Chicago teachers challenge cuts

SOME 100 teachers, parents and community members picketed in front of the Chicago Public Schools' (CPS) Board of Education meeting in July in protest of yet more layoffs and demands for sweeping concessions from the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU).

Six hundred layoff notices went out to teachers and support staff one week before the start of school at the city's "year-round" public schools. (About a third of Chicago's schools are now on a "year-round" school schedule.)

Williette Price, a 20-year veteran teacher and literacy coach at a Dewey Elementary on the South Side, received her dismissal notice in June. She spoke to the crowd outside the board meeting about her unjust treatment:

I am one of those highly qualified teachers we're all hearing about that the board claims they want in every classroom. I went back to school myself to get every endorsement they told me to. They told me I could be a literacy coach with my credentials and help teachers and students. Now I've been kicked out of the system because they say they can't afford people like me, and I'm not even put in the displaced teachers pool. I'm devastated by this. It's so unfair.

Williette hasn't taken her dismissal lying down. She helped to organize other dismissed coaches and teachers--and with the assistance of union members in the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) and Operation PUSH, they're fighting back.

"[Board CEO] Ron Huberman should stop lying," Price said. "He told the media he was firing unsatisfactory teachers. Getting bad teachers out of the classroom--that's a lie. I'm a highly qualified, superior teacher. You should hear my letters of recommendation from my [former] administrators."

Berenice Salas, a fourth-grade teacher from Hinton Elementary School in the Southwest Side the Englewood neighborhood, shared a similar sense of outrage from the bullhorn, as teachers picketed outside the meeting. About to begin her fourth year of teaching--the year that a teacher makes tenure, under the CTU contract--Salas was one of the 600 "honorably dismissed" this past week.

"Do they think teachers will just sit back and accept this?" said Salas. "That we'll turn our backs on each other? The board is trying to put conflict between the teachers and the union, but it's not going to work. We're with the union this time because the union is going to fight with us."

THE BOARD claims that further layoffs--up to 1,500--can only be stopped if the union agrees to reopen the contract and offer up major concessions on wages and benefits.

Layoff notices were delivered by mail as teachers were readying their classrooms and preparing lesson plans for the start of a new school year, and while the newly elected reform leadership of the CTU was preparing for budget talks with the board.

During the budget talks, the board delivered a menu of options that the union could to agree to in order to make up a $370 billion hole in the budget. The eight menu items include teachers giving back nine paid holidays and 4 percent raises that are slated to take effect the last two years of the contract, accepting five furlough days and a freeze on board contributions to the teacher's pension fund, and other goodies.

The union is demanding to see the budget before agreeing to a single giveback. In a prepared statement on the union's Web site, newly elected CTU President Karen Lewis said, "The CTU requested full access to all documents pertaining to the 2010-11 CPS budget. Last year, CPS spent $400 million in contracts, but who holds those contracts and for what...we still don't have that budget in our hands."

According to CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey, who also spoke at the rally, "We can see from past practices of the board that whatever they take away from us, we'll never get back. They'll take and take until there's nothing left of our union or of public education if we let them."

For its part, the transparency with which the union is conducting negotiations is a breath of fresh air. More than 30 rank-and-file union members are part of a negotiation committee that attends all bargaining sessions with the board.

This negotiation team scored a small victory during its second day of talks when it forced the board to agree to a joint investigative committee on how to access previously unaccounted-for property tax revenue.

Despite their claims to want to bargain fairly with the new leadership, Ron Huberman and spokespeople for the Board of Education are conducting a war in the Chicago press against the teachers' union. They're attempting to deflect parents' and students' justifiable anger over increasing class sizes and program cuts away from themselves--and toward teachers who they claim are putting their own economic interests ahead of the interests of kids.

But the board's own recent conduct casts doubt on their level of commitment to public school students in Chicago. Lavish spending by bureaucrats on perks for themselves while demanding drastic classroom cuts--as well as the continued hiring of 200 inexperienced teachers connected with the anti-union "Teach for America" organization amid the current round of layoffs--hints at the more sinister agenda at work in CPS: union-busting and privatization.

In the face of these attacks, the union's ability to build common cause with parents and community organizations in the coming days will be the key to exposing and reversing the board's years of hypocrisy and mismanagement of CPS.