As demonstrators left downtown streets late Friday, the Chicago Teachers Union was left to figure out how to leverage its one-day strike to achieve a new contract and increased funding for education from the state.
“I don’t think that’s entirely landed yet,” CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey said Friday when asked about the union’s next move. “But trying to generate attention and a sense of urgency is the point.
“Now we’ve got to keep the momentum going. The protests started a process that is critical and needed.”
The CTU and Chicago Public Schools remain in contract negotiations, which are in a final phase that ends in May. If an agreement isn’t reached by then, an open-ended strike is a possibility.
Union members and their supporters cast Friday’s protests as a step toward building a populist coalition to advance a labor-led agenda for more government funding and gaining advantage over political adversaries led by Gov. Bruce Rauner.
“This is not a moment,” CTU President Karen Lewis said to a raucous rally in the campus commons at Chicago State University. “Brothers and sisters, this is a movement.
“This is about empowerment for people who have been disenfranchised for so long — people who have given up, people who have thought ‘this doesn’t apply to me.'”
Rauner — a primary target of hours of protests throughout the city — denounced the CTU’s strike as the “height of arrogance.”
CPS and CTU agree on a need for help from Springfield. But so far there has been no consensus, publicly anyway, on legislation that would increase funding to the district.
The dispute is less about whether to spend more money on education — Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Rauner and state lawmakers generally agree that schools should be better funded — than it is about how to achieve a funding increase.
Rauner has long advocated spending more on primary and secondary education, but also has been a vocal opponent of the CTU and a longtime critic of CPS.
Emanuel has asked for state assistance to help dig CPS out of its financial hole. Democratic Senate President John Cullerton has pushed to change the formula used to distribute state dollars to schools so that more goes to CPS. Rauner has said he supports changing the funding formula, but only if doing so doesn’t take money away from schools outside Chicago.
But Rauner also wants passage of his bill that would weaken union rights in collective bargaining with local governments and school districts. That’s where the various sides have been stuck for the better part of a year. Union officials sense the impasse is an opportunity.
“People are scratching their heads and saying ‘Wait a second. My state university is closing, my school system’s on the verge of collapse,” CTU organizer Jackson Potter said.
Potter said he thinks the influence of what he described as “downtown Democrats” has diminished in the face of more liberal, neighborhood-based anger over economic and racial disparities, in addition to an ongoing state budget impasse the union thinks has left the governor vulnerable. Potter’s view, an influential one inside CTU’s ranks, is that there’s no reason to cede ground on the union’s agenda in Springfield.
Rauner on Friday blasted the walkout, saying it was “shameful that Chicago’s children are the victims in this raw display of political power.”
The governor also said, agreeing with the district, that the walkout was illegal and that teachers who participated were “thumbing their nose at taxpayers.”
“It’s the height of arrogance from those we’ve entrusted with our children’s futures,” the governor said.
CPS on Friday filed a charge with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board demanding monetary damages from the union and a legal ruling to prevent a similar event.
Rauner is demanding approval for a key element of his pro-business, union-weakening agenda before he’ll approve state financial help for CPS. The governor wants legislators to pass a bill that would allow local governments and school districts to decide what gets collectively bargained with unions. The measure is opposed by union-allied lawmakers at the Capitol.
“If local controls had already been enacted, CPS negotiations likely would have been concluded by now, a strike would have been averted, and taxpayers and children would have been protected,” Rauner said. “Let’s pass real reforms to give the families of Illinois a better future.”
Rauner again called on the General Assembly to pass a budget that increases state funding for schools statewide. That’s been his push this year, after he approved the education funding portion in last year’s Democrat-passed spending plan while vetoing spending for the rest of state government.
On Friday outside Clemente High School in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, union representative Tom Keddy said he’s confident Friday’s walkout will yield some level of action by city or state government leaders.
“If it’s as big of a demonstration as we expect it will be, I don’t think they (local leaders) can ignore it,” he said.
Barbara McCoy, a special education teacher at King High School on the South Side, didn’t hesitate when asked about her expected outcome for Friday’s action.
“First of all, what’s going to happen is the awareness of the need for funds,” McCoy said seconds before a Chicago Police Department cruiser rolled by and blared its siren to support the protesters.
“Secondly, it is going to bring to light that you don’t treat teachers this way,” she said. “We also want the citizens of Chicago to know that if we don’t stand up to Rahm Emanuel and the governor that this is just going to continue. They need to find another funding source.”
During a news conference Friday morning at Beasley Elementary School, Lewis was asked how the union would define success for the walkout.
“Quantified success is we see a lot of people from different unions, from community organizations, coming out to support us,” Lewis said. “It’s a step in the right direction that CTU is leading. Because we have had kind of a dormant labor movement for many, many years — and it will not get better if the labor movement doesn’t move.”
Katie Moncton, an art teacher for six years at Lincoln Elementary School, marched during a rally at Northeastern Illinois University holding a hand-painted portrait of Emanuel and Rauner lounging on a tropical island. A message-in-a-bottle floating in the water read “Save our schools.” Moncton said she wasn’t certain that local leaders would respond to the walkout with a plan to tackle funding problems.
“I do think that we’ve sent a message though,” she said. “That we’re not giving up on this. That we aren’t tiring of this.”
The backdrop of Friday’s action was ongoing labor talks between CPS and CTU. A final stage of negotiations will wind down in the coming weeks after an arbitrator rules on the union and school district’s quarrels.
Asked if Friday’s union gambit would help CTU’s stance in contract negotiations, Lewis said: “It can only help.”
“Because,” she said, “It shows that people are willing to do what’s necessary. We’re willing to take risks, we’re willing to move to the next level. I think that helps.
“I’m hoping we’ll land a contract soon, that’s my hope, that’s my prayer,” Lewis said. “And I think that’s what our members want.”
Tribune reporters Marwa Eltaguori, Jeanne Kuang, Will Lee and Alexis Myers contributed.
