Should Chicago Weigh Defunding the CPS?
Despite massive scandals that include rampant allegations of sexual abuse and declining academic performance among students, Chicago’s public-school educators still maintain the blessings of their progressive brethren.
An infamy so vast that Chicago’s media could not ignore it, the scandals in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) were revealed in a rare Chicago Tribune investigation not aimed at the police, but at a system that experienced more than 500 allegations of assault against students.
In one revolting instance, the Chicago Tribune revealed the plight of one young girl who lost interest in attending classes after being repeatedly raped by a CPS employee.
As recounted by the Tribune:
“One young athlete, a 16-year-old honors student aiming for a law career, began cutting advanced chemistry and math classes to avoid a track coach who raped her repeatedly in his office at Simeon Career Academy. Even after he was arrested, “she didn’t know if she wanted to go to school any more. She told me she felt alone. … She talked about suicide,” Simeon Principal Sheldon House testified at the coach’s 2016 criminal trial.
Even though the Tribune conducted a thorough examination of the allegations, the investigation showed that the CPS had little to show for the protection of its students.
According to the Chicago Tribune:
“The exact number of cases in which school workers sexually assaulted students remains elusive, in part because CPS does so little to understand and tackle the problem. The district acknowledges that it does not track child abuse by its employees in a consistent or formal manner.”
In plain English, the CPS admitted it has no official system to record incidents of child abuse at the hands of CPS employees.
The evidence of student abuse revealed by the Tribune hardly affected the Chicago Teachers Union’s (CTU) ability to get a contract last fall. To achieve its goal, the CTU engaged in a massive public relations campaign to secure a new contract when their last agreement expired earlier this year. The CTU’s tactics included a strike and demonstrations throughout the city. With the media following them around like trained lapdogs and repeating the CTU’s message, the CTU extracted almost every concession they wanted from Mayor Lightfoot and the city.
The ability of the CTU to get a contract so easily in the wake of the scandal is puzzling, especially after a consultant was hired to guide and monitor reform within the CPS after the sex-abuse scandal erupted. Although reform was needed and required in light of the nature of the scandal, the consultant later reported the CTU resisted cooperation and refused to return the firm’s phone calls regarding the matter.
“The Chicago Teachers Union failed to participate in a major study aimed at protecting students from sexual violence, according to the study and its authors.”
“Consultant Maggie Hickey, a former federal prosecutor hired last year to help Chicago Public Schools revamp its Office of Student Protections and Title IX, wrote in a Sept. 26 report that she tried repeatedly to seek the input of CTU President Jesse Sharkey but received no cooperation.”
“The Chicago Teachers Union President is the only person we contacted who failed to respond to our inquiries. We made multiple attempts to contact him by phone, by email, and through his assistant and office, during both our preliminary and follow-up evaluations,” Hickey wrote in a footnote to her 134-page report.
Jesse Sharkey refused to return phone calls?
It’s not just sexual assaults that point to the depraved condition of Chicago’s public education system. This is also a system backed by the CTU that fails to provide even the most basic literacy skills to its youth, particularly its minority youth.
A failure of the schooling system fleshed out in an essay following the end of the 2019 CTU strike, Chicago Contrarian’s Florian Sohnke wrote:
“According to illinoisreportcard.com, of the nearly 106,000 students registered in Chicago School District 299 high schools, an astounding 25 percent of students do not graduate, 11 percent fail to earn a degree over four years, and SAT scores among CPS students lag far behind students in separate school districts throughout the state. In addition to those gloomy statistics, 19 percent of those enrolled as freshmen in CPS secondary schools are not fully prepared for the first year of high school. Across the entire District, of the 631 schools on every level, a mere 11 are declared “exemplary,” 431 are regarded as “commendable,” another 114 are classified as “underperforming,” and the bottom 82 are labeled as “lowest performing.” Worse, one-third of CPS students are habitually truant, one-quarter chronically absent, and dropout rates are ascending. Hardly data Sharkey prefers the public to know, of the 20,900 full-time employees (FTE), 36 percent of educators found a reason to miss more than ten school days of work and approximately ten percent of classroom instructors fail to earn a proficient or excellent rating. All of this, of course, is occurring in a district which pays educators an average annual salary of $74,446, administrators an average salary of $110,862, and spends an average of $13,000 on students.”
With the fiasco at the CPS and the CTU ignoring demands to institute reform after a sexual abuse scandal, why did the CTU get such a good contract? Why was the corruption and institutional failure there largely ignored by elected officials and the media? Why have no demonstrations, rioting or looting taken place?
The answer is not complicated. The CPS and CTU illuminate a central and chilling theme repeated throughout the country: The transgressions of any group, individual or institution willing to jump on the progressive bandwagon, particularly in the drive to falsely vilify the police, can be overlooked or forgiven, so long as they maintain the progressive party line.
And the CPS and CTU are pivotal players in the progressive movement, particularly in their vilification of the police, both in curriculum and ideology.
According to Block Club Chicago:
“Chicago Public Schools students, teachers and parents are spearheading a Lincoln Park protest Thursday to publicly demand that the city defund the Chicago Police Department.”
“We are calling for a city that puts people before profits and pain,” organizers said. “We are calling for a better future for our children and for ourselves.”
It marks a particular arrogance and self-delusion for an education institution with the defective record of the CPS and the CTU to be attacking the police. Imagine the response if a youth were raped in the custody of Chicago police officers. Fellow officers would be furious, and the FOP would hardly fail to return phone calls addressing how such crimes were perpetuated right under their nose.
The CPS will always retreat to the mythology of police coercion and abuse to justify their antipathy of the police, but just as the CTU and CPS have overlooked prevalent evidence of sexual assault against their students, they have ignored extensive evidence of false allegations against police officers, evidence that murderers and rapists have been set free under false pretenses, even those who murdered children. Indeed, attempts by the police union to confront them with this evidence has consistently been met with stone silence.
The CPS and CTU joining the progressive anti-police movement reverberating throughout the city explains why the sexual abuse scandal failed to generate the ire of Mayor Lightfoot in her negotiations with the union, but a police officer working 12-hours shifts day after day and being incessantly attacked by uniformed, hysterical protesters, earned her wrath when one officer gave protesters the finger.
Chicago educators and their union are simultaneously undermining the two social levers to reduce crime: Education on the front end, and the criminal justice system on the other. A sign of how deep the anti-police movement has burrowed itself into Chicago institutions, this is dangerous and it is placing Chicago’s youth, particularly the minority students, at the greatest risk.
It also begs one significant question: Before defunding the police, would it be better to defund the public educators?
