Poll: Chicago Teachers Union wildly unpopular in Illinois

A survey commissioned by the Illinois Policy Institute found only one in five state voters have a positive view of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

Over half (56%) of voters report a negative opinion.

Additionally, 48% of survey respondents said they were less likely to vote for a political candidate who received contributions from a teachers’ union. Only 15% said they would be more likely to support such a candidate.

The CTU became notorious for its radical woke agenda, which has included pro-LGBT and pro-abortion efforts, restorative justice and other far-left agenda items.

Furthermore, it’s been criticized for refusing to release audits, allegedly using public-school students to electioneer, and what critics call the hypocrisy of CTU President Stacy Davis Gates, who opposes school choice but sends her own child to a private school. 

Meanwhile, only 20% of Illinoisans think well of the union.

Ironically, CTU also spends just 20% of its funding on representing teachers, according to Illinois Policy. The rest goes toward the union’s political activities.

National teachers’ unions are falling out of favor for similar reasons.

For example, over the past three decades, the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has given the vast majority of its political contributions to Democrats.

In the 2022 midterms, AFT and the National Education Association (NEA) donated $1.3 million to Democrats but just $2,500 to Republicans.

Additionally, the NEA spent twice as much money on political lobbying as it did on actually representing its own members in 2020-2021, one news report found.

Union membership is also shrinking.

The NEA lost over 12,000 members in the 2022-23 school year. In the previous year, the NEA and AFT lost a combined 59,000 members.

The Illinois Policy polling results also didn’t bode well for the state’s Democrat leadership.

Voters listed their top issues as high taxes (60%), state governance (26%), the economy (25%), crime (19%) and education (17%).

Democrat Gov. J.B. Pritzker isn’t polling well either, with 47% of voters approving and 50% disapproving of his job performance.