Once Again, Chicago Teachers Union Puts Politics Over Students

American public education has seen better days: Roughly one in two of all adults in the U.S. have a pessimistic outlook regarding public schools, according to the Pew Research Center.

It’s easy to see why this is the case. Many teachers seem more intent on corrupting children with “drag queen story hours” than they are with teaching them basic math and reading skills. And things have only gotten worse since the COVID-19 lockdowns, which, tragically, have likely torpedoed the aspirations of a generation of young students.

Worse yet, the COVID lockdowns are not the only culprit in the ongoing national failure of our schoolchildren. A significant contributor is public teachers’ unions, who, despite whatever lofty goals they might proclaim, seem more interested in riding the gravy train and prioritizing a radical political agenda over nurturing young minds.

A great example of this is the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which is currently engaged in negotiations to attain billions of dollars for a cornucopia of nakedly political goals instead of any initiatives that would actually help students under their care. If successful in getting their total ask, the CTU will receive what is understood to be an extra $50 billion in taxpayer dollars.

To put matters into perspective, that’s almost double Israel’s entire defense budget.

And what will most of this money be going to? Is it for better equipped classrooms, more school supplies, new programming for students, initiatives to ensure higher graduation rates, better math scores, or improved reading comprehension?

No — this money will go towards funding abortion and surrogacy, “LGTBQ+” trainings for teachers, and “gender-neutral bathrooms,” “green social housing” for union members, among a whole list of other radical demands.

The average Chicago public school teacher currently takes home more than $90,000 a year in compensation, but even that whopping figure is seemingly not enough for the CTU, which is demanding that figure be raised to nearly $150,000 in the next few years.

If Chicago’s teachers had a stellar record of improving student performance, they might be justified in demanding such high salaries. But the numbers tell a different story.

In 2023, the Illinois Policy Institute found that roughly three out of four students in Chicago’s public schools could not “read at grade level on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness,” and “Nearly 83% did not meet proficiency in math.”

Perhaps it is no surprise then that CTU president Stacy Davis Gates sent her son to a private school instead of letting him go to one of the public schools that her own union helps run; moreover, a 2017 study found that 39 percent of Chicago public school teachers send their children to private schools, which is two times the rate of other public school systems and four times the rate of the average American family.

As if to drive home the true priorities of the CTU, hundreds of teachers were given “a paid day-off so they can go to Springfield to lobby lawmakers” today as part of the negotiations, according to reporting by local news station WGN-TV.

The CTU, sadly, is not the only culprit.

The National Education Association (NEA), the largest teachers’ union in the U.S., was found in 2022 attempting to hide its support for Critical Race Theory (CRT); it was also caught asking Big Tech companies to censor any posts that disagreed with CRT or suggested that racism is being taught in K-12 schools.

The obvious response to this shameless lobbying and pursuit of political goals by teachers’ unions at the expense of students is to expand school choice. And that is happening with breathtaking speed at the state level. As The Federalist recently reported, prior to 2021, no state had passed universal school choice — which provides tuition funding to all students to attend whichever school they want. Since then, it has been enacted in 11 states, and more states are likely to follow their lead.

Parents — especially mothers and fathers in low-income households who often do not have any other choice but to send their child to public schools — should have more options to either homeschool their children or send them to private and charter schools. Their children deserve it, and more and more parents are demanding it.

Of course, teachers’ unions are wholly against the school choice movement, preferring instead to trap students in failing schools. Nebraska, for example, recently passed a school choice law that provides $10 million in direct funding to low-income parents who want to send their children to private schools, but the state teachers’ union is driving a major effort to get the law recalled through a ballot measure.

Given all this, you would think the public teachers’ unions would instead do some serious soul searching and consider why the students under their care are failing so badly and perhaps consider investing in and instructing their students in basic academics instead of indoctrinating them in left-wing ideologies. But that would require hard work and actual teaching instead of lobbying for taxpayer dollars for their pet causes.

And so as the CTU members go truant today, abandoning the classroom and children in favor of their own demands for more money to fund their own personal desires, just remember that actions speak louder than words, and what their actions tell you is the hard, cold truth: These teachers care more about themselves and their politics than they do about their students.

As seen in this article, many K-12 schools now embrace the secular woke agenda and are hostile to Christian beliefs and parental rights. Fortunately, parents don’t have to settle for this. Liberty University Online Academy is a K-12 program designed to educate your children in the ways of the Lord while preparing them to stand firm in their faith when they graduate. Our flexible online curriculum ensures that your student is trained at your convenience and keeps YOU the ultimate educator of your children.