On September 26, the Chicago Teachers Union, representing all of the teachers in America’s second largest city, posted on X upon the death of “Assata Shakur” AKA Joanne Chesimard, that “The life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of Black liberation, and a leader of freedom whose spirit continues to live in our struggle.”
That would be one way to describe Shakur.
Another way to describe her would be as a woman convicted of the murder of New Jersey police officer Werner Foerster, a former FBI most wanted terrorist who was broken out of jail by armed comrades and eventually escaped to Communist Cuba, where she lived under the protection of the totalitarian Communist Castro regime for the remainder of her life.
And Foerster’s murder was far from the only serious crime Shakur was charged with or accused of involvement in. In another instance, she was identified by John Powis (a politically progressive priest) as part of a group of people who robbed his church and threatened to “blow his head off” if he did not cough up $1,800 that had been earmarked for the poor from church funds.
That one of America’s largest teachers’ unions, fattened by millions of taxpayer dollars, would choose Shakur as a figure to lionize reveals much about the modern left. While the union celebrates radicalism, the most recent test scores for Chicago Public Schools show fewer than one in three students can read at grade level. Fewer than one in five can do math at grade level. Chicago does this while spending almost $20,000 per student, almost two thirds more per student than is spent in my “affluent” school district in Montana. As is so often the case with the left, radicalism goes hand-in-hand with the collapse of basic governance and competence.
There is no meaningful political differences on these questions between Democrat unions, political activists, the media and academia and many Democrat politicians. All heads of the same leftist hydra. The AP described Shakur as a “black liberation activist” on X – as if this was why she was punished rather than for her crimes. The Washington Post praised her “near mythical status” while USA Today noted her as a “potent political symbol, representing for some a valiant soldier in the war against an oppressive and racist police state.” At least three Democratic Congresswomen, none of them marginal figures, went online to praise her after her death.
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley also honored Shakur both online and on X. Pressley, whose district is just 20 percent African American, represents most of Cambridge, Massachusetts, including Harvard University, the pinnacle of the elite left-wing establishment. She could make her statement fully confident in her warm reception in the hallowed halls of academia. After all, Angela Davis, an African-American radical whose guns were used by the brother of her then boyfriend to kill a judge and several others in a courthouse (landing her on the FBI’s 10 most wanted list), was eventually fully rehabilitated by the establishment, serving for decades as a distinguished professor at UC Santa Cruz and receiving an honorary degree from Cambridge University this year, all while declining to repudiate her radical past.
Other politicians praising Shakur included Congresswoman Yvette Clarke (head of the Congressional Black Caucus) and Summer Lee, who represents Pittsburgh in Congress. Clarke Tweeted that “If there is a single truth in the world it is that Assata died a free woman. May she rest in power and paradise for all eternity.” Clarke had no thoughts at all, of course, as to the victims of her terror campaign.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Socialists of America announced “Rest in Power, Assata Shakur. The American state brutally oppressed Assata and her Black Panther Party Comrades,” praising the “solidarity” and “loyalty” of the totalitarian Cuban regime that kept her from justice. Zohran Mamdani, the likely next mayor of New York City, is a DSA member who declined to condemn the stance when pressed by the New York Post.
What we see with the Chicago teachers is the normalization of radicalism on the American left, where there is increasingly no real and meaningful gap between the establishment and the extremists. All political movements have dangerous fringe figures, but the Democrat media, academia and political establishments have embraced some of their worst and most violent ones.
There were a few honorable exceptions, of course, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy called the celebration of Shakur “shameful and depraved.” But Murphy a 68-year-old white male former investment banker, does not likely represent the future of the Democratic Party. The people celebrating Shakur do.
And that should frighten us all.
Tag: Chicago Teachers Union
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Why have Democrats mainstreamed a terrorist?
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Why Chicago Teachers Union lionized a terrorist
When I first saw the Chicago Teachers Union’s post honoring Assata Shakur, I thought it was a headline from the Babylon Bee. But no, this one was real, and beyond parody.
The union, entrusted with educating Chicago’s children, used its official social media account to mourn the death of a convicted cop killer, calling her a “revolutionary fighter” and “leader of freedom.”
Shakur was found guilty of murdering New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster in 1973 and later escaped prison, landing on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists List with a $2 million bounty. To make matters worse, CTU Vice President Jackson Potter doubled down, declaring on X that “Assata was a freedom fighter!”
The tone-deaf post is a glaring sign that the CTU can’t be trusted to educate children. While the union wastes time lionizing a terrorist, Chicago Public Schools are failing spectacularly. In 55 schools, not a single child is proficient in math. Taxpayers shell out about $30,000 per student annually, yet the system squanders that money on everything but effective teaching. It’s almost as if the CTU is competing for the title of most unhinged organization on Earth, alienating reasonable members in the process.
This post should serve as a wake-up call for Chicago teachers who don’t share these extreme views. If your values aren’t reflected in honoring a murderer, why keep funding the radicals at the top?
Thanks to the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, unions can no longer force public school teachers to pay dues, as it violates their First Amendment rights. Rational educators who simply want to teach can opt out and stop handing over their hard-earned paychecks to bosses like CTU President Stacy Davis Gates.
Teachers can now get free personal liability insurance through the Teacher Freedom Alliance. That way, they keep more of their own money, stay protected, and cut off support for this insanity.
Their post isn’t a one-off mistake. Stacy Davis Gates declared earlier this year at the City Club of Chicago that children in public schools belong to her union. Her X bio even proclaims, “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe.” But if kids truly belonged to the union, their leadership would be in jail for child abuse, given the horrifying academic outcomes.
Remember 2022, when the CTU voted to strike and keep schools closed long after it was clear reopenings were safe? Those closures harmed children academically and emotionally. The union deleted a post claiming the push to reopen was “rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny.” Meanwhile, CTU board member Sarah Chambers was caught vacationing in Puerto Rico, thousands of miles away, while railing against returning to work.
Stacy Davis Gates labeled school choice “racist,” yet she sends her own son to a private school. The CTU also reposted a video of a mock guillotine outside Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s house, stating they were “completely frightened by, completely impressed by and completely in support of wherever this is headed.”
As an affiliate of Randi Weingarten’s American Federation of Teachers, the CTU mirrors national union extremism. Chicago Public Schools have morphed into a jobs program for adults rather than an education system for kids. Staffing has ballooned 20 percent since 2019, even as enrollment dropped 10 percent.
The CTU operates more like a political machine than an educational advocate. It poured $2.4 million into electing former organizer Brandon Johnson as mayor. Now, Johnson holds the highest unfavorable rating in Chicago mayoral history, with nearly 80 percent viewing him negatively.
Teachers deserve better representation. Parents deserve schools that prioritize learning over ideology. And children deserve a chance to succeed, not a union that honors killers while failing them in the classroom. It’s time for teachers to hold the union cartel accountable by opting out and starving the beast from the inside. -
Chicago Public Schools have failed. But there’s another option
Illinois recently released its 2024 Educational Report Card. The grades are, not surprisingly, bleak. Eighty schools reported not a single student who reached grade proficiency in math. Of the state’s low-income students, only 24.6 percent are proficient in reading, and 13.7 percent in math.
The Chicago Teachers Union – with impeccable grammar and punctuation – blames insufficient funding: “[Governor JB] Pritzker cries poor, he is leaving $10 billion in billionaire and big tech tax breaks on the table. Reversing just a fraction of that windfall would provide [Chicago Public Schools] and all Illinois schools the funds they need to thrive.”
Not that the CPS or the CTU have proven themselves emblems of fiscal responsibility. CPS is running a $734 million deficit and devotes 7 percent of its funding to debt service. It suffers immense administrative bloat: fewer than half of its 45,965 full-time employees are teachers. Despite falling enrollment rates, its budget balloons every year. Chicago schools face an incredibly difficult task. But to spend $9.9 billion this year alone, while 18,000 students attend zero-proficiency schools? That seems slightly excessive.
The CTU, meanwhile, charges its teachers $1,410.98 a year and devotes 80 cents on the dollar to campaign donations. Following a 2021 discrimination lawsuit against CPS (not to be confused with the more recent labor negotiation that increased CPS operating costs by $1.5 billion), the union paid its law firm $4 million in fees. It just so happens that the firm is owned by the mother of the union’s vice president, Jackson Potter. The union’s president, Stacy Davis Gates, declared on X that ”*School choice* was actually the choice of racists” while her son was enrolled in a prestigious Catholic school. Not surprisingly, the union maintains a shining 21 percent favorability rating within the state.
Perhaps it is time to try something new.
Investing in charter schools is a good first step. According to a 15-year Stanford University study, charter schools across the nation consistently yield higher reading and math outcomes than their public-school counterparts. Few charter-school studies have followed Chicago specifically in recent years, but as of 2017, the city’s charter schools sent 19 percent more of their graduates to four-year colleges than did its district high schools. Yet these charter schools operated on 36 percent less spending per student than mainstream public schools. This disparity could be interpreted in three ways: that charter schools operate efficiently because they must compete for students to enroll; that they are underfunded; or that typical public schools are not so starved for cash as they claim (one Douglass Academy High School spent $93,787 per student in 2024, and 100 percent of its students still failed in math). Regardless of which interpretation you choose, the upshot is that charter schools are succeeding (comparatively, at least) where typical public schools are failing. The very fact that the parents of one in four Chicago high-schoolers choose to enroll in a charter school indicates a higher level of trust than in district schools. Taxpayers ought to be questioning why CPS agreed, in the March labor negotiation, to place a moratorium on the founding of new charter schools.
Better yet, Illinois could give students the opportunity to escape the dismal public-school system altogether. The state currently offers a 25 percent tax credit for educational expenses such as private-school tuition, but it caps the credit at $750 per family. While this modest break may be nice for middle- to high-income families with students enrolled in private schools, it does not bridge the gap for severely disadvantaged families. Illinois once enabled these low-income students to receive tuition scholarships via its “Invest in Kids” program, which gave a 75 percent tax credit to families and businesses that donated to Scholarship Granting Organizations (SGOs). But in 2023, at the behest of you-guessed-who, the CTU, Illinois axed the program.
Fortunately, Congress has offered Illinois the opportunity to grant school choice to those families whom the public-school system has failed. The Big Beautiful Bill created a 100 percent tax credit – should a state governor or legislature opt-in – to match an individual’s donation to an educational SGO. These organizations then grant scholarships to low-income or disabled students to attend private schools. The new program would cost neither the state of Illinois nor the local public-school district a cent.
Both CPS and the CTU have failed the students of Illinois. With the federal scholarship program, a 12-year-old in West Garfield Park could attend a private school that invests in children, not political campaigns. Governor Pritzker must decide: will only the wealthy be taught to read?