If Mayor Johnson wants a discussion on reparations, the conversation should start with the destructive, multi-generational impact the conduct of the Chicago Teacher Union has had on Chicago’s poor families
Mayor Brandon Johnson wants Chicago to talk about reparations. At the end of March, Johnson launched the “Repair Chicago” initiative, which is being framed as a public forum to collect “lived experiences of harm” rather than a program with concrete remedies. If Chicago’s going to have a serious conversation about reparations, then it should not stop with the distant past. It should include the damage done right here, right now, to the children and families who have been trapped for years inside a failing public school system shaped and dominated by the Chicago Teachers Union.
Since seizing control over the CTU some 15 years ago, the CORE Caucus leadership has undermined the quality of public education in Chicago. The CORE Caucus has used strikes, strike threats, regular disruption, and constant political warfare to advance a broader ideological agenda that has little to do with education and everything to do with accumulating power. Students do not get those lost days back. Children who fall behind in reading, writing, and math do not magically catch up because union leaders decide they are on the right side of history.
The CTU and its allies inflicted unprecedented damage on school children and their families during COVID. Chicago Public Schools remained closed far longer than they should have been, with students locked out of classrooms for a staggering 78 straight weeks. Whatever one thinks about the fear and uncertainty during the pandemic, it was clear the city’s children were paying an enormous price. Tens of thousands never returned. Others returned so far behind, they still contend with years of learning loss and were forced to rebound from disruptions to their social and emotional development.
The CTU and its allies were not merely passive participants in that damage. They were singularly responsible for keeping schools closed long after many other systems had resumed in-person or hybrid instruction. They insisted union preferences and political demands take priority over children’s needs. Worse, the CTU turned reopening the schools into a bargaining chip. The union’s conduct during the pandemic should be seen as one of the most consequential educational failures in modern Chicago history.
And the cost was not just academic. Chicago’s prolonged school closures coincided with a broader public safety disaster. Young people who should have been in classrooms were instead out on the streets, disconnected from adults, structure, and routine. Data from the University of Chicago Crime Lab indicates a 50 percent increase in shootings involving school-aged youth (17 and younger) in Chicago during the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 90 percent of these victims not enrolled in school.
Then there’s the student safety issue of abuse by CTU members. Chicago Public Schools has repeatedly faced serious allegations and investigations involving abuse of students and misconduct by adults entrusted with their care. The CPS inspector general has documented and investigated many hundreds of complaints each year including accusations of sexual misconduct. Every failure to investigate promptly, remove bad actors quickly, and protect children compounds the harm.
And yet the union culture that dominates Chicago education too often treats accountability as the enemy. Too often it protects the institution before the child on not only child abuse cases and almost any complaint that threatens member job security or even their present work assignment. Protection of their members is the union’s top priority as demonstrated by always assuming the default posture of defense, delay, grievance, and denial. That is institutional self-preservation.
The same can be said of academic standards and accountability. CTU has spent years pushing a culture that lowers standards, softens expectations, and weakens accountability. The city’s children, especially those in struggling neighborhood schools, are handed diplomas even when many can barely read, write, or do math at grade level. A system that abandons standards sentences them to permanent disadvantage and for many families extends generational poverty.
Social promotion isn’t equity, it’s fraud. It tells children they are succeeding when they are not. It tells parents not to worry. It allows the district to claim progress without any academic achievement. And it tells employers, colleges, and the larger economy to absorb the consequences later. The student pays first. The rest of society pays later. While the district boasts record graduation rates, only one in six meet math standards. Only one in three met reading standards prior to the state pf Illinois lowering the cut score this year.
That is why school choice matters so much. Working parents do not ask for ideology. They ask for a functioning safe school that will be truthful about explaining their child’s progress. Yet the CTU has made itself a relentless opponent of providing school alternatives, both private and public, that would give lower income families, especially poor families, a chance to escape failing neighborhood schools.
The CTU has been largely responsible for killing the state’s private school scholarship program for lower income parents and Governor JB Pritzker’s reluctance to participate in the new federal education scholarship tax credit program. They are also determined to limit if not eliminate public school choices like public charters and even magnet schools, despite those schools’ superior performance and the fact they serve an overwhelmingly minority low income population.
The district had systematically denied equitable funding to public charters, providing over a third less funding per pupil and no facility support while imposing ever increasing burdensome mandates due to union pressure that impedes their ability to innovate and recruit and retain both students and staff. This is punishing the nearly 54,000 students charters serve, including 25 percent of CPS high school students — 98 percent of whom are Black and Latino and 87 percent of whom linger in poverty
Meanwhile, union leaders and political allies often send their own children to private schools, selective schools, or other preferred options, while low-income families are stuck in often failing and severely under enrolled neighboring schools. The union’s talk about equity is all rhetoric. The CTU has helped create a school system that would make the old Jim Crow South very proud.
If Chicago wants to discuss reparations it should ask what it owes students who lost years of learning because schools were closed too long. It owes children pushed through a system that lowered standards. It owes families denied quality education alternatives while CTU strengthened its monopoly on failure. An honest discussion means admitting the union’s role in school system failure. It’s about the actual victims holding those responsible who did the damage.
