The Chicago Disaster

 George Will at the Washington Post.

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In the disaster that is Chicago, its teachers union plays a starring role

Stacy Davis Gates, president of what is, in effect, Chicago’s government — the Chicago Teachers Union — has at last done something helpful. Having denounced school choice as fascist (Mussolini favored it? Who knew?) and, of course, racist (what isn’t?), she has enrolled her son in a private school. This is so that (she recently explained to her union members) “he could live out his dream of being a soccer player while also having a curriculum that can meet his social and emotional needs.”

Davis Gates has erased the patina of idealism that cloaks the CTU’s sacrifice of students on the altar of its avarice. By diminishing her union, her hypocrisy might benefit its victims, who include K-12 students imprisoned in dysfunctional public schools. Other victims are the rest of the city’s shrinking population, buffeted by progressive policies implemented by politicians who are the CTU’s poodles.

The union’s current crusade is to kill the Invest in Kids Act, Illinois’ school choice program, which serves 9,600 children from low-income families and had a waiting list of 26,000 children as of July. Unless renewed by the state legislature, it will expire Dec. 31. Davis Gates earns 483 percent more than the average family that received a scholarship through Empower Illinois, the state’s largest scholarship-granting organization.

Mayor Brandon Johnson was a paid CTU lobbyist, whose salary averaged nearly $90,000, before his April election, which was fueled by an $8-a-month CTU assessment from its members. Although Johnson taught for only four years in Chicago’s public schools, he is eligible for union benefits (among others) totaling $1.1 million over his expected lifetime.

Think of the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund’s unfunded liability ($13.8 billion and rising), part of the city’s total pension liability (at least $48 billion and rising), as deferred taxation: The public will pay, eventually. Chicagoans should book interstate moving vans after digesting data assembled by the Illinois Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization:

Minority pupils compose 89 percent of Chicago’s public-school student body. In third through eighth grades, the percentage of Black students proficient in reading and math are 11 percent and 6 percent. Hispanics 17 percent, 11 percent. The percentage of 11th-graders proficient on the SAT in reading and math: Black students 10 and 8; Hispanics: 16 and 17. In 22 schools, not a single student can read at grade level; in 33, not a single student can do math at grade level. Even the supposedly good news is disgusting: Last year, the graduation rate was a record-high 82.9 percent — even though chronic absenteeism is 49 percent among low-income students.

These are the results of public-school operational spending increasing 58 percent in a decade, to $26,356 per pupil. Mostly this funds teachers’ salaries and benefits. Teachers praising “socialism” and prating about “social justice” thrive while their students’ futures are stunted.

The society in which the schools are situated is fraying. A neighborhood group pleads for people to refrain from gunfire between 9 a.m. and 9 p.m. Serious crime increased 41 percent from 2021 to 2022 and is up 29 percent in the first nine months of this year. Since 2019, the number of police officers is down more than 1,700, and shoplifting, essentially decriminalized by police incapacity (1,000 police positions are unfilled), is causing grocery store closures in crime-plagued neighborhoods. The mayor, unfazed by presiding over failures regarding fundamentals — education and public safety — suggests government grocery stores. What could go wrong?

To Chicagoans, “the Loop” denotes the downtown section circled by elevated train tracks. Now the city is caught in the vortex of a “doom loop.”

Progressive politicians produce high tax rates. (Among U.S. cities, Chicago has the second-highest commercial property taxes and, as of 2021, the highest combined state and local sales taxes.) Progressive prosecutors produce demoralized police and high crime rates. (Arrests were made in just 12 percent of crimes in 2021, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.) Crime and taxes cause renters to abandon commercial real estate leases. (Kroll Bond Rating Agency says the rate of delinquent or otherwise distressed commercial real estate loans in August, in the single digits nationally, was 22.7 percent in Chicago, the worst among major U.S. cities.) Nearby retail and restaurant enterprises struggle and fail. Homeowners’ taxes rise to compensate for plunging commercial property valuations. Residents flee. Decline accelerates.

Chicago has had Democratic mayors for 92 consecutive years. The 50-member City Council has no Republicans. The “toddlin’ town” Frank Sinatra celebrated is a tottering town. And a warning to the nation about governments on short leashes tightly held by their employees’ unions.