CHICAGO — Democrats convene here amid destruction more comprehensive, deadly and intractable than that of 1871. The Great Fire hardly interrupted the city’s ascent. Today, however, Chicago suffers from the “blue model” of urban politics: government of, by and for government employee unions. Chicago is the nation’s warning.
Spending on public schools (more than $24,000 per student, not counting debt service and capital expenditures) has increased 107 percent since 2012, but proficiency in reading and math in grades 3-8 plummeted 63 percent and 78 percent, respectively. Only 22 percent of 11th-graders can read at grade level, and only 19 percent do math at grade level. Black students’ percentages are 11 and 8. While school enrollment declined 9 percent in 2020-2022, spending increased 35.7 percent, with one unionized employee for every eight students.
The meticulous Illinois Policy Institute, a think tank that chronicles and combats Chicago’s collapse, notes that one high school, built to accommodate 912 students, serves 35 students, but is getting eight new unionized staffers, bringing its total staff count to 30. The CTU, which insisted on closing schools during the pandemic, now opposes closing the 161 more-than-half-empty schools (26 percent of Chicago’s schools). But it wants to end the 11 selective enrollment high schools for “equity” reasons. Nearly half of these schools’ students are from low-income families, and almost 60 percent are Black or Hispanic.
Student chronic absenteeism — missing at least 10 percent of school days — is 40 percent (46 percent for Black students), but even worse for CTU teachers, 43 percent of whom missed 10 or more days in the 2022-2023 school year. The CTU’s (leaked) more than 700 new contract demands include: 9 percent wage increases annually, 45 days off each year, police-free schools (see “school violence,” below), a 100 percent electric school-bus fleet, housing subsidies for teachers, a paid “climate champion” and a “gender-support coordinator” (or an LGBTQ+ specialist) in every school, and coverage for gender-affirming care. The CTU’s Gates stood at Richards Career Academy and vowed to create more schools like it. No student there tested proficient in reading or math on the state assessment last year.
The IPI says Chicago’s population has shrunk by more than a quarter since it peaked in 1950; in 2023, the city hit its lowest point since 1920. Cook County, which includes Chicago, lost 58,000 in 2023, the second-most of any U.S. county.
Chicago’s poverty rate is 36.5 percent higher than the U.S. average, the 12.7 percent Black unemployment rate is the highest among the 15 largest U.S. cities, the 10.25 percent sales tax is the highest of any major city, and combined city and state taxes would take over 12 percent of a U.S. median family income. Property tax levies have doubled in 10 years, and the downtown office vacancy rate — nearly 26 percent, a record — presages a doom loop: fewer people downtown, restaurants and retailers closing, the downward spiral inviting increased crime.
Crime is higher than in any other major U.S. city. Year-on-year, robberies are up 21 percent, assaults 7 percent, violent crimes in schools 26 percent. Chicago has led the nation in number of homicides for 12 consecutive years. Its murder rate is five times higher than New York City’s, but its homicide arrest rate is at a 24-year low. Johnson, who is Black, dislikes Chicago’s ShotSpotter acoustical technology that locates gunshots’ origins. He thinks it sends too many police into minority neighborhoods.
Walmart left four such neighborhoods that, the online publication Wirepoints says, experienced more than 5,000 crimes in 2022. Crime drives grocery stores from such neighborhoods, so Johnson proposes city-owned and -operated groceries. What could go wrong?
The four-day Fourth of July weekend’s toll was unusual: 109 shot, 19 fatally. The weekend of Aug. 3-4 was more normal: 48 shot, five fatally.
Chicago’s population has declined for nine consecutive years as education has cratered, crime has soared, and public services have withered because almost half of the city budget goes to debt service and government employees’ pensions. These have been negotiated with government sitting on both sides of the table: its employees demanding that it do what it wants to do — grow. The steep price of this progressivism is disproportionately paid by its supposed beneficiaries.
