Chicago Teachers Union Demands Reach Cartoonish Levels

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It’s that time of year again in the Windy City and we’re not talking about spring being in the air. The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is negotiating with the city for a renewal of their contract. Keep in mind that these negotiations are taking place just as the city is being overrun with migrants and facing a potentially crippling budget shortfall. But that’s not slowing the roll of the CTU one bit. They are calling for an increase of $50 billion (with a “b”) over their previous contract. They claim that the eye-watering figure is needed for another round of raises for their members and a wide range of new freebies including fully-paid abortions for teachers and new LGBT programs and training in the city’s schools. As you’ll see in this report from Fox News, they are making these demands when the total tax receipts for the entire state of Illinois last year were only $50.7 billion.

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) is negotiating a new contract with the public schools system and is understood to be calling for an extra $50 billion to pay for wage hikes as well as other demands such as fully paid abortions for its members, new migrant services and facilities and a host of LGBT-related requirements and training in schools.

To put the figure into context, the total base tax receipts for the state of Illinois last year were $50.7 billion.

The incredible demands are being made despite its members delivering underwhelming results for its students, with only 21 percent of the city’s eighth graders being proficient readers, according to the last Nation’s Report Card, which provides national results about students’ performance.

As noted above, it’s not as if Chicago’s public schools have been burning up the track in terms of performance to merit such a generous package. Chicago oversees a collection of school districts that have been performing worse than almost anywhere else in the nation outside of Baltimore. Less than a quarter of students are able to read or do math proficiently for their grade level. 

Is throwing more money at the problem going to improve the situation in these schools? You are to be forgiven if you’re dubious. Let’s just look at where the money would be going. They want to give another round of huge raises to the same teachers who are currently producing terrible results. Rather than putting an additional focus on math and reading, they want to implement LGBT-related programs and training in the schools. That would no doubt include “educational materials” in the libraries that are currently being banned in other states. And they want fully financed abortions for teachers? Isn’t that already covered by their health insurance?

Perhaps they want these raises because they are so poorly paid. I’m afraid that excuse isn’t going to fly either. According to salary.com, high school teachers in Chicago are paid between $56,000 and $86,000 annually, with an average of $69,200. That figure is a full $10,000 higher than the average single-income salary for all Americans and they are receiving it for a job where many of them barely work during the summer and they get extra paid days off every time there’s even a moderate amount of snowfall. 

The one area where we might have a bit of sympathy for CTU’s demands is their concern over needing additional resources for “migrants.” (In other words, the hoards of illegal aliens that are overrunning the city.) For all of the faults and shortcomings of the CTU, they were not responsible for the migrant situation. That is the fault of the state and municipal officials who established Chicago as a sanctuary city and Illinois as a sanctuary state. The migrants were fed an expectation that the children they brought with them would be given an education. But why should the taxpayers of Chicago shoulder that burden and pass the cash on to the CTU? Tell them to go to the federal government and ask for more school funding since it was Joe Biden who unleashed them all into the country, to begin with. 

This $50 billion demand is preposterous. If the city agrees to it, they will only be robbing low-income, minority communities of even more services. That’s something residents of the city have been screaming at the Mayor about all year. The reality of the situation is that everyone has had to tighten their belts because of the way the country is currently being run into the ground. The CTU needs to do the same. If they don’t like it, they should consider endorsing someone else in November and voting for them.