Stacy Davis Gates warns of the Confederacy's return to rally her base — but her actions have created a school system the Old South might well admire
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates is once again echoing Mayor Brandon Johnson’s Civil War rhetoric. “Trump has picked his side,” she claimed in last week’s address at the City Club of Chicago. “He is here to win the relitigation of the Civil War and finish the work of the Confederacy.” If Gates is searching for a school system that would be embraced by the old Confederacy, she need look no further than the CTU-dominated Chicago Public Schools (CPS).
CPS is a system that denies poor families educational alternatives to their often failing and nearly empty CTU-controlled neighborhood schools. This outcome is the direct result of the CTU’s relentless drive to secure its monopoly over public education — prioritizing the expansion of its membership and benefits, reducing workloads, and protecting jobs — while eliminating any real accountability for performance or even the behavior of its members.
The CTU and its former-employee-turned-mayor would have us believe that funding is the issue. Yet Chicago is the second-best-funded large urban school system, spending $30,000 per pupil, consuming 56 percent of all property taxes collected in the city, and receiving nearly $1 billion in additional city subsidies. Why, then, are only 11 percent of Black students proficient in reading and eight percent in math, while Latino students are only 18 percent proficient in reading and 15 percent in math?
Let's make this unambiguous: The CTU-dominated CPS is a walking, talking civil rights violation. Chicago’s poor public-school children — overwhelmingly Black and Latino — are held hostage in underperforming and under-enrolled neighborhood schools. Meanwhile, CTU leaders and many of their members send their own children to magnet or private schools. Forbes reports that nearly 40 percent of CTU teachers send their children to private schools.
The CTU’s campaign against school choice has been relentless:
- The CTU played a leading role in lobbying for the elimination of the state’s Invest in Kids scholarship program, which provided thousands of low-income Black and Latino parents in Chicago the chance to send their children to better-performing, often safer, schools.
- The CTU forced the School District 299 to deny poor families public school alternatives by capping the number of public charter schools and their enrollment, while working to eliminate them by forcing unionization, severely limiting their renewal periods, and imposing mandates that impeded innovation.
- The CTU opposed equitable funding for public charters, which educate over 54,000 students — 98 percent of whom are Black or Latino and 88 percent low-income—by providing them, on average, $8,600 less per pupil than district schools, while offering little capital support.
- The CTU pushed the district to block charter schools from renting any public-school buildings in predominantly Black and Latino neighborhoods on the South and West Sides, preventing those buildings from remaining educational assets for their communities.
- The CTU is working to eliminate Chicago’s magnet and selective enrollment schools — the district’s highest-performing public schools, which present an embarrassing contrast to the often-failing neighborhood schools. More than 70 percent of pupils enrolled in magnets are minority students, and more than 50 percent are low-income.
Through its political influence and labor contracts, the CTU is denying poor children alternatives to their failing neighborhood schools. Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO) found in its third national study on charter schools that charter students make significantly more academic progress in math and reading than their peers in traditional schools.
Economist Thomas Sowell’s 2020 book, *Charter Schools and Their Enemies*, found similar results in New York City. In buildings housing both charter and traditional schools, just 14 percent of traditional classrooms had a majority of students proficient in reading — compared to 65 percent for charters. In math, it was 10 percent versus 68 percent.
Catholic schools also consistently outperform public schools. The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) shows Catholic schools leading across nearly every category. The Manhattan Institute reports that if Catholic schools were a state, they’d be the highest-performing in the country. U.S. Department of Education data confirms that Black, Latino, and low-income students in Catholic schools outperform their peers in both traditional and public charter schools.
At City Club, Davis Gates remarked that children “belong to the [community].” When Davis Gates uttered these words, she was speaking the truth in a limited sense. In the absence of school choice, poor children are indeed theirs — they are the CTU’s hostages, especially poor children. These poorer children —mainly Black and Latino — have been used, through CTU strikes and threats of work stoppages, to secure more members, record pay increases, reduced workloads, and job security regardless of performance and behavior.
The hostage-taking was on full display when the CTU forced the district to keep school campuses closed for 78 consecutive weeks under threat of a strike. This was in defiance of the science and ignored the experience of private schools that quickly and safely reopened. The consequences were devastating for the district’s already abysmal academic performance and caused thousands of students to drop out. It also contributed to a historic increase in crime committed by and against out-of-school youth.
It is the height of hypocrisy for Davis Gates and Mayor Johnson to harness Civil War rhetoric when their own policies have created a system that discriminates against the very families they claim to champion. These students constitute over 82 percent of all public-school students in the city. It may not be racist by intent, but it is racist in outcome. Yet Davis Gates has time and again called those who support school choice “fascists” and “racists,” despite enrolling her own child in a Catholic school.
If anyone is doing the work of the Confederacy, it’s the CTU — and the school district has been complicit. CPS administration works to sustain its bureaucracy and maintain control over resources, while CTU leaders seek to protect and expand their membership and benefits, all while limiting accountability and competition. Both entities calibrate their actions to these ends. It is overwhelmingly poor Black and Latino families who suffer.
Davis Gates and Johnson would do the Confederacy proud.
