According to the Illinois Policy Institute, state test scores for Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in 2024 reveal alarming statistics. Fewer than 33% of students read at grade level, and fewer than 20% can perform math at their elementary grade level. High school juniors fared even worse, with fewer than 25% reading at grade level.
Chronic absenteeism—defined as missing more than 10% of school days—remains a significant issue. Nearly half of Chicago students from low-income families missed 17 or more days of school. Between 2019 and 2023, chronic absenteeism rose for all students, climbing from 24% to 40%, and for socioeconomically disadvantaged students, from 26% to 44%.
Additionally, as reported by the Chicago Sun-Times on October 21, 2024, CPS graduation rates in 2023 showed disparities across demographic groups. The rates were 93% for white women and 90% for white men, 88% for Latina women and 83% for Latino men, and 85% for Black women and 78% for Black men.
But fear not! The CTU has an answer that will reverse this dire trend: pay teachers more money, allow them to have less classroom time to prepare lessons, and provide additional support staff to the teachers. Additionally, the schools need more psychologists, counselors, and psychiatrists. CTU and the far-left progressives are always just a few hundred million dollars away from the promised utopia of all students realizing their heretofore undiscovered genius that lies just beneath the suboptimal conditions that create systemic disparities.
However, we find ourselves in a paradox. Students are not attending school, as confirmed by the high percentage of chronic absenteeism, and when they are attending school, they are underperforming incredibly! An obvious question must be asked: Is the answer to the problem of underperforming high school students paying more money to teachers?
Imagine that you are in the market for a new car with an unlimited budget. You can buy a budget car for $10,000, or you can purchase a luxury car for $100,000. The luxury car is going to have more features than the cheaper car. However, each additional dollar that you spend over $100,000 is not going to yield the same increase you get going from $10,000 to $100,000. We call this diminishing returns. There is no guarantee that paying teachers more money is going to yield higher-quality instruction for students. We need a completely novel approach.
We require a far more robust, fundamental change to the education system in CPS. The most important of these is to sunset the anachronistic Spring, Summer, and Winter breaks, as we are no longer an agrarian society. The abolition of CTU, performance-based compensation, longer school years, and the return of truant officers are ideas that need to be considered if we want to see a reversal of the downward trends we have witnessed for decades. Continuing to ignore the hard choices that need to be made will create a future for our children where the economic chasm widens and success will continue to elude them. That is not the future we want for the next generation of Chicagoans.