It's time to put up or shut up
The Chicago Public Schools are alarmingly successful at exactly one thing: Extracting money — oceans of it — from the taxpayers of this beleaguered city. Year after year, CPS manages to set fire to staggering sums of public treasure while producing educational outcomes that would shame a frontier one-room schoolhouse. It is the most expensive failure in the history of public administration.
We’ve now reached a point where more than $31,000 per student per year is being pried from Chicago taxpayers to keep this bureaucratic behemoth afloat. That’s right — taxpayers are involuntarily forking over elite private-school money to an institution whose performance often struggles to match third-world literacy rates.
And who is presiding over this spectacular redistribution racket? None other than Mayor 6.6 — the Robin Hood of the Chicago Teachers Union, though in this version of the legend, Robin Hood steals not just from the rich but from the poor too. He takes from everyone and delivers the boodle straight to his boss, the notorious Stacey Davis Gates, Chicago’s very own commissar of ideological indoctrination.
The mayor is merely the errand boy; Davis Gates’ is the one running Sherwood Forest.
The $30,000 question
Let’s cut through the propaganda. If CPS were a private school charging the actual per-pupil cost of $30,000, it would have no students. Not one. Parents would laugh them out of the room, then sprint away clutching their wallets.
And yet, because the money is extracted through the tax system — compulsory, opaque, and politically insulated — CPS faces zero accountability. They can fail forever, because the parents of the children they’re failing have no leverage.
But what if they did?
Time for skin in the game
Here’s the modest proposal, and it’s almost too logical for Chicago politics to comprehend:
On a means-tested basis, parents should pay a portion of CPS’s actual cost of educating their child.
Even a small percentage. Even a symbolic amount. Something that acknowledges the basic principle that stakeholders demand quality when they directly pay for a service.
And if parents don’t want to pay to send their child to CPS?
Simple.
Give them a refundable, education-only tax credit equal to the amount CPS would have spent. Let them take that credit anywhere: Catholic schools, charter schools, private academies, or new schools that will inevitably arise in response to actual demand for quality education.
Supply follows demand. It always has.
Imagine a Chicago where parents choose schools, not where schools trap children.
Who would choose CPS?
Be honest: If you could take your $30,000 in taxpayer-funded education dollars and walk it over to any school in the city, how many parents would voluntarily choose CPS?
Some might pick Whitney Young, Lane Tech, or Northside — the few magnet schools that perform as though achievement still matters.
But the rest? The vast majority of CPS campuses would be empty enough to host a pickleball league by October.
This is not theory. It’s not ideology. It’s the most predictable consumer behavior in the world.
When a system fails, people flee — unless they are forbidden to.
The thought crime of school choice
Predictably, giving parents this sort of freedom is labeled “fascist” by the progressive left. That’s rich. Since when is choice fascist? Since when is letting poor families access the same quality of education that union officials’ own children enjoy an act of tyranny?
If anything, the monopoly that forbids escape is the authoritarian structure — not the policy that allows it.
The real reason the CTU hates school choice is simple: competition exposes incompetence.
Private and parochial schools routinely educate children for far less money — often half or a third of CPS’s lavish per-pupil price tag — and they do it with measurable results, functional discipline, and curricula free of political indoctrination.
The CTU cannot survive that comparison.
Put up or shut up
So here is the challenge to CPS and its political apparatchiks: Either improve the quality of your product to match the private sector, or reduce your cost to match the private sector.
Pick one.
Pick both.
But spare us the ritual denunciation of families who simply want their children to learn how to read before ninth grade.
If CPS truly believes it is providing a superior education, then it should welcome competition. If it is confident in its $30,000-a-year miracle, then parents should be knocking down the doors to enroll their children.
But CPS knows the truth.
Mayor 6.6 knows it.
Stacey Davis Gates knows it.
Give families the choice and the system collapses overnight — not because of “racism,” or “privilege,” or “fascism,” but because CPS cannot compete.
If that is the case, then there is only one rational public-policy response:
Defund the schools the way they wanted to defund the police.
Not out of spite — but out of necessity. To protect taxpayers. To protect children. And to protect the city’s future from a school system that has proven, decade after decade, it cannot do the one thing it exists to do.
Let the money follow the child. If CPS can’t put up, then it’s time for them to shut up.
