The Chicago Teachers Union found itself under criticism this week after attempting to use a school day for what it called civic action and a defense of public education, ultimately reaching a compromise with Chicago Public Schools administration that keeps school in session while providing district-funded buses and food for students to attend a rally organized by the union. CTU president Stacy Davis Gates defended the arrangement by invoking James Baldwin’s phrase that the children are always ours, a sentiment her critics noted is somewhat complicated by the fact that she herself sends her own children to private school. Union vice president Jackson Potter, who has described himself publicly as an out and proud communist, used his remarks to call on Chicagoans to stand up against what he called an authoritarian billionaire in Washington.
Josh Weiner, chief strategy officer at the North American Values Institute and Chicago resident, joined Dan Proft on Chicago’s Morning Answer to assess what the union’s escalating political activity means for the balance of power in Chicago education politics.
Weiner said the CTU has been growing increasingly brazen, and he traced the recent escalation to the period immediately following the American military campaign against Iran, when the union co-sponsored a hands-off Iran protest that it organized alongside groups he identified as Leninist-Marxist organizations including the Freedom Road Socialist Organization and the Palestinian Youth Movement, which he said has documented ties to terrorist organizations. The Mayday resolution being promoted through the school system spans an extraordinary range of political causes including LGBTQ rights, racial justice, anti-poverty taxation, voting rights, opposition to US Middle East policy, diversity and equity initiatives, and more. Weiner said the practical question worth asking is how eight-year-olds are forming independent political opinions across that entire ideological spectrum simultaneously, and said the obvious answer is that they are not. They are being used as political props, and he said a growing number of parents and teachers in the city recognize it as such.
He said polling data suggests the CTU’s political overreach may finally be producing measurable backlash. A February survey showed the union’s unfavorability rating at over fifty-three percent, with only twenty-seven and a half percent viewing it favorably. He called that genuinely new for an organization that has operated with significant popular goodwill in Chicago for years, and said it represents a real opening for politicians willing to distance themselves from the union’s more extreme positions. He identified six or seven school board members actively opposing the current direction, as well as a coalition of moderate Democratic aldermen who have been pushing back against the CTU and the broader democratic socialist political infrastructure that has aligned with Mayor Brandon Johnson.
Proft was more skeptical about the prospects for meaningful political change, noting that neither Johnson, Governor Pritzker, nor the broader Springfield political class has shown any willingness to pick a fight with the CTU regardless of what it does. Weiner acknowledged the power dynamics but argued that the more unpopular the union becomes with ordinary voters, the less political cover it provides to the politicians who have depended on its organizational muscle and financial support, eventually making the calculus shift.
The conversation turned to Illinois’s refusal to opt into the federal tax credit scholarship program included in the budget reconciliation bill, which provides dollar-for-dollar federal tax credits for donations to scholarship funds that allow lower-income students to attend private schools of their families’ choosing. Weiner said this is literally free money from the federal government flowing into Illinois education with no cost to state taxpayers, noting that even Colorado’s Democratic Governor Jared Polis said he would obviously participate because refusing free money for kids would be indefensible. Pritzker has not moved to opt in, a position Weiner said is explicable only as deference to CTU opposition, since the union recognizes that school choice programs threaten its monopoly control over public education funding and the political power that derives from it. He noted that Chicago mayoral candidate Susanna Mendoza has come out in support of participating in the scholarship program, which Proft said makes her worth watching as a candidate who might be able to occupy a more centrist lane in a potentially crowded 2027 mayoral field.
On the broader curriculum question, Weiner said Illinois mandated culturally responsive education statewide in 2021, with full implementation beginning this year, and that his organization is lobbying to revisit that mandate along with related curriculum standards. He said the issue has reached a point where even people broadly sympathetic to the underlying political values are expressing discomfort with age-appropriateness, pointing to a recent curriculum fair in Chicago where materials promoting gender and sexuality content were presented to preschool-age children. He said that dynamic, more than any abstract ideological argument, is what is driving the growing gap between the CTU’s political ambitions and the actual concerns of the families its schools are supposed to serve.