The Chicago Public Schools are alarmingly successful at exactly one thing: Extracting money — oceans of it — from the taxpayers of this beleaguered city. Year after year, CPS manages to set fire to staggering sums of public treasure while producing educational outcomes that would shame a frontier one-room schoolhouse. It is the most expensive failure in the history of public administration.
We’ve now reached a point where more than $31,000 per student per year is being pried from Chicago taxpayers to keep this bureaucratic behemoth afloat. That’s right — taxpayers are involuntarily forking over elite private-school money to an institution whose performance often struggles to match third-world literacy rates.
And who is presiding over this spectacular redistribution racket? None other than Mayor 6.6 — the Robin Hood of the Chicago Teachers Union, though in this version of the legend, Robin Hood steals not just from the rich but from the poor too. He takes from everyone and delivers the boodle straight to his boss, the notorious Stacey Davis Gates, Chicago’s very own commissar of ideological indoctrination.
The mayor is merely the errand boy; Davis Gates’ is the one running Sherwood Forest.