The Chicago Teachers Union’s War on Standards and Choice
Nearly four years on from the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the traditional American public education system remains in disarray. The virus exposed longstanding structural flaws in public schools capacity to respond to such crises, particularly thanks to the overwhelming influence of teachers unions. Now the unions are trying to hide the damage they have wrought by pushing elected officials to reject objective standards and school choice.
In Chicago, leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and their peers nationally are pressing districts and states to end testing. They claim that doing so will reduce student stress, promote teacher autonomy, and end racist practices; their real motivation is to eliminate quantitative accountability standards for poorly performing teachers. Emboldened by the election of former CTU organizer Brandon Johnson as mayor (my opponent in last year s race), these efforts threaten to bring back what was once called the soft bigotry of low expectations and not just for students.
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) is already moving to a soft scoring and assessment system for measuring school performance rather than individual student performance. Its new policy for sizing up schools would expand the types of evaluation metrics, placing greater emphasis on how schools promote students social and emotional development. While factors such as staffing levels, curriculum, and other district investments are important in evaluating school performance, the move to diminish student outcomes in evaluations is the institutional partner to grade inflation for students.