School Choice, Not Reparations, Is the Ticket to Success for Chicago’s Minority Families

If Mayor Johnson wants a discussion on reparations, the conversation should start with the destructive impact of the Chicago Teachers Union and its denial of school choice

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s election-year gambit is to double down on race and historical trauma to deflect from his unfulfilled promises and his administration’s failures of governance. In March 2026, Johnson launched “Repair Chicago,” a public engagement campaign of bus tours, panel discussions, town halls, and hearings intended to inform a reparations study for Black residents. No word on whether the destructive impact of his former employer, the Chicago Teachers Union, will be examined.

While the mayor preoccupied himself with convening panels consumed with race, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) lost another 11,537 students this year, bringing enrollment to 304,687. Enrollment has fallen by more than 130,000 from its peak of nearly 439,000 in the 2002–'03 school year. The decline might have been greater without the arrival of thousands of immigrant students in recent years. The number of Black children in the city fell by about 49 percent between 2000 and 2020, a far steeper decline than the roughly 14 percent decline among Black adults.

Families make decisions for many reasons, but the caliber of schools should be part of any serious examination of the exodus of Black families from Chicago. Chicago has lost more than 260,000 Black residents since 2000. This staggering loss of Black students cannot be explained by demographics alone without asking whether the lack of quality school choices is one reason families leave. 

CTU leadership and its former employee, Mayor Johnson, have responded by making the CPS crisis all about a lack of funding while blocking public support for poor families who send, or seek to send, their children to private schools. At the same time, they have sought to limit public charter schools and selective-enrollment magnet school alternatives to underperforming and often sparsely enrolled neighborhood schools.

A demand for even more state and local funding

CTU leadership, Brandon Johnson, and their allies argue that Illinois owes CPS substantially more money, some $2 billion. The fact remains that the district has received major increases in funding even as enrollment has fallen. CPS says annual funding provided directly to schools has grown by more than $1 billion since 2019, and its adopted fiscal 2027 operating budget includes about $4.46 billion in property-tax revenue. The district also received extraordinary, one-time federal COVID relief. Where was the accountability for how that money was spent?

CPS’s fiscal 2027 budget totals $10.11 billion, including capital spending. Its operating budget is approximately $8.72 billion. Dividing the total budget by current enrollment yields more than $33,000 spent per student, although that figure includes costs beyond day-to-day classroom operations. CPS reports 46,288 budgeted full-time-equivalent positions for fiscal 2027 — roughly one position for every 6.6 enrolled students — and more budgeted non-teaching positions than teaching positions.

And what does the school district have to show for this spending? In 2025, the Illinois State Board of Education changed the scores students needed to be considered proficient, making comparisons with earlier results unreliable. Even under the new benchmarks, fewer than half of CPS students tested proficient in English language arts and fewer than three in 10 in math on the grades 3-8 state assessment.

These troubling statistics are hardly surprising after repeated labor disputes and the long disruption of in-person schooling during the COVID pandemic. Worse, CPS risks downplaying testing and accountability and even ending the ranking of schools by academic performance, just when families most need an honest account of academic performance. Lowering expectations cannot be a substitute for helping children meet them.

Opposing private school choice

Teachers’ unions oppose school choice out of self-interest, protecting jobs and dues rather than serving the best interests of children. They bitterly oppose allowing children use of public funds to attend private schools while working to limit public charter schools and selective-enrollment options whose performance challenges the neighborhood-school monopoly.

CTU opposed Illinois’ Invest in Kids scholarship program, which expired at the end of 2023. It also opposes the new federal Education Freedom Tax Credit. Governor JB Pritzker has not yet opted Illinois into the program, seemingly searching for excuses not to participate. Beginning in 2027, both public and private school families of eligible students in participating states can receive privately funded scholarships for qualifying educational expenses.

Private schools have demonstrated extraordinary success, including in neighborhoods suffering economic hardship. Writing about National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results, Kathleen Porter-Magee observed: “If Catholic schools were a state, they would be the highest performing in the nation on all four NAEP tests.” Her comparison is a powerful argument for giving families more options, though test-score differences alone cannot establish how much of the advantage a school itself produces.

Catholic schools, in particular, offered an important alternative during the COVID-19 pandemic. National test results showed that Catholic-school students generally lost less ground than their public-school peers. Chicago Catholic schools saw no academic falloff nor a mass exodus of students, in contrast to Chicago public schools, which experienced both. Chicago families should not need wealth to consider a school that fits their children.

No two schools represent the importance of school choice better than Chicago Hope Academy and Manley High School on the West Side. Located in East Garfield Park, Hope enrolls 299 students in grades 9-12 and receives five applications for every freshman seat. Over 90 percent of its graduates attend a four-year college. The school is overwhelmingly Black and Latino and low-income. In 2024, Hope received 400 applications for 74 available seats in its freshman class.

One mile away from Hope Academy sits Manley High School. A school constructed to enroll 1,176 students, Manley only recorded 78 enrolled students last year. Only three percent met state standards in language arts, zero percent in math, and four percent in science. Just 35 percent of Manley students graduated, and only 10 percent were accepted to college. Equally troubling, 70 percent of Manley’s students are chronically absent. The CTU-led drive to kill the state private school scholarship cost 175 students, mostly Black and Latino, their state financial support.

Limiting public school choices

For most low-income CPS families, public non-union charter schools and magnet schools are the only alternatives to their often-failing neighborhood schools. As evidence of the desire of minority families to seek out alternatives to inferior neighborhood schools, 87 percent of charter school students come from low-income families and 97 percent are Black and Latino. For magnet schools, 70 percent of those enrolled are Black and Latino, and over 50 percent are low-income.

Despite the desire of Black and Latino families seeking admission in charter schools, The CTU’s response has been to press the district to cap the number of charter schools and their enrollment and degrade both charter and magnet schools. Despite the high percentage of minority and low-income students enrolled, public charter schools receive a third less per-pupil funding than the district average, while nine of the 11 public magnet high schools receive less funding. Meanwhile, severely under-enrolled and underperforming neighborhood schools, many of which are among the CTU’s “Sustainable Community Schools,” receive enormous per-pupil funding.

The evidence is indisputable that charter schools, as well as private schools, specifically parochial schools, perform far better across all demographics. This is backed up by the massive ongoing CADO study, the most recent book by economist Thomas Sowell, and analysis of national NAEP scores by the Manhattan Institute. More exciting is emerging research showing that the presence of substantive school choices, whether private or public, is resulting in the improvement of traditional public schools as the competition drives those schools to get better.

School choice is a civil right

The most important civil-rights goal of this century is providing parents with a high-quality education for their children. That goal won’t be approached, let alone achieved, by denying low-income families school choice. Without meaningful public school options, Chicago risks maintaining a two-tier system: Wealthier families can pay private-school tuition while many middle- and most low-income families cannot. Without scholarships or tax-credit programs, many middle- and most lower-income families who seek a better option are locked out.

CTU’s leaders, union members, and their political supporters have access to the educational choices being denied to most low-income, overwhelmingly minority families that they themselves take advantage of. Studies suggest that anywhere from 31 to 39 percent of Chicago Public Schools teachers send their children to private schools, while a comparable percentage send their children to selective-enrollment magnet schools and even the public charter schools the union leadership is trying to limit and degrade. Families without means or connections deserve the same options.

A historic opportunity

Teachers unions’ grip on public education has already inflicted lasting damage on generations of children. If Chicago wants to discuss reparations, it should ask what it owes students who lost years of learning while schools were closed, what it owes children pushed through a system with inadequate academic results, and what it owes families denied quality education alternatives. An honest discussion must include the union’s role in those decisions — and accountability for the people who made them.

If the goal of the reparations campaign is to embrace policies that can help address historic inequities, begin by embracing school choice for all families, regardless of income or ZIP code. Empower communities through their elected Local School Councils and the principals they select to pursue the best school models. Embrace the federal Education Freedom Tax Credit, which, by some estimates, could provide up to $2 billion annually in grants directly to eligible families with children in public and private schools.

Beginning in 2027, donors may qualify for a federal tax credit of up to $1,700 per person for contributions to approved scholarship-granting organizations. Funds can be used by families not only for private school tuition but also to provide financing for an array of public-school-adjacent programs of the parents’ own choosing. This includes tutoring, enrichment, college prep, vocational education, special education, technology, transportation, early childhood education, and much more.

This financial opportunity must not be squandered.