One of the things President Donald Trump campaigned on was getting rid of the Department of Education over the next four years. It is just another arm of a bloated bureaucracy that isn't helping American students learn. What it has done is give teachers' unions inordinate amounts of political power. As we saw during the pandemic, they even had a say in public policy in the form of school closures and when, or if, they would reopen. But while Trump is making good on his promise to shutter the Department of Education, one city's teachers' union is not being shy about who they think is in charge of America's kids.
On Monday, at a City Club Chicago event, Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) President Stacy Davis Gates admitted to what most Americans have been thinking all along about teachers' unions in general. She declared that “all children belong to” the union. Gates, of course, engaged in the prerequisite Trump-bashing, calling Trump's plan to eliminate the Department of Education a "relitigation" of the Civil War, and complained about the decaying state of the very school system she is in charge of.
Gates used a quote by civil rights activist James Baldwin to let the not-so-secret agenda of the union out of the bag, saying, “The children are always ours. Every single one of them, all over the globe.” Gates then mocked any parents who might respond to such a statement and added, “Yes, we do. We do.” And what anti-Trump rant would be complete without pulling out the race card? Gates implied that Trump's wanting to get rid of the Department of Education and fire federal employees is an attack on the Civil Rights movement.
Stacy Davis Gates might want to pay attention to the bigger problems in her aforementioned decaying school district, rather than allowing Donald Trump to live rent-free in her head. According to the Illinois Report Card released in October of 2024, fewer than one in three students could read, and one in five could do math at their elementary grade level in 2024.
Those low test scores may be the result of the union fighting to keep students out of the classroom during the pandemic. Chicago students completed the 2020-2021 school year entirely remotely and did not return to in-person learning until August of 2021. But that was still not enough vacation time for Chicago's teachers. They pushed for remote learning through 2022, resulting in a five-day walkout.
Then there is the ongoing federal investigation into the district's refusal to end diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives. According to the Department of Education, the district is concentrating “on remedial measures only for black students, despite acknowledging that Chicago students of all races struggle academically." As if that wasn't enough, there is the district's sex education program, which allegedly is full of gender identity content, including "gender and sexuality workshops" that they have tried to hide from the public.
But when the mayor of Chicago is a friend of yours, there is no need to keep secrets. Gates and Mayor Brandon Johnson are both former Social Studies teachers, and Johnson is in agreement with the union's agenda. And, as always, there is a healthy dose of Democrat hypocrisy, as Gates sent her son to a private school for its athletic program, and Johnson's son attended a private school for its orchestra and advanced placement programs. This would be the same Stacy Davis Gates who tweeted in 2022 that "school choice was actually the choice of racists."
The real not-so-secret secret is that Stacy Davis Gates is not afraid that Donald Trump is taking away anyone's civil rights by abolishing the Department of Education; she's afraid he is taking away her power. And that's all that matters.
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