As new Democratic mayor takes office
Chicago Public Schools lay off hundreds of teachers and staff
On May 31, 220 Chicago Public School (CPS) teachers and 498 support staff received layoff notices. The spring term ends June 18 with classes set to resume in early September and more school closures may be in the offing.
With grim regularity each summer, layoffs of Chicago Public School teachers and staff are announced. This year, the Sun Times took note of that fact, publishing figures over the last 10 years that demonstrate the depth of the cuts and the shocking drop in the total numbers of teachers employed in the CPS.
Since 2009, 8,806 teachers and 8,556 classroom support staff have been laid off. Some teachers are then hired back into CPS, often at a lower pay rate, or work as substitutes for a time. This year, CPS is advertising more than 1,500 open positions for the 2019–20 school year.
The greatest number of teacher and staff layoffs occurred in 2013 after the betrayal of the 2012 teachers strike, which paved the way for the closure of an unprecedented 50 public elementary schools in the poorest areas of the city. That year, 2,239 teachers and 1,716 paraprofessionals and classroom staff were laid off, representing 9.6 percent of the workforce, according to the Sun Times report.
Chicago City Hall
The cumulative effect of these policies has been disastrous. According to teachers, these cuts have created dangerously overcrowded classrooms and special education classes routinely operate without the minimum staff legally mandated for safety, let alone optimal learning.
The CPS teachers’ contract will expire on June 30 between the roughly 26,000 teachers and staff and the city administration of newly inaugurated mayor Lori Lightfoot.
Lightfoot, a former federal prosecutor, corporate attorney and public relations agent for the Chicago Police and Emanuel administration operating in the wake of the cover-up of the murder of black teenager Laquan McDonald, took office on May 20. Since then, she has announced the dissolution of the mayor-appointed school board and its reconstitution with appointees of her choosing. During her campaign, she claimed to support a return to an elected school board in Chicago and has said her appointees represent a step in this direction. In 1995, Democratic mayor Richard Daley with bipartisan support established so-called “mayoral control” of the school system, which was a critical feature of its privatization via charter expansion.
Lightfoot also opted to keep CEO Janice Jackson, but pledged to make fewer decisions affecting CPS “behind closed doors.”
Lightfoot’s appointee to chair the school board is Miguel Del Valle, former city clerk and old hand in the Democratic Party machine, who also once served as chairman of Chicago Mayor Harold Washington’s Advisory Commission on Latino Affairs. As a candidate for Chicago mayor in 2011, del Valle told the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, he wanted to “cut personnel deeply.” Also appointed to the board was University of Illinois-Chicago professor Elizabeth Todd-Breland, who has written on education in Chicago and on former CTU President Karen Lewis’ evolution as a political leader from the standpoint of identity politics.
Despite having backed her opponent in the recent runoff election, CTU has tried to make much of the fact that Lightfoot is the first female, gay, African-American mayor, working to portray her as “progressive” and obscure her long resume as a representative of big business and the ruling class, including her role in the cover-up of McDonald’s death.
In its previous and completely insincere election-year criticisms of Lightfoot, CTU noted her ties to veteran corporate education “reform” operatives; her support for the transformation of shuttered schools into police training academies (Lightfoot previously served as head of Emanuel’s sham police oversight board); and her statement in January that for the 2019 Chicago teachers’ contract, “We can’t negotiate and give away dollars we don’t have.”
But since her election victory, an ad produced by the CTU, “Who is the real Lori Lightfoot?” has been removed from the union’s YouTube channel.
The CTU is widely discredited among teachers, having collaborated with former Mayor Rahm Emanuel in school closures, layoffs and charter school expansion as well as attacks on teacher pay, pensions and healthcare benefits. Since December 2018, the union has betrayed a series of strikes by highly exploited charter school teachers.
The ever-present threat of cuts and school closures, regular layoffs and severely deteriorated teaching and learning conditions are fueling teacher anger and determination to fight in Chicago, just as they are around the country and indeed worldwide.
This growing disaffection and disgust can be seen in the high abstention in recent union elections and in the low turnout at a recent rally downtown for a “fair contract.” In mid-May, CTU president and member of the now-defunct International Socialist Organization Jesse Sharkey and the Caucus of Rank and File Educators leadership was re-elected with about 66 percent of the vote. Therese Boyle of the Members First caucus, which was making a broad call for CTU to improve pay, benefits and teaching and learning conditions, took about 34 percent of the vote. According to the blog Second City Teachers, vote totals indicate 9,565 CTU members voted for Sharkey and CORE, while 4,840 voted for Boyle and Members First. But the largest bloc of teachers, clinicians and teacher aides did not vote for anyone.
The passive opposition to the CTU reflected in the low vote turnout must be turned to active opposition: new, independent, rank and file organizations are needed.
Opposition to the intolerable conditions facing teachers is bound up with the defense of public education as a whole. This requires that teachers build rank-and-file workplace committees independent of the CTU and the Democratic Party and its pro-corporate program of budget cuts and charterization. Workers must demand oversight and control of negotiations, raising their own demands for the restoration of concessions, the hiring of thousands of additional teachers and the full funding of the schools.
In conducting this fight teachers must turn out to the working class more broadly, including teachers in neighboring suburban districts, city workers, autoworkers and other sections of workers coming into struggle. The defense of public education is a political fight that raises the necessity for the development of an independent political movement of the working class based on a socialist program. The resources needed to fund education exist in abundance, but this fight requires a frontal assault on the privately accumulated wealth of billionaires and re-ordering society’s priorities in the interest of human need, not profit.
Chicago’s Hemorrhaging Housing Market
High taxes and government debt have soured buyers on Illinois and the nation’s third-largest city.Spring 2019
Cities
Economy, finance, and budgets
In early 2012, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel warned residents and local politicians that, unless the city, along with the state of Illinois, started tackling its deep pension problems, “You won’t recruit a business, you won’t recruit a family to live here.” Seven years later, as Emanuel exits office, it’s becoming clearer what he meant.
A few months ago, Realtor.com predicted
that Chicago would have the weakest
housing activity this year among the nation’s
top 100 markets.
that Chicago would have the weakest
housing activity this year among the nation’s
top 100 markets.
Average housing prices in the Windy City still haven’t completely recovered from the real-estate downturn that began in 2009, though property taxes continue to climb. No wonder, then, that Illinois ranks among states losing the most people to other areas of the country, or that some Chicago-area homeowners are taking big losses when they sell their houses. The future doesn’t look brighter. “Taxes are high, the services [that taxes] pay for are terrible, and the debt load is so high, so palpably unsustainable that people have no belief that the resources can be found to turn it all around,” Ball State economist Michael Hicks told the local press last year.
Government-employee unions have pushed legislation that gradually forces local municipalities to ramp up pension contributions, even as efforts to control retirement-system costs have sputtered. The result: higher taxes. Chicago’s annual pension payments have doubled over the last few years, to nearly $1.2 billion, and are set to rise to $2 billion within three years. In 2015, the city passed $543 million in property-tax increases, phased in over three years, to pay for the burden. Every penny that the city collects in property taxes goes into the pension system. The financially troubled Chicago school system has also been raising its share of local homeowner taxes, including a $224 million hike in the 2017 school year. The combined bite now gives Chicago among the highest residential property-tax rates of any American city.
As taxes soar, residents are leaving Illinois and its largest city. From 2011 through 2017, Illinois ranked second among the states in net domestic outmigration, losing 640,000 more residents than it gained from other states, according to a study by demographer Wendell Cox. Chicago is a big reason. A recent Bloomberg study of metropolitan-area migration data found that the city had a net migration loss of 105,000 in 2014; it got worse in 2017, with the net loss totaling 155,000. Governors of some high-tax states, like New York’s Andrew Cuomo, have acknowledged the role that tax increases play in driving residents out, but in Illinois, new governor Jay Pritzker has proposed changing the state’s constitution so that he can institute a progressive income tax on the wealthy—giving them extra incentives to go somewhere else.
It isn’t just the wealthy, who tend to be older, leaving. A new study by demographer William Frey of the migration patterns of millennials (those aged 22 to 38) found that Chicago ranks as the third-least attractive among the nation’s 53 largest metro areas, losing an average of nearly 19,000 more young adults than it gains every year. Those losses account for the bulk of millennial flight from Illinois, which similarly ranks below all but two states in trying to attract young adults. One problem is the flagging local economy. Despite big real-estate deals that have pushed up commercial rents in the Loop, the greater Chicago metro region has averaged less than 1 percent growth in private-sector jobs in each of the last two years.
Every homeowner leaving Illinois puts a house on the market without buying another one locally. That’s one reason the Chicago marketplace is struggling. The average price of a single-family home in Chicago is lower than it was before prices began plunging back in 2009. Nationwide, by contrast, home prices are 30 percent higher than before the crash. One consequence of the lagging recovery is that Chicago has more homes with underwater mortgages—that is, the mortgage is greater than the value of the home—than any other major market. As many as 135,000 of these homeowners may risk default when the next recession hits and prices plummet again. Homeowners are feeling the pinch in other ways, too; local papers are filled with stories of people regretting their investment in a house. Last year, Crain’s Chicago Business told the story of a Chicago-area executive who lost more than half a million on the sale of his home when he retired to move elsewhere. If he had invested the money in the stock market instead, he said, “I’d probably have $6 million now.”
For years, voters in some states have acted as if government financial problems, including massive pension debt, weren’t real. Everything would work out somehow, they seemed to believe. Take a look at Illinois and the nation’s third-largest city to see how that bet is playing out.
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