By: Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner
One of the biggest cons the Chicago Teachers Union and Chicago Public Schools continue to pull off is convincing Chicagoans that the two are adversaries.
Yes, the union and the administration “fight” and they even get downright nasty, especially when negotiating over a contract. But when they finally come to an agreement, they both end up winners. What’s unsaid is the Chicago taxpayer is left the loser.
It just happened again. After lots of acrimony, the CTU and CPS have just agreed to a preliminary teachers contract. The union hailed the deal as “historic.” CPS CEO Pedro Martinez called it a “victory.”
No wonder, considering what’s in it. There’s $1.5 billion more in salaries and hiring costs in the four-year contract. More than 800 new hires. And automatic 7.5% to 8.5% yearly raises for teachers – the largest raise for teachers in 13 years according to CPS.
The result is a win-win for the behemoths. The CTU gets more members – meaning more union dues. Its members get raises of around 32% over the four years. And the administration gets an even bigger bureaucracy and budget to manage.
Meanwhile, Chicagoans get stuck with the bill and the city digs a deeper financial hole for itself.
It’s impossible to tell if it’s this contract or the next one, or some other event like a stock market correction, that will trigger some form of reckoning for Chicago. Or maybe there’ll be no trigger, but rather just a “slow boil” like the one we wrote about in a recent Sun-Times editorial.
That’s because it’s hard to know just where “the line” is for Chicago. We don’t know how much more in TIF money there is to keep plugging city and CPS deficits. We don’t know how much more property tax hikes Chicagoans can handle. Those taxes have already jumped more than three times the rate of inflation over the last decade. We also don’t know how much more businesses will put up with – the city’s commercial property tax rate is already the highest of any major city in the nation.
But what we do know is this: CPS is already junk-rated and the city itself just got hit with a downgrade again. Residents and high-profile businesses have been leaving, with the downtown increasingly vacant. Nearly 27% of office space is not leased, a new high for the 11th-straight quarter.
And there’s the potential for those vacancies to get worse as more leases expire over the next couple of years. Kastle Systems’ office occupancy data – measured via office worker security card swipes – shows the occupancy rate is only at 57% of its pre-pandemic levels.
On top of the downtown’s potential doom-loop, every level of Chicago government, from the city to CPS to the transit systems are facing hundreds-of-millions or billion-dollar budget deficits for the foreseeable future.
Then there are the massive pension debts owed by the city and its sister governments. Those debts are already the biggest among the nation’s largest cities, and the super-sized salary increases in the new contract are sure to make them even bigger.
And don’t forget crime, which Ken Griffin says eventually forced Citadel to escape Chicago. Yes, murders in Chicago are down, but that’s just part of the national trend. The city is still the nation’s extreme outlier when it comes to the total number of murders, a sad fact that has now lasted for 13 straight years.
Too many Chicagoans haven’t yet connected the dots between their struggles, burdens and their poor quality of life and the self-serving policies of their politicians.
Until enough finally do make that connection, the con will continue. One contract at a time. One budget at a time. One tax hike at a time.
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By the way, speaking of the new CTU/CPS contract, we can’t ignore the biggest con those two groups are pulling off: making parents think they’re teaching Chicago’s kids how to read and do math.
Dismal results, and all for the cost of $30,000 per student. Soon to be even more due to the new contract.
Read more from Wirepoints:
- Shutter, roll back, freeze. Three things Chicago Public Schools needs to do.
- Homeschooling and the hypocrisy of Illinois politicians
- One of the first targets for an Illinois DOGE? Chicago’s 20 nearly-empty, failing schools. Here’s the 2025 list.
- One big example of why Illinois badly needs a DOGE of its own
Appendix
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.
Was in a south side school district this week working and on that day (like Many) there was a fight among the student youth. Some social beef between groups of girls. Police intervened, but not before a couple were hurt. The staff said that one of the girls was wearing a tshirt that said “I’ll beat your ass”. When the parent came in to pick up that girl, the parent had the same shirt on. The staff indicated that all of the 12 youth were involved were juniors and seniors not passing anything and likely may not graduate. These kids… Read more »
I couldn’t agree more. I’ve been told repeatedly by people long gone and born a hundred years ago now that in their era education locally was considered a privilege and generally treated with respect by the students and adults. Students who disagreed and behaved accordingly generally were allowed to drop out. When education somehow became treated as a “right” all aspects of it started heading south: the basic curriculum, and growing numbers of non-productive student attitudes, teacher expectations for their behavioral patterns—all accompanied by communities paying ever growing taxes for significant numbers of “students” who treat the system and what… Read more »
Yep, James – you and I are on the same page this week. The fight was vicious and it was girls fighting. Anger and not a care in the world about how they were hurting the other person – not one. They even fought with the Police – didn’t matter. School District policies just don’t make sense – “unworkable concept” – totally agree. The staff are disgusted with the situation. The biggest problem is that the kids are just images of their parents. Behaving this way is all they know. They do not understand any other way of living and… Read more »
Speaking of market corrections…Have any of the funds gone belly up with all the upheaval over tariffs, or will they wait until 5 PM Friday to announce it?
Note the salaries are for a 180-day work year, not counting sick and paid leave time. Normal private sector worker puts in 240 days.
When you add in the benefits and pensions starting at ages in the early 50’s it just blows away what the average private sector worker makes.
Just think; you could have been a teacher, but even with apparent envy aside I bet you’ll say you thought such work was far beneath than your worth. Only scum would do that kind of “work “, right?
Clearly you are delusional because there is no Envy for your colleagues Sloth and Greed. It’s sad that the once respected profession of teaching has been dragged into the septic tank by the verminous parasitic thugs of Teachers Unions. To become a teacher now requires one giving up their soul and conscience and being happy with stealing the futures from children while stealing the cash from the parents wallets. A special place in hell awaits the CTU/IFT/NEA imps of Satan.
James, can you see my hand gesture pointed towards you?
Sure, thumbs up to you as well, and I’m glad we could agree.. Thanks!
There once was a “fight” full of flair,
‘Tween the CTU and CPS pair.
But with raises and dues,
They both got to schmooze—
While the taxpayer gasped for fresh air.
Although the contract is not the best for CTU members, we can negotiate better terms next time. CTU members need to work to help elect state reps that will provide us more money. Let’s keep working and we can get the additional funding for more staff to help our students and finally get the 9% raise we deserve. Stay strong CTU
CTU is already hated by most taxpayers in Chicago. Now everyone else n Illinois can hate the verminous scum maggots of CTU. When public sector unions are made unconstitutional and all prior contracts thereby moot I look forward to stepping over the homeless former CTU vermin in the gutter. If nice I may toss a baggie of gravy train to the beggars but most days I’ll simply let my dog urinate on them. Might give the gutter snipe a good kick in the face.
Hey Jessie Sharky is back negotiating from the sidelines didn’t go so well according to you hey. Fiscal collapse is around the corner.
Sheesh
Chicago is Building 7. Planned demolition. Then scavengers come-like emanuel and his crew – pick up the carcass for pennies and rebuild. Like trump/kushners plan for Palestine.
I’m not against rhe TIF monies getting dog-robbed for TIF’s in IL are a con job on taxpayers IMHO. However the numbers are so out of balance that fiscal collapse will need to come before any meaningful change can happen. It’s a long, dark, road for Chicago into the forseeable future unfortunately. Of course the grifters will be just fine.
“y’all ain’t sh_ _”…..Stacy telling her SEIU co-workers to shove it a couple days ago pretty much sums it up for me.