By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
For decades, the Chicago Teachers Union has done whatever was necessary to get what it wanted. Strikes. Walkouts. Shutdowns. Vitriol. Attacks. They rolled former mayor Rahm Emanuel twice. And they chewed up Lori Lightfoot. Their reward from Chicago and state pols? More money, more personnel and more power, as we documented in our WSJ opinion piece here.
The union has parlayed that power into control of the mayor’s office and now it’s supercharging the vitriol. It’s threatening to plow through everything – including financial reality – to get what it wants when its current teachers contract expires in June. CTU president Stacy Davis-Gates said as much in her recent “$50 billion” City Club speech, as we outlined here.
What shouldn’t be forgotten is how much damage the last contract inflicted on Chicagoans. As negotiations heat up, here’s a reminder:
The 2019 contract negotiations
In 2019, newly-elected mayor Lori Lightfoot began negotiations by offering the CTU the “most-generous” contract in its history. If her goal was to reset relations with the union after the adversarial years of Rahm Emanuel, it was doomed from the start. Lightfoot’s generosity was repaid with an 11-day strike that ended with the union extracting even more benefits from the shrinking school system:
- The average CPS teacher received a salary hike of 24% over five years. By the contract’s end, the average pay for teachers based on the contract’s salary schedule will be close to $100,000.
- A second-year teacher’s salary rose from $53,000 in 2019 to $72,000 by the end of the 5-year agreement, a 35% pay raise.
- CPS agreed to increase teachers’ health insurance subsidies and freeze the cost of deductibles, co-pays, and other charges for the entire five-year term of the contract.
- CPS promised to add at least 200 more school social worker positions to the city’s schools and at least 250 additional full-time nurse positions over the next five years.
The benefits in the contract pushed CPS teachers’ compensation up to some of the most generous in the nation. In fact, the district’s pay scale now ranks between 1st and 4th-highest of all of its big-district peers.
A newly-hired Chicago teacher with a bachelor’s degree will receive an annual salary of over $63,000 after adjusting for cost of living. That’s the highest starting salary of all the 148 biggest school districts in the nation, according to teacher contract data compiled by the National Council on Teacher Quality.
By comparison, New York City pays new teachers $55,700 after factoring in the cost to live there. And Los Angeles pays its new teachers just $50,186.
In total, the 2019 contract cost Chicagoans an additional $1.4 billion over the past five years – and that doesn’t include the added cost to pensions due to the contract’s higher salaries.
And how were Chicagoans rewarded during that contract? The CTU did everything in its power to keep the city’s children out of classrooms during the pandemic. Teachers walked out multiple times when CPS tried to reopen schools and the union declared anyone who wanted to reopen schools was racist.
And after that, the CTU demanded the district maintain disruptive mitigation measures – like masking children – in place for far longer than were ever necessary.
Spending at CPS also jumped dramatically during the pandemic. The all-in per student spend since the 2019 contract has jumped by a whopping 40 percent, to more than $29,000. And despite all that spending, today fewer CPS kids are reading and doing math at grade level when compared to 2019.
More than money
Chicagoans are about to pay a lot more for the “privilege” of sending their children to failing city schools. But the damage the CTU plans to inflict with its new contract goes far beyond money.
Davis-Gates said in her speech that the union wants to spur a “cultural transformation” of CPS and the city. The union has already managed to remove police from schools, but they have a host of other priorities:
- Spending even more on – and staffing up – nearly empty, failing schools.
- Ending selective enrollment, magnet and charter schools.
- Spending millions on priorities like healthcare and rental assistance.
- Ending standardized testing of students and other accountability metrics.
And this time, there won’t even be any limited opposition in the form of Lightfoot or Emanuel to slow them down.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- Cost? ‘Stop asking that question,’ says Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates in strident speech about contract demands
- City Club of Chicago plays host to education officials’ latest excuse for dismal student outcomes: The covid pandemic
- Chicago Public Schools’ twisted goal: End selective enrollment schools while keeping nearly empty, failing schools open
- Chicago Public Schools: Hundreds of new sexual abuse allegations, not stolen laptops, should get all the attention
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With $162 billion more from taxpayers, couldn’t you deliver a few bond upgrades, too
Audio and summary 
A largely unasked question is becoming glaring: Is Illinois doing all it should to use artificial intelligence to make government cost less and work better? So far, the evidence says no.
Get the water cannons tuned up to blast the CTU strikers this summer.
Line them up blow them over baby!!
When Chicago goes bankrupt I look forward to stepping over former CTU members living in the gutter. If they are lucky I may toss them some of my dog’s training treats from my coatpocket. But otherwise I likely will just spit on them. CTU members are vermin.
Dead from Red Ed…….
Squeezee the python will take care of all the commie, oh sorry union demands .
The coils get tighter until the breathing stops. You can hear the wheezing now.
For a great laugh go out to Holy Sepulcher
Cemetery in Worth and stand next to da
Mayors grave, listen and you can hear the
Great Irish laughter as he can’t help himself On how the scraps are being fought over.
Keep smokin the hopium.
GIMME….GIMME………GREEDY TEACHERS……… AND THE KIDS ARE NOT LEARNING A THING………. EXCEPT DISRESPECT!!!
So much for the “fair and balanced reporting” trend Nick started. Is Wirepoints going to start selling CTU merch soon?
What do you specifically object to in article?
CTU amazingly always gets away with offering ZERO stats or potential taxpayer revenue sources on how much or how to pay for all their crazy demands. All they will rely on is that under state Evidence Based Funding Formula (that Rauner signed onto) CPS is underfunded.
then question becomes, IF all’s that is offered by CTU as reason for all their CRAZY contract demands is that CPS is not meeting state Evidence Based Funding Formula, THEN are all the CRAZY social service demands (housing students, nurse (RN?) in each school, etc, etc) or all the pay/benefit increases for CTU members part of state Evidence Based Funding Formula? Or, in ADDITION to?
Stop digging, Chicago Bankruptcy Now!
Best thing that can happen in Chicago is the checks start to bounce.
Once the debt gets so severe that the bond markets quit investing in the sinking ship of CPS, the checks might start to bounce. Only “might” because in another Biden administration he may allow the Federal Reserve to start buying municipal bonds. The FED has already begun to buy the bonds of stressed Democratic States like California and New Jersey. I think Democrats are willing to keep printing money until we all go broke.
We’re so, so far away from a default that would cause the bond market to stop buying CPS debt. There’s still trillions of dollars out there chasing yield; and the more dollars printed, the more yield those dollars chase. Heck, Congress just passed a massive pork spending bill spending additional $460,000,000,000 which lasts only through the summer. Those dollars make their way to rich people, who invested those dollars in worthless art, gratuitous consumer luxuries, junk corporate debt and of course, high yield municipal bonds. Heck, investors still consider Argentina a worthwhile investment as long as the yield and indentures… Read more »
The Pritzker clan, like many $billionaire clan’s, is mitigated with their offshore bank accounts and shell companies in Bermuda and Grand Cayman. JB says higher taxes on the serfs is needed, but not for him and his clan. Dan Biss and Chris Kennedy called him out, and the first thing JB did was lie, then when caught, bloviated about his hypocrisy.
Nassau, Bahamas not Bermuda.
“Rauner jumped in as well, saying in a statement that Pritzker “wants to raise taxes on hardworking Illinois families but will dodge taxes himself.”
“The Chicago Tribune’s report shows that JB Pritzker cannot be trusted. He will game the system for his own benefit and leave hardworking Illinoisans footing the bill,” Rauner added.”
How incredibly prophetic.
You raise an issue which I think will come to pass. Since the current mayor and the CTU are on the same side of the table, it is likely that a new contract is one that simply cannot be fully paid. It’s not like the mayor has any financial or budgeting acumen. And taxes are much harder to raise AND collect that the socialist apparatchiks think. The middle and upper middle class carry the freight, and their numbers are diminishing. And who in the political class in Chicago cares about fiscal responsibility? So there could be and likely will be… Read more »
As H.L. Mencken opined, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Chicagoans deserve to get it good and hard.
Cancel the contracts outright. Inform the union that the city will not renew the contracts and start from ground zero. Throwing more money into the hole know as the CTU will not improve children’s education. And that should be priority one. The unions be damned!