movement seeking to build a community for young, center-left voters disillusioned with the ideas of the far-left, but has since transitioned to do boots-on-the-ground work to support pragmatic center-left policies and candidates. A recent survey they conducted of their member’s policy preferences offers some interesting insights into a new and growing bloc of young voters. When asked if America would benefit from reforming and modernizing its K-12 education system, 79% of those polled agreed or strongly agreed. When asked about school choice, specifically whether giving parents a variety of public models to choose from would increase educational equity, 69% agreed or strongly agreed.
Finally, keeping in mind that charter schools are free public schools that are open to all, but that are run by the school’s leader rather than a bureaucratic central office, only 14% of respondents said that giving leaders at the school level more control over the day-to-day decisions would fail to improve the student experience and academic outcomes.
Democrats in many places are listening to voters and parents who desire school choice. Chicago just isn’t one of them.
When the Democratic National Convention comes to Chicago next August, the center-left wing of the party needs to ensure it speaks up on behalf of the parents, working-class voters, and young voters who have made it clear that they ¾ like the majority of U.S. voters ¾ have lost tolerance for “one-size-fits-all” education systems that prioritize union officials and central office bureaucrats over students and parents. Democrats can’t let Chicago’s education shenanigans — which will ultimately disenfranchise poor and minority children — take center stage as the nation contemplates the 2024 vote.
The center-left of the party must wrest the debate away from those on the left who would give parents short shrift, while at the same time, expose Republicans’ weakness on public education. According to the PPI poll, only 34% of working-class voters approve of Republican-hatched universal voucher programs that publicly subsidize private and religious schools. However, keeping tax dollars directed at public schools — of which charters are a subset — meets with the approval of 60% of America’s working-class voters. These numbers suggest that Democrats have a ripe opportunity to reclaim the mantle of the “education party.”
The Democratic National Convention in Chicago would be an excellent arena to amplify voters’ preferences and to make it clear that when it comes to education, Democrats are indeed listening.
Tressa Pankovits is the co-director of the Reinventing America’s Schools Project at the Progressive Policy Institute.
