There are few things I enjoy more about this job than writing a good "hilarity ensues" headline about the latest lefty absurdity, but when it comes to today's Chicago Public Schools (CPS) absurdity, the only word that will do is "tragedy."
Illinois Policy just issued a report showing that while CPS has doubled spending per student since 2012, grades are down by 60-80%, depending on the subject. "Just 1-in-4 CPS students can read or perform math at grade level," the report says. "The percent of students enrolling in college after high school graduation is decreasing. And for those who do enroll, another study found many are struggling to finish college in four years – just 30% get their bachelor’s in four years compared to 47% nationally."
By every other measure... there's no other way to put this... CPS is falling apart.
- In 2023, 26% of students in grades 3 through 8 across all of CPS could read at grade level and about 18% could do math proficiently. For 11th grade CPS students, only 22% could read at grade level and 19% do math proficiently.
- CPS’ failure to engage students shows in the chronic absenteeism rate. Chronic absenteeism has skyrocketed.
- According to ISBE data, 86.3% of teachers in CPS were rated as proficient or excellent in 2023, down from 91.4% in 2019. Yet many students in CPS are struggling to reach proficiency in core subjects.
There's much more at the link, all of it tragic. An entire generation of Chicago students is failing — and being failed by their schools and, let's be brutally honest, by their families.
If you're thinking that CPS must be seriously underfunded to achieve such dismal results, you must have been living in a cave for the last 40 or 50 years. CPS will spend a jaw-dropping $29,028 per student this year. My family lives in a lovely exurb of Colorado Springs and our district spends roughly one-third of what CPS does — $10,214 per student — and we get much better results. It isn't about the money. It rarely is.
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But CPS is just getting started.
For Fiscal Year 2025, CPS claims it faces "a nearly $400 million budget shortfall as federal COVID-19 dollars run out." That's because CPS made permanent spending hikes based on temporary federal aid, and now they expect Chicago taxpayers to pay for their short-sighted idiocy. They'll probably get it, too, since Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson is a wholly-owned subsidiary of CPS and the Chicago Teachers Union.
Let me tell you the dirty little secret about K-12 education spending. The teachers' union and/or your local government constantly play the same game. First, they like to boast that the district spends X number of dollars per student. With the very next breath, they'll complain that X number of dollars isn't enough. For next year, they'll need X+Y, where Y is equal to whatever they think they can squeeze out of you, the taxpayer.
Lather, rinse, repeat because the year after next, they'll demand X+Y+Y.
"It's for the children," they'll remind you.
But it isn't. Absolutely nothing like $29,028 goes to educating each student. While there's been an explosion in pricey education administration, the number of dollars that actually reach the classroom — books, supplies, furniture, teachers' salaries, etc — is more or less stagnant. Public education is no longer about educating students. It's about shoving ever-increasing amounts of taxpayer money into administrators' gaping maws.
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