They're Not Just Brainwashing Kids. They're Taking Them to the Polls

What would a city be like if the teachers’ unions didn’t just run the educational system, but the entire place top to bottom? To find out just pay a visit to the streets of Chicago. If you dare.

When Mayor Brandon Johnson ran for office, the Chicago Teachers Union had made its pitch for its former “legislative coordinator” after putting millions into his campaign by promising that “if a teacher became mayor, we could build the city we all deserve.”

It’s only May and 800 people have already been shot. The violence is so ubiquitous that the Cinco de Mayo parade had to be canceled due to gang violence along its route.

But CTU members are building the city that they think they deserve with a demand for a $50 billion contract, the total tax receipts for the entire state, calls for average teacher salaries of $144,620, free abortions and thousands in funding for every illegal alien.

With 45 days off the parts of the year they actually work, 9 forms of leave added to the 15 they already have, and an annual maximum of 244 sick days, the plan is to allow CTU’s teachers to work for less than half the year. And that’s assuming you can even call what they do “work”.

But the truly explosive part of the CTU’s demands though isn’t demanding six figure salaries for its union hacks while barely 1 in 5 of their teenage students can properly read, it’s a ploy to turn schools into voter recruitment centers.

Chicago schools are already among the most politicized in the country, but CTU wants to go beyond ideological indoctrination and directly into community organizing and voter outreach.

Illinois Policy reported that “CTU’s 142-page list of demands includes that schools ‘shall designate a day of civic action to assist students who are of age to register to vote and cast votes.’”

CTU, which is already a massive taxpayer-subsidized voter turnout and electoral operation for Democrats, leftists and its own people, like Mayor Johnson, now wants to exploit the students who are the captive audiences in its classrooms to rig elections.

High school students may not seem like especially fertile territory for voter outreach, but Illinois already allows 17-year-olds to vote in primaries and 16-year-olds can pre-register to vote.

During Mayor Johnson’s push for a tax hike referendum, teachers took students out of class and marched them off to vote. Not only wasn’t this done in secret, but CTU’s vice president announced a “Parade to the Polls, where students will march to an early voting site” and urged teachers to “organize a group of voting age students.”

While the tax hike referendum backed by CTU failed, the union still wants to keep on organizing students and in the process it reveals how teachers’ unions really see the children under their care.

The Chicago Teachers Union, like most teachers’ unions, is a political organization, not an educational body, and does not see students as anything except means to political power.

CTU has used children to take control of Chicago and now it’s trying to exploit them to further expand its political sway by using them directly, not just indirectly, in elections. The union believes that it’s a sad waste for students to be sitting in classrooms when teachers could be parading them down the street chanting political slogans and then having them cast votes.

By any educational metric, Chicago public schools are a sad failure, but by the political standards of CTU, they’re a huge success. Chicago students may struggle to read, but Chicago teachers are making many times the average salary and one of their own is running things.

And that is the real purpose of unions.

Unions don’t exist to provide services but to prevent anyone else from providing them. That is why teachers’ unions furiously battle to suppress private schools and charter schools.

It’s a myth that unions derive their power from doing their jobs. It’s just the opposite.

The power of unions rests solely in their ability to not do their jobs. The weakest unions are private sector unions whose workers actually work, while the strongest unions are municipal unions which don’t work. The less a union works, the stronger its members become.

Teachers’ unions, including CTU, which led the way in refusing to work during the pandemic, emerged from the lockdowns stronger than ever after having inflicted catastrophic damage on a generation of students. And now as CTU prepares to play hardball in a new set of negotiations, there are two things that are certain: the union will win and students as well as parents will lose.

But CTU is also unsatisfied with just making money. The already obscene salary demands are being bolstered by more calls for political control. Unions are political organizations. They offer members money only in order to pretend to be representing their interests. But teachers’ unions are political organizations and their actual mission is to take power to impose a leftist agenda.

And after consolidating control over teachers, why not then make the kids into CTU voters too?

Cook County Democrats have been known to vote in the name of the senile and the dead, why not children too? Teachers’ unions pushing kids to vote for their agendas is on the same level as hospitals and nursing homes getting people who barely know where they are to the polls.

Why go to all that trouble? Consider CTU’s own mayor.

Mayor Brandon Johnson has an approval rating of only 21%. How is he going to win another election when everyone in Chicago hates him even worse than they did Lori Lightfoot?

CTU is going to need a bunch of money and a bunch of voters. Its demands will provide both.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.

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