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Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, are set to tout their education policies to the nation at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week. Walz, a former teacher and wife of a former teacher, is fond of talking about her time as a teacher. But anyone interested in the future of education under a Harris-Walz administration will learn more by looking outside the convention than inside it.
Chicago schools will be almost completely deserted this week, as planned. This year, district leaders said the city will be “accommodating an estimated influx of 75,000 visitors” and “[allow] It’s a time for students to attend conventions, volunteer and get involved in the civic life of conventions.”
Yes, 320,000 students are out of school and forced to watch political parties talk about the importance of education. Teachers are still expected to come to work for professional development days, and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) plans to bus teachers to Soldier Field on Thursday night to watch Harris’ acceptance speech on a big screen.
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It is difficult to imagine that Chicago Public Schools (CPS) or the Chicago Transit District would have been so tolerant of other groups, and it seems suspicious that the school district would have such concerns about an event with 75,000 attendees when it has no such concerns about the city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day celebration, which draws hundreds of thousands of people.
A sign in support of Vice President Kamala Harris is held up at the American Federation of Teachers’ 88th National Convention on July 25, 2024 in Houston, Texas. (Montinique Monroe/Getty Images)
This isn’t the first time Chicago students have been kept out of school for political reasons: Chicago Public Schools didn’t fully reopen from the impacts of COVID-19 until late August 2021, a full year after many other school districts successfully returned students to the classroom. The CTU, an umbrella organization of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a since-deleted tweet that reopening efforts were “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.”
Even if schools had been open this week, the failures of our union-controlled school system would be obvious if you looked far and wide: A five-minute walk from the United Center is William H. Brown STEM Magnet School, where proficient rates in English Language Arts (ELA) and math are less than 10 percent.
At Robert Nathaniel Dett Elementary, less than a half-mile from the convention site, less than 1 percent of students are English proficient and more than 60 percent are chronically absent. At Talcott Elementary, just a mile north from where Harris and Waltz will be speaking, proficiency rates in both core subjects are below 30 percent. These schools are not isolated cases; district-wide, proficiency rates in reading and math are below 30 percent.
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Even when schools are open, many of them are nearly empty: Enrollment is expected to fall by more than 50,000 students between 2018 and 2023, and 181 district schools were operating at less than 50% capacity last school year. Douglas and Manly high schools were 96% and 95% empty, respectively.
Local leaders can’t close the emptiest schools even if they wanted to: A 2021 state law that the CTU praised prohibits CPS from closing schools until early 2025. A bill has been proposed to extend that moratorium until 2027.
There’s no need to worry that these schools will be underutilized: The CTU is demanding that vacant floors in schools be converted into shelters for unoccupied migrants as part of a new contract currently being negotiated with CPS. The union’s $50 billion demand would cost taxpayers in the long run more than three times the amount proposed by the mayor for the city’s entire 2024 budget.
The renovation of school facilities is just one part of a long list of demands that also include across-the-board pay increases unrelated to performance and lower standards for teacher evaluations.
This isn’t the first time Chicago students have been kept out of school for political reasons: Chicago Public Schools didn’t fully reopen from the impacts of COVID-19 until late August 2021, a full year after many other school districts successfully returned students to the classroom. The CTU, an umbrella organization of the American Federation of Teachers, said in a since-deleted tweet that reopening efforts were “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.”
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The current state of education in Chicago is a perfect example of what happens when teachers unions run a city. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson was directly elected by the CTU and put into office with union funding. Johnson has appointed all but one member of the school board (though the board is scheduled to switch to a combined appointed and elected board in January). Mayor Johnson and CTU President Stacey Davis Gates spoke from the main stage at last month’s American Federation of Teachers convention.
In school, CPS students are unlikely to learn to read, write, or do math. Outside school, they have few opportunities. But they will learn the sad lesson that to education bureaucrats and union bosses, learning takes a back seat to politics.
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