Others Celebrate “Take Your Child To Work Day,” Chicago Celebrates “Keep Your Child Out Of School Day”
Teachers’ unions are a cancer on America. They are a blight that never stops taking. That is not an easy thing for me to say; my daughter has been a teacher of second- and third-graders for 14 or 15 years, and I have attended and assisted her with things like pumpkin carvings, book readings, etc. She is the best teacher I have ever been around. You may think I’m biased, but the time she puts in outside the classroom is unbelievable. She and teachers like her spend more time, money, thought, and planning than anyone will ever know.
Easy or not, teachers’ unions have way too much power and influence. Their decisions affect the lives of America’s youth, and on far too many occasions, those decisions are politically motivated and detrimental to the educational process.
In one of the more outrageous examples, the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) filed a petition asking Chicago Public Schools to allow students to be absent on May 1st so kids can join the union’s one-day strike against Trump.
Union vice president Jackson Potter tried to dress this farce up as a learning experience: “Teaching our students what civic action looks like requires more than textbooks.”
This moronic nonsense is part of a nationwide push – organized by socialists, anti-ICE activists, and open-borders groups – to close schools, businesses, and workplaces in a coordinated strike against the Trump administration.
National Education Association union leaders are already distributing a toolkit with a map of planned events. The May Day Strong coalition includes the teachers’ union, the nurses’ union, and groups like Sunrise Movement and Indivisible.
No matter how the CTU and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson try to spin this, it is nothing more than Democrats and far-left idiots throwing a temper tantrum. This is the same clown that CTU and its affiliates invested over $5.6 million to put in office. – He has already shown support for this ignorance. His union secured the mayor’s position, and now the mayor is reciprocating by supporting the school day.
The Chicago Teachers Union’s strike history, which Democrats refuse to discuss, is
that they declare a crisis, use it as an excuse to stop teaching, and then demand money and political wins to return to work.
They did this same bullsh*t in 2012 when they shut down Chicago schools for ten days and left 300,000 students stranded. They did it again in 2019 with another strike that cost taxpayers at least $1.5 billion in contract concessions. In 2021 and 2022, they chose not to return to classrooms, even after most major school districts had reopened, disregarding their own district’s plans and the concerns of Chicago parents.
Now they’re doing it again – except this time the union isn’t even pretending the kids come first.
CTU’s announcement clarifies its true priorities: the May 1st action is aimed at ICE, billionaires, and the Iran War, along with school funding. These issues are unrelated to reading scores in Chicago and instead reflect the political agenda of the radical Left.
Illinois state law grants students one excused absence for a civic event. CTU aims to claim that exemption for a socialist political rally.
CTU alone contributed $2.3 million to Johnson’s campaign, even violating its own rules by using member dues for a $1.5 million donation that its handbook explicitly forbids.
Including affiliates, the total surpasses $5.6 million. Over 60 percent of CTU’s political donations go to aldermen affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America.
This union was not created to protect workers’ rights. This political organization purchased City Hall and is now utilizing the government school system as its base of operation.
Whenever CTU seeks action from the Chicago School Board, Johnson responds by delivering. If CTU plans to strike, Johnson does not oppose it. And when CTU proposes to shut down schools to involve children in a political protest, Johnson shows his support even before the petition is signed.
President Trump is implementing the immigration laws enacted by Congress. ICE is performing its duties. Meanwhile, the Chicago Teachers Union – the same group that kept kids out of classrooms for two years, claiming it was compassion – just declared it needs those children to march against the president on May 1st.
It’s more than obvious that the union owns the mayor, the mayor owns the school board, and the school board is about to hand the children over to them. This has nothing to do with education.
I wonder what would happen if a teacher like my daughter refused to participate and instead kept her class in school to actually learn. I’m betting that person would be fired under some phony pretense just for doing what they are being paid to do.
The CTU president is a narcissistic fascist named Stacy Davis Gates, who has made no secret of the fact that she and the union support progressive candidates, and they direct significant resources toward school board races. Under her leadership, the union has prioritized political action and the expansion of its influence in city politics.
What she values is obvious: power, influence, money, and notoriety. Notice that children have nothing to do with her true priorities. She is a political activist running a teachers’ union that has been under scrutiny and criticized by the Illinois Policy Institute and community members for its low favorability ratings and political spending.
By the way, this year one of her children enrolled in a private Catholic school. Even though she has previously Idiotically claimed that private schools were born out of racism.
So the president of the CTU has a kid in private school, while she plots to have children enrolled in public schools, involved in a useless protest.
That’s leadership in Chicago.
