Courtesy of Chicago Teachers Union

The Chicago Teachers Union blasted Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot and her negotiators for continuing to stonewall at the bargaining table. The union has been negotiating since January for a contract that enshrines the equity promises of the two leading mayoral candidates in enforceable contract language. With the CPS/CTU contract now officially expired, all terms and conditions of mandatory subjects of bargaining remain in place legally, although CPS has a track record of ignoring those legal constraints. The last time the CTU was forced to work without a contract, the appointed board of education robbed educators of contractually agreed upon wages by failing to honor educators’ steps and lanes, implemented furlough days—another hit on workers’ wages—and dismantled special education.

CTU bargaining team members laid out a dismal pattern of obstruction by Lightfoot’s bargaining team to address deep inequities that undercut students and schools—inequities that the CTU has sought to address in a new contract. Those include demands for funding basic education supports, increasing diversity among teachers and staff, adequately staffing special education and bilingual education, providing each school with at least one librarian and school nurse, ending a desperate shortage of social workers and counselors, funding restorative justice staff and trauma supports, expanding in-school early childhood education, and providing schools with after-school, sports, music and arts programs. In addition, CPS has yet to agree to the CTU’s sanctuary language, which would close some of the carve-outs in Emanuel’s ‘Welcoming Cities’ ordinance, which continues to put immigrant children and families at risk of deportation. CPS has also moved to expand instead of curtail privatization of in-school pre-Kindergarten programming, despite evidence of high costs, poor services and graft associated with CPS privatization schemes.