Mayor Brandon Johnson and his appointed school board have moved to embrace the Chicago Teachers Union agenda to move toward what they call the Sustainable Community Schools model. It includes a funding formula that is based not on the number of students a school has but allegedly on student need. The union’s aim is to eliminate public school choice and strengthen its monopoly while protecting its members’ jobs. It is a Trojan horse.
This is part of a national teachers union campaign to recover support lost during the pandemic when unions forced schools to remain closed with devastating consequences. In 2023, the American Federation of Teachers announced that the union, which has some of the most militant big-city chapters under its umbrella, launched its campaign to “catalyze a vast expansion of community schools.”
The model claims to be a “holistic” approach to education that brings together educators, families and community partners to meet students’ and families’ academic and nonacademic needs and strengthen communities. These schools are presented as superior models to charter, magnet and private schools.
The CTU claims the school district has 20 “sustainable community schools” and in teacher contract negotiations wants funding to increase that number to 200. An Illinois Policy Institute analysis shows that on average, these schools perform far below other Chicago public schools in reading and math, absenteeism, graduation rates and more. The union’s advocacy for community schools is accompanied by a coordinated attack on school choice. It does this by insisting that public support for not only private but also public charter and selective enrollment schools is a financial threat to neighborhood schools. And that student-based funding is inequitable. Nothing could be further from the truth.
State and local school funding formulas require the money to follow students. Yet charter schools in CPS actually receive far less funding per student — around $8,600 less — and virtually no capital or facility support.
The CTU’s “needs-based” formula is a smokescreen to protect union jobs at severely underenrolled schools, such as Manley Career Academy High School on Chicago’s West Side. Manley was built to serve 3,000 students, but just 67 attended as of 2023. According to an Illinois Policy Institute analysis, a third of CPS schools are half empty. Most are failing to educate the students who remain.
There is nothing in the CTU’s community schools proposal that adds accountability. In fact, CTU leadership is pushing the district away from any sort of accountability for students, teachers or schools. The district covers up its failures by promoting unprepared children to the next grade level. The attack on selective-enrollment schools is a part of that effort to de-emphasize testing.
By contrast, public charter schools and private schools have real accountability. If a charter school fails to perform to the specifications in its charter, including meeting enrollment targets, the school loses the right to operate. If a private school flounders, parents stop paying tuition and go elsewhere.
Let’s be clear. The union’s push to transition away from public school choice in Chicago will have its greatest impact on low-income Black and Latino families, as CPS takes away public school alternatives to its failing and often-unsafe neighborhood schools.
Chicago’s Sustainable Community Schools initiative and needs-based funding are long on rhetoric but short on substance. They fail to address the three biggest obstacles to improving neighborhood schools.
1. Only some of all district funds go to the local schools.
2. The CTU blocks any changes to local schools that affect its members.
3. The district is determined to deny families any alternative to its often failing, underused neighborhood schools.
Real community empowerment is creating community schools that are truly autonomous. That means the vast majority of funding follows the children. Schools are granted broad autonomy over programs, staffing, school calendar and expenditure priorities. The community through elected Local School Councils are given full autonomy to select better school models, adopt programs and enter into partnerships that meet the needs of the children and community.
The Sustainable Community Schools model is a Trojan horse intended by the union to eliminate competition and protect its members. The phasing out of public school choice, the abandonment of standards and accountability and the redistribution of resources to failing, underenrolled schools are a race to the bottom.
Effective schools, whether community, public charter or magnet, are schools that are liberated from the centralized command-and-control structure that has remained in effect since the 1800s. They are schools not bound by the restrictive union covenants that go beyond compensation and benefits and control all things that affect the delivery of education services — such as the length of the school day and year, staffing, teacher assignments, promotions, evaluations and teacher accountability.
But effective schools are not what the CTU and school district leaders have in mind.
Paul Vallas is an adviser for the Illinois Policy Institute. He has run for Chicago mayor twice and was previously budget director for the city and CEO of Chicago Public Schools.
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