The city of Chicago is running out of money and the teachers want a 9% raise and other increased benefits.
They want more teacher's assistants, more nurses, more psychologists, more, more, more while the city is going to have to cut a billion dollars from other programs just to stay afloat.
Now comes word from a report released by the Illinois State Board of Education that further calls into question the actual value of Chicago teachers and whether they deserve any kind of raise at all.
The report reveals that fully 41% of Chicago teachers are "chronically absent" from their jobs. This means they missed "10 or more days of school, including sick days and other personal leave, but not including most long-term leave, such as parental or medical leave," according to the report.
Chicago already has the highest-paid teachers of any school district in the country. They want to take out a $300 million loan at usurious rates to fund all these new goodies. And because the mayor of Chicago, Brandon Johnson, is in the teachers' pocket after having worked as a teacher's union organizer, they are likely to get their loan and everything else they ask for.
Meanwhile, cops, firemen, and others will be forced to take a cut or a smaller raise to pay for this extortion.
The problem is not confined to Chicago. More than 34% of teachers were chronically absent in the state of Illinois, and it's not much better nationwide.
"A 2022 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics found that 72 percent of public schools reported that teacher absences increased 'a lot' or 'a little' when compared to before the pandemic," writes Reason.com's Emma Camp.
"When the kids are there, the school needs someone to cover the classroom. In education, an absence means someone has to pick up the slack, so when a teacher is out, it has real, immediate costs," writes Chad Aldeman, a reporter for The 74.
"As might be expected, research has found that one-off substitute teachers are not nearly as effective as regular full-time teachers. Lower-achieving students are both more likely to be assigned to subs and more negatively harmed when their regular teacher is absent." writes Aldeman.
Why is this happening at all? Aldeman isn't sure. After analyzing the data, he says he found "only very small correlations between teacher attendance and the rate at which they stayed with their district employer, the evaluations they received or the district's overall staffing levels." He also noted he didn't find evidence suggesting that higher teacher absenteeism was driven by an increase in sick days.
No matter the cause, when teachers are absent from the classroom, their students end up learning less. Adding insult to injury, Chicago spent over 22 percent of its local funds on public pensions in 2024—up from 6.8 percent in 2014. Meanwhile, the state government is projected to spend $11.2 billion dollars on pensions in 2025, with one of the largest single state pension funds being the one developed for public school teachers.
It's nauseating. For these pious, hypocritical, radical left teachers to resist all efforts to modernize and reform the way they teach their failing students and then complain that school choice is a threat to the "kids" is despicable.
Since 2019, Chicago has not only increased the number of teachers (while there are 38,000 fewer students) but there are now 17% more "administrators" (bureaucrats) employed by the school district. More administrators means more union members, which means more dues money and more cash available to contribute to Democratic politicians.
The CTU has become the most powerful union in the state. Politicians cross them at their own peril.
