By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
The fiscal insanity at Chicago Public Schools continues. Officials there plan to hire another 2,000 part-time and full-time workers this coming school year, never mind the district has racked up the biggest pension debt of any school district in the country. Moody’s already puts CPS’ pension shortfall at $22.8 billion, more than any other school district in the country.* More workers mean more salaries and even more pension debts.
To make matters more insane, those same officials warn the school district could lose up to 100,000 students this coming school year – about 29% of the district total – as a result of the multi-pronged crises facing Chicago. Those student losses would be on top of the 95,000 the district already lost between 2000 and 2021.
It’s madness any way you slice the numbers, making it clear Mayor Lori Lightfoot and city leaders either don’t understand or don’t care about Chicago’s finances.
A March 2019 Moody’s report laid out for Lightfoot just what a mess she was inheriting when she took over as Mayor. That report showed City of Chicago debts consumed more of city revenues than any other major city in the country, by far. About 32% of the city’s budget was consumed by fixed costs including debt repayments, retiree health obligations and pension contributions – and 57 percent when Moody’s added in the additional amounts Chicago should have been contributing to pensions, called the tread water gap, simply to keep its debts from getting larger that year.
And the city has long been drowning in debts, with CPS’ finances similarly dire. It’s why the city’s credit got junk rated in 2015, making Chicago the only major city in the country besides Detroit to be rated junk. It’s also why CPS got a triple-notch downgrade to land in junk territory in 2015.
Those kinds of debts and credit ratings should have had the mayor and any one in charge of finances quaking in their boots, but not here in Chicago.
Instead, hiring new staff in the face of falling enrollment was part of Lightfoot and CPS’ game plan even before the pandemic hit. When Lightfoot negotiated the new teachers contract with the Chicago’s Teachers Union in 2019, the district promised to pay for hundreds of new employees of all kinds over the following five years. Lightfoot called it the “most generous offer in CPS history.” For details on the contract, click here.
Today, Chicago officials are even more confident in hiring and spending since the city and CPS are both being bathed with billions in federal cash.
A second factor contributing to the spree is Moody’s recent one-notch upgrade of CPS. Somebody forgot to tell district officials that the rating barely improved from “highly speculative” to “speculative” – still three notches deep into junk territory. Even with the upgrade, CPS only caught up with the rating of the Detroit Public Schools.
What’s fascinating about the hiring move is just how blatantly opposed to common sense it all is.
Even before the virus invaded Chicago, the school district was bleeding children. In 2000, the district had 435,000 students. By 2021, the total had fallen to 340,000. Now the district is warning of another 100,000 loss in students as a result of COVID and other factors.
That potential loss in enrollment hasn’t slowed the hiring train at CPS, however. The district’s $9.3 billion budget adds the 2,000 new workers, half of which will be supervisors for classrooms for educators who are teaching remotely. For sure, many of the new employees are supposed to be part-time, but their hiring brings to mind the Milton Friedman quote: “Nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.”
CPS’ total staffing will grow to over 41,700 employees with those new hires. The last time CPS had so many employees was in 2010 – back when the district had 70,000 more students than it had last school year.
CPS was already headed towards fiscal disaster before the pandemic. The massive windfall the district got from the feds has delayed the reckoning a bit, but the question remains, what happens when the federal spigot runs dry?
*Teacher pensions for NYC schools are part of the city’s overall finances.
Read more about Chicago and CPS’ financial crises:
Audio and summary 
If this bill passes, say goodbye to local control over all Illinois parks and expect to see open drug and alcohol use, needles, no sanitation and fire hazards, but no ordinary park users.
I have little respect for parents of CPS students who have not begun to home school or find a private school and pull out of CPS. Ultimately all responsibility is with the parent, regardless of the externals like a crappy school system. At some point every parent needs to blame themselves for putting their kids at the enormous disadvantage of going to CPS, then so something about it. Just waiting for things to get better is no longer an option.
And the band played on. Next they’ll praise all the scholarships awarded to exit ramp colleges.
IL CONST ART 10 requires that K-12 education be efficient, high quality and free. Generally statutes of limitation don’t expire while a person is a minor. Suits may be filed against the State or a State Agency under the Court of Claims law for either “torts” or “contract” breaches. What are the chances that a group of illiterate unemployed 20-year-olds could sue for the lack of efficient high-quality education? I understand that Chicago schools are a bit more autonomous and that may be where the most “damaged” victims went to school. AND who knows what other state or federal constitutional… Read more »
Defund CPS.
Joe Piombino, you may be a product of CPS math education as the ratio is 8 students per employee.
way to go chicagoans,keep voting for these democrat imbeciles,lets see how fast you can run the city and state into the toilet!-youre all doing a great job of it so far!
Over 8 employees for every student. Think about that.
Plus an army of dubiously qualified/unqualified substitutes because there are contractually endless innumerable ways for ctu to not be in classroom. Plus and army of other contract workers. Currently cps can’t even find enough subs. It’s an absolute joke.
Let’s consider the logic here. First, you complain that CPS subs aren’t qualified for the job. Then, your very next sentence seems to be that they can’t find enough people to even register for doing it. Now, really which is more important here since those two sentences seem as opposing points of view from the same guy? Make uppa you mind.
hey teacher james,jesse snarkey needs u to wash his prius,so run along,and do what youre told!
Yessa, Mr. Boss man; I does it.
now you got it boy,wash my prius hubcaps boy
Yessa, I makes it nice and shiney fu ya all.
thats pretty funny teacher james,thank u
Its just one of my mini-talents.
i have new respect for you!!-i appreciate humor in all of this political bullshit
James–the problem is ctu has a zillion ways writen into there contract to be in the class room as little as possible, its the absurd contracts that are the problem. Years back when my kids were @ cps there were routinely weeks out of the minimal length year when they were stuck with subs. Im sure poor kids stuck with subs for weeks couldn’t possibly have anything to do w the systemic racist flop of cps test scores, but disinvested obviously isn’t the issue at +$27,000 a student budget. With ctu demanding thousands of new hires it would be a… Read more »
The life of a substitute is often harder than you might imagine as an outsider. Suppose you went into your office almost literally everyday without a clue as to the day’s job responsibilities other than to “educate” (or at least entertain spell-bindingly, one hopes) a set of students many of whom are miscreants and not at all intimidated by your presence as their assigned “teacher” for the day. If you can put yourself in that position for just a minute or two with day’s assignment not even within your own field of educational preparation, perhaps, then you’ll begin to appreciate… Read more »
Miscreants-Reminds me of the movie “To Sir,With Love” with Sidney Poitier. To me a great movie. Bunch of Fonzi type kids who could care less about education and a teacher who really cared about them and their futures. Wish that was the case today. P.S. Great song by LULU.
Yes, but those were relatively polite movie versions of miscreants. The real ones in today’s much more liberalized world are much more aggressively verbally and sometimes physically as well. You were watching a sanitized version of reality.
Sorry James but most subs show up and read the note from the actual (so called) teacher. Read pages 39 thru 47. Sit quietly at your desk or give the class a 25 question test. Call for a movie and maintain minimum chaos. If you’re talking long term subs a different story. I know subs who do to 4 or 5 different classrooms with different subjects in a day. A non Spanish speaking sub in…..Spanish class, a drivers ed teacher in a Calculus class, phys ed teachers in geometry. Not as stressful as you describe.
Well, there are people who can do it with aplomb. I couldn’t. Could you? But, if you think a sub’s job is easy you’ve obviously never had to do it with the kind of day-to-day varied assignments outside your own educational background such as I described. Try being a Spanish teacher by training, then being asked to teach, say, 2nd year Algebra. Yes, you might do it as you’ve described for a day, but its likely you’d be stressed beyond belief trying to do it by day 3 and by then having to create your own lesson plans to do… Read more »
If they could just get some substitute teachers like this guy problem would be solved.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7FixvoKBw
Being a sub for a day might be entertsinihg for you and for the kids as this guy inadvertently portrayed it. Doing it for real even a week straight is a very different matter because you have planning required for what follows on succeeding days, something hard to do without your own background being a source of knowledge and/or experience to do so. Sometimes better applicants simply are not available so its left to someone else with enough confidence to gopher it simply vecause of self-confidence. Some can do it reasonably well for a short time at least.
I guess your “I’m always right” attitude gets you so many down votes. I’m now convinced. Typical of an ego inflated, smarter than everybody contrarian who refuses to accept anybody’s opinion because no matter how right they are or how much sense they make, they are wrong in your ever important opinion. Sub teaching could be done by a homeless person off the street in 90% of the sub situations. I’m not a teacher but actually subbed a class when there was a need. The school changed the name of the class for one day to a “study period” and… Read more »
Your version of what’s required is that of a mental skater, and its no wonder at all why you found it so easy to do. You simply tried to pass the time and draw your pay. A person who cares about what they do and how well they do it would do the job very differently without someone else’s script in hand at least. You and “teachers” like you are the source of much that’s wrong with the educational system. Instead of being so arrogant as to how easy it was/is you ought to feel more shame in your lack… Read more »
And again your arrogant I’m always right opinion rises to the occasion. If you were or are a so called teacher you must be the most disliked person among your peers because you are an arrogant individual. Never right but never wrong should be your screen name.
Then, they are simply winging it through force of personality. That can work for awhile, but by the 2nd or 3rd day their off-topic Johnny Carson repertoire is rapidly depleting, and at least the better students are starting to see it as a waste of their time. The less intereted ones might not see it for another day or two, but they will become behavior problems when that thought becomes more engaging to them as it will.
I challenge anyone– try and google what cps spends on substitutes a year or how many classroom days subs cover for teachers a year?
Its of no major interest to me even though I’m reasonably sure its a very large figure. The bottom line is they MUST have substitutes qualified by their standards and ready for service when needed.
James, at what point is it for you that the cost to provid public education services or other government services is ‘of major interest’?
That’s a good question but one well beyond my pay grade. Maybe you can handle it. Me–I’m just another John Doe citizen.
It sounds like a normal day for a CPS teacher, clueless!
Pay attention now, kiddies! You are way too quick to make any assumptions about someone you don’t know in any personal sense. Here are two things I’m not: clueless and/or a CPS teacher. Neither have ever been true. I have my opinions as you do, but when I said something is above my pay grade its my polite way of saying my opinion doesn’t matter. Maybe you think your opinions always do matter. Let me offer you a hint of reality: they don’t.
Will never happen, but at an astounding current cost of over +$27,000 per student/ per year, the solution would be to offer $20,000 a year student vochers and use the remaining +$7,000 to go to the rediculous pension…and shut down the entire cps/ctu train wreck.
I’m curious whether the COVID windfall could legally have been used to fix pre-COVID pension funding problems? Or did the so-called “leadership” somehow think that it is in their long-term interest to deploy an additional cohort of public employee foot soldiers?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
It’s a classic ponzi scheme. They need the new employees to pay the pensions of the old employees.
That’s not logical at all in that any new employees would pay a pittance of their salaries towards funding the CPS overall pendion funding debt. So, why not fund those debts directly so that all that amount goes toward thei pension debt? Well, I guess that more rational option is foreclosed by the federal prohibition of such existing pension debt directly whereas funding the employment of unneeded personnel isn’t prohibited at all. We live in Bizarro World at the present time under these strange new federal laws!
Excellent analogy on Bizarro world according to urban dictionary.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bizarro%20world
Also the increased 2,000 employees will somehow be figured into next years budget since I believe that they can’t get less money than than the previous year. I can’t think of the term they use. Maybe hold harmless. Not sure. In Ptell counties the budget is never less than the year before and they include upgrades whether needed or not.
A 100,000 drop in enrollment in one year seems a bit drastic. I can’t see CPS losing nearly a 1/3 of their student body so quickly. Maybe they saw the attrition throughout last year and are expecting the worse?
On a pension note, I’m pretty sure part-time employees accrue a full year of service time, which can become costly if that employee converts to full-time. The longer that conversion takes, the costlier it gets.
It’s since 2001, not in one year.
CPS slurp-ups its “just-average” but otherwise academically-unprepared under-achiever graduates, who otherwise can’t succeed in white-collar corporate business environment, even with their 3rd-rate teacher college diploma. Note the average ACT score of 18 for CPS teachers. That’s how Chicago City Hall maintains its loyal-voter base. So, CPS adds another 2000 jobs, presto!
Knock it if you will, but with a few exceptions who else would even want to work there? Not me, and apparently not you as well. So, if public education continues as a national mandate some people have to be employed there until such time as a voucher system comes to pass. Meantime all such cental city public school systems are “a different animal” than most schools elsewhere and funded for reasons well beyond the hope for classical academic success for its graduates.
James – not many high skill teachers want to work there, Hence the 18 ACT scores of teachers. I am not sure the low ACT scores matter so much with elementary students. An ability to reach students is fairly important at that level. But one also can’t assume the lower academically qualified do connect with students – some likely do – but in a district with no decent teacher assessments, who knows? Failure rates on Praxis type exams are a problem in terms of attracting minority teachers, rarely discussed. I am all for decent teacher standards, but teaching at an… Read more »
I have to say that I think the CTU has gone absolutely nutso with all of their demands. The CTU leadership got a taste real power under Mayor Lightfoot, and now they are addicted to wanting ever more of it. All most of the CPS parents really want is a reliable, safe place to send their children so the parents don’t have to watch them 24 hours every day. So, the parents tend to favor whatever CTU demands and somewhat because so much is funded by the federal govt. as well the state of IL instead of being so heavily… Read more »