From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Chicago Teachers Didn’t Win Everything, But They’ve Transformed the City—And the Labor Movement
Date November 6, 2019 1:15 AM
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[“It took our members 10 days to bring these promises home,”
CTU Vice President Stacy Davis Gates told reporters after an agreement
was reached over instructional days. “But I want to tell my members:
They have changed Chicago.” ] [[link removed]]

CHICAGO TEACHERS DIDN’T WIN EVERYTHING, BUT THEY’VE TRANSFORMED
THE CITY—AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT  
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Rebecca Burns
November 1, 2019
Working In These Times
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_ “It took our members 10 days to bring these promises home,” CTU
Vice President Stacy Davis Gates told reporters after an agreement was
reached over instructional days. “But I want to tell my members:
They have changed Chicago.” _

Chicago teachers made history through their strike. But their fight
isn't over., Scott Heins/Getty Images

 

Chicago teachers and staff returned to the classrooms Friday after
more than two weeks on strike. Their walkout lasted longer than the
city’s landmark 2012 strike, as well as those in Los Angeles and
Oakland earlier this year.

The Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) strike also lasted long enough for
the season’s first snowstorm to blanket thousands of teachers and
staff who surrounded City Hall Thursday morning to demand Mayor Lori
Lightfoot agree to restore missed instructional days as a final
condition of their returning to work. After a few hours, the union and
the mayor arrived at a compromise of five make-up days—a move
Lightfoot had resisted until the eleventh hour, despite the fact that
it’s a standard conclusion
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to teacher strikes.

Over the course of an often-bitter battle, CTU and its sister union,
SEIU 73, overcame a series of such ultimatums from the recently
elected mayor. Before the strike, Lightfoot had refused
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write issues such as staffing increases or class size caps into a
contract at all. Following a budget address last week, Lightfoot vowed
that there was no more money left for a “bailout” of the school
district. But a tentative agreement approved by CTU delegates
Wednesday night requires the school district to put a nurse and social
worker in every school within five years and allocates $35 million
more annually to reduce overcrowded classrooms. Both unions also won
pay bumps for support staff who have made poverty wages. 

Yet these substantial gains still fell short of what many members had
hoped to achieve, given that they were fighting for basic investments
already enjoyed by most suburban school districts—investments that
Lightfoot herself had campaigned on this spring. 

“It took our members 10 days to bring these promises home,” CTU
Vice President Stacy Davis Gates told reporters after an agreement was
reached over instructional days. “But I want to tell my members:
They have changed Chicago.” 

Members of SEIU 73 ratified their contract this week, and CTU members
will now have 10 days to do so. But the impact of the two-week walkout
is likely to extend far beyond the contracts themselves. 

During daily rallies that drew tens of thousands of teachers, staff
and supporters, the unions repeatedly made the argument that there was
plenty of wealth in the city to invest in schools and public
services—it was just concentrated in the wrong hands. They also
touched on what’s often a third-rail for public-sector unions,
criticizing the resources lavished on police at their expense. The
strike’s momentum will carry over most immediately into a budget
battle with Lightfoot, with the teachers’ union partnering with a
larger coalition fighting to tax corporations and luxury real-estate
at a higher rate in order to fund affordable housing, public mental
health clinics and other services. 

The teachers union also shone a light on an opaque financing tool
known as Tax Increment Financing, or TIF, that’s intended to funnel
additional property tax dollars to “blighted” areas, but that
critics say is akin to a “corporate slush fund
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On Tuesday, nine CTU members were arrested at the headquarters of
Sterling Bay to protest the city’s decision to award the Wall-Street
backed
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developer more than $1 billion of TIF subsidies earlier this year.

“That day in and of itself was huge because we were able to call out
the city’s hypocrisy,” says Roxana González, an 8th-grade teacher
at Dr. Jorge Prieto Math and Science Academy who was among those
arrested. “The fight to fund what our communities need is a much
longer one than our contract fight, and teachers across the city are
going to continue to be a part of it.” 

The two-week walkout will also likely have reverberations for teachers
and other union members outside of Chicago. The CTU’s 2012 strike
helped inspire a national network called “Bargaining for the Common
Good” that has brought together unions seeking to expand the scope
of contract bargaining beyond pay and benefits. 

“In many ways this was both the toughest and most visionary strike
fought yet on the principals of Bargaining for the Common Good,”
says Joseph McCartin, the director of the Kalmanovitz Initiative for
Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University.

“The union engaged in some effective popular education about the
structural issues of school underfunding that it can follow up on in
the future. Although it was a difficult fight, the CTU has come away
with gains that will make the schools better and encourage teachers
elsewhere to fight for similar things.” 

One of CTU’s boldest “common good” demands
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was for affordable housing—a move that captured national headlines
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and became a centerpiece of the mayor’s narrative that the union was
stalling negotiations through an overly political agenda. 

While the union didn’t win on housing assistance for new teachers or
gain the school district’s support for rent control, one of CTU’s
earliest and clearest victories was an agreement to hire staff
specifically to support the more than 17,000 homeless students in
Chicago Public Schools—an approach that could be a model for other
school districts. 

Other key wins on social justice issues include new guarantees for
bilingual education, including more dedicated teachers for English
language learners, and a declaration that Chicago schools are
sanctuary spaces. 

These are vital issues in a school district where nearly half of
students are Latinx and nearly one-fifth are English language
learners, says González, who also helped push for these changes as a
member of the CTU’s Latinx caucus. She has previously faced a lack
of resources and the potential for discipline when she tried to aid a
former student who reached out to her for help with a pending
deportation case. As part of the new agreement on sanctuary schools,
the school district will create a training program for staff on how to
respond to ICE presence in schools and assist immigrant students. It
will also allocate up to $200,000 annually to help employees navigate
immigration issues.  

The victories are less clear-cut when it comes to the key issue of
support staffing. The district will begin hiring more nurses and
social workers in the highest-need schools this year, but it will take
five years before they’re guaranteed for every school. And while the
CTU has highlighted that nine out of 10 majority-black schools in
Chicago do not have a librarian, the agreement creates a joint
union-school district committee on “staffing equity” that will
provide a path—but not a guarantee—for high-need schools to hire
additional librarians, counselors or restorative justice
coordinators. 

Some teachers say they were prepared to continue striking until more
progress was made on staffing, smaller caps on class sizes and
regaining teacher prep time eliminated under previous Mayor Rahm
Emanuel. But facing an intransigent mayor, worsening weather and a
November 1 deadline for the suspension of their employer health
insurance, CTU delegates ultimately voted on Wednesday night to
approve the tentative agreement by a margin of 60%. 

Class size remains a particular concern for instructors like Jeni
Crone, an art teacher at Lindbloom Math and Science Academy. While CTU
won for the first time an avenue to enforce hard caps on class sizes,
the recommended limits themselves remain the same: Up to 31 in high
school classes, depending on the subject, which can reach 38 students
before an automatic remedy is triggered. 

Crone previously taught at Kelvyn Park High School, but lost her job
there in 2017 amidst a round of budget cuts that led to the loss of 11
positions
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at the school. She says she repeatedly saw high class-size caps used
as justification to merge two smaller classes into one larger one.
Before her position was cut, her three art classes were combined into
two, with 34 and 35 students, respectively. 

“It’s one of the easiest ways for CPS to save money,” she says.
“But we should be normalizing smaller class sizes.”

Still, Crone says she is “cautiously optimistic” about the
contract’s wins, and is determined above all to make sure that union
members remain united with students and parents to continue demanding
more.

“I am not totally content, but the way I see it, it’s OK for us
not to be content,” Crone says. “That means I still want better
for my students, and we should always want better for them.” 

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