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Chicago Public Schools should be closed, blown up, and every teacher fired. 

I don’t say that lightly. Every person, a supporter of public schools or not, should be ashamed that any school system so damaging to children should even exist. 

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Yet, because Chicago’s incompetent mayor is a creature of the public schools, teachers will no doubt get a raise, get more power, and may even shape climate policy for the city. 

Student performance measures in Chicago have never been impressive, but pandemic-era policies pushed by the Chicago Teachers Union only made things worse. Yet, when asked to grade the performance of public schools Johnson said the quiet part out loud: he doesn’t care about performance, only pouring more money into the failing system. 

That’s how you wind up with public schools spending astronomical sums per student without a single one of them able to perform at grade level. Nobody in the system appears to care, as long as the money keeps flowing to the teachers and administrators. 

Besides, they have REALLY important issues to deal with, like climate change. 

The Center Square) – The Chicago Teachers Union is pushing its Green Schools Campaign in negotiations with Chicago Public Schools.

The union wants retro-fitted buildings, solar panels, electric school buses and carbon-neutral programs, in addition to major increases in pay and staffing levels.

CTU President Stacy Davis Gates said it was students who pushed the union to bargain about things not immediately connected to reading, writing and arithmetic.

“The young people in this city have been very vocal about the responsibility and the accountability that grown-ups have in sustaining our Earth,” Gates said.

Jeff Fiedler of the Chicago Republican Party said CTU leaders want to change the narrative.

“They don’t want to talk about how the kids are failing in Chicago Public Schools, how minority kids are failing, how people are leaving,” Fiedler said.

CPS enrollment is down about 20% since 2010. Taxpayer funding of CPS has increased more than 50% during the same period.

Fiedler explained that the climate demands are CTU’s Green New Deal.

“How is any of this going to solve the immediate problem that most of the children, who are Chicago children, cannot read, cannot write, and cannot compute?” Fiedler asked.

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Chicago Republican Party? There’s a Chicago Republican Party? Good luck with that. 

Teachers claim that they are doing this for the students, which is ironic since the teachers are themselves the ones who focused on these issues to get the students riled up about them in the first place. 

There’s no shortage of money for schools in Chicago, of course. It’s the results that aren’t there. 

Chicago under Johnson is facing a fiscal death spiral and an educational apocalypse, and he seems just fine with that. As long as the public employees get their cut of the money he and his union cronies seem happy to see the city fall apart. 

Eliminating the public schools is not a complete solution to Chicago’s problems–not even the educational problems, which have many intersecting causes. 

But this would be a good start. 

Unfortunately, people in Blue Cities seem convinced that public servants want to serve the public, and that their only problem is lack of resources. 

$30,000/student is much more than enough; what you need are teachers who care about teaching and lots fewer schools (many are half full or less), administrators, and DEI programs. 

No doubt what Chicagoans will get instead are solar panels on schools and better pay for useless teachers. 

And Democrat mayors as far as the eye can see.