To right-size public schools, Chicago should adopt the federal BRACS process
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) has discovered a painless method of balancing its budget: Don’t balance it. Instead, raid the city’s tax-increment-financing (TIF) accounts, call the proceeds a “surplus,” and use the windfall to postpone decisions about a school system that employs too many people and operates too many buildings for its shrinking student population.
For fiscal year 2026, Chicago declared a record TIF surplus of slightly more than $1 billion. Because CPS receives roughly 55 percent of property tax revenue collected in the city, the school district’s share came to about $552 million. That was considerably more than the $379 million CPS had assumed in its budget and amounted to about 5 percent of the district’s $10.2 billion spending plan. The transaction was celebrated as a victory for education. It might more accurately be described as a victory over arithmetic.
TIF districts were created to finance redevelopment in areas where private investment supposedly would not occur without public assistance. Property-tax revenue generated by growth above a district’s original tax base is deposited into a special account rather than distributed immediately to schools, parks and other taxing bodies.
When City Hall declares that some of this money is no longer needed for redevelopment, it is returned to the taxing bodies as surplus. The money therefore looks free only because it was diverted from ordinary public budgets in the first place.
Chicago’s annual TIF sweep has evolved into a municipal shell game. Money is withheld from normal distribution in the name of redevelopment, accumulates in special accounts, and is later released with great fanfare to rescue CPS and City Hall from operating deficits. The Civic Federation has warned that TIF was designed as an economic-development mechanism, not a recurring source of operating revenue, and that today’s enormous surpluses cannot be counted on indefinitely as districts expire.
The greater problem is what the TIF rescue allows CPS not to do. Chicago’s school system faces a structural mismatch between enrollment and infrastructure. About 150 schools are at least half empty, while 47 operate at less than one-third of their intended capacity. Since 2017, those 47 severely under-enrolled schools have absorbed more than $213 million in maintenance and renovation spending. They also account for roughly $400 million of CPS’s estimated $3.1 billion in critical building repairs.
A school building designed for 1,000 children but serving 200 still requires a principal, clerical support, security, custodians, engineers, utilities, inspections, roof repairs, boilers and masonry work. Its students may receive fewer courses, sports, clubs and advanced programs because there are too few of them to support a full educational menu.
Closing such a school does not eliminate the cost of educating its students. Teachers, special-education services and instructional materials must follow them to receiving schools. Transportation and transition expenses may rise. Nor does every closure produce the total amount of savings promised by consultants.
Operating two largely empty buildings when the students could be accommodated in one is not compassion. It is an expensive refusal to choose. The dollars consumed heating empty classrooms cannot also be spent on reading specialists, safer buildings, and vocational education, not to mention tax relief for Chicago’s already overburdened taxpayers.
CPS needs a facilities commission with the independence and authority to recommend consolidations, attendance-boundary changes and closures across the entire system. Chicago tried something similar before, but it designed the body to fail.
In 2012, CPS established the Commission on School Utilization under former Commonwealth Edison executive Frank Clark. The Clark Commission examined enrollment, school capacity and the consequences of possible closures. It conducted hearings and offered general recommendations during the turbulent process that preceded the 2013 school closings.
However, the commission was essentially toothless. It could advise CPS, but it could not compel the district to accept its findings. It did not control the final closure list, and politicians remained free to evaluate each school according to the intensity of the protests surrounding it. That is precisely why a Chicago commission should resemble the federal Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) process.
BRAC was created in 1988 because Congress had proved incapable of closing obsolete military installations. Nearly every member could agree that the Pentagon maintained too many bases, but few would vote to close the base in their own district. The solution was an independent commission applying uniform criteria to a comprehensive national package.
Under the traditional BRAC framework, the commission’s recommendations were reviewed as a whole. The President could accept or reject the package, and Congress could block it only by rejecting it in its entirety. Legislators could not quietly remove their local base while leaving everyone else’s on the closure list. The process also relied on published standards, reviewed data, public hearings, and community participation in reuse decisions.
A Chicago School Realignment Commission (CSRC) could operate similarly. It would examine enrollment, usable capacity, per-pupil operating costs, building conditions, demographic projections, academic programs, transportation, student safety and the quality of proposed receiving schools. It would then submit one package of closures, mergers, grade reorganizations, and boundary adjustments.
The Chicago Board of Education would vote thumbs up or down. It could not save one politically connected school while closing another in identical circumstances. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) would argue that schools are community institutions, not military warehouses. It would say that CPS capacity formulas treat art rooms, counseling areas, bilingual programs and special education classrooms as vacant space. It would note that the 2013 closures fell heavily on back neighborhoods and that moving students into unfamiliar territory created safety and transportation concerns. The union would demand evidence that receiving schools are academically stronger and properly staffed.
CTU would also contend that CPS helped manufacture excess capacity by opening charter schools while neighborhood enrollment declined. What does that have to do with the price of potatoes? CTU will do or say anything that harms the beauty of school choice. Its retrospective on the 2013 closings disputed the district’s savings claims and argued that affected students did not receive the promised educational benefits. According to whom?
These objections are not frivolous but they are exaggerated. Any commission should of course guarantee public hearings, audited data, realistic capacity measurements, safe-passage planning, and investments in receiving schools before students arrive. Communities should participate in deciding whether closed buildings are sold, demolished or reused.
CTU’s likely alternative is not cost-free. The union has generally favored investing more money in under-enrolled schools in hopes of allegedly attracting students back. Good luck with that. That may work in selected neighborhoods. It cannot be a systemwide facilities policy when Chicago has lost tens of thousands of students and maintains dozens of buildings that are mostly empty.
Nor should union opposition determine whether consolidation occurs. CTU represents its members. That is why they exist. It does not represent taxpayers, future students, bondholders, or families whose children attend crowded or inadequately programmed schools elsewhere in the city.
The purpose of a BRAC-style commission is not to remove politics from school policy. That is impossible. Its purpose is to prevent every alderman, board member, union official, and neighborhood organization from agreeing that consolidation is necessary while insisting that somebody else’s school be consolidated. The CTU opposition will be ferocious but not any more ferocious than those congressional districts that were losing their gravy train.
For fiscal 2027, CPS has prudently reduced its assumed TIF surplus to $200 million. Yet it still depends on that uncertain revenue while proposing furloughs and spending restrictions to cover the remainder of its gap.
Chicago can continue sweeping TIF accounts, shifting pension obligations and pretending that one-time money has cured a recurring deficit. It can also admit that a school system serving fewer children requires fewer facilities. TIF money has enabled CPS to avoid biting the bullet. A genuine school-closing commission would make sure the next bullet cannot be passed around City Hall indefinitely.
