The Chicago Teachers Union war on school choice

The CTU’s War on Public School Choice

By Paul Vallas

February 25th,2026

“The Chicago Teachers Union is on a campaign to degrade and ultimately eliminate poor families’—overwhelmingly Black and Latino—alternatives to their neighborhood schools.”

Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) leader Jackson Potter testified at last week’s school board meeting, continuing the union’s ongoing propaganda campaign against public charter schools—this time targeting the struggling ASPIRA network. The union’s rhetoric about financial mismanagement and ineffectiveness could just as easily describe Chicago Public Schools (CPS), where test scores remain low and dozens of campuses sit half-empty. Ironically, CTU itself has contributed to ASPIRA’s instability.

The inevitable outcome of CTU’s campaign is the elimination of even the limited educational choices still available to families—particularly low-income Black and Latino families who have historically suffered under a neighborhood school system that too often fails to deliver results. In total, Chicago’s charter schools now serve over 54,000 students—more than 90 percent of them Black or Latino and the vast majority from low-income households. Nearly 10 percent of CPS elementary students and roughly 25 percent of public high school students attend public charter schools.

Illinois’s failure to renew the Invest in Kids tax-credit scholarship program—and refusal to replace it with any meaningful new scholarship initiative—has trapped low-income families in underperforming schools.

This is, in effect, educational redlining, where access to quality education depends largely on income and ZIP code. An estimated 30–40 percent of CTU members send their own children to private schools, while many others secure slots for their children in selective-enrollment and magnet school programs.

Yet the union remains determined to degrade and ultimately eliminate public charter school choices for most poor public school families—an outcome that will most harm the very families the CTU claims to represent. Charter schools provide families with tuition-free, public alternatives to neighborhood schools, offering flexibility in school design, schedule, curriculum, and the length of the school day and year, while maintaining public accountability.

For example, U.S. public schools on average have one of the shortest school years in the developed world, typically around 180 days, compared to well over 200 days in many other developed countries.

According to Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes (CREDO), Illinois charter students gain the equivalent of about 40 extra days of learning in reading and 48 extra days in math compared with peer-matched students in traditional public schools. Few interventions close the achievement gap more effectively than additional learning time— “time on task.”

Independent research consistently shows that charter schools can outperform traditional district schools, particularly for historically underserved students. CREDO’s multi-state studies have tracked more than two million charter students across what is now 31 jurisdictions over 15 years. The evidence shows that, in many states and cities, charter schools produce stronger student gains despite enrolling a more challenging student population, with Black and Hispanic students in charter schools often showing significantly greater progress in both reading and math than their peers in traditional schools. [1]

Economist Thomas Sowell reached similar conclusions in his book Charter Schools and Their Enemies. Studying more than 100 New York City schools that share the same buildings and student demographics, Sowell found that among Black students, only about 14 percent were proficient in English and 11 percent in math in traditional public schools, compared with roughly 65 percent and 68 percent respectively in the co-located charter schools.

Yet CTU views charter schools as competitors—institutions that operate outside the union’s control and challenge its effective monopoly over how children are taught. The union’s political influence has pushed the legislature and the CPS Board to adopt increasingly restrictive policies on charter growth.

CTU’s campaign is deliberate, coordinated, and transparent—yet largely ignored by state and local leaders who depend on union support and by much of the mainstream media, which often uncritically repeats the union’s talking points. Consider the key strategies in this campaign:

Capping charter growth

Through its collective bargaining agreement, CTU has pushed for hard caps on both the number of charter schools and charter enrollment levels, regardless of family demand or waitlists.

Blocking facility access

CTU-backed board policies and political pressure have helped keep charters out of most of the 50 school buildings closed under Mayor Rahm Emanuel in 2013. Despite serving roughly a fifth of CPS students, charters have historically received only a small share of the district’s capital budget and have been largely excluded from major facility investments.

Deliberately underfunding charters

Public charters are legally entitled to at least 97 percent of CPS’s per capita tuition amount, but in practice the district withholds funds for central costs and facilities, leaving many charters with substantially less per-pupil funding than district-run schools and forcing them to divert operating dollars to pay for buildings. Since 2019, CPS has steered hundreds of millions in tax-increment financing (TIF) surpluses to district initiatives while providing little direct support to charter facilities.

Unstable renewals

Instead of the five-, seven-, or ten-year renewals allowed under Illinois law, CPS now routinely limits charters to two- or three-year renewals, undermining strategic planning and making it harder to recruit and retain teachers and students.

Stripping autonomy

Under the guise of “accountability,” CPS has piled on mandates regarding budgets, staffing, and governance—restrictions that erode the flexibility charters need to innovate in ways that best serve children, flexibility that traditional public schools themselves are rarely granted.

Forced unionization In 2021, Governor J.B. Pritzker signed a CTU-backed “union neutrality” law requiring charter schools to facilitate union organizing efforts, making it easier for CTU to extend its reach into charter schools. This undermines one of the core principles that made charter schools effective alternatives in the first place: genuine operational autonomy in exchange for results. [3]

It is no coincidence that every major public charter network unionized by CTU has since faced financial distress, declining test scores, and enrollment losses. The union’s endgame is clear: disrupt, degrade, and eventually absorb charters into CPS’s ranks of failing, under-enrolled neighborhood schools. The ACERO Charter Network experience shows this pattern in action.

After CTU organized Acero’s staff, the union launched the nation’s first charter school strike, forcing the network into a contract that closely mirrors CPS’s restrictive labor agreement—with rigid work rules and limited accountability. In 2023, the CPS Board granted Acero only a three-year renewal, weakening the network’s ability to plan for the future, while enrollment limits and declining student numbers made it increasingly difficult to sustain operations.

The resulting financial decline was predictable—and politically convenient. Rather than allowing ACERO to consolidate responsibly and remain a viable charter alternative, CTU allies pressured CPS to absorb those schools into the district’s roster of failing, under-enrolled campuses. Let there be no confusion: this is part of a broader, systematic effort to eliminate every meaningful public school alternative to CTU control—ensuring that Chicago families, especially those in Black and Latino communities, have no real choice at all.

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Paul Vallas formerly ran the public school systems in Chicago, Philadelphia and the Louisiana Recovery School District. He was a candidate for Mayor of Chicago.