CHICAGO—After a series of webinars and in-school meetings, members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) will vote on April 10-11 on a trail-blazing tentative contract with the Chicago Public Schools. The pact increases spending on community schools, adds counselors and librarians and enriches the curriculum. It also increases protections against edicts and threats from the national Republican Trump regime and its white nationalist backers.
After almost a year of bargaining between the 30,000-plus member union and controversial city school superintendent Pedro Martinez, union President Stacy Davis Gates, a social studies teacher, announced the pact at an April 1 press conference. The union board and the union’s 700-member House of Delegates overwhelmingly approved on April 2. The member vote will be the final word.
“This has been an achievement of resilience and focus and this contract does a lot of addressing the needs” of students in the nation’s fourth-largest public school system in the U.S., said Gates. That ranking does not count Puerto Rico, which has one commonwealth-wide system for all its students.
Activities that make schools special environments for kids to learn in, such as sports, arts, music, and other extracurricular activities, are to be restored. They were cut—along with 56 neighborhood schools on the majority-minority South and West Sides—by reviled former Mayor Rahm Emanuel.
“The school experience is not just reading and math. We were able to negotiate with the families” of the CPS students, as well as the school superintendent’s team for “renovation and rehabilitation” of the system’s older buildings “and to get the lead out” of pipes and paint.
But there’s “a national context” to the contract, too, Davis contended. Defying Trump and the radical right’s agenda, it establishes schools as sanctuaries for Spanish-speaking students, both native and migrant. It insulates the school curriculum from whitewashing by Trump’s white nationalists, too.
The teachers had wide public support during the bargaining, by being “in the school communities…so the teachers can go back to what the students need,” said Gates. Two community activists who are also teachers also spoke at the press conference.
Numerical gains include 100 more librarians, several hundred more counselors, and 400 more teachers assistants, who can provide individualized instruction to students with learning disabilities. Positions previously filled by expensive outside vendors, such as 70 in technical support, will be brought in-house, said union Vice President Jackson Potter, a high school history teacher.
“This contract also protects people from the draconian evaluations process” prior school superintendents imposed, Potter added. Those evaluations drove African-American teachers, especially men, out of the system. Chicago’s pupils are overwhelmingly from families of color.
Will see cost-of-living hikes
Teachers and staffers will see cost-of-living increases of 17%-20% over the pact’s four-year span, retroactive to last July. And there are mandated reductions in class sizes at all levels from K-12. “We won’t be teaching in kindergartens with 40 kids” anymore, said Dr. Dianne Crawford, an early childhood education teacher. The maximum will be 25.
“For too long our classrooms have been overcrowded and under-resourced,” added Crawford, who also has a child in one of those classrooms. “My children will move more access to a library, to counselors, to social workers.”
It also features more prep time for teachers, including for parent-teacher conferences, and better dental, vision, infertility, and abortion care, gender-affirming care, hearing aids, speech therapy, physical therapy, occupational therapy, and chiropractic services.
Gates and the other speakers at the press conference at CTU headquarters in Chicago’s Damen neighborhood are also ready for the flak from the radical right, both statewide and nationally. The statewide critics are expected to object to spending more on teachers and students.
The national flak will come as CTU protects its students and teachers from Trump’s ICE agents stationed outside schools in what is a sanctuary city—and which the tentative contract ensures will be sanctuary schools. It will also protect teachers who want to teach real, complete, and complex history and social sciences, not the sanitized white nationalist version Trump wants to impose nationwide.
“There’ll be a continuation of sanctuary schools procedures,” said Emily Ayala, a community activist from Chicago’s Southeast Side whose pre-schooler attends the Ed Sadlowski Elementary School, named for a notable reformist Chicago union activist. “As people of color, the most important thing is our common humanity and to protect each other.
“With this climate,” she said of Trump, his agents, and his backers, “the school has seen a slump in attendance” as its mostly Latino neighborhood parents keep kids home for fear of ICE attacks on their kids or them. “The community has seen unmarked cars and unlabeled vehicles” near the school.
The contract also features “a first-ever climate justice and green schools agreement. This is a big deal,” Ayala said. “We have been exposed to so many toxins and hazards,” a common threat to exploited working-class communities such as the Southeast Side.
That provision is especially big because Trump is eliminating federal funds for climate justice and green projects, including for schools, nationwide.
In its explanatory press release on the tentative agreement, CTU declared the pact “will represent a major leap forward in the transformation of a district still recovering from the gutting and financial irresponsibility carried out by Trump’s Project 2025 style efforts under” former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, his schools chancellor Arne Duncan, right-wing former schools CEO Paul Vallas, “and other privatization forces that closed over 200 public schools between 2002 and 2018.
“Despite the efforts of right-wing actors…and the MAGA forces that seek to deny the investments Chicago’s students deserve, this proposed contract builds upon the past several contracts.”
Gates conceded the story is not over since “It’s impossible for one contract to undo all the damage” of prior years. But the union predicted the pact “charts a new direction of investment, expansion of sustainable community and dual language schools, increased staffing, and a focus on reparatory equity to provide the educational experience Chicago students deserve no matter what neighborhood they live in.”
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