POLL: NEARLY HALF OF CITY’S VOTERS SUPPORT POSSIBLE TEACHERS STRIKE
How the CTU — and its driven vice president — ended up in a fight for social justice
Stacy Davis Gates’ seventh-grade world geography teacher taught her a lesson that stuck with her.
“Mr. Jordan, he says that it’s easier to build strong children than to repair broken men,” Davis Gates recalls.
Though it’s a simple thought, it explains most everything Davis Gates says and does.
It’s why she ended up teaching in the Chicago Public Schools system. It’s why she finds herself where she is today, the vice president of a teachers union with 25,000 members.
And it’s why she’s on the verge of either helping push Chicago into a massive public worker strike or playing a key role in cementing some of the biggest educational reforms the country has ever seen.
After months of unapologetically and fiercely demanding solutions at the bargaining table that the mayor has said don’t belong in a labor contract, Davis Gates says she isn’t looking for attention or power. She didn’t expect to be here and doesn’t have goals to be elsewhere. She says she’s just fighting for the same thing she has been for years: Permanent social and educational justice for students of color.
In her mind, if that means upending the school year for a few days, then so be it.
‘Should have been dealt with decades ago’
Davis Gates gives an uncomfortable chuckle when asked if working as a teacher at a public school was what she expected.
“Not at all,” she says. “I felt like a failure every single day.”
She didn’t feel that way because of the work she was doing. It was the system built around her students — or the lack thereof — that made her take another look at the type of support Chicago’s black students were really receiving, she says.
When she started in 2004 at Englewood Technical Prep Academy High School, Davis Gates passed by one vacant lot after another on her walk to work. Outside the school, police wagons waited to take away kids. At the door, students went through metal detectors that resembled the ones at the city’s airports. Inside, things weren’t much better.
They had her teaching history in a home economics classroom, stove and all.
“You are acutely aware that something isn’t right,” Davis Gates says.
Her breaking point — the one that “radicalized” her — came more than a decade ago when she says the city started to shut down