CPS Corruption Exposé Shows Why Chicago Teachers Union’s Reign of Terror Must End — Now

Those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach…govern. This must stop

Chicago did not arrive at this moment by accident. The city did not simply “lose its way.” What we are living through is the predictable outcome of institutional capture, centered on one sprawling bureaucracy that now consumes a staggering share of your property taxes while producing fewer students, worse outcomes, and a governing class increasingly detached from reality: Chicago Public Schools.

Yes folks, the inmates are running the asylum, and that includes not just the schools these fools misrule, but the city they fail to serve, and the cancer of their ill-gotten power extends to the county and even the state.

When critics talk about “products of the system,” the point is often misunderstood. This is not primarily an indictment of students — many of whom are victims of the chaos. It is an indictment of the adults who entered CPS as teachers or administrators, failed upward, and then migrated into politics, unions, and city governance. Chicago is now being run by people who learned their managerial habits inside a system where accountability is optional and ideology substitutes for results.

Chicago now spends over $30,000 per pupil in a district with shrinking enrollment and a ballooning administrative class, yet parents flee, test scores stagnate, and basic discipline collapses. This is not an education system anymore. It is a political economy, designed to move money, protect insiders, and punish dissent.

An indictment from inside the building

What makes this travesty impossible to ignore is the source of the latest revelations. The exposé did not come from conservative activists or outside watchdogs. It came from CPS’s own Office of the Inspector General, whose latest annual report reads less like an audit and more like a criminal docket.

Even the Chicago Tribune — not known as a muckraker of the odious morass that is the Democrat Neo-machine — was forced to report on what the OIG documented: fraud, abuse, sexual misconduct, residency violations, and wholesale mismanagement across the district. This wasn’t one bad apple. It was an orchard.

The findings reveal a culture in which public money is treated as free money, rules are treated as suggestions, and consequences are endlessly deferred.

Pandemic money as a feeding frenzy

The pandemic years exposed CPS at its most shameless. Federal COVID relief funds poured into the district, and oversight all but vanished. The OIG found multiple cases of CPS principals defrauding pandemic relief programs, including one who collected more than $41,000 in forgivable loans on top of a six-figure salary. Another slipped quietly into retirement while under investigation — Chicago’s preferred exit strategy for the politically connected.

These cases were not anomalies. They added to more than 20 previous investigations involving CPS employees abusing pandemic programs. Charter schools under the CPS umbrella collected over $43 million in forgivable PPP loans, despite continuing to receive full public funding.

Meanwhile, CPS paid $28.5 million to bus vendors who provided no services at all during remote learning. Only a fraction of that money has been recovered. At the same time, overtime and “additional compensation” surged 74 percent, while 77,000 laptops and devices — worth roughly $23 million — were reported lost or stolen.

If this were a private company, the board would have been replaced, and the executives frog-marched out. In Chicago, it barely caused a ripple.

Fraud, mismanagement, and the culture of 'no'

Beyond pandemic money, the OIG documented a steady pattern of everyday corruption. Investigators found falsified federal grant applications using fake enrollment data, forcing CPS to repay more than $1 million. One employee stole over $135,000 by padding work hours. Residency rules —designed to ensure CPS employees actually live in the city they serve — were openly flouted, including one administrator who lived in Florida for nearly two years while lying about it.

Add to that a doubling of district travel spending between 2019 and 2024, followed by a sudden “travel freeze” only after CPS stared down a $734 million budget deficit. The pattern is unmistakable: spend first, justify later, and never admit fault.

A moral failure, not just a financial one

The most disturbing findings had nothing to do with money. The OIG closed 335 sexual misconduct cases in a single year, with 55 substantiated findings. Multiple staff members abused students over a span of years on the same campus. One former CPS dean was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

This was not a failure of training manuals. It was a failure of institutional will — a system more interested in protecting itself than protecting children. When bureaucracy becomes more sacred than students, this is what happens.

We are paying child molesters with our tax dollars.

How a union became a government

At the center of this wreckage sits the Chicago Teachers Union, which long ago ceased to function as a normal labor organization. The CTU is now a political machine, one that trains candidates, finances campaigns, writes policy, and enforces ideological discipline.

Its alumni dominate City Hall and exert enormous influence over Cook County and Springfield. Mayor Brandon Johnson is not an outlier; he is the model. His ascent from classroom to union leadership to the fifth floor is the clearest illustration of how CPS culture metastasized into city governance.

Let that sink in for a moment, because the insanity deserves reflection: the people hired to teach children are now running and ruining the city that hires them, biting the hand that feeds them. No major American metropolis can survive that, especially since the teachers have morphed into mad Marxists.

The cracks in the wall

And yet, the political monopoly is weakening. Across racial and neighborhood lines, voters are starting to rebel — not out of ideology, but out of exhaustion.

Black families are increasingly unwilling to tolerate schools that fail their children while lecturing them about “equity.” Hispanic voters are rejecting radicalism in favor of order and opportunity. White voters have already begun to bolt. The coalition that sustained CTU dominance is fraying.

We’ve seen warning shots. Paul Vallas came within striking distance of stopping Brandon Johnson. Brendan Reilly is challenging Toni Preckwinkle, an outcome once considered unthinkable.

It almost happened. And now, armed with evidence from CPS’s own watchdog, it can happen.

The final con

Unable to defend their record, the CTU-aligned political class wants to change the subject. They are desperate to frame upcoming elections as a referendum on Donald Trump or national politics. Don’t fall for it.

This election is about why your taxes keep rising while services collapse. It’s about why corruption is documented but never punished. It’s about why ideology always outranks competence in Chicago. And it’s about why alienating the federal government and inciting disorder somehow pass for “progress.”

End it — or it will end you

Chicago does not need another blue-ribbon commission or another glossy reform plan. It needs political courage and voter revolt. The CPS Inspector General’s report did not merely catalog misconduct; it explained why the CTU’s reign of terror must end.

Chicago wasn’t ruined by conservatives.

It wasn’t ruined by Republicans.

It was ruined by a failed school system that decided to seize power instead of educate, and was allowed to do so by the tragically misguided electorate.

And the only people who can stop it are the people who pay the bills — and finally decide they’ve had enough.