On Thursday, a band of about thirty striking teachers and staff from Kelvyn Park High School made its way along Chicago’s West Fullerton Avenue in bright morning sunshine, holding signs aloft as drivers honked their horns and gave thumbs-up. Leading the parade were two people carrying a hand-painted banner that read “Kelvyn Park Teachers Stand Up for Students.” Someone wheeled a boom box tuned to Aretha Franklin, who was belting out “Oh, freedom, yeah, freedom!” Noe Castro, an English and journalism teacher, was in the back of the pack, rapping wooden drumsticks on a snare drum. He, like many of the others, was wearing red, the color of teachers’ strikes around the country, memorably branded as “Red for Ed.”
Castro, who is Kelvyn Park’s representative to the Chicago Teachers Union, said that the strike, which was then entering its second week, was wearing him out. Mainly, he said, it was the uncertainty of not knowing when the union leadership and Chicago’s first-year mayor, Lori Lightfoot, would reach a deal. After a bout of optimism late in the week, the two sides failed to reach an agreement and resumed negotiations on Saturday morning. The central sticking point has not been salaries but the teachers’ demands for expanded support services and enforceable limits on class size.
“It seems so commonsense to all of us. If you have too many students, it’s no longer a class. It’s no longer teaching,” Castro told me. And when those students have problems that aren’t being solved at home, as countless Kelvyn Park students do, they bring them to school, where Castro and his colleagues struggle to help.
The work stoppage in Chicago, home to the nation’s third-largest school district, with more than three hundred and sixty thousand students, in hundreds of schools, is the second in seven years. It began when the union declared that Lightfoot, a political novice, was not living up to her promises of progressive school reform. The teachers, led by the union head Jesse Sharkey, a former social-studies teacher, answered her offer of higher pay and staffing increases with a walkout. As families scrambled to arrange activities for their children, and sports teams forfeited championship competitions, the strike quickly became the most serious test of Lightfoot’s leadership and of the power of the union, which has long had a contentious relationship with City Hall.
As negotiations intensified last summer, the city increased its pay offer to sixteen per cent over five years, with salaries likely to grow further when other raises are included, according to Lightfoot. Beyond discussions of pay and the length of the contract, however, the union has emphasized the physical and emotional needs of students, including the need for more counselling and health-care staff. The byword of both sides is equity, and Lightfoot contends that she has made a significant down payment on her promises of reform. As she put it in an interview with Jenn White, of the Chicago public-radio station WBEZ, “We are addressing those larger systemic issues, and issues that inform equity.” She promised help for students “living in neighborhoods where they are traumatized by violence, where they’re bringing their life experience into the classroom with them.” The union says that it isn’t enough.
To build public support, and keep up the pressure on Lightfoot, the C.T.U. has drawn on its nearly twenty-five thousand members, as well as parents, to stage hundreds of pickets and protests, including a rally and march on Friday from Buckingham Fountain, in Grant Park. On Tuesday, the union revelled in a visit from Elizabeth Warren, who showed up at a picket line at Oscar DePriest Elementary, on the predominantly black West Side. She declared that “everyone in America should support you in this strike, and the reason is because when you go out and fight, you don’t just fight for yourselves.” Bernie Sanders spoke at a C.T.U. rally in late September, calling the union “the conscience of the United States of America,” and Joe Biden, the former Vice-President, tweeted that he was “proud to stand” with the teachers and support staff. The trick is to make the numbers work in the $7.7 billion schools budget at a time when Lightfoot is also trying close a deficit of more than eight hundred million dollars in the regular city budget. “The costs are rising, and the opportunities to secure new revenues have diminished,” Terry Mazany, a former interim C.E.O. of the Chicago school system, told me as the strike continued. “I don’t envy any of the leaders in this city.”
Kelvyn Park High School, a stately building marked by four Ionic columns, sits in a largely Hispanic working-class neighborhood on the city’s northwest side. The school, which serves grades seven through twelve, is close enough to Lightfoot’s home, in Logan Square, that protesting teachers have marched past her house. Castro described students whose lives are unstable because of family finances or difficulties at home. The school is more than eighty-nine per cent Hispanic and seven per cent black, the school district reports, and nearly ninety-eight per cent of its students are classified as coming from low-income families. A high percentage are learning English as a second language, and fewer than half of graduates attend college. Parents who can afford it will often move from the neighborhood or transfer their children to schools with higher graduation rates or better services, a common quest that has seen Chicago public-school enrollment fall by more than forty thousand students in less than ten years. Teachers leave, too. Castro’s ninth-grade English students have asked whether he will still be there when they graduate.
On Thursday morning, Castro and his colleagues finished their protest march and circled back to the high school, where they put down their signs, checked their phones for news, and headed to a row of folding tables laden with snacks, sliced fruit, and a bullhorn. A pot of boiling water, for oatmeal on a chilly day, sat on a propane camping stove. Jessica Andrick, wearing a long red scarf and a ski hat that featured a silhouette of the Chicago skyline, spread some peanut butter on an English muffin, and took a seat on the sidewalk. She is the only school counsellor for the four hundred students at Kelvyn Park. “This still isn’t a big caseload, compared to some schools, but it feels like a lot,” she told me. Her duties also include administering Advanced Placement tests, helping students who are applying to college fill out financial forms, and planning graduation.
Some students knock on her door to talk about troubles they’re having in class, but others have problems that are beyond her ability to solve. Maybe one parent lives in Chicago and works long hours, and the other lives in Mexico. Or a student has experienced trauma but lacks the know-how to process it. “They’re trying to live without getting any sort of treatment for it, and we’re not in a position to do intensive therapy,” Andrick said. The school has two social workers and a part-time psychologist, but it’s never enough. Too often, when she refers a student to a clinic for therapy, the waiting list is long or the family has no health insurance and can’t pay.
As Andrick was describing the situation, Stacy Hopp, the school’s case manager for special education, joined us. Every day, she sees the gaps that the C.T.U. negotiating teams are trying to fill. Approximately one in every four students at Kelvyn Park is identified as a special-education student, and each of them needs a learning plan and meetings with a parent present. The school is down two special-education teachers, and Hopp teaches three classes. In one of them, where she partners with a general-education English teacher, there are thirty-five students. “When they all show up,” she said, “we don’t have enough chairs.”
The school hosts a vision clinic, Hopp said, because “kids are squinting, and they don’t have parents who can take them, and they don’t have insurance, so we do it here.” There are children with underlying health issues, including diabetes and asthma, and she would like a nurse to be stationed at the school more than one day a week. (Lightfoot’s team has offered a full-time nurse and social worker for every school, every day.) “We have pregnant girls who come to me and ask questions, like, ‘You’ve had a baby. Tell me about it,’ ” Hopp said. Veronica Jara, who teaches English as a second language, coördinates bilingual education, and serves as the school’s athletic director, told me, “When they get sick, they ask, ‘Can I go to the nurse?’ And I have to say, ‘The nurse isn’t here today.’ ”
The latest action by Chicago teachers comes after a wave of teacher strikes last year, several in Republican-led states, including West Virginia, Arizona, and Oklahoma. There were strikes in Colorado, California, and North Carolina, where teachers crowded into the legislative chambers in Raleigh and chanted, “Remember, remember, we vote in November.” When North Carolina educators met earlier this year to set priorities, the first demand was additional librarians, psychologists, social workers, and health professionals. A common denominator of the strikes was the conviction that years of austerity budgets had cut too deeply, weakening schools and punishing teachers, staff, and students and their families.
When Chicago’s teachers stopped work in 2012, it was their first strike in twenty-five years. The cast of leading players was markedly different, as was the tone. Teachers and union executives openly disdained the tough-talking mayor, Rahm Emanuel, who returned the favor. Karen Lewis, who was the C.T.U. president before stepping down last year, to battle cancer, had called him a “liar” and a “bully” and said that he had told her to go to hell, but in stronger language. Emanuel earned the ire of teachers by rescinding a four-per-cent pay raise and persuading the state legislature to raise the threshold for calling a strike to seventy-five per cent of union members. Later, he cut the school system’s budget midyear, two years in a row. In September, declaring that the differences were “night and day,” Lightfoot said, “I’m not Rahm.”
One thing that unites the two strikes, however, according to labor historians who have closely followed the C.T.U., is the union’s focus on issues reaching beyond wages and benefits to include support staff who tend to the well-being of students and, by extension, their families. The gains in 2012 were modest, but teachers demonstrated the power of “collective action to advocate for their students, fight back against austerity policies and reshape the terms of public education debates,” Elizabeth Todd-Breland, an associate professor at the University of Illinois, who was recently appointed by Lightfoot to the Chicago Board of Education, wrote.
Robert Bruno directs the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois, where he teaches courses on collective bargaining. He sees this year’s strike as a continuation of the C.T.U.’s 2012 push, when the union made novel arguments in favor of improved learning conditions. This time, the C.T.U.’s negotiating partner is a mayor who shares many of the union’s goals, if not its budgetary ambitions or desire for binding contract language. Lightfoot “campaigned largely in support of C.T.U.’s positions, and, even though the teachers didn’t endorse her, there was nothing about her candidacy that was antagonistic,” Bruno said. “She committed to increasing staffing and lowering class sizes. She committed to an elected school board. She committed to maintaining a moratorium on charter schools, and not closing neighborhood schools.” As he sees it, Lightfoot “got to the bargaining table and had to figure out how to pay for it. Now, you’ve got teachers who feel almost betrayed.”
Lightfoot has been very visible during the strike, defending the positions taken by Chicago Public Schools negotiators while making clear that she recognizes the school system’s weaknesses. Her frustration showed when White, of WBEZ, asked her, “Do you think some of the teachers have legitimate concerns, though, about things like class size?” Lightfoot replied, “Of course, which is precisely why we have been trying to meet their needs, with written proposals that address them.” In the same interview, she said that fewer than twenty per cent of the district’s classes are too full and reported that she has proposed solutions for the classrooms of “kids who are really struggling, particularly in communities of color.” One hurdle in addressing the need for more nurses and special-education teachers, she said, is a statewide shortage of both. She reminded listeners that, owing to the school system’s long-standing financial troubles, which she inherited, Chicago pays seven hundred million dollars each year to lenders, “just to keep the lights on. There isn’t some big pot of money waiting to be distributed. That is not a real thing.”
At the Kelvyn Park picket line, teachers and staff discussed their views of the mayor. Although Lightfoot has not been widely demonized by striking union members, as Emanuel was, Hopp told me, “I really don’t appreciate her.” She felt insulted by Lightfoot’s request, last week, that schools reopen while negotiations continued. Andrick, the school counsellor, said, “I don’t think I’ll view her in a positive light after this. She definitely didn’t start out strongly as a new mayor.” But she added that Lightfoot has only been on the job a short while, and the details of the contract remain unknown. “I like to think people can redeem themselves.”
