Leftist activists masquerading as “educators” never say die. Even as they enter the gates of hell, they won’t back down. Their own professional inadequacies as measured by their students’ lousy test scores will not get leftist activists to back down from their mission to turn students into ideological mini-thems. Like junkies, they mainline power, stealing money from taxpayers to feed their habit.
Neither failing students nor public anger at their surreptitious waste of taxpayer money will get leftist teachers to rethink their ideological commitments or corrupt behavior. Just this week the Illinois Policy Institute reported on the shocking waste of millions of public dollars by CPS employees.
Over the past six years, CPS employees spent $23.6 million indulging in luxurious trips using money sucked out of the pockets of hardworking taxpayers. The most dramatic increases in CPS abuse of taxpayer funds occurred in 2023 and 2024—just after Stacy Davis Gates took over as president of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) in July 2022.
In 2022, the year before Gates ran the CTU, CPS travel expenses were $3.4 million. In 2023, they more than doubled to $6.9 million, and then in 2024, they ballooned to $7.7 million.
Here are some of the expenses highlighted by the Illinois Policy Institute:
- One teacher took a seven-day, $4,700 trip to a luxury Hawaiian resort for a four-day professional development seminar.
- Multiple $1,000-a-person round-trip domestic flights and room rates of $500-plus to over $900 a night.
- $50,000 for 24 employees of one school to attend a professional development conference in Las Vegas in 2024.
- A principal who decided to attend a 2023 Las Vegas conference at the last minute, booked a hotel room at a cost of $945 per night for a three-night stay.
- Word spread about one vendor’s seminars in Las Vegas and other destinations, leading over 600 staffers to spend $1.5 million attending them. They stayed in four- and five-star hotels on the Las Vegas Strip for over $400 a night. When that same vendor offered the conference in Chicago, few attended.
- A principal booked a suite at a luxury Las Vegas Strip hotel away from the conference and stayed an extra day so he could bring his non-employee spouse to celebrate their anniversary. The principal booked the suite an extra day without requesting approval.
- At least two dozen employees took round-trip Chicago to Las Vegas flights costing more than $1,000 each.
- 15 international professional development trips for staff, with 12 of those never submitted for approval. One trip was even rejected by the Office of Finance, but the employees traveled anyway.
Do CTU members care about wasting taxpayer money? Do they care about the lost learning that occurs every day students have substitute teachers, also known as expensive babysitters?
Chicagoans may not know that substitute teachers in CPS schools are paid between $125-193 per day. Gemini estimates that the cost to CPS of substitute teachers to cover teachers attending professional development is approximately $36 million.
That I know of, there is no evidence that these expensive “professional development” escapades improve student learning. Professional development leftist style is not intended to raise test scores. A quick look at the conference plans of the other leftist teachers union, the National Education Association (NEA), reveals the goals of leftist-controlled professional development.
The Dec.2-4, 2025 training is part of the NEA’s “Focus Academy.” The focus of this conference is in its title: “Advancing LGBTQ+ Justice and Transgender Advocacy.”
That’s right, while students are failing academically in droves, shrieking banshee NEA President Becky Pringle thinks what ails them is lack of knowledge about perverse sexuality and crossdressing fetishes.
In its usual spirit of “inclusion,” NEA propagandists single out for aspersions those on the “right” and “Republicans” who hold different beliefs about the nature and treatment of gender dysphoria, accusing them of ignorance, attacking “trans” people, sabotaging progressives, using “dog whistles” to “whip up fear and consolidate power,” generating a “moral panic,” “fear-mongering about Critical Race Theory, “mobilizing” Republicans through racism and transphobism, and impugning leftists—okay, I’ll give them that last one.
The inclusivists make clear what they think about conservatives and give their foot soldiers their marching orders:
Name the villains who violate our values, expose their motivation of getting back into or holding onto power, and position them as a barrier to what our families need. Call out how the villains: exploit divisions across races … and exploit the lack of familiarity with transgender people.
Let’s break all that inclusive rhetoric down a bit.
First, not personally knowing children who experience gender dysphoria, or teens confused by the web of lies they encounter on social media, or adults with crossdressing fetishes does not mean Americans are ignorant of the nature and causes of gender dysphoria or on how to treat those who experience it.
Similarly, no one needs to know a “minor attracted person,” zoophile, or infantilist to understand and respond to those disordered predilections.
Second, when leftists claim conservatives are “attacking” “trans” people, they mean conservatives are positively affirming rightly ordered ideas about the reality and meaning of biological sex.
While anyone who believes locker room usage and sports should correspond to biological sex is accused of attacking crossdressing people, crossdressing men who insist on intruding into women’s locker rooms where women are undressing are never accused of mounting an attack against women. Funny how that works.
The battle we’re in over public schools is a battle of opposing worldviews. The NEA makes that clear in its Orwellian command to its minions to replace the word “gender” with “genders” or “our genders”:
Pluralizing genders enables greater agreement with our worldview. …
Third, “sabotaging progressives” and “consolidating power” means working to restore the sane policies that “progressives” have been working tenaciously for decades to eradicate.
When progressives gained control of the levers of institutional power at all levels of education and began systemically embedding their values, beliefs, biases, and assumptions everywhere, were they “sabotaging” conservatives and “consolidating power”?
In this December’s training session, will leftists attempt to generate “moral panic” about conservatives? Will leftists fearmonger about conservative, reality-based beliefs about sex? Is this training session intended to “mobilize” leftists through anti-white racism that masquerades as anti-racism?
The NEA states that “Religious and ethnic bigotry has no place in our public schools.” “Ethnic” means “pertaining to a religious, racial, or cultural group.” “Culture” denotes the totality of socially transmitted behavior patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work, and thought characteristic of a community or population.” As such, the NEA violates its own principles by encouraging its members to embrace bigotry toward religious and ethnic groups that believe in the sacredness of biological sex and promote its policy implications.
Ignorant, incompetent, bigoted, self-serving, corrupt adults like leftist CPS teachers and NEA members cannot serve as role models for children or teens. And Chicago Public Schools will not improve until the death grip of leftists is pried loose from the institutions of power and the public purse.