CTU Strike Vote Update

The good news is that it looks like we may meet and even significantly surpass the egregious 76% threshold for the strike vote.  My own school's union reps report that of over 100 staff, all but a couple voted for the authorizaton with only five votes missing -- and those votes are being rounded up, with the union reps going out to deliver and collect ballots to those out sick or on maternity leave.  Other teachers I have talked to reported similar results from around the city. 


This ridiculous 3/4 super-majority requirement is even more draconian than I reported yesterday.  It turns out that for a strike vote to be valid, 76% of the total membership has to vote Yes, not just those able to turn up for the vote.  Non-votes and abstentions are counted as No votes.  So, alone among public unions in Illinois, the CTU must meet a higher standard than any vote in any other circumstance in this country that I know of.


Quick Civics lesson.  In our national political/electoral system, there is only one instance in which a super-majority of 3/4 is required, and that is if you want to amend the US Constitution.  This requires a 3/4 majority of both houses of Congress, plus 3/4 of the states.  Note: 3/4 of those who vote in the House and the Senate, not 3/4 of all members of Congress.  This is as it should be -- it should be hard to change the constitution.  But, does a teachers' strike rise to (or, indeed, above) the standard we require for a change to our entire national governmental system?


Meanwhile, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Jean-Claude Brizard, has launched a blitz of propaganda to scare parents and teachers about this authorization vote.  Spanish language robo calls are going out to Hispanic parents warning that the teachers are out to screw their children.  Yesterday in the middle of the school day -- in the middle of final exams, to be precise -- the PA system in our school announced that teachers should send a student to the main office to collect "an important letter" from JCB to be sent home to parents.  One of his complaints?  That the authorization vote itself, which was over by 8:30 AM and took place away from any classrooms in our school, would cause a "disruption in our children's classrooms that are currently in session."  Oh, the irony….


He also, in a letter to teachers, complained about the union's "misleading representations" and characterized this early vote as "wrong" in that it includes retiring teachers who have no stake in the process and "will not bear the consequences" of a strike.  Misleading....  What he fails to acknowledge is that any new contract will certainly impact pensions -- obviously of critical import to new retirees.  Also conveniently left out of his missive is the fact that a later vote -- say, at the end of August -- will be held when 2,000 CPS teachers who are newly retired but not yet off the union rolls will be difficult to round up for the vote. 


At base, Brizard seems to be brassed off that the teachers are organizing and planning ahead for the beginning of the new school year in August and September.  This is, apparently, very bad.  The fact that the CPS management and its minions in the private sector are supremely organized, busily planning and spending buckets of money and exerting strenuous energy to prepare to fend off a potential strike is okay, however.  Thus the over-arching attitude towards unions in this country.  Management -- whether corporate, or governmental -- does everything in its overwhelming power to prevent strikes by intimidation, propaganda (including ads and commercials), and fixing the rules against labor; in short, by planning and organizing.  Workers, however, as soon as they begin to organize and plan, are demonized as somehow un-American and Communistic, or at the very least as playing unfair and trying to screw over the rest of the country by asserting their rights and demanding justice.  We have truly gone down the rabbit hole.


The students know what is at stake.  They have seen after school programs cut to the bone and have seen Art and Music offerings dwindle to near-nonexistence in some schools.  They know that their softball coaches and debate coaches and volleyball coaches have no money for buses and sometimes even resort to paying umpire fees and meals and snacks and the like out of their own pockets so their kids can compete.  They know that the grandiose “Full Day” extension of the school day threatens to be a time-suck with little to no true enrichment on offer because no new funds are forthcoming (this aside from the fact that the 15-20% increase in mandatory working hours for teachers will be recompensed with an mere 2% overall raise under Brizard’s plan).  Apparently, just keeping us recalcitrant teachers and our charges inside of a school building for another hour or so a day will somehow, by osmosis, improve results.  A very talented young artist at my school named Victor G (he is a Junior, and could easily outshine some syndicated cartoonists) came up with the riposte below.

Stealing Candy from a Baby
Cartoon by Victor G, 11th grader in Chicago Public Schools

I could go on, and perhaps will at a later date.  For now I will leave you, Fearless Reader, with one last symptom of the skewed priorities of CPS and Mayor Rahm.  My high school is part of a nationally-recognized, successful program called AVID.  AVID is designed to help the middling students who are so often neglected and forgotten as teachers focus on the stars and the problem kids.  It fosters academic skills such as note-taking and organization and pushes them to take Honors and AP classes.  And it works, as dozens of studies and my own experience teaching AVID students demonstrate.  It works so well that  my high school – my struggling, forever-on-probation high school – is a demonstration school for AVID.  Folks from all over the city and beyond come to my school to see AVID at work promoting ordinary students' success.  So retaining the program is a no-brainer, right?


Not in Rahm and Jean-Claude land.  CPS has just announced that it will no longer fund AVID and its mission to raise the academic bar for  Chicago high schoolers and provide them with the tools to succeed in college and beyond. 


The official CPS motto promises “Children First.”  First, that is, to be thrown under the fiscal bus.