Rahm Emanuel tried to get a handle on the cost of public education in Chicago. But since he’s been gone, the system is back to the same old tax and spend
Rahm Emanuel is reportedly thinking about running for president, which is amusing on several levels. For one thing, he has almost no chance of winning the Democratic nomination. For another, one of the reasons he has no chance is what he actually got right as mayor of Chicago: He tried to impose some fiscal reality on Chicago Public Schools.
That made him a villain to the teacher's union, the activist class, and the permanent grievance industry that surrounds public education in this city.
Emanuel’s great sin was closing under-enrolled schools. In 2013, CPS shut down 50 schools, most of them elementary schools, in what critics called the largest mass school closing in American history. The political fallout was enormous. The Chicago Teachers Union and its allies treated the closures as an act of war.
But here is the question nobody on the left wants to answer honestly: What exactly is a school district supposed to do when it has far fewer students than buildings?
The current CPS system has 316,224 students and 630 schools. The district’s Fiscal Year 2026 budget is $10.25 billion. That is not a typo. Ten billion dollars. Divide that by enrollment, and you are looking at more than $32,000 per student before you even get into the absurdities of specific half-empty buildings.
And there are plenty of absurdities.
A Civic Federation analysis found that 58 percent of CPS buildings are underutilized, meaning they are below 70 percent capacity. In 2024, 154 out of 498 CPS schools were operating at less than half capacity. Chalkbeat and ProPublica found 47 schools operating below one-third capacity, almost twice as many severely under-enrolled buildings as Chicago had at the time of the 2013 closings. The most ridiculous example was Frederick Douglass Academy High School, with 28 students and a per-student cost of $93,000.
That is not a school system. That is a jobs program with blackboards.
Rahm Emanuel understood, at least partially, the numbers did not work. If you have a building designed for 800 children and it has 150 children, you do not have a school. You have a monument to denial. You still have heat, electricity, maintenance, administration, security, janitorial services, support staff, lunchroom operations, and all the overhead of a functioning institution. But you do not have the students to justify it.
In the real world, that means consolidation.
The Archdiocese of Chicago understands this. The Catholic Church has closed parishes, churches, and schools all over the city because there are no longer enough parishioners, students, or tuition-paying families to support them. And the Church has God on its side. Even so, the Archdiocese does not sit around waiting for divine intervention to pay the gas bill at a half-empty school.
It closes schools. It consolidates parishes. It moves students. It does what any rational organization does when the numbers no longer add up.
But CPS is not run like a rational organization. It is run like a political protection racket.
Under Brandon Johnson, our Mayor 6.6, the city has gone back to the same old tax-and-spend theology that created the crisis in the first place. Johnson is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chicago Teachers Union. He came out of that world. He was elected by that world. And he governs as if the first duty of city government is not to educate children, protect taxpayers, or preserve Chicago’s future, but to keep CTU happy.
One of the worst developments is the abandonment of the principle that money should follow the student. Instead, money increasingly follows the school. That means a school can lose enrollment and still be protected from the fiscal consequences of losing enrollment. CPS itself says its FY 2026 school allocations use prior-year enrollment to prevent budget reductions even if actual enrollment declines.
Think about what that means. A family leaves Chicago. A child leaves CPS. The school still keeps the money structure. The system protects the building, the staff, and the bureaucracy, not the student.
That is backward.
The defenders of this madness will say every school needs a full complement of services. That sounds nice until you remember this city cannot even fill positions evenly across its own neighborhoods. In safer, more stable areas, staffing is easier. In unsafe neighborhoods, vacancies are far worse, especially in hard-to-fill areas like special education.
That brings us back to the one great truth Chicago progressives refuse to learn: Public safety is the prerequisite for everything else.
It is the prerequisite for education. It is the prerequisite for business investment. It is the prerequisite for housing stability. It is the prerequisite for neighborhood revival. If teachers do not feel safe going to work, if families do not feel safe sending children to school, if businesses will not invest in the neighborhood, then no amount of “equity” language will save the school.
You cannot build a functioning education system on a foundation of lawlessness.
Special education is another major cost driver. Federal law mandates services for students with disabilities, and morally, those students deserve an education. But the federal government has never adequately funded the mandate it created. Congress once contemplated covering 40 percent of the excess cost of special education. It has never come close. The current federal share is commonly estimated at less than 12 or 13 percent.
That leaves local school districts and taxpayers holding the bag.
Rahm Emanuel’s administration was aggressive, arguably too aggressive, in trying to control special education costs. His administration got into legal trouble over it. But even if Emanuel crossed lines, the underlying pressure was real. When Washington mandates services but does not fund them, and Springfield and Chicago politicians refuse to make hard choices, the bill eventually lands on the homeowner.
And the homeowner is tapped out.
In Cook County, we are already seeing the result: Property tax bills that make no economic sense. Houses in marginal neighborhoods can be worth $200,000 and carry $17,000 tax bills that look like a second mortgage. What happens then? People leave. Businesses leave. Families leave. Children leave CPS. Enrollment falls. Buildings become emptier. Per-pupil costs rise. The system demands more money. Taxes rise again.
That is the death spiral.
The activists will insist that closing schools causes enrollment decline. That confuses cause and effect. The enrollment decline is what makes closures necessary. When families disappear, when birthrates fall, when residents leave the city, and when parents seek alternatives, you cannot pretend the old physical footprint still makes sense.
Emanuel also expanded charter schools, which infuriated the CTU for the obvious reason that charters threatened the union monopoly. Critics can argue about the charter record, and not every charter school is a miracle. But the basic impulse was correct: CPS needed competition, flexibility, and alternatives to a system that too often exists for the benefit of adults and their careers.
And whatever else one says about Rahm, student performance improved during his tenure. Stanford researcher Sean Reardon found Chicago students were learning and growing faster than students in 96 percent of districts nationally. Other reporting noted CPS test-score gains from 2009 to 2014 outpaced the national average.
That did not happen because Chicago poured money into ghost schools. It happened because there was at least some willingness to challenge the old model.
Now the old model is back with a vengeance.
The inmates are running the asylum. The teachers' union effectively runs the school system. The mayor is its political product. The school board is increasingly a theater for organized interests. The taxpayers are treated as an inexhaustible resource. And the children, supposedly the reason the system exists, are too often used as human shields for adult employment demands.
No serious city can survive this way.
A school district with declining enrollment must shrink its footprint. It must consolidate buildings. It must put students in schools large enough to offer real academic programs, sports, clubs, arts, advanced classes, and support services. A tiny school with a massive per-pupil cost is not automatically a community treasure. It may be an educational dead end.
Chicago needs to stop pretending otherwise.
The answer is not another tax hike. It is not another bailout. It is not another round of Springfield money. It is not another CTU contract that treats taxpayers like an ATM. The answer is a rational system that educates children cost-effectively, sends money where students actually are, closes ghost schools where necessary, and restores public safety so families and teachers want to stay in the city.
Rahm Emanuel was no fiscal saint. But on this issue, he saw the obvious: You cannot run a school system for students who are no longer there.
Chicago forgot that lesson. And if voters do not replace the politicians presiding over this madness, the whole house of cards is going to collapse right on our heads.
