Opinion: Board's Proposal Puts D86 on a Path Toward a Sustainable Future

A letter to the editor, submitted by Todd Van Fleet.

“That which is unsustainable will not be sustained.” Nobel prize winner, Milton Friedman, was speaking of irrational economic behaviors when he coined this phrase and it’s the main reason my wife and I moved our family from our Chicago home of many years to the western suburbs. A primary motivation was to find a public school system offering the possibility of superior outcomes for our children while reducing exposure to the type of unsustainable economic forces that are strangling and shepherding the decline of the Chicago public school (CPS) system.

The issues plaguing CPS are mainly economic in nature yet simple to understand for anyone willing to try; a rising share of the budget each year is devoted to paying expenses having nothing to do with in-school instruction. Amounts earmarked for retiree benefits are increasingly tying up financial resources that would otherwise be used to support the classroom. The city has largely ignored the problem to this point recognizing the unpopularity of raising real estate taxes on increasingly overtaxed residents and kicking the can down the road by not dealing with ballooning obligations under existing union contracts. The result is unfavorable for parents, students, and teachers alike who are seeing ever-larger class sizes, more challenging work environments, fewer extracurricular activities, and academic decline systemwide.

This is the future of District 86 and every other district that fails to address the burden presented by overly generous compensation and retirement benefits demanded by unions. To be clear, the union is not the teachers and the teachers are not the union. The union is a bureaucracy existing to preserve its own interests which have nothing to do with either the quality of education received by our children or the long-term interests of the teachers comprising their membership.

Want evidence? Look east to Chicago where the union has chosen rich benefits over keeping teachers employed. Look at the private schools in the area where non-unionized teachers provide high quality education at significantly lower overall cost. Look at any public school system in the country where there are substantial gaps between over-performing and underperforming schools or within any individual school where there are over-performing and underperforming teachers. Unions are present regardless. In other words, unions have no beneficial impact on education outcomes. Parents, students, and teachers impact outcomes.

So, despite what union representatives would have parents believe, you can be in favor of providing high quality education and the resources necessary to support it without being supportive of the union and what it represents. Indeed, a very threatening and scary thought for union leadership, which seems fond of using school children as props in their never-ending campaign to demonize opponents.

On this front, district parents may actually want to take the union’s advice and use the current impasse with the school board as a “teachable moment” for their children. But instead of asking them to contemplate the dread of teachers walking out on them and their classmates as the union does with ongoing threats to strike, ask them to contemplate the meaning of other words spoken by Friedman. “Nobody spends somebody else’s money as carefully as he spends his own. Nobody uses somebody else’s resources as carefully as he uses his own.”

Parents should support the Board’s proposal which puts the district on a path toward a sustainable future.

Todd Van Fleet
District 86 parent