In April 2025, the Chicago Teachers Union ratified a $1.5 billion contract that included a 16% raise for teachers and new class-size caps ranging from 25 to 31 students depending on the grade level.
That sounds great. And in a world of infinite resources, it would be. Yet last month, in a move that surprised nobody who was familiar with the district’s financial situation, Chicago Public Schools closed a $732.5 million deficit that avoided layoffs by assuming additional revenue from the state.
To be clear, the problem isn’t that Chicago wants to pay its teachers well or ensure their working conditions are manageable. It’s the number of chairs at the bargaining table that are occupied by teacher unions and their allies.
According to a recent study by our organization, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, Illinois has the country’s seventh strongest teachers unions. More specifically, it ranks sixth for “involvement in politics” (meaning its unions are among the most electorally active in the country) and fourth for “labor and bargaining policies” (meaning the resulting contracts constrain administrative decisions more than most).
In Chicago, some of those numbers have first and last names. For example, Mayor Brandon Johnson was a Chicago Teachers Union organizer
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before entering politics, and the union was a prominent backer of his 2023 mayoral campaign. Once he became mayor, Johnson had the opportunity to appoint the majority of the school board that ratified the $1.5 billion contract.Although that number was inherently unsustainable, the biggest problem isn’t that a district that has experienced significant enrollment decline was planning to reduce its teaching force. It’s how those changes are likely to be implemented because of the constraints that are embedded in the most recent contract, prior contracts, and Illinois law.
For example, under both Illinois law and the 2024-2028 union contract, the most junior teachers in a given performance tier must be laid off first. Consequently, because high-poverty schools rely disproportionately on newer teachers, the classrooms that are most likely to be affected are those whose students can least afford the disruption.
Similarly, although benefits of smaller class sizes are real, at least for economically disadvantaged kids in early grades, uniform caps put high-poverty schools at a competitive disadvantage (because other working conditions are more difficult). In New York City, a nearly identical mandate is projected to generate three additional teaching vacancies at the highest-poverty schools for every vacancy at the lowest-poverty schools.
Finally, there’s the district’s slow-moving pension crisis, which is the root source of much of the current fiscal pressure, but which the 2024-2028 agreement does nothing to address. Thanks to “pension holidays” in the 1990s and 2000s that shifted the costs to future generations, the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund has $14.2 billion in unfunded liabilities that it must somehow honor.
Yet rather than confronting that history, the 2024-2028 contract retains a provision that allows teachers to bank up to 244 unused sick days as pension credit at retirement, effectively compounding a preexisting liability that already pulls $135 million annually from the same high-poverty classrooms that are about to lose their teachers.
So, what is to be done?
There’s no silver bullet for the current mess. Still, if it’s tired of making messes, Illinois could narrow the scope of what unions can bargain over. For example, in 2011 Wisconsin decided that decisions about layoff procedures, class sizes and teacher placements should belong to the employer.
Regardless, the state and the city must confront the outsized role of public sector unions, which inevitably put the interests of their members before those of taxpayers, future hires and the most vulnerable students.
Otherwise, the students who have lost the most will never have a seat at the table.
David Griffith is national research director and Kennedy Sundberg is research assistant at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a K-12 education think tank.
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