The Chicago Teachers Union will have “some pretty strong demands” in the new teachers contract, union president Stacy Davis Gates said Thursday, even though the mayor of Chicago is now one of their own: former teacher turned paid CTU organizer Brandon Johnson.
In negotiations, “the driving force has always been inequity and injustice that Black and Brown students and their families experience in this city. And that injustice did not roll away on April 4. We just got another gladiator in a place of power,” Davis Gates told the Sun-Times.
With the old contract due to expire next summer, Davis Gates has started “talking turkey” with her members about their priorities for any new deal.
They include smaller class sizes; more bilingual support staff to serve the children of asylum seekers; building time into the elementary school day for teachers to collaborate; and more “sustainable community schools.”
The CTU also wants to improve a special education program that now has an “overabundance of Black boys,” Davis Gates said.
“We intend to extend on the infrastructure that we built in 2019 to offer smaller class sizes, to make sure that a nurse and a social worker is in every school community … There are schools in this city that do not have enough staffing. We have to ameliorate that need,” the union president said.
“With our newcomers arriving in this city, some of them are in schools on the South and West Side … that do not have any bilingual support staff. We have to fix that, as well. We have a lot to do.”
Another priority is a 10-year plan to improve school facilities rooted in “equity and justice.”
“The first week of school where we were absorbing ungodly temperatures inside of our school communities — all of those impacts are coming to a head, and we have a leader with vision,” Davis Gates said.
“We want a master plan that sees the Chinatown high school and also sees Washington High School in the 10th Ward and the elementary school just steps away from it where the roof was collapsing ... We want to see Nash Elementary School on the West Side of Chicago that needs an upgrade. We talk about the average age of buildings. That one ticks the average age [of 83 years] way up.”
Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates joined Mayor Brandon Johnson at Brighton Park Elementary School in August to mark the first day of classes at Chicago Public Schools.
Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times
Johnson owes his election to the millions of dollars in campaign contributions and hundreds of foot soldiers provided by the CTU, its state and national federations, and the CTU-affiliated United Working Families.
Throughout the campaign, Johnson was asked how he would navigate that conflict of interest and represent the financial interests of Chicago taxpayers when he is beholden to his former union.
The mayor’s decision to give teachers and school administrators 13 weeks of paid parental leave without demanding anything in return only fueled those suspicions.
Even so, Davis Gates scoffed at the notion of a mayoral conflict.
“I don’t understand how someone who is a part of a movement — how someone who co-led this movement and built this movement with us — owes us anything,” she said.
“We don’t operate from the perspective of quid pro quo. We operate from the perspective of collaboration, coalition and movement. That is very different from quid pro quo. That is a commitment to the struggle for justice and equity.”
Jim Franczek, the veteran city labor lawyer who negotiated the last eight teachers’ contracts, was fired by Mayor Lori Lightfoot for his comments during a Sun-Times podcast, when he essentially endorsed Paul Vallas over Brandon Johnson in the April 4 mayoral runoff.
Despite that, Johnson brought Franczek back at the request of the Fraternal Order of Police to negotiate the new police contract and unresolved issues on the existing contract instead of going to arbitration.
Davis Gates said she has no problem with Franczek negotiating the new teachers contract.
“We negotiated one of the best contracts in the history of our union in 2019, and Jim Franczek was at that table,” Davis Gates said.
“Our perspective on negotiating is one that is grounded and rooted in the common good. That’s not about a labor lawyer … The perspective that we bring into a contract campaign is the word ‘transformation.’ It’s the word ‘organizing.’ When we bring that perspective in, it marginalizes the foolery at the table.”
The burgeoning migrant crisis has stabilized CPS enrollment but cost the city upward of $300 million so far.
Davis Gates acknowledged that Johnson’s plan to open giant tent cities he prefers to call “winterized basecamps” to get more than 2,000 asylum seekers off the floors of Chicago police stations, O’Hare and Midway Airports is “less than ideal.”
But, she said, “He’s doing what no other political leader in this country is doing right now. He is behaving with empathy and leadership. He is making solutions out of impossible circumstances. And with very little help from any other political or governmental entity.”
The migrant crisis is “really a housing crisis” exacerbated by “mayors who have destroyed public housing and made affordable housing unavailable,” she said. That cannot be “easily remedied” and certainly not in four months.
“The wholesale destruction of the public good in this city was in the making for a generation. Now, you put that up against four months” since Johnson took office, Davis Gates said.
“I think it’s pretty unfair, quite frankly, to believe that the mayor of Chicago is a magician.”
