It must be getting claustrophobic over at the CTU Center
The feds seem to have caught onto the financial mess the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has created for itself and are demanding the union's audit records going back to 2019, if they even exist, that is.
The CTU has been stonewalling since the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee sent its letter on November 20th, but last week the union finally claimed that they would comply with the committee's requests, though they have pushed the date off from December 8th to the 22nd.
Already the CTU has been holding information back from its members and violating its own rules mandating that its audits be released to members annually. And for a while it looked like the union was going to do the same to the feds.
The notice taken by the congressional committee comes after a group of teachers filed a lawsuit early in October to force the CTU to release the audits it has withheld from its members.
The CTU attempted to have the lawsuit thrown out, but a judge denied the request.
The House committee noted how alarmed it is over the CTU's refusal to obey its own rules and worried the union is acting to "betray the trust of the very people they are meant to serve."
"This failure to disclose financial information strips dues-paying members of their basic right to understand how their money is spent," the November 20th letter states. "Every dollar paid by workers should serve their interests, not those of a select few operating in the shadows."
The Republican-led committee also slammed CTU President Stacy Davis Gates for throwing the race card over the probe and accusing the committee of using a "racist dog whistle" by demanding the audits. She also accused the committee of treating her like a "thief."
"It is a waste of time, and it’s a waste of resources, but we will be good citizens, and we will be responding with any responsive documents," Bromwich told the Chicago Sun-Times. "There is much less here than meets the eye."
Waste of time or not, the letter comes even as news recently broke that the CTU wasted $173,000 on a recording studio in New Mexico -- not even one in Chicago. But the union has still not divulged what the huge expense was actually for or what was done at this New Mexico studio.
Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel at the Liberty Justice Center, the group spearheading the lawsuit against the CTU, says they intend to carry on with the lawsuit because the union has not released the records. "We’re interested in finding more about the audits that they’ve produced in discovery to make sure that these are legitimate," he said, according to the Sun-Times.
Meanwhile, the "Teachers" union continues to show that successfully teaching children is the absolute last thing it is interested in achieving.
As of August, the most recent reading scores revealed that fewer than one in three Chicago school kids can read at grade level. It is worse for math. Only one in five kids can do math at appropriate levels. Scores are more or less down all across the board in every metric.
This despite even more tax dollars being pumped into the schools. Worse, the bigger budget comes as fewer and fewer students are enrolled to justify that ever increasing budget.
Indeed, according to Bloomberg, Chicago's student enrollment fell a huge 9,000 in number, putting the student body at 100,000 fewer than the number of students enrolled in Chicago schools 20 years ago.
The biggest drops were among black and Hispanic students. Hispanic enrollment fell 4.5% to 146,862 and Black enrollment fell 2.6% to 108,380, Bloomberg added.
Yet, the CTU thinks it deserves even more tax dollars thrown at them. And it's getting it, too.
The Chicago Public Schools budget wildly increased over last year gaining an extra $76 million over the 2024 budget, affording the school a nearly $1.9 billion budget. All for falling test scores and thousands of fewer students.
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