Those who can’t do, teach. And those who can’t teach, govern. That has to stop. We have to stop it
Chicago didn’t wake up one morning and discover itself governed by incompetents.
This disaster was grown, nurtured, and weaponized inside the very institution that now consumes the largest share of your property taxes while delivering ever-worsening results: the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and the demons who have possessed it, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), led by the Notorious SDG, Stacy Davis Gates.
This has nothing to do with the students, who are, in many cases, its victims. We are talking about the teachers, administrators, and union operatives who entered CPS, failed upward, and then migrated into City Hall, Cook County government, and the political-industrial complex that now runs Chicago like a captured city-state.
Chicago now spends nearly $40,000 per pupil on a system with declining enrollment, a ballooning bureaucracy, and outcomes that would embarrass a developing country. Functional illiteracy is up. Discipline is down. Parents are fleeing, taking their children with them, continuing the systemic death spiral. And yet the money never stops flowing — because this is no longer an education system. It is a patronage and power system. The response to virtually every failure is the same: demand more money, hire more people, expand the bureaucracy, and insist that anyone questioning the results is somehow attacking teachers or children.
The inmates are indeed running the asylum — not just CPS, but the entire city, the county, and state. They have their eyes on the prize — the entire nation and perhaps then, in typical Marxist fashion, the world.
That has to stop. We have to stop it. Now.
The indictment came from inside the house
What makes this moment different is that the latest bombshell didn’t come from conservative activists or right-leaning think tanks. It came from CPS’s own watchdog.
Even the Chicago Tribune — hardly an investigative bloodhound when it comes to Democrats running Chicago into the ground — was forced to report on the most recent annual report from the CPS Office of the Inspector General. The findings are staggering.
This is no mere whiff of impropriety. It was a full autopsy of institutional rot.
Pandemic fraud: Free money, no oversight
The OIG documented multiple cases of CPS principals defrauding federal COVID relief programs, including one who pocketed more than $41,000 in forgivable loans while already earning a six-figure salary. Another quietly retired mid-investigation — Chicago’s version of being “promoted out of a crime scene.”
These cases weren’t isolated. They joined more than 20 prior investigations involving CPS employees abusing pandemic relief funds. Apparently, when Washington opened the federal checkbook during COVID, some people inside CPS saw not emergency assistance intended to keep businesses and workers afloat, but another opportunity to get theirs.
Then came the cherry on top: $28.5 million paid to bus vendors who provided no services whatsoever during remote learning. Only $3 million has been clawed back.
During this same period:
- Overtime and “extra compensation” exploded 74 percent;
- 77,000 laptops and devices went “lost or stolen” — a $23 million disappearance;
- Travel spending later doubled, even as the district lurched toward a $734 million deficit.
If this were a private corporation, the executives would be wearing ankle monitors.
Fraud as a management style
The corruption didn’t stop with pandemic money.
Investigators found:
- Falsified federal grant applications using fake enrollment data, forcing CPS to repay over $1 million;
- An employee who stole $135,000 by padding work hours;
- Widespread residency fraud, including CPS staff living outside Chicago, outside Illinois — and in one case, Florida, while lying about it for nearly two years.
This isn’t mere sloppiness; it’s institutional contempt for taxpayers. And taxpayers are expected to respond to each new budget crisis by reaching deeper into their pockets, while the people managing the money demand still more of it. At some point, the people writing the checks are entitled to ask what happened to the money they already provided.
Sexual abuse and moral collapse
Then there’s the part that should end careers — if the scoundrels running our city and its schools had a scintilla of integrity. The OIG closed 335 sexual misconduct cases in a single year. Fifty-five were substantiated. Multiple staff members abused students over years on the same campus. One former CPS dean was sentenced to 22 years in prison.
This is a system that has failed repeatedly to protect children, and yet the bureaucracy rolls on — well-funded, politically protected, and utterly unaccountable.
The union that captured a city
At the center of this mess is the Chicago Teachers Union — no longer a labor organization, but a political machine.
The CTU has captured:
- CPS
- City Hall
- Cook County
- The State of Ill-Annoy
- The narrative
- The budget
Its alumni now run Chicago — or heavily influence those who do. That includes Mayor Brandon Johnson, whose career arc — from classroom to union to fifth floor — perfectly illustrates the disease. The organization that exists ostensibly to represent public employees has become one of the most powerful political organizations in Illinois, helping elect the very officials who determine how much money its members receive and how much taxpayers must surrender to pay for it.
The insanity is obvious once you say it out loud:
The hired hands we employed to teach our children are now running the city.
No major city can survive that arrangement.
A Political revolt is brewing
And yet — quietly but unmistakably — Chicagoans are waking up.
Across identity politics and neighborhood lines, voters are starting to connect the dots:
- The Black community is increasingly fed up with schools that fail their kids;
- Hispanic voters are rejecting ideological nonsense in favor of order and competence;
- What we used to call ethnic voters in places like the 19th Ward and Edison Park are already in open rebellion.
We’ve seen the cracks:
- Brendan Reilly challenging Toni Preckwinkle;
- Paul Vallas coming within striking distance of stopping Brandon Johnson.
It nearly happened, and it can happen, come the Ides of March.
The bigger con
Desperate to hold power, the CTU-aligned political class is trying to frame upcoming elections as a referendum on Trump. It’s a lie.
This election is about:
- Why your taxes keep going up;
- Why your schools keep getting worse;
- Why corruption is so rarely punished and so often rewarded;
- Why ideology always beats competence in Chicago, as evidenced by alienating the federal government, inciting resistance to law enforcement, encouraging chaos that costs millions of dollars in police overtime, and pretending none of this has consequences.
The consequences are everywhere. They show up in property tax bills, school enrollment, city budgets, public safety, families leaving Chicago, and the increasingly absurd proposition that the answer to every government failure is to give the people responsible for it even more money and power.
End it — or be ruled by it
Chicago doesn’t need another task force. It doesn’t need another study. It needs regime change at the ballot box. The CPS OIG report didn’t just document corruption. It documented why the CTU’s reign of terror must end — for the sake of students, taxpayers, and a city that still remembers what sanity looks like.
Conservatives didn’t ruin Chicago. Republicans didn’t ruin it. They haven’t run it for nearly 100 years. It was ruined by a failed school system that decided to govern instead of educate, and the only people who can stop it are the people paying the bills.
That would be us.
Remember in March.
