The average elementary school principal’s salary at Chicago Public Schools is $124,500 in 2025. (For an assistant principal, it’s $93,179.) The perks are amazing, including a parking space with your name on it in downtown Chicago (worth $300/month), the finest health insurance money can buy, and a generous pension, all supported by my tax dollars.

(And, they only work seven hours a day, five days a week, nine months a year, which works out to $13,833 per month, not including the supplementary benefits.)

I happen to know one of them, because we were on the same championship college football team back in the Stone Age. After our respective bachelor’s degrees, I became a paralegal and he got a master’s in education from Bill Ayers at the University of Illinois at Chicago, becoming totally indoctrinated into left-wing ideology. (If you have a master’s degree, do you work seven-hour days for $13,833 per month? Almost certainly not. Ayers got even more for working less, before he took that pension.)

Back in our Al Bundy glory days of college football, my friend was a moderate Democrat, and I was a moderate Republican. Our post-graduate experiences polarized us both. He cheerfully jokes about Chicago Democrats stealing the Illinois share of Electoral College votes in every presidential election, except one, for our entire lives. “Dead Republicans rise from their graves every Election Day, and do the zombie shuffle to their polling places to vote a straight Democrat ticket — they vote in alphabetical order, and they all have the same handwriting.”

I’m kind of a comedy connoisseur, but I never laugh at such jokes — it’s far too close to the truth, and for Illinois Republicans, that truth is infuriating. It’s like telling a thoroughly racist joke to a room full of African-Americans. He doesn’t care. Telling one racist joke could get him fired, but telling jokes daily at the expense of conservatives (and similar banter) was part of what got him where he is today.

This has been a necessary introduction to a discussion of the total folly that is the federal Department of Education. Like nearly every other department and agency in Washington D.C., and in every other vibrant blue capital, Republicans’ tax dollars push Democratic Party Deep State (DPDS) ideology.

What hath the DOE wrought? See the image on the right:

DOE spending per child had been going up & math and reading scores  have been going down. The majority of the money was going to salaries. DOE employee salaries hit 120k per year. The 300 billion budget can now go directly to states. pic.twitter.com/G0ECu4DX9c

— CeniCapital (@Ceni_Capital) March 20, 2025

The red line is growth in the number of administrators, employees who never teach a class, over the past 25 years in public schools (+95%). The yellow line is principals (like my friend) and assistant principals (+39%) who rarely, if ever, teach a class. The green line is teachers (+10%), and the blue line is students (+5%). All this, and much more, resulted from policies of the DOE, and Blue State boards of education.

What do all those new administrators administer? Mostly, DPDS ideology. After-school “Drag” and LGBTQ clubs cropped up, and schools became hyper-focused on the “achievements” from the whole cast of DEI characters. I suspect this focus on left-wing ideology also produced our public schools’ abysmal proficiency scores, compared to children in many private schools, and in many other countries.

During a (thankfully brief) sojourn as a Chicago resident, my son attended Rodolfo Lozano Bilingual Academy, a special ESL school for Spanish-speaking students in grades K–8.  Though all eight of my son’s great-grandparents were born in Switzerland, Ireland, or Germany, he was sent there due to a speech difficulty. (He was the only “gringo” in the room.) The lion’s share of speech pathologists and therapists employed by the entire CPS system work at Lozano. Many other big Blue cities have ESL schools just like Lozano. For this reason (and others), there’s no doubt the children of illegal aliens are receiving far more dollars spent on their education than native-born Americans, even though many of their parents never pay a nickel in taxes to support these schools.

You see, “diversity” (of race, religion, and sexuality) is chiseled into every facet of our big Blue city public schools, where an astronomical amount of our education money is spent. The entire hiring and promotion process is dominated by DEI fanatics, and you’ll never rise above an entry-level teaching position if you don’t loudly espouse the Democrats, and all they stand for. In fact, it would be hard to even get hired for that entry-level job.

My Chicago principal friend admitted that all he had to do was put “they/them” pronouns and a Pride flag on his LinkedIn profile and into his email signature block, march in a few Pride parades, and suddenly he was fast-tracked for promotion.

But he’s neither homosexual nor bisexual, nor does he “swing that way.” It’s all a sham for the sake of his career. In fact, he’s married to a female teacher (whom Rush Limbaugh would have called a “Feminazi”), parents to two juvenile delinquents and a bisexual OnlyFans actress. Turns out, that leftist ideology came home to roost.

After their picture-perfect early childhoods, I watched (and listened to my friend’s lamentations) in horror and dismay for many years, as all three of these kids bounced in and out of rehab and juvenile court like ping-pong balls, before settling into their current careers.

Both of the boys are already in prison for dealing drugs. Since I took a break from doing her taxes to write this, I can report that the girl is already well on her way to her first million dollars at the age of 18 (good, I guess, until you consider where the money’s coming from), but is also already HIV-positive (very, very bad).

In other words, all three are trainwrecks. All of this was made possible by our tax dollars. Every nickel their parents have been paid in their entire adult lives, and every nickel toward the best health insurance money can buy — for drug rehab and the daughter’s hideously expensive cocktail of HIV anti-retroviral drugs — came from our taxes.

Meanwhile, my son is growing up to be a fine young man in a small, distant suburb. And every nickel came from my hard work, not your taxes.

This “Tale of Two Families” offers many lessons large and small. One of the largest is that the walls of our church, sensible conservative parenting and instruction, and the cornfields our two families drive past to visit each other have insulated my son from leftist influences that have wrecked the lives of all three of my college friend’s children.

But the largest of all are that (1) the DOE must be eliminated, and (2) all schools and their administrators must exclusively focus on reading, writing, math, science, and unbiased history, and not at all on left-wing indoctrination, ESL, CRT, DEI, and Heather Has Two Mommies. Look where that got my friend and his family.

Jim Davis is an IT specialist and paralegal, with degrees in political science and statistical analysis: the underpinning of all science. His work has appeared in Newsmax and Daily Caller. You can find him as RealProfessor219 on Rumble.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license.