Chicago Teachers Union President Ends Equity Debate by Exercising Choice
Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates unintentionally delivered the best mic drop to conversations on how to truly promote equity in America and empower children to unleash their potential. The union president who has called supporters of school choice ‘racist’ now sends one of her three children to private Catholic school.
Davis Gates is fortunate enough to be able to exercise the powerful choice of sending her child to a school of her choosing rather than to Chicago Public Schools. All families deserve that same opportunity, though Davis Gates and the CTU have fought it.
That’s why the rest of America needs to beware the CTU’s unjust and hypocritical governance model, which they’re aggressively working to export across the country. It harms students. It harms America’s future.
Davis Gates explained her decision in a letter to CTU members by saying she and her husband were “forced” to send their son to “private high school so he could live out his dream of being a soccer player while also having a curriculum that can meet his social and emotional needs.” No doubt.
CPS is failing the vast majority of its 320,000-plus enrolled students. CPS schools are consistently below state averages. In some grades at certain schools, not a single student meets grade-level standards. That’s unquestionably unfair to those students.
Davis Gates also cited “substandard services to Black and Brown families.” Talk about a dramatic understatement: only 10.2% of Black 11th-grade students in CPS meet or exceed standards in reading, and fewer than 7.9% in math. Among low-income students, only 12.9% of 11th-graders are proficient in reading, and 13.3% in math. More injustice.
What’s the common thread responsible for subjugating Chicago students, families, and communities to this systemic injustice and inequity? The radical leftist leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, above all Davis Gates.
While the CTU likes to blame lack of funding, that’s simply not true. CPS’ budget this year is $9.4 billion. That comes out to nearly $30,000 per student, significantly more than the $18,000 per student expense at the school where Davis Gates thinks her son can flourish.
These gut-wrenching realities account for CPS enrollment plummeting by over 39,000 students during the past five years. When given the choice, parents vote loud and clear with their feet.
The reality is the poor and minority families most in need of the freedom to choose a school that meets their individual needs don’t have the resources – neither financially nor through clout – to exercise the same choice as Davis Gates, Rahm Emanuel, statehouse leaders, our governor and Barack Obama.
That’s why the Illinois General Assembly needs to renew and make permanent the Invest in Kids scholarship program. It’s Illinois’ only school choice program, and Davis Gates and the CTU have actively tried to kill it.
Invest in Kids empowers over 9,600 of Illinois’ neediest students to attend a school of their choosing, with an estimated four times that number waiting for a scholarship. It’s funded by generous supporters who receive a 75% state income tax credit for donating. The program is capped at $75 million annually and has brought in over $330 million since its inception. It is set to expire at the end of this year unless lawmakers act soon.
In May, the Illinois General Assembly intentionally didn’t include a renewal in the state budget. This decision was driven by enormous pressure from the CTU, which has given tens of millions of dollars to Illinois politicians.
With the hypocrisy of CTU leadership unmasked, Illinois lawmakers need to vote for Illinois families and make Invest in Kids permanent in the veto session starting Oct. 24.
CTU is eager to export its radical model across America. That agenda entails installing union leaders such as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson into elected office so unions can pull all the levers of power, including being on both sides of the table when negotiating new union contracts. Expect Johnson to repay unions handsomely for bankrolling him.
And this radical model includes enshrining union supremacy in state constitutions, as it did with Amendment 1 in Illinois in November 2022. Unions in California and Pennsylvania are now pushing similar measures.
The very idea of America is premised on the notion all Americans are free to pursue happiness. The only way that idea can stay alive is by erasing the inequity rampant across America through systemic change that will empower children to unleash their potential. And as Davis Gates has shown, it starts with school choice.
Josh Bandoch, Ph.D., is head of policy at the Illinois Policy Institute, a nonpartisan organization focused on free-market principles, based in Chicago.
