Usually New Year’s resolutions are a chance to ditch bad habits and make a change for the better, but the Chicago’s Teachers Union (CTU) is choosing to buck that convention as they resolve to more of the same in 2026. The union posted this week on social media that its resolution is to “speak truth to power” and committed to “defending Black and brown and immigrant communities who are targeted by federal agents,” as well as “fighting back against an administration trying to dismantle the U.S. Department of Education and roll back civil rights protections.”
Those are lofty goals in a school district that can hardly teach kids to read and write. In 2025, 43 percent of Chicago’s third through eighth grade students were reading at grade level. Only 27 percent were proficient in math. Those are fundamentaldeficits that haunt kids into high school. In 11th grade, only 40 percent were proficient in reading and 25 percent in math on the ACT.
It’s hard to believe the union has students’ best interests at heart when its bosses continue to ignore the biggest problems. Poor test scores endure despite lower standards. Last summer, the state of Illinois lowered proficiency benchmarks on reading and math scores.
Effective instruction starts by showing up. For the fourth year in a row, chronic absenteeism among students stayed stuck near 40 percent, about 16 points higher than in 2019. Teachers are also playing hooky, with about 43 percent of educators missing 10 or more days of school, compared to 34 percent statewide. Teacher absences are a top predictor of student success.
Then again, failure seems to be the gold standard for this union, and now its president Stacy Davis Gates will be able to spread her radical agenda across the state after being elected to lead the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Davis Gates, who has a history of blowing offmandatory union audits and has described testing as “junk science rooted in White supremacy,” is clearly allergic to accountability and excellence.
If the CTU actually cares about fighting injustice, it should focus on the basics. Black students in third through eight grade score 33 percent lower on reading than White students, and low-income students score 32 percent lower than the rest. Meanwhile, the union is being investigated by the House Education and Workforce Committee for failing to produce an annual audit of its spending over the last five years.
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