Chicago Public Schools is drowning. Not just in bad headlines or failing test scores, but in nearly $9 billion of debt. And this week, the district announced it’s cutting more than 1,500 jobs to stay afloat—760 teachers and roughly 800 support staff. That’s enough to make any parent nervous.
But then I started digging into the disciplinary records, and I found out that 700 teachers were reprimanded in a single year for misconduct. Not laid off. Reprimanded. Seven hundred.
In one year. That number hit me differently. On one hand, you have teachers being pushed out because the district is broke. On the other hand, you have hundreds of employees who were disciplined for doing something wrong—some of it minor like chronic tardiness, but some of it so serious that 40 people were permanently banned from ever working in CPS again.
Ten employees were fired or resigned over allegations of sexual misconduct against students. Ten. And I couldn’t stop wondering: how many of those 700 disciplined employees are still in the classroom today? I spent months going through the records, and here’s what I found.
The Chicago Teachers Union is calling the layoffs reckless. They’re begging state lawmakers in Springfield for emergency funding. But the district says it has no choice. They have a $732 million budget gap.
They’ve frozen hiring. They’ve required teachers to take five unpaid days off. And yet, even with all that cutting, the debt isn’t going away. Property taxes are going up.
Again. So parents in Cook County are paying more money for a school system that’s both broke and struggling to hold its own staff accountable. But here’s the part that really stuck with me. I spoke to teachers who got their layoff notices.
One dance teacher on the West Side got the call. Several special education teachers posted their termination letters online. These aren’t just numbers on a spreadsheet. These are people who showed up every day.
Maybe some of them were the ones who showed up late. Maybe some of them were the ones who got written up. But maybe some of them were great teachers who just happened to be in the wrong place when the budget ran dry. And that’s the ugly math of it all.
CPS employs about 46,000 people. Seven hundred of them were disciplined in one year. That’s roughly 1. 5 percent.
Sounds small, until you realize that means over 98 percent of the teachers are doing their jobs just fine, yet they’re the ones getting punished with layoffs. The district says it will try to rehire most of them next year. But that’s cold comfort when you’ve already been told your job is gone. So who’s really being held accountable here?
The teachers who showed up on time? Or the ones who didn’t? Because from where I’m sitting, the broken system is failing everyone, and the people paying for it are the kids—and the taxpayers who keep getting asked to write bigger checks for smaller results.
