CTU plans to try to pressure state lawmakers into providing more money for Chicago schools. But Springfield is tapped out.
Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez, left, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates hold a news conference at City Hall in Chicago on June 8, 2023, to announce changes to the CPS parental leave policy. On Wednesday, hundreds of Chicago Public Schools teacher will descend on Springfield to lobby lawmakers in what they’re calling a “day of action” for what they contend is more than $1 billion “owed” to the city’s school system by the state.
None of these tactics should come as a surprise, either. The CTU playbook has been made up of “action days,” incendiary rhetoric and a sea of red shirts for years now. And it’s impossible to dispute the success of those pressure tactics. That the CTU has its own fully captured mayor sitting on the fifth floor is the culmination of a decade’s worth of radical politicization of an organization that after all is — or should be — simply a labor union.
Still, CTU will charge ahead Wednesday. The money grubbing, of course, is shameless given that the union is demandingIt’s not as if CPS has been suffering a decline — or even a leveling off — of state funds since Pritzker took office in 2019. State contributions to CPS have increased 14% in that time frame to more than $2.1 billion, from less than $1.9 billion. The percentage increase is substantially more when one accounts for the 10.
Not helping CPS/CTU’s cause, given their inability thus far to shake the money tree in Springfield or anywhere else, is their furtive method of providing more cash to floundering schools in parts of the city where parents are choosing options they consider better for their kids, or from where families with school-age children simply have fled.
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