If You Can’t Spell What’s on the Sign, Don’t Wave It in Chicago Schools

The CTU continues to prioritize left-wing politics over learning, acquiring knowledge, critical thinking and problem-solving skills

Chicago parents expect Chicago Public Schools educators to teach reading, writing, and critical thinking skills — not to use classrooms as staging grounds for foreign and domestic political activism.

Yet, that’s exactly what happened when union-backed activists used taxpayer-funded schools to promote protests tied to Venezuela, all while displaying a poster that misspelled the word “governor” as “governer.” This gaffe would be funny if it weren’t so alarming.

This wasn’t a typographical error scribbled by a student in a rush. It was part of a professionally organized political display, endorsed by the same education establishment — the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) — that insists it knows what’s best for America’s children.

These are the people entrusted with shaping young minds, yet they can’t be bothered to get basic spelling correct. More troubling than the misspelling is what it represents — a system more focused on political indoctrination than education. In fact, the Illinois Report Card recently released student performance data showing that only 30.5 percent of Chicago Public Schools (CPS) students in third through eighth grade can read at grade level, while just 22.4 percent of Chicago’s eleventh graders meet that same standard. That seems like it should be of greater importance than unions inserting themselves into political affairs, and yet, to no one’s surprise, these dismal student proficiency scores almost never mentioned in conversations over the state of Chicago Public Schools.

Chicago’s Public Schools have been struggling for years with literacy rates, chronic absenteeism and declining trust from parents. Instead of addressing those crises, CTU leadership is using classrooms and school spaces to push ideological causes wholly unrelated to educating children. Let’s be clear: Teachers have First Amendment rights only as private citizens. Public schools are not political playgrounds, and classrooms are not the place to air one-sided grievances with our country, president and government. Parents don’t send their kids to school to be recruited into international protest movements or subjected to ideological messaging that has nothing to do with math, science, reading, or history.

When educators and unions abandon education, which should be their core mission, confidence in public education erodes. And when they do so while demonstrating basic incompetence, parents are right to ask: “If they can’t spell ‘governor,’ how can we trust them to teach our kids to read?” The answer is, they don’t. Parents don’t trust public schools anymore, nor should they. School choice has never been more popular around the country, with 18 states passing universal access, and the unions want you to think it's a bad thing. They want you to think that because it takes their power away. They can no longer indoctrinate an entire generation in one fell swoop, as they’ve been doing for decades.

However, there is an important truth unions and their radical allies work to hide by suing any organization that tries to spread the word or offer help: Teachers have options. Good teachers do not have to stand idly by or continue paying dues to an apparatus that shows little regard for their livelihoods, or for the children those unions claim to serve. Organizations like the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, along with their local affiliates, spend hundreds of millions of dollars backing left-wing candidates and causes, promoting anti-American sentiment, and aligning themselves with America’s enemies — foreign and domestic — while neglecting teachers and failing to improve outcomes in the classroom.

Chicago families and Chicago teachers deserve better. Education should be about students, not misspelled slogans. And the adults in the system should be focused on teaching kids how to think — not what to think.

‍

Ryan Walters is CEO of the Teacher Freedom Alliance and former Oklahoma State Superintendent.