Chicago, IL – On July 15, the Chicago Public Schools bureaucracy announced plans to lay off over 1,500 workers across the district, including 760 teachers and 800 aides. In addition, they announced potential five-day furloughs for all employees and a midyear spending freeze, cutting the average CPS teacher’s pay by $2,300. As a result, these moves would save the Old State $85 million in wages owed to education workers.
CPS announced the cuts in order to close a $732 million deficit, despite possessing enough capital to adequately pay education workers and resource schools on the South and West Sides. Around 108,380 students across the district are Black/New Afrikan, leaving them among the demographics most affected, left with few librarians, special education workers, and restorative justice coordinators to serve them. When these plans were first announced, Superintendent and CEO Macquline King claimed the district “is facing serious financial challenges,” which she acknowledged are “disruptive to the education of our students”; in the same breath, the bureaucrat described these cuts as “responsible” and “student-centered”, all the while leeching off the very national-minority students they abandon daily.
On record, the Chicago Board of Education stated the planned budget relies on a request for $200 million in funding from TIF districts, where baseline funds for public services are frozen while extra tax revenue generated by rising property values in a given neighborhood gets diverted into the TIF fund instead, aiding gentrification rather than funding the schools and services taxpayers already rely on. As the Board begs billionaire Governor J.B. Pritzker and state legislators for more money, the inequities impacting low-income, national-minority students shine a light on the impending failure of education under imperialism. Chicago Teachers Union president Stacy Davis Gates criticized CPS’s proposed budget, calling it “dead on arrival.” Bureaucrat Jennifer Custer, however, gaslights the public about CTU’s actions, claiming CTU has made no effort to collaborate on the new budget.
However, both forces serve as appendages to the State, pretending to serve the masses of poor and proletarian students in the neighborhoods, while demonizing them behind the scenes in order to leave them dangling on a string with a deceptive mask.
CTU and Mayor Brandon Johnson, rooted in the labor aristocracy of the education sector, are overseeing the suppression of dissent against these developments, upholding a union bureaucracy that lives far more comfortably than the masses of education workers and students. In fact, CTU refused to call a strike, or even hold a strike vote, for the 10 months of negotiations.
Johnson, who came up through the Black petite-bourgeoisie on Chicago’s West Side, was elected mayor in 2023 with the support of the Democratic Socialists of America, or DSA, and CTU, both functioning as enemies of the masses. Johnson purported himself to be a “leader in our communities in the fights for fully funded public schools”; however, his role instead as a servant of the Old State at the city level continues a long history of corruption and demagoguery that defines the city of Chicago. Unsurprisingly, he was welcomed to open the 2024 Labor Notes Conference, an organization founded by Kim Moody and other veterans of the Trotskyist movement, well-known liquidationists of class struggle within and without the labor movement.
It should come as no surprise that the budget, which was eventually shot down, is part of a gradual campaign of militarization of the people by the imperialist State; in this case, stripping away the education system through massive cuts and the reproduction of the worst manifestations of bourgeois ideology. On June 16, the Trump administration began the process of stripping the Department of Education of its special education and civil rights enforcement, harming 7 million students with disabilities. A move which will liquidate the workforce and services necessary for working-class families nationwide.
For the multinational proletarian and poor masses of Chicago, the violence of the State is a reflection of the social relations following the development of the United States into the hegemon of the world imperialist system. From the racial zoning that pushed New Afrikan migrants out of the Black Belt, to decrepit schools, to the mass closure of schools in New Afrikan neighborhoods, CPS, CTU, and Mayor Johnson can only be seen as servants of the Old State, policing and discarding the thousands of national-minority youth who attend Chicago’s public schools.
As the 2027 mayoral elections will demonstrate, the Old State and the education bureaucracy cannot be defeated through elections. Only by developing a strong class-conscious line among education workers, one inseparable from the neighborhood struggle, can genuine resistance toward a new kind of education come to be: education grounded in scientific and technical knowledge and in class and production struggle, ensuring the masses of workers and oppressed students hold democratic power away from the State and democratically govern the means of socialized education.
