The Chicago Public Schools system is a disaster, and it isn’t being helped by the fact that the city’s Democratic officials keep using it as a political tool.
Mayor Brandon Johnson is trying to push out the district’s CEO, Pedro Martinez, over a dispute in which Martinez opposed Johnson’s plan for a $300 million short-term, high-interest loan for school funding after the Democratic legislature rejected Johnson’s funding request. The feud eventually led all seven members of the city’s school board to step down, allowing Johnson to appoint new members who could fire Martinez.
The seven school board members who resigned were handpicked by Johnson back in 2023. He counts an environmental activist and a former member of the teachers’ union among his new appointees. Johnson is also a former organizer for the Chicago Teachers Union, which declared that reopening schools during the pandemic “is rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny” and that standardized testing is “rooted in white supremacy.”
That same union has been agitating for massive funding increases that CPS said would balloon the district’s budget deficit by at least $2.5 billion. Chicago’s education spending has risen steadily since 2012, up 97%, while reading scores and math scores have dropped by 63% and 78%, respectively, over that same time. The union has also demanded stipends for illegal immigrants and a forced transition to electric school buses.
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Everyone is in a political fight. Johnson is fighting with Martinez over control of the school system, and the union is fighting with CPS for even bigger handouts for progressive political priorities from taxpayers. It is Democratic political operatives and Democratic political activists all the way down, using the school system as a political toy to try and one-up each other.
Left behind in all of this are the students of Chicago, the country’s third-largest city. They are trapped in failing schools that are somehow getting worse educational results while receiving even more funding, all while the adults in charge use them as political pawns to do everything but actually fix the schools that are failing to teach them. As is par for the course, Democrats use education as a political platform and then use the education system as a political tool, where the students who are supposed to be the focus are used as nothing more than talking points for funds or other political priorities.