Classroom Collapse: The Cost of Chicago’s Failing School System
Imagine a kid who is walking into his K-12 school. He can’t afford to go to a private school, so he is limited to his local school. As he walks into it, he sees the rundown infrastructure and underutilized spaces, navigating the hollow halls to get to his class. Once he gets into class, he asks for a pencil because he lost his, but the teacher says the class doesn’t have any extras because money is tight. Moreover, he was put into a system that didn’t allow him to reach his potential, a harsh reality of CPS. This experience is what thousands of CPS students experience daily, as the Chicago Public Schools system is in a dire financial situation, with $9.1 billion in long-term debt (The Daily Economy, 2025). Although Chicago has many severe challenges, the crippling education system is the most damaging to the city’s economy in the long run because it directly weakens communities by causing higher crime rates and limiting economic opportunity. To get out of this mess, the city should establish a finance authority specifically to oversee the Chicago Public Schools system.
CPS is in Deep Water
The vast majority of Chicago Public Schools are underfunded and underenrolled. The Chicago Teachers Union explained that the Illinois state government has underfunded CPS by $1.6 billion (CTU Leadership Team, 2025). As someone who briefly attended a Chicago Public School, this is a very unfortunate reality.
Figure 1
Although the CTU is known to be biased towards increasing funding to CPS schools, this statistic they put out still signals a serious financial problem for the CPS school system. The lack of funding has forced many schools to close, like my old elementary school. Approximately three years after switching schools to get a higher-quality education, my old school closed due to funding shortages. Schools' closing and poor education have meant that total enrollment in the Chicago Public Schools system has been decreasing a lot over the years, with consistent decreases since 2003 (Chicago Business, 2022).
Another problem with the funding issues is that students often do not have a safe place to go after school. In the surrounding suburbs, there are high-quality after-school programs for students to participate in either for fun or to wait until their parents get home from work. However, many schools in Chicago struggle to even stay open during the school day, let alone stay open for multiple hours after school. The Chicago Tribune illustrated on the right that 170 schools are at risk of shutting down due to funding issues (Chicago Tribune, 2022).
This directly impacts after-school opportunities for kids. Furthermore, the organization After School Alliance reported that ¾ of Illinois parents who want to send their children to after-school programs are unable to do so due to unavailability, with the report explaining that urban areas like
Chicago have more unmet demand than rural areas (After School Alliance, 2025).
Moreover, a study conducted by the After School Alliance exclaimed that kids who do not participate in after-school programs and those who are unsupervised between the hours of 3 PM and 6 PM are those most likely to experiment with drugs and commit crimes (After School Alliance, 2025).
Figure 2
Not only is this dangerous for kids, but it also creates an environment where academics are not a big priority, leading to a decline in the quality of life. This trend is illustrated on the Illinois Policy chart above, which shows a trend that in low-income areas, 95% of students fall behind the academic expectations that the state sets (Illinois Policy).
Due to all these issues, many Chicagoans believe that the public school system is unfixable. On the surface, this is a totally fair belief, as even CPS itself said that it is operating with a $734 million deficit, a devastating amount that seems impossible to climb out of (Koumpilova, 2025). Although this is a lot of money, Chicago Public Schools has dealt with a situation way worse than this one and found its way out of it.
A Way Out of the Water
To understand how bad of a situation CPS was in, let’s go back a couple of decades. Leading up to the 1980’s, the situation got so bad that Chicago Public Schools missed payroll regularly, which led to 9 teacher strikes occurring in the 20 years prior (Tabor, 2024). Noticing the chaos, the Illinois General Assembly passed the School Finance Authority Act. In summary, the act established the Chicago School Finance Authority, which was to be made up of 5 board members who were chosen by the mayor and the governor. The authority was tasked with creating financial plans that would help balance CPS’s budget.
Immediately, the authority was very successful. Specifically, by 1993, the school board managed to obtain a budget surplus through being responsible for debt management and practicing controlled spending. Although the Chicago School Finance Authority was dissolved in 2010 after the authority paid back the debts that it was tasked to pay off, this same model would be exceptionally beneficial for the financial state of Chicago Public Schools, and this is the most sustainable, cost-effective solution there is to solve CPS’s issues. This approach, in contrast to other solutions like just increasing funding or cutting costs, will allow CPS to address both long-term debt and improve the school system’s ability to plan financially for the future. Furthermore, this model, with small changes as needed, would function the same way as it did in the past and would help CPS become more stable financially and help it decrease the amount of money it borrows.
The Best Economic Solution Debate
This solution is more effective and provides a better outlook for CPS’s financial future than other solutions being used by Chicago policymakers. Moreover, Brandon Johnson, the mayor of Chicago, has consistently proposed solutions where CPS takes more debt to pay immediate costs. For example, in 2024, a controversial solution to help solve CPS’s crisis that Johnson proposed was to take out a $175 million high-interest, short-term loan to help cover pension costs for CPS employees.
When the school district proposed that they mainly focus on cutting costs, Johnson shut down that proposal. Furthermore, he became furious with Pedro Martinez, the CEO of CPS at the time, stating that he should resign from his position because of his opposition to the loan. However, this ended up backfiring on Johnson, as seven of CPS’s board members ended up resigning. This action was to send a message to the Chicago government: CPS is sick of going further into debt.
Also, CPS has been spending exponentially more overtime, yet the test scores of its students have not been following; they have only been going down. Illinois Policy conducted research analyzing the trends between 2012, two years after the Chicago School Finance Authority was dissolved, until 2024, and the data is concerning at best.
During those 12 years, spending has gone up 97%, reading test scores have dropped 63%, and math test scores have plummeted 78% (Tabor, 2024). This shows a clear and important pattern: there are structural inefficiencies with how CPS allocates its resources.
Figure 3
Now, let’s bring this back to what truly matters: the quality of education being provided to students. Students do not learn better through getting electric school buses worth millions of dollars, like CPS is doing, or having large amounts of CPS’s money go towards pensions. Instead, there should be a higher amount of investment into school infrastructure, after-school programs, and hiring more teachers to lower the student-teacher ratios. These kinds of structural changes are most likely to happen if a system like the Chicago School Finance Authority is reestablished.
The Roots of Chicago’s Economic Issues
Concluding a topic like solving Chicago’s economic issues can be quite daunting, as there are so many different arguments that people can make. However, pause, and take a second to look past all the data and different arguments, and picture a tree. Chicago’s problems are like a massive tree: there are so many that are visible. However, for every big tree, there needs to be roots that make that tree grow, and the issues with Chicago Public Schools are the roots that made the tree grow big.
A Different Perspective
While researching this topic, I focused a lot on finding information that does not involve adding debt to the education system, so from the start, I was already biased towards one specific type of solution. Furthermore, I have lived in the Chicago area my entire life, and I already have deep-rooted opinions on these issues, meaning there are certain viewpoints that I did not really entertain. To summarize, a limitation of my stance is that there is a lot more than what meets the eye.
Specifically, you can totally make the argument that crime is the biggest factor in Chicago’s economic struggles. Of the Chicago neighborhoods, the most dangerous areas are those where kids get the worst education. Your life as a student at the top-ranked Walter Peyton magnet school is totally different than if you go to school in West Garfield Park, the most dangerous area of the city. A lot of kids do not go to school for their safety, as they would have to trek through gang territory to get to school. To conclude, crime has made the quality of Chicago Public Schools worse.
Conclusion
With this point, many may ask, wouldn’t crime be the main factor? The main reason is that the poor education system is where crime in Chicago comes from. There are not a lot of gangs in wealthy areas, and that is because those areas have opportunities for their residents.
According to a University of Michigan study, students who attended better-funded schools were 15% less likely to be arrested through age 30 (Rivkin, 2022). Although both education and crime influence each other, communities largely become unsafe due to a lack of opportunity, stemming from poor education. This means that, rather than framing high crime rates as the primary reason for poor education, poor education plays a greater role in contributing to higher crime rates and different issues than the other way around. Due to my belief that providing a great education is instrumental in supporting the economy and communities, and my research showing how CPS’s finances are hurting the city, I am biased towards this position.
I want readers to remember that it is crucial to get a good education to provide for others and the economy. Furthermore, policymakers need to realize that they could turn the city around if they make more investments in the education system, and that is where the money should be going. Establishing a finance authority would help create a domino effect: through improving education, there will be an exponential increase in opportunity across the city. At first, investment would be like pouring water on a rock: the problem would seem the same. However, over time, Chicago Public Schools will improve, and communities will be revitalized.
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