Parents and students lost in the CPS struggle over power and money

When Chicago Public Schools, or CPS, unveiled its list of 50 schools to be closed this past summer, Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, President Karen Lewis acted as if the union she leads was a victim of the city’s $1 billion deficit — not a willing accomplice in its creation. Lewis will probably never say...

When Chicago Public Schools, or CPS, unveiled its list of 50 schools to be closed this past summer, Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU, President Karen Lewis acted as if the union she leads was a victim of the city’s $1 billion deficit — not a willing accomplice in its creation.

Lewis will probably never say that the union supported all of the pension holidays, or breaks from paying back pension debt, the city took in exchange for an enormous increase in salaries – 80 percent, before taking into account pay raises that result  from more experience and education, over 10 years.

She probably also won’t explain that the district picks up almost all of the employee contributions to the pension system – money that could have been used to finance the city’s massive deficit.

Nor will she admit that CTU’s plan to fix CPS’s finances is completely unrealistic. Union bosses are calling for implementing a local income tax for all workers in Chicago and a financial transaction tax at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, which won’t raise as much revenue as they expect because it will drive business away.

But CPS deserves some of the blame as well.

The district’s reasoning for the school closings has been confused since the process began. At first, its primary justification was to save money, citing data that showed a cost savings of $500,000 to $800,000 per school.

When people began questioning those numbers, CPS’s story changed. Instead of being primarily about cost savings, the school closings were being undertaken to move kids out of the poorest-performing schools in the city.

But that argument only lasted for a few days. Opponents of the school closings went to the media with a study conducted by the University of Chicago’s Consortium on School Research, which showed that eight of 10 Chicago students displaced by school closings in the past have transferred to worse-performing schools than the ones they were attending.

Lost within the back and forth between CTU and CPS, though, are the concerns of parents whose children will bear the brunt of the closing decisions. Some are fearful that their children will be attending a lower-performing school, while others worry that their children will encounter gang violence going to and from school.

While both sides have done an equally poor job of listening to parents’ concerns, CTU’s feigned victimization is more morally troublesome.

It’s time to shift power from bureaucrats to parents and children. Parents who want to expand charter schools or have argued that they should be given the resources and the ability to decide where their children should go to school have been ignored by the CTU. Those who embraced the status quo were listened to and promoted.

As long as Chicago’s school system is centered on the interests of the CPS board or the CTU bosses, the best interests of the city’s children will always be considered last. It doesn’t need to be this way.

The city should instead give parents the resources and responsibility through vouchers to make education decisions for their children themselves – only then will the education system do what’s best for students.