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A BLUEPRINT FOR RESISTING TRUMP EDUCATION CUTS? CHICAGO TEACHERS
REACH “POWERFUL” TENTATIVE CONTRACT  
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Stacy Davis Gates, Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez
April 1, 2025
Democracy Now!
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_ In a major labor victory, the Chicago Teachers Union reached a
tentative agreement with Chicago Public Schools Monday night that
reaffirms sanctuary school protections, protects the ability to teach
Black history, and gives veteran teachers a raise. _

, Democracy Now! (screen clip)

 

In a major labor victory, the Chicago Teachers Union reached a
tentative agreement with Chicago Public Schools Monday night that
reaffirms sanctuary school protections, protects the ability to teach
Black history, gives veteran teachers a raise, and more. The deal
comes amid attacks on public education by the Trump administration.
“The collective bargaining agreement is a very powerful tool to use,
especially in this moment, to ensure that people are protected,”
says Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. She
also discusses the new posthumous memoir by former CTU President
Karen Lewis, titled _I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and
Education_, and lessons Lewis shared for the struggle ahead.

 
Transcript

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is _Democracy Now!_, democracynow.org. I’m Amy
Goodman in New York, with Juan González in Chicago, where we’re
going to stay, because in a major labor victory, the Chicago Teachers
Union has reached a tentative contract deal with Chicago Public
Schools after more than a year of negotiations without a strike or
threat of a strike for the first time in less than — in more than a
decade. The full membership still has to vote before everything is
final. The deal reaffirms sanctuary school protections, protects the
ability to teach Black history and includes raises for veteran
teachers and more. This comes amidst attacks on public education by
the Trump administration, as well as concerns about ICE agents
targeting Chicago schools.

For more, we’re joined in Chicago by Stacy Davis Gates, president of
the Chicago Teachers Union, also wrote the afterword to the new
posthumous memoir by the former Chicago Teachers Union President Karen
Lewis titled _I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education_. It
also has a foreword by the world-renowned abolitionist, author and
activist, professor Angela Davis.

Stacy Davis Gates, welcome back to _Democracy Now!_ Explain the
contract victory you almost have secured.

STACY DAVIS GATES: Good morning. Thank you for having me again.

This contract provides us with the capacity to move our school
district forward in a time of Trump. As you noted earlier, the
destruction of the Department of Education is going to have profound
impact on the least of these. This contract provides a force field of
protection for both our LGBTQIA+ students and our members. It provides
academic freedom to ensure that history teachers like me are able to
teach about the power of Reconstruction in this country, led by
enslaved Africans in the first profound general strike that this
country experienced. Beyond that, this contract is a way in which our
immigrant students and their families can find safety in sending their
children to schools, where we will protect them, as we have already.
The collective bargaining agreement is a very powerful tool to use,
especially in this moment, to ensure that people are protected, to
ensure that their ability to enjoy the public good has some guardrails
on it.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Stacy Davis Gates, could you talk about some of
the other proposals you were able to win, including more funding for
sports programs and sustainable community schools?

STACY DAVIS GATES: Absolutely. Thank you for that question. Dyett
High School in the Washington Park neighborhood of Chicago was closed
by Rahm Emanuel, who was the mayor of Chicago. In fact, he closed over
50 schools at one time in the city. We, in coalition with the Kenwood
Oakland Community Organization, teachers and grandmothers and
alderpeople, like Jeanette Taylor, they went on a hunger strike. And
in that hunger strike, they won the reopening of their schools. Our
union then, in coalition with this community coalition, took their
needs to the bargaining table and established community schools. We
have expanded the number of community schools as an effort to support
and structure spaces that don’t have to close, but provide
opportunity. This year, Dyett’s boys’ basketball team is
celebrating a state championship.

Again, this collective bargaining agreement provides space for
progress. We have a evaluation system in the Chicago Public Schools
that has deprivileged both Black children and Black teachers of a very
well-rounded experience. What we’ve done is marginalized those
impacts and created pathways to get more Black teachers into the
system. While corporations like Target are walking away from embracing
Black workers and Black employees, we are providing pathways to
support more of them.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the difficulty of the
negotiations? Clearly, this was an unusual situation, because the
current mayor, Brandon Johnson, used to be an organizer with your
union, so the union striking against this mayor, who was so close to
them, would have been a difficult situation. How were you able to
maneuver with the negotiations with the Chicago Public Schools and the
Mayor’s Office?

STACY DAVIS GATES: The power of our solidarity has been most
vividly illustrated in our ability to strike. Karen Lewis led one in
2012 that was perhaps one of the most galvanizing moments of our
nation’s labor history. But beyond that, what we’ve done is that
we’ve done a few things. We’ve resisted the impacts of
privatization and created spaces, through the strike, through
negotiating, through the coalition space, to create power, power that
enables us to do a lot of things. Yes, we can fight. We do that very
well. And it is that fight, the equity that we build in that struggle,
that has enabled this opportunity to push for something that has been
more transformative. We’ve changed and enshrined in this contract a
budgeting system that creates equity, that is embedded in making sure
that children who go to school on the South and the West Sides of the
city, that their budgets are prioritized in a reparatory manner. That
is in this contract. That’s not just built through the negotiating
table. That’s built through community coalition. That is built
through supporting hunger strikes. That is built through taking it to
the picket line. It is built through bold, unapologetic love for our
city’s children.

AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering if you could comment on Karen Lewis.
You wrote the afterword to the new memoir by the
former CTU president, Chicago Teachers Union president, Karen Lewis,
the book titled _I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education_.
It’s also got a foreword by Angela Davis. Can you talk about her
life and legacy as a transformative leader and what lessons you think
are key to draw upon now?

STACY DAVIS GATES: That is a wonderful question. Thank you.

Karen Lewis is the blueprint for the type of leadership that we need
in this very moment. Karen Lewis took the helm of the Chicago Teachers
Union when Rahm Emanuel was the mayor of this city, a mayor that used
the public good for the rich. In fact, he and Elon palled around here
in Chicago. We had a mayor that foreclosed on public education by
shutting down 50 schools on Black children on the South and West Sides
of the city. We had a mayor who covered up the murder of a Black
teenager in the city. We faced a very well-funded, neoliberal
establishment that was hell-bent on marginalizing everything that we
needed to have life and life more abundantly.

Karen Lewis organized. She found her confederates and the community
and organizations like the Kenwood Oakland and people like Jitu Brown
and Northside Action for Justice, and built a movement that was based
on giving Chicagoans what they deserve, because if you give Chicagoans
what they deserve, the children of this city are rooted and anchored
in that. And so, what I would say in this moment is that Karen Lewis
was fearless. Karen Lewis looked at power and laughed. Karen Lewis
created space for coalition. And Karen Lewis led with humility and
with a fearlessness of love, care and legacy.

AMY GOODMAN: Stacy Davis Gates, thanks so much for being with us,
president of the Chicago Teachers Union, joining us from Chicago.

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative
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_AMY GOODMAN is the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!, a
national, daily, independent, award-winning news program airing on
over 1,400 public television and radio stations worldwide. _

_The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard honored Goodman with
the 2014 I.F. Stone Medal for Journalistic Independence Lifetime
Achievement Award. She is also the first journalist to receive the
Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the 'Alternative Nobel Prize'
for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots
political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative
voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” She is the
first co-recipient of the Park Center for Independent Media’s Izzy
Award, named for the great muckraking journalist I.F. Stone, and was
later selected for induction into the Park Center’s I.F. Stone Hall
of Fame. The Independent of London called Amy Goodman and Democracy
Now! “an inspiration.”_

_Goodman has co-authored six New York Times bestsellers. Her latest,
Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America,
looks back over the past two decades of Democracy Now! and the
powerful movements and charismatic leaders who are re-shaping our
world._

_JUAN GONZÁLEZ is Co-Host of Democracy Now! He has been a
professional journalist for more than 40 years and was a staff
columnist at the New York Daily News from 1987 to 2016. He is a
two-time recipient of the George Polk Award for commentary (1998 and
2010) and was inducted into the Deadline Club’s New York Journalism
Hall of Fame in 2015. A professor of Journalism and Media Studies at
Rutgers University from 2017 to 2023, he is currently a Senior Fellow
at the Great Cities Institute of the University of Illinois-Chicago._

_STACY DAVIS GATES is an American labor leader and educator.
She was elected president of the union in May 2022 after previously
serving as vice president under Jesse Sharkey. Davis joined the staff
of the CTU as political director in 2011.  _

_Democracy Now! produces a daily, global, independent news hour hosted
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