Main Edition
US
FR
August 20, 2024 - 8:30pm
As the Democratic National Convention began in Chicago this week, one local group used the occasion to show off its national influence. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) has just concluded a two-day event, hosted by Progressive Democrats of America, which featured high-profile speakers including Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Pramila Jayapal, who heads the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
“It is the home of the progressive movement in the city,” CTU president Stacy Davis Gates said in her welcoming remarks, describing the auditorium where the event was being held as “the house of justice, the house of equity, the house of power”. The CTU is a branch of the American Federation of Teachers which, along with the National Education Association, represents millions of educators across the country.
Those unions are powerful in shaping the Democratic agenda on a variety of issues. First Lady Jill Biden is an NEA member. Tim Walz, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, is a former teacher whose selection by Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, has been celebrated by the unions.
The CTU, which represents 20,000 educators in the nation’s third-largest school district, clearly wants to shape the national conversation. According to the Illinois Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, only 17 cents of every dollar is spent by the CTU to advocate for its members. And as the Economist recently put it, the CTU has become “one of the most powerful in the country”, despite its relatively small membership of 20,000 (the United Auto Workers boasts 400,000). It has done so by shaping, and adopting, the rhetoric of intersectionality and “liberation” now common in progressive circles.
Gates said she was “radicalised” by the CTU’s 2012 strike, the first in a quarter of a century. The strike in Chicago led to similar actions across the country and made the CTU one of the most visible progressive organisations during Barack Obama’s second term. But once Donald Trump came along, the CTU experienced the same mission creep as the American Civil Liberties Union, Planned Parenthood and other progressive institutions. If social pathologies were intersectional, the thinking went, the solutions had to be as well. But no organisation can do everything well.
The CTU achieved a major victory in electing current Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson in 2023 with a massive organising operation. Unfortunately, though, the progressive politician is desperately unpopular — if his approval rating hits 30%, it will be major news — and the CTU is (not unfairly) blamed for guiding his administration.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
SubscribeThey’re doing a bang up job for equality… by making everyone equally poor, uneducated, and emotionally stunted.
Equity, sir. Equity. Regardless of talents and diligence, all shall be equally rewarded.
Give all these teachersxSAT tests in subjects they allegedlyvteach. One that fall into bottom half, discard.
If you mean the bottom half of society as a whole, you might need to discard pretty much all the teachers.
“The devastating argument against the CTU comes from its own work. According to results from the Illinois Assessment of Readiness, 31% Chicago students in the third through eighth grade are proficient in reading. Only 19% are proficient in maths.”
Time will tell, but progressives who believe their movement to be gaining momentum might only be perceiving the acceleration things maximally experience right before they smash into the ground.
The problem is that they are dragging the rest of us down with them! We as a society pay for their social engineering experiments, and have to deal with the fallout.
You fail to mention a lot of barriers that exist that affect learning. The students who make up the bulk of students in Chicago are poor. They are hungry, live in dangerous neighborhoods, and are most likely living with a single mother. I had parents who didn’t care what their child did. If there was any love, I didn’t see it. All of these barriers to learning make a teacher’s job harder than the teachers in private schools who can expel any kid for any reason. I’d like to see anyone here take a hand at teaching in one of these schools for two weeks.
All of that dysfunctionality you cite is born of the very same political philosophy that rules the public educational system. Liberals created the “brides of the state” and the broken families of the welfare system that they relentlessly double down on. Liberals prevent implementation of the kind of discipline necessary to keep order in any classroom. Public schools once had and exercised the prerogative to expel disruptive students but by their own progressive philosophy now as a matter of policy reject all effective restrictions on student behavior. Enrollment in private schools would be a fraction of its current level if the public schools offered a viable alternative.
Public service unions should be banned from donating any money to election campaigns. They have an incestuous and conflicted relationship with politicians. They donate money to politicians and politicians grant them pay raises and other privileges, and oppose policies like school choice. It’s frickin gross.
You are correct. It’s an endless cycle of mutual dependency for the sake of power and money, and the epitome of one hand washing the other.
I always considered unions as a way of protecting workers right. The fact that they ended up shutting down schools, putting pressure on the curriculum or taking a position on political issues unrelated to teaching suggests they are no longer a union,
I have always regarded most unions as lobbying groups. The original idea of protecting workers and working for a betterment of society has fallen by the wayside decades ago.
“The house of justice, the house of equity, the house of power”. — A few years ago, I would have said they are either incredibly naive and believe their own propaganda, but the old adage that stupidity is a more common explanation than malice no longer cuts it. These people are driven by a fervent desire to drag everyone to the bottom and to destroy society. Wilful destruction is the very definition of malicious behaviour, and they must be stopped.
It’s natural that people who live off the state should want more of it and use their collective muscle to bully their fellow citizens into paying for it.
That’s why the state should never be a provider(except where there is a natural monopoly). Its role is to regulate and arbitrate. This role is massively compromised by the conflicts of interest that arise when it becomes a provider. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t have equal access to education and healthcare via systems based on mutualism.
Absolutely.
CTU cares about 1 thing only – salary of teachers. Every 3 years, they strike. The performance of the schools is worse every single year, and yet they get salary increases. The school population is dropping, schools get closed, and they get salary increases. They should be de-certified, but in IL, that will never happen. I moved out of IL in 2009 and will never return.