Two out of three Americans just told Gallup that our K-12 schools have completely failed.
And the people running those schools just proved them right.
What the Chicago Teachers Union spent in 2025 is the clearest proof yet of where the money actually goes.
How Chicago Public Schools Spend $55,000 Per Student at Schools Nobody Attends
The Chicago Teachers Union spent $4.2 million on politics and lobbying in 2025, and less than 18 percent of that went to representing teachers.
The rest went to electing politicians – including socialist Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former union organizer now installed as mayor and effectively running his office as an extension of the far-left union that put him there.
Meanwhile, Frederick Douglass Academy High School in Chicago has 27 students – 2 percent of its building's capacity – and the city spends $55,000 per student to keep it open while the union that controls the entire system sends millions to Democrat politicians who make sure nobody can shut it down.
Thirty-five percent of Chicago schools are half full or less, and none of that stopped the system from dropping a couple million on transcendental meditation sessions or giving teachers and students days off – with city-subsidized buses – to march in May Day protests.
That is the cartel in action.
The $1 Billion Teachers Union Loop That Keeps Democrats Blocking School Choice
Law professor Jonathan Turley – author of Rage and the Republic – named the system for what it is: a cartel, using its control over a protected market to guarantee "higher prices, lower quality, and stifled innovation."
Adam Smith saw this coming – he warned that people of the same trade inevitably conspire against the public.
The education cartel found something even better than price-fixing: it bought the legislators who set the price.
Since 2015, the NEA and AFT – the two largest teachers unions in America – spent $669 million on federal campaigns and another $336 million on state and local races.
The NEA alone pulls in roughly $391 million in membership dues every year, and the AFT pumped $2.5 million directly into the Democratic Party's Congressional war chest between mid-2025 and early 2026.
Democrats cash the checks and spend their careers making sure no parent can pull a child out of the system that cut those checks.
In blue states with the most powerful unions, the results are identical: New York spends nearly $37,000 per student and more than half of third through fifth graders just failed their reading proficiency exams. That is what a monopoly looks like when nobody is allowed to leave.
The Arkansas School Choice Blueprint That Democrats Cannot Explain Away
Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders demanded accountability, and proficiency rates across Arkansas rose more than 7 percent in just three years – by 2026, 42.2 percent of students were hitting proficiency standards, up from 36.9 percent the year before.
Blue states watched those numbers and locked the door anyway. Now even the Democrats who locked it are losing faith.
Gallup found that overall satisfaction with K-12 schools has plunged nearly 20 points since 2024 – and Democrats are largely driving the collapse. The people who keep voting for the politicians protecting this cartel have finally figured out what the cartel did to their kids. They just haven't figured out who to blame yet.
Nikole Hannah-Jones spent her career at The New York Times championing inner-city public schools – building her entire reputation on the argument that abandoning them was abandonment of black children.
Then her own daughter insisted on leaving, because she could see what those years of championing had actually produced: a system that protects its budget long before it protects its students. Most families cannot afford to make the same escape.
That is the cartel model: extract hundreds of millions from teacher dues, funnel it to Democrats, have Democrats block every exit, watch scores collapse, demand more money to fix the mess, collect.
Students are the price of that arrangement. Brandon Johnson sits in Chicago's mayor's office because the union that runs the school system paid to put him there.
27 students are sitting in a $55,000-per-head school that should have been closed years ago – and it is still open because closing it would mean admitting the whole arrangement is a fraud.
The cartel will make sure Chicago never tries what Arkansas proved.
Sources:
- Megan Brenan, "U.S. K-12 Education Satisfaction at Record Low," Gallup/Walton Family Foundation, September 7, 2026.
- "Teacher Unions Contribute Millions to Dems' State Campaigns," The Center Square, 2026.
- Jonathan Turley, "The Education Cartel and the Blue State School Scam," The Hill, October 6, 2026.
- "Gov. Sanders Reveals Major Breakthrough in Education," Fox News Digital, 2026.
- "Poll: Dissatisfaction with K-12 Schools," Deseret News, September 8, 2026.