Chicago, Its Teachers Union, and ‘Mayor CTU’s’ Risky Power Grab

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Since early October, Chicago’s school system has been upended by political intrigue reminiscent of what one reads about in history books covering corrupt nineteenth-century city governments. In a move that the Wall Street Journal editorial board called a “coup” led by Chicago Teacher Union-backed Mayor Brandon Johnson, all seven members of the Chicago Board of Education resigned on October 4. Those resignations came just weeks before Chicagoans were set, for the first time ever, to vote for their school board members, who have historically been appointed by the mayor.

The proximate cause of the political fracas is a $300 million hole in Chicago Public Schools’ annual budget, driven primarily by the drying up of federal pandemic relief dollars. But funding challenges in the Windy City are downstream of a concerning reality: Chicago is increasingly beholden to the wishes of its teachers union. This is especially the case under the leadership of Mayor Brandon Johnson, who spent a decade as an organizer for the CTU and ascended to the mayoralty with its backing. At the helm of the city, Johnson has been willing to bend over backward to put his union sympathies into policy. A since-retired reporter told Chicago Magazine editor Edward McClelland that CTU President Stacy Davis Gates “made Brandon Johnson.” Now, “Stacy Davis Gates owns Brandon Johnson.” 

Former U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D) shared a similar sentiment: “We have a new political machine [in Chicago], and it’s called the CTU, and its vassal is Mayor Johnson.”

The previous board’s resignations marked the apex of the tensions that have been simmering between it and Johnson ever since the board approved a controversial $9.9 billion budget in July. In addition, the board has sided with CPS CEO Pedro Martinez in opposing a $300 million short-term, high-interest loan to pay for the expensive raises sought by the CTU, which is negotiating a new contract with the board. After Johnson’s hardball move, there’s little question that the union’s negotiators are breathing a sigh of relief. In the memorable words of Chicago Magazine’s McClelland, following the board’s resignations, “Mayor CTU will appoint a set of lackeys, brownnosers, and apple polishers who will carry out the Chicago Teachers Union’s program” — fire Martinez, take out the loan, and use the money to hand out 9% raises for teachers.

Indeed, it’s clear that Johnson’s recent school board moves align well with the CTU’s positions. The union, which is actively hostile toward Martinez, wants him gone. But the school board, which was almost entirely hand-picked by Johnson himself, refused to play along because it recognized the irresponsibility of taking on a risky loan.

It’s worth dwelling a bit on the financial situation of CPS. It can be boiled down to two words: not good. The school board passed a $9.9 billion budget in July that did not include money for the contract that the board is currently negotiating with the CTU, which typically adds $100 million to $120 million annually to the district’s operating costs, nor a non-teaching-staff pension payment that will cost the district $175 million. 

These two expenses culminated in the roughly $300 million gap mentioned above. Mayor Johnson has pushed the school board and Martinez to take out a loan to close this gap, but because CPS bonds are “junk” rated, the interest payments on the loan would likely be exorbitant. Indeed, CPS is already $9.3 billion in debt, and principal and interest payments on outstanding debt — the debt that exists before this potential new loan would take effect — will total $817 million this year alone. When Johnson first floated the idea of taking out a loan in July, an internal CPS memo reviewed by Chalkbeat called it a “fictional or phantom revenue source.”

An apparent lack of adequate state funding may also be at play here. In 2017, Illinois changed its school-funding formula to better fund historically under-resourced districts. Under the reformed funding formula, CPS only has 79% of its required funding this year due to the district’s recent increase in English language learners and a decrease in local revenue, both of which increased the required funding per the state’s formula. 

Lurking in the background of this shortfall is the rocky relationship between Johnson and Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker, providing fertile ground for the conspiracy-minded to suspect that the governor is holding back funding from Chicago’s schools out of personal pettiness. But the reality is more prosaic: Other districts in Illinois are even worse off than Chicago, including the 49 of them that are funded below 70%of what the state formula says they need. This suggests that Chicago is not being squashed by gubernatorial caprices. In the words of one person close to CPS, “I think that the union thought, once Brandon [Johnson] got elected, that they’d be able to walk into Springfield and get whatever they wanted. . . . But there’s no money, especially after ESSER funds have expired.”

Still, Chicago spends a lot of money each year on education. Per-student operating expenses in FY 22 totaled $24,132, roughly double the national average. Moreover, as Chad Aldeman wrote last month, CPS has added thousands of personnel at the same time that enrollment in the district has been declining. “Budgeting decisions like these would be anathema in any other industry,” argues Aldeman, “where leaders normally try to match up the number of employees with customer demand.” But “Chicago Public Schools is doing the opposite.” 

Indeed, Aldeman notes that the district “chose to invest 92% of its one-time relief funds in full-time school employees,” a decision that greatly benefited the CTU’s members — and, by extension, CTU’s coffers.

But “Mayor CTU” refuses to countenance worries about the CPS’s dire financial straits. In the press conference during which Johnson announced the board’s new appointees — which local news outlets have described as “fiery” and “combative” — he compared those raising concerns about fiscal responsibility to slaveholders. “They said it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate Black people,” Johnson argued. “And now you have detractors making the same argument of the Confederacy when it comes to public education in this system.”

One can hardly blame the CTU for its insistence that its members receive generous raises, financial considerations be damned. The first concern of a union, after all, is simple: to act in the best interests of its members. But Brandon Johnson deserves less sympathy. In a time of unprecedented financial chaos for the school district, Mayor Johnson is acting in the interests not of Chicago as a whole but of the CTU. This is not to suggest that Johnson is a stooge of the union. Johnson strikes this observer as a full-throated advocate for the cause on which he rose to power, which is why the CTU funded him so generously in the first place; the arrow of causality does not point in the opposite direction.

Still, Johnson should know better than to jeopardize the financial health of the city’s school system in order to push forward the interests of just one of his many constituencies. In contrast, Chicago voters delivered a strong anti-union verdict in last week’s elections, as just four of the 10 school-board candidates elected were backed by the CTU. 

Perhaps this is a sign that Chicagoans have recognized the peril of being beholden to the union.

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