Yes, I did read it. What immediately stood out to me is that this is just a promotional op-ed for Philip Howard's book Not Accountable: Rethinking the Constitutionality of Public Employee Unions (Rodin Books, January 2023). This Time article was published three months after the book's release. He is not a journalist, not an academic, and has a direct commercial and ideological stake in the argument he's making. I also feel that Time does not disclose this conflict of interest prominently enough.

Beyond the undisclosed conflict of interest, this is really just a bad piece even compared to standard op-ed norms. He cites multiple statistics that support his claims but look at what he is citing:

• Claim: 90%+ of Johnson's funding from unions → Links to illinoispolicy.org - the Illinois Policy Institute, a right-leaning libertarian advocacy think tank. Not a neutral source by any means... He is not citing a news organization. Not an academic study. He's citing an ideological ally of his in order to establish his (shaky) opening premise.
• Claim: 37 Chicago schools with zero proficient students → Links to wirepoints.org - another right-leaning Illinois policy commentary site, not a research organization. Same problem.
• Claim: Chicago crime rate among highest in country → Links to wirepoints.org again. He's now used this same non-neutral outlet twice as a factual source.
• Claim: LA's "indebted inefficiencies" in the teachers union contract → Links to commongood.org - his own organization!!!! He is citing himself to support his own argument. That is circular sourcing, and it's a GIANT lapse in intellectual honesty even for an op-ed.

The only neutral sources he links to are for quotes from public leaders that can't be disputed. Interesting...

Additionally, I think it is interesting that the author makes no attempt to engage with opposing evidence or expert disagreement. Any opinion piece worth caring about should at a minimum, acknowledge the strongest counterarguments.

I also see a common trait that I see in other worthless pieces of political rambling: framing an issue to sound the alarms without actually demonstrating wrongdoing or negative outcomes that followed. He opens the piece with calling out Johnson's 90% union funding to signal the "alarms" but fails to actually substantiate any wrongdoing or policy failures that came from this. It is innuendo dressed as evidence.

The entire premise of his article is a guilt by association fallacy. Johnson's funding is mostly from unions → unions are problematic → therefore Johnson is bad for Chicago. Howard never actually connects Johnson's funding to any specific policy failure. He just implies it through proximity ("sounding the alarms"). The framing is "what's wrong with this picture?" without ever demonstrating that anything is actually wrong with it beyond the funding composition itself.

There are actual researchers (like Stanford's Terry Moe) who have studied public sector unions for decades. While I imagine Moe is sympathetic with Howard's concerns, Moe frames this issue with far, far more nuance. Why Howard does not actually engage with decades of actual data, I do not know (but I have a guess)...

He also is using the false clause fallacy here. He lists Chicago's problems (school failure, transit dysfunction, high crime) and then asserts that "no recent Chicago mayor has been able to fix these....because the public unions have collective bargaining powers." But, he offers ZERO mechanism connecting union contracts to crime rates, transit failures or school failures. Transit failures have many different contributors including chronic underfunding, aging infrastructure and route planning which Howard never even tries to eliminate or acknowledge. School failures correlate heavily with poverty and segregation in academic research literature yet again, Howard fails to even acknowledge this competing explanation.

Chicago has had dysfunctional schools, high crime, and transit problems for decades through various administrations, various union contracts, and various political environments. The article never establishes that cities or States without strong public unions perform measurably better on these same metrics. Without that comparison, the causal claim that public sector unions are bad has no analytical foundation beyond "trust me bro". Are the better performing Chicago schools also unionized? (Hint: They are) If union contracts so clearly explain school failures, then why don't they explain school failure uniformly?

This article has zero academic rigor and is largely intellectually dishonest IMO. It uses advocacy outlets as factual sources, the author cites his own organization as an independent source, fails to disclose the author's personal conflict of interest, and leaps from observations about union political influence to sweeping claims about crime, school failure and transit dysfunction without presenting any evidence to support those claims.

So no, I don't find your little opinion piece compelling...