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 Students and teachers are back in school across
Illinois, but teachers unions keep claiming there are not enough teachers to run
classrooms.
That’s wrong. State data proves it.
Teachers’ unions have perpetuated the teacher shortage myth. The Illinois
Education Association claimed Aug. 28, 2022, the “teacher and education employee
shortage [is] getting worse.”
But according to data from the Illinois State Board of Education, there are
fewer students and more teachers in Illinois today compared to a decade ago.
Public school enrollment in Illinois has decreased by nearly 9% in the past
decade with just under 1.9 million students enrolled in the 2020-2021 school
year. That represents a loss of nearly 180,000 since 2011-2012. Nearly 70,000 of
those students have left the public school system since the COVID-19 pandemic.
The number of teachers in the state has simultaneously been rising during this
10-year period. Illinois had over 4,500 more teachers in 2020-2021, the most
recent year with fully available data, than in the 2011-2012 school year.
Teacher numbers have climbed by 3.5% while the number of students has dipped by
nearly 9%.
Just since the onset of the pandemic, Illinois has added nearly 2,000 teachers
to public school districts across the state.
Despite this data, teachers’ unions claim there is a shortage of teachers and
education staff. Vacancies exist in public schools, and they have for decades.
But they are typically concentrated in specific districts and positions.
There are currently 5,301 open positions in the state, according to ISBE. Nearly
60% of those vacancies are paraprofessionals and school support personnel.
One-fifth of those empty positions are in Chicago Public Schools, which has
struggled with enrollment in the past decade and where one-third of their school
buildings are less than half full.
Chad Aldeman, who writes about education finance at Edunomics Lab, suggests some
school districts across the country have recently been able to hire additional
staff with the aid of federal pandemic funds.
“I think we’ve actually gained classroom teachers in the last year, because of
new hiring after the federal stimulus bills,” said Aldeman. If such new
positions go unfilled, they’re counted as additional vacancies.
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Heather Schwartz, a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corp., told The
Atlantic, “There might be a shortage in the sense that a lot of new positions
are going unfilled.”
Teachers unions remain bent on pushing the narrative of a teacher shortage, but
it seems odd to claim a shortage when there are more teachers employed in
Illinois public schools right now than a decade ago, or even in 2019.
In Chicago Public Schools, the district with many of the unfilled positions, the
Chicago Teachers Union seems to only exacerbate the issue of vacancies by
refusing to shutter under-enrolled and subsequently low-performing schools.
About one-third of CPS’ traditional, non-charter schools are less than half
full. Among those schools, the five most empty are at less than 10% capacity and
at most 6% and 1% of their students are proficient in reading and math,
respectively.
CTU supports moratoriums on public school closures, further perpetuating
under-enrolled schools, many of which subject students to low-performing
academic atmospheres. Teachers staffing near-empty, underachieving schools could
be better used elsewhere.
CTU exemplifies how teachers’ unions have continually sought their own agendas
in district decisions, regardless of the data or benefit to students and
schools.
On Nov. 8, 2022, voters in Illinois will have a chance to stand up to the
misleading claims of teachers unions which harm district schools. Amendment 1 is
the first thing on the ballot this November and would give Illinois teachers
union bosses the nation’s most extreme government union powers, but many
students and parents have already shown they’ve had enough of teachers union
antics by leaving the public education system.
Amendment 1 is a referendum on taxes in Illinois more than anything else. One
conservative estimate is Amendment 1 would virtually guarantee higher property
taxes of more than $2,100 during the next four years, simply by maintaining
Illinois’ status quo. Should government union bosses exercise new powers granted
through Amendment 1, the tax hike on Illinoisans could wind up being far more
costly.
CTU and Chicago’s schools show what happens when government unions have too much
power. Voters on Nov. 8 will have a chance to give them more power, or to say
unelected government union bosses have no business dictating students’ success.
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