Greer: Following Biden-Harris Bailout, Bankruptcy Looms For Chicago School District

By Stan Greer, Guest Contributor

If Democrat Kamala Harris wins the evidently neck-and-neck 2024 contest for the presidency, what can Americans expect from her with regard to education policy? The Washington Post recently asked Harris spokeswoman Mia Ehrenberg this question. Ehrenberg quickly pointed to Harris’s tie-breaking Senate vote on March 6, 2021, to pass the so-called “American Rescue Plan” (ARP), which made it possible for union-label President Joe Biden to sign it a few days later. The clear implication was that the ARP’s education component is the blueprint for the Harris education agenda.

What does that mean? If you’re not sure, take a look at what’s happened to the fourth largest government school district in the U.S., Chicago Public Schools (CPS), under the ARP.

From FY 2012 through FY 2021, CPS enrollment fell by nearly 16 percent, largely as a consequence of mounting parental dissatisfaction with district schools’ performance, even as the number of taxpayer-funded employees on CPS payrolls increased, albeit modestly.

Though the ratio of unionized K-12 government education employees to CPS schoolchildren was rising over this period, as it had been for decades, militant Chicago Teacher Union (CTU/AFT/AFL-CIO) bosses were bitterly unhappy about the relative slowness in the growth in their dues-funded coffers. That’s why they and other teacher union bosses nationwide were ecstatic about the passage of the ARP, a $1.9 trillion bill that included roughly $200 billion in direct and indirect bailout money for overwhelmingly unionized government K-12 schools.

This money was supposedly needed to help Big Labor-dominated school districts like CPS reopen safely, even though districts large and small in Right to Work states like Florida, Georgia and Texas had already reopened safely months earlier, with no exorbitant spending required. The reality is that most of the money went into increasing the dues-paying ranks of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) and National Education Association (NEA) unions.

Education bureaucrats in Chicago, for example, have used their “whopping” $2.8 billion ARP allocation to expand CPS payrolls by nearly 8,000 positions since 2021, even though CPS’s long-term enrollment decline greatly accelerated from 2020 to 2022, as CTU bosses kept schools shuttered for the putative purpose of stemming the spread of COVID-19. (Since 2023, CPS enrollment has rebounded slightly, but only because of the huge influx of migrants from abroad into the Windy City under Biden Administration policies.)

Most of the employees CPS has added aren’t teachers. And expanding CPS payrolls by roughly 20 percent over the past four years has done nothing to improve the system’s miserable track record at educating students. As policy writer Helen Raleigh pointed out a couple of weeks ago, in the 2022-23 school year, nearly 75 percent of CPS students in grades 3-8 “failed to meet reading standards on the Illinois Assessment of Readiness,” and more than 80 percent “failed the math test.”

The price tag of CPS’s Biden-Harris enabled hiring spree was huge. During the 2023-24 academic year alone, CPS burned through $737 million in federal taxpayer money funneled to the district through the ARP to cover its jacked-up payroll costs.

Now that the last $233 million of the $2.8 billion in ARP money raked in by CPS has been folded into its 2024-25 budget, public officials have to figure out what to do next year, when the city of Chicago itself is facing a projected $982 million budget deficit.

The only responsible course for Chicago elected officials is to cut CPS’s excessive spending sharply, starting with the reversal of the completely unwarranted staffing expansion that the Biden-Harris ARP enabled. But there is virtually zero chance that will happen in Illinois, where Big Labor rammed through a state constitutional amendment in 2022 permanently enshrining and dramatically expanding union bosses’ monopoly-bargaining power over how K-12 and other government employees are compensated and managed. Indeed, in ongoing contract negotiations, CTU bosses are actually demanding that the CPS hire more than 7,000 additional employees over the next few years.

Barring an as-yet unforeseen federal intervention, it seems a CPS bankruptcy is looming. Sadly, that is the least-bad realistic scenario for Chicago schoolchildren, parents and taxpayers. But if Harris becomes the next President, she can be expected to press instead for a new, federal taxpayer-funded handout to CTU and other greedy government union bosses that is even more costly than the ARP!

Stan Greer is chief researcher for the National Right to Work Committee.