When will CTU stop clout-building, and start thinking of the students?
What do you think nirvana would look like for the Chicago Teachers Union? It seems CTU President Jesse Sharkey offered a glimpse of that perfect world, while talking about what lies ahead for the always fraught, ever-contentious relationship between the union and Chicago Public Schools.
“We’re in a different situation that one we’ve ever been in. ... It’s continuous bargaining,” Sharkey said.
Continuous bargaining. No-end-in-sight bargaining. Bargaining till the cows come home. We’re not surprised. With K-8 CPS students finally benefiting from in-class instruction despite roadblock after roadblock put up by CTU, the union is now talking about holding up the resumption of varying forms of in-class learning for high school students.
After more than a year of all-remote learning, CPS high schools are slated to reopen April 19, albeit in a hybrid form that involves a weekly mix of in-class and online instruction. Families can opt in or out. Last week, however, the union asked CPS to put off opening up high schools for at least a week. The Tribune reported that Sharkey also expects more flashpoints of tension with CPS when the new school year rolls around in the fall.
Continuous bargaining, continuous conflict, continuous anxiety and anguish for CPS students and parents. Mayor Lori Lightfoot is holding her ground, and she’s right to do so. “I see no basis for delay, and it’s my expectation we will open high schools as indicated by CPS,” she said last week.
Perhaps CTU leadership has been emboldened by Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s signing of a bill that makes it easier for CPS teachers to go on strike. That bill repealed a section of the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act that in 1995 imposed limits on topics that the union could negotiate. Now that the bill has become law, CTU’s expanded array of issues it can bargain over include class sizes, subcontracting and staff assignments — not just traditional issues such as pay and benefits.
What’s in store for the city? Chicagoans still remember a time when CTU strikes happened almost every year — nine walkouts between 1969 and 1987, and threats to strike eight other times. Afterward, then-Mayor Richard M. Daley joined with Republicans in the General Assembly to push for a CPS reform bill that stopped the steady barrage of teacher strikes and the damage it did to students’ education.
The last thing the city needs is a teachers union empowered to broaden the clout it already wields. We’ve seen the issues that CTU brings to the bargaining table that have nothing to do with education — defunding police, affordable housing, rent abatements. Their tether to schooling is solely a CTU concoction.
Right now, CPS’ biggest priority is to give students and their parents the opportunity to return to some degree of in-class instruction, and begin to repair damage to academic growth that the pandemic — and remote learning — inflicted. The extent of that damage is disturbing. Students have been failing at greater rates than last year. Overall attendance has dropped, and preschool enrollment is down. For Black and Latino students, the trends are only worse.
There’s a difference between ensuring a pandemic-safe environment for students and staff, and sidetracking movement toward in-class instruction solely for the sake of exerting leverage on CPS and Lightfoot. Health safety protocols similar to those used to allow K-8 students to return to in-class learning will be employed at the high school level.
They include mandated mask-wearing for all students, teachers and staff; COVID-19 testing availability; HEPA-filtered air purifiers in every classroom; daily temperature checks and other health screenings; and the placement of students into small pods to minimize exposure to other students and ensure social distancing. And as a result of the agreement reached between CPS and CTU earlier this year, CPS agreed to prioritize vaccinating teachers.
There’s no turning back on the legislation Pritzker signed. That damage is done. But CTU still has the power — and the duty — to help put high school students’ education back on track. All it has to do is stop putting up roadblocks, and start thinking about the welfare — and future — of students.