Wall Street Journal Comment:
Your editorial “Making Public Unions More Accountable” (May 5) shows that many states make it easy for public employee unions to use taxpayer resources to advance their political agendas. That dynamic was on display last week when Chicago Public Schools caved to Mayor Brandon Johnson and the Chicago Teachers Union, allowing teachers and students to ditch school to attend socialist-backed labor rallies.
There’s never a good excuse for taxpayer-funded field trips to one-sided political rallies. In Chicago, where so many students are already missing school, it’s particularly indefensible. Roughly a quarter of Chicago high-school students missed more than a month of school in the 2023-24 school year, and chronic absenteeism has persisted. Graduation rates, meanwhile, continue to rise—even as dozens of the city’s schools have failed to educate a single student to grade-level proficiency, according to the watchdog group Wirepoints.