CTU’s opposition to school choice combined with its assault on public school standards and accountability has created an apartheid school system in which poor families, overwhelmingly black and Latino, are trapped in failing schools
Apartheid was the brutal system of racial segregation and discrimination enforced in South Africa from 1948 to 1994. The term is synonymous with deliberate separation and systemic disadvantage.
By that definition, in places where teachers unions control the schools, those public education systems are de facto state-sanctioned apartheid vehicles. In their determination to maintain an ironclad monopoly, the unions deny poor families — overwhelmingly Black and Latino — access to quality educational options. This is racist, if not by intent, but certainly in outcome.
Nowhere is this apartheid-style control clearer than in Chicago. The Chicago Teachers Union’ (CTU) leadership is determined to strengthen its monopoly over education — not only by eliminating private school options for poor families, but also by targeting public school choice. The CTU is actively working to eliminate both charter and magnet schools, which highlight the stark performance gap between those schools and severely underperforming neighborhood schools. By eliminating options, the CTU imprisons poor families in failing, half-empty schools, reform be damned. Meanwhile, they work equally hard to expand their member’s benefits and numbers, all the while protecting them from accountability.
