In Defense of the Chicago Teachers Union

As the Chicago Teachers Union battles with Chicago Public Schools over a new contract, they are denounced by many, including:

• the Editorial Board of the Wall Street Journal, which says “CTU abandons students to seek a billion-dollar raise” as it greedily leverages a “corrupt bargain” to get what it wants.
• the Editorial Board of the Chicago Tribune, who condemn “CTU’s outlandish and unaffordable demands…[with] No goals to hit. No pressure to perform” and urge Chicago to “Resist the Chicago Teachers Union’s latest money grab”.
• conservative journalist Vince Bielski, who says current CTU leaders came to power because CTU members opposed attempts to “bring accountability to districts through testing”.
• prominent Chicago businessman and political candidate Willie Wilson, who alleges that the CTU’s  “lack of teacher accountability” is fueling the school-to-prison pipeline.
• the Illinois Policy Institute, a self-described taxpayer advocate, whose policy analyst Hannah Schmid recently denounced the CTU as putting “power first and students last.”
• conservative journalist Joe Kotkin, who calls CTU “clueless” over its pay demands.

What do critics blame the CTU for? Anything and everything.

Conservatives Want Achievement, CTU Wants Frivolity

Bielski alleges that “instead of lifting achievement, a priority associated with conservative educators, CTU leaders frequently say their goal is to bring ‘joy’ to education.” 

CPS’ chronic absenteeism rate rose from 24% in 2019 to 39.8% in 2023, and average daily student attendance fell from 93.2% to 88.3% over the same period. What CTU realizes even if its critics don’t is that the best way to address this problem is to give kids reasons to want to go to school.

Yes, educators can sometimes improve student attendance and work habits by reading students the riot act and holding their grades over them. Those who teach required classes can emphasize the danger of not graduating–as I’ve occasionally told my 12th graders, “None of you gets out of this school without my approval.”

But these only go so far. Sometimes, particularly at the higher grade levels, students want to come to school mostly because of the extracurriculars–drama, music, clubs, sports, etc. When you cut a student’s favorite activity, you may lose the student because sometimes that was the only reason the student still came to school. 

From a teacher's perspective, with some of the more troubled students, the biggest struggle is just getting them into your classroom. Many have heavy familial obligations. Some work late on weeknights. Often their parents are stretched so thin they’ve lost the ability to effectively monitor their attendance, even when the school leans on the parents. Instilling in the student the desire to go to school is the most effective way to overcome these problems. 

Restorative Justice

CTU is also negotiating for Restorative Justice coordinators, which conservative critics see as extraneous at best, and often view as part of an alleged unraveling of discipline in schools and classrooms. Such views are shortsighted.

The Los Angeles Unified School District began to institute Restorative Justice into schools on a large scale in 2013, after receiving heavy criticism for suspending too many students of color. From 2013 to 2023, suspensions in LAUSD dropped by almost 80%. In general, this is a good thing–suspensions often resolve little but instead throw the student even further behind and make it more difficult for them to reconnect with their classes.

To outsiders and even at times to some teachers, it can seem frivolous to pay RJ coordinators to spend some of their time sitting with students in their office, chatting them up, and giving them juice or snacks. 

Yet because the RJ coordinator has the time to do this, they can bond with troubled students, including those who just came from the Juvenile Correctional system or from a group home in the foster care system. They build connections with these students before there is trouble, so when problems happen, they can better diffuse them. They provide at-risk kids the oversight they often need to stay on track and help talk and walk the students out of trouble.

It is important and valuable work, but it can be hard to quantify its value–the fights that don't happen, the times that a student doesn't bring a weapon to campus don’t fit on a balance sheet. Thus districts like CPS resist implementing it. When budgets get tight, it’s often cut.

Teacher Evaluations

One of the biggest areas of disagreement between the CTU and the CPS concerns teacher evaluations. Critics portray teacher union resistance to evaluations as a function of our lack of desire and/or ability to do our jobs properly.

Wilson, for example, criticizes the CTU for wanting a pay increase “with little to no accountability measures for student literacy.” He suggests that CPS “bind teacher pay raises to students’ academic performance” and wants “church, community and business leaders [to]...establish oversight committees for schools to hold the CTU and teachers accountable for student progress.” 

After all, he explains, “As a business leader, I am compensated based on results. The same should apply to our teachers.”

Former Tribune columnist Eric Zorn summarizes this point of view as “the problem with CPS is that teachers just aren’t trying hard enough” and Wilson’s “compensation metrics would turbo-charge educators’ incentives to laser focus on standardized tests.” Wilson and other critics seem not to realize that the absolutely quickest way to kill a student’s interest in a subject is to teach to a test.

Chicago Teachers have good reason to want to reform CPS’ teacher evaluation system. Like so many critics of teachers unions, the CPS system judges and punishes teachers on the basis of the amount of misfortune and societal disadvantage their students endure. 

A study published in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis found that teachers working in lower-income schools were unfairly penalized. K-12 Dive contributor Shawna De La Rosa explains:

“The typical Black Chicago teacher ranked in the 37th percentile of teacher observation scores, compared to the typical White teacher’s 55th percentile ranking. After researchers controlled the differences for factors such as academic achievement, poverty, and student misconduct rates, the gap statistically disappeared. The study found 89% of the Black/White gap in classroom observation scores was driven by differences between the schools where the teachers worked.”

The CTU cites a veteran white teacher whose ratings were consistently low when teaching in low-income, largely black schools but who suddenly became a highly-rated teacher after transferring to a largely white, elite school.

For highly-rated tenured teachers, CPS-mandated evaluations are a time-grinding dog and pony show they have to do every two years. 

For newer and younger CPS teachers–who struggle to find the enormous amount of time it takes to develop and implement new lessons on new subjects–evaluations are a nerve-wracking hassle CPS requires them to endure every year.

CTU’s Pay Demands

In 2019 CTU demanded a 5% a year raise, which the Illinois Policy Institute called an “insult” to Chicago taxpayers. They won a 16% raise over five years, in part because, as Bielski bitterly notes, they “[took] advantage of a right to strike that’s not shared by teachers in many other nearby states.” Yet if anybody should be bitter, it’s Chicago teachers–according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, from 2019-2024, national prices rose 25%. 

In the current contract battle, CPS said it has offered teachers a 16% raise over four years, and CTU countered at 24%, which CPS has refused. It's hard to see why 6% a year would be considered unreasonable. CPS members lost ground over their previous contract, and while inflation has slowed to 3%, there are no guarantees and no particular reason to believe that it will not rise again over the life of the coming contract. 

Getting & Keeping Good Teachers

In general, pushing for salary increases goes far beyond the union acting to ensure that its members are paid properly–it also has a tremendous effect on the quality of our schools. Most teachers are not in this business to earn big money, they just want to be paid decently and not feel taken advantage of. My experiences teaching in non-union high schools in the 1990s provide a good example. 

There were a corps of us in our twenties, all dedicated teachers who enjoyed our work, all effective. Ten years later practically none of us were still in the profession. Why? 

Money. The long hours were part of it, but the money was really the killer. 

The most I ever made teaching in those non-union schools was in 1996 when I earned net pay of $1,634 a month. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, that's $3,340 a month in today's money–in Los Angeles, one of the most expensive cities in the world. 

Some of the women I taught with moved into other fields and/or had children. The men needed to be the primary breadwinners for their growing families and went into fields where they could earn more money. Thus the low pay pushed high-performing individuals out of the profession, in each case depriving thousands of future students of the benefit of those teachers’ work. 

Should CTU be ‘Entertaining Proposals for Cutbacks’?

Bielski criticizes “CTU President Stacy Davis Gates and other militant leaders” because they “are not entertaining proposals for cutbacks in current contract negotiations.”

While CTU teachers are lectured over their students’ performance on standardized English tests, according to a 2022 analysis by the Chicago Sun-Times, only 90 of CPS’ 513 schools have a full-time librarian. They note that “there are librarians at only 10% of schools where Black students are the largest percentage of the student body, compared with 25% of schools where white kids are.”

Yes, we can drill kids endlessly on language skills but with a trained professional on campus who can get students to want to read, you can accomplish far more. In the 11-day CTU strike in 2019, the union fought for CPS to hire a librarian for every school, but didn’t get it. 

Davis Gates explains, “We’re up against a status quo in the city that has made it okay to have schools that don’t have physical education, that don’t have art teachers, that don’t have music teachers”, adding that CTU wants students to have “sports and fine arts…[the] opportunity to participate in student government, newspaper, choir.”

According to Dave Stieber, an 18-year veteran of CPS, as a Chicago teacher “you have to fight tooth and nail for literally everything — from textbooks and computers, nurses, and functioning athletic facilities to libraries and social workers. You have to fight to get crumbling asbestos floor and ceiling tiles out of the school, to get new HVAC systems so your students don’t freeze or swelter, to get your school cleaned…” 

Is it a surprise that CTU is not in the mood to “entertain proposals for cutbacks”?

‘Social Justice Agenda’

Conservatives often criticize CTU and other teachers unions for what Bielsiki calls our “social justice priorities”, but teachers are loyal to their students–it's entirely appropriate for CTU to address the issues Chicago students and their families face, including immigration, homelessness, and the high cost of housing. Given the threat that climate change poses to these children's future, it is similarly appropriate for teachers unions to fight for solar panels and other climate-related measures. 

Enrollment

Bielski says that in CPS “Enrollment has plunged 20% in Chicago since 2012, a bigger decline than in many large cities” and cites “the pull of charter and home schools promising a better education…” than what CTU educators provide.

Yet the Chicago metro area’s unemployment rate is the highest in the nation among large metropolitan areas, and the population of Chicago has declined sharply. As the Illinois Policy Institute notes, Chicago's population has shrunk for nine straight years and is now lower than it was in 1920. 

They explain that “polling conducted for the Illinois Policy Institute showed 34% of Chicagoans would leave the city if given the opportunity,” and many seeking to leave cited affordability as a major reason. 

This affordability crisis hits families with school-age children the hardest because it is so difficult for young parents to afford suitable housing for their families. CTU’s critics say enrollment is down because of the CTU and CPS, but don’t mention the affordability crisis, except when they’re criticizing the CTU for its efforts to address it.

In the movie Hoffa, as Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa leads his men into a labor battle, he explains, “[if] the President, newspapers, everybody else in the damn world says I'm wrong, I gotta be right!” 

Today anti-union forces, big business and its press, the political establishment, conservatives, self-described taxpayer and good governance advocates, and seemingly everyone else are saying that CTU is wrong. Take a closer look at what CTU is fighting for–they’re right.