You might find former CPS CEO Paul Vallas’s comments at Illinois Policy as interesting as I did:
When Chicago Public Schools announced 77,000 technology devices worth over $23 million went missing during the 2021-2022 school year, the response from Chicago Teachers Union leadership was status quo: a call for more funding.
There wasn’t a condemnation for stolen property. There wasn’t a call for student, teacher or school accountability. Their solution was for each of CPS’ 646 schools to get a technology coordinator to safeguard these devices.
That would require spending $49.5 million in salary and benefits to hire another 468 technology coordinators, based on the averages for the existing 178 CPS tech folks.
That’s CTU math: save $23 million by spending $49.5 million.
Here’s the CPS’s scorecard:
The CTU seems to believe it’s impossible to improve student outcomes unless the entire city’s treasury is funneled into the schools. And in this, they have an ally in the mayor, who in his first six months has capitulated to the CTU to the tune of a $271 million infusion for CTU-dominated schools – consisting of a $226 million windfall from the tax increment financing surplus and the city absorbing an additional $45 million in school district pension costs.
With the new teachers contract expiring next summer, the CTU appears poised to insist on even more. The last contract cost the school district a staggering $1.5 billion and made CPS teachers among the highest-paid big district teachers in the nation. Yet it did not extend the school day or year by a single minute. It also failed to prevent the union from engaging in three work stoppages and shutting down the school campuses for 77 straight weeks, with devastating consequences.
CTU President Stacy Davis Gates repeats tired rhetoric, claiming the driving force behind negotiations on a new contract is “inequity and injustice that Black and Brown students and their families experience in this city.” Davis Gates is demanding smaller class sizes, more bilingual support staff to serve asylum-seekers’ children and building time into the school day for teachers to collaborate. In other words, less instructional time and higher salaries.
Full-time positions in CPS increased by 18.7% in the past three years, with 45,159 full-time positions budgeted for 2024, despite enrollment declines. The district now has one full-time employee for every seven student and one teacher for every 15 students.
Just to place all of that in some context there is no straight line relationship between spending per student or students per classroom and student achievement. Sure, there are some cases when spending more money or reducing class size will improve outcomes but Chicago is not one of those cases and spending increases and reducing classroom size has diminishing returns to scale anyway.
My thoughts on improving the Chicago Public Schools don’t comport perfectly with Mr. Vallas’s. For example, I think that the CPS would be better off if it were divided into multiple districts. It’s way beyond the point where there are increasing efficiencies with scale. And don’t even get me started on the massive injustice of Chicagoans paying the entire freight for the cushy retirements of Chicago teachers while paying for the retirements of the whole state’s retired teachers as well.
