After nasty clashes involving character assassinations and a mass resignation, a showdown is drawing closer in Chicago between the most powerful local teachers’ union in the country and the most financially distressed school district.
The growing possibility of a teachers’ strike in a city with a long history of labor upheavals highlights the troubles rocking public schools nationwide. First came drops in academic performance and enrollment from lower birth rates and the pull of charter and home schools promising a better education and sometimes delivering it. Enrollment has plunged 20% in Chicago since 2012, a bigger decline than in many large cities.
After the pandemic hit, a windfall of $190 billion in federal emergency funding helped districts like Chicago paper over years of deficit spending and significantly expand the ranks of teachers, social workers, and counselors. Now that the federal aid has ended, students have only partly recovered from their devastating learning loss while budget deficits have ballooned, prompting widespread education cuts in Houston and upcoming reductions in San Francisco, to name just a few districts facing fiscal woes.
Chicago may be the most financially dysfunctional of them all, says Marguerite Roza, head of Georgetown’s Edunomics Lab. At the center of the drama is the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which has become a dominant force in city politics after playing a pivotal role in the election of one of its own, Brandon Johnson, as mayor two years ago.
Emboldened by the victory, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates and other militant leaders are not entertaining proposals for cutbacks in current contract negotiations. Instead, they are demanding significant increases in compensation and staffing and other changes to advance their social justice and anti-testing agenda. But CTU’s leverage may be weakened by the fraying of union solidarity.
CTU’s chief nemesis is Chicago Public Schools CEO Pedro Martinez, an immigrant from Mexico who was raised in a poor family in the Windy City before getting his MBA. An advocate of rigorous academics and accountability for teachers, Martinez says he offered the union only part of what it wants to avoid more financial turmoil and instability.
In many ways, this is a story about the hazards of running a district deeply into debt. With a projected $500 million annual deficit and holding a whopping $9.3 billion in long-term debt, the district depends on the city of Chicago, which also runs in the red, to provide most of its $9.9 billion in funding. Making matters more precarious, the district has to rely on short-term loans at high interest rates to make payroll. It is also the largest issuer of junk bonds in the U.S.
The labor negotiations took an ugly turn in December over the matter of a loan. Martinez flatly refused Mayor Johnson’s request to take on more debt to fund CTU’s salary demands. The union protested with a vote of no confidence in the CEO, and then a school board appointed by Johnson fired him.
Adding insult to injury, Davis Gates disparaged Martinez, whose contract allows him to stay on his job until June. The union president compared Martinez to a special education student who can’t be suspended and later apologized for the offensive remark, according to media reports.
The costly issues in the negotiations are compensation and staffing. The district says it offered a 16% cost of living pay hike over four years, on top of baked-in increases that bring the total to about 30% for most teachers with a master’s degree. The average teacher salary would jump to $110,000, with the most experienced instructors earning $140,000 – compensation that’s competitive with other large urban districts.
The union says it wants a bigger cost of living increase of 18% over four years. It’s also demanding the hiring of more than 1,200 teaching assistants, librarians, nurses, art teachers, social workers, and more – on top of 7,000 new hires since 2019.
With tensions running high, an arbitrator has been called in to recommend a nonbinding resolution. But arbitration hasn’t stopped the union from striking in the past.
If CTU and the district don’t agree to a financially sound deal, a state takeover is possible, and the 325,000 predominately black and Latino students would pay the price, says Roza of Georgetown.
“Historically, when districts can’t pay their bills, what happens isn’t pretty,” said Roza. “Bean counters come in and make widespread cuts, and parents get really mad because they don’t have any representation.”
Strife Within CTU
Although CTU projects a united front in its frequent press conferences criticizing Martinez as unwilling to fight for more funding, there’s unrest inside the union over the leadership of Davis Gates, two longtime CTU members who insisted on anonymity told RealClearInvestigations. Both say they doubt that she could get enough members to approve a strike.
The internal critics say the leadership’s political demands for green schools and affordable housing are given more priority than the primary mission of educating students, most of whom aren’t proficient in reading and math. They also object to what they call the divisive leadership of Davis Gates, who earns more than $269,000 a year, according to an estimate by Illinois Policy, a nonpartisan group that advocates for government accountability.
CTU has three caucuses, with Davis Gates leading the left-leaning CORE caucus. Members of the other caucuses who challenge CORE are punished by losing their committee assignments and other responsibilities, the union members said.
“If you don't drink the CORE Kool-Aid, they will make your life miserable. I've watched them do it,” one member said. “The other caucuses are now joining together to defeat CORE.”
In the latest example of internal strife, members are suing CTU and Davis Gates for failing to publish annual audits of the union’s books for four years as required by its own rules. Concerned that the union may have acted improperly in funding Johnson’s mayoral campaign, CTU member Philip Weiss says he requested in writing to see the audits three times. Getting no response from CTU, Weiss and four other members sued in October to force publication of the audits.
At the time, Weiss was also running for re-election as a trustee at the Chicago Teachers’ Pension Fund. At a gathering of union delegates to meet the trustee candidates, Weiss says, Davis Gates mispresented his political background to cast him as a danger to CTU.
“She declared to the delegates that I was right wing and part of Project 2025,” Weiss said, referring to the conservative policy manifesto. “These are factually false statements. She ambushed me before she introduced me as a candidate.”
Weiss, a lifelong Democrat who’s not a member of CORE, wasn’t reelected. CORE candidates won the two trustee seats.
CTU and the union’s lawyer didn’t respond to requests for interviews. The CTU lawyer called the lawsuit “harassing and frivolous,” according to a letter to Weiss’s lawyer at the Liberty Justice Center, who posted it on X.
CTU’s Social Justice Agenda
CTU became “Chicago’s most powerful political machine” after CORE leaders took the reins more than a decade ago, says Mailee Smith, a labor expert at Illinois Policy. They rode a backlash against reforms that sought to bring accountability to districts through testing and close severely under-enrolled and poorly performing schools.
The new leaders revived CTU’s long tradition of striking in 2012, taking advantage of a right to strike that’s not shared by teachers in many other nearby states. In that decade, the union held two more strikes, which proved effective in winning a contract in 2019 with a 16% raise over five years and a significant increase in staffing. It turned out that the district had agreed to a contract it couldn’t pay for and was later saved by $2.8 billion in federal pandemic funding, a former senior district official told RCI.
CORE’s leaders also changed CTU’s political strategy by focusing on social justice issues to extend its influence, a shift embraced by teachers’ unions in Los Angeles and other cities. The strategy found support at the State Capitol in 2022 when lawmakers enacted a CTU-backed amendment to the constitution that allows government unions to bargain over a wide range of issues, such as climate change and immigration, that go beyond bread-and-butter negotiations for wages and benefits.
CTU’s biggest triumph was the mayoral election of Johnson, a former middle-school teacher. CTU and other teachers’ unions provided Johnson with more than 60% of his campaign money and a robust door-to-door ground game, says Smith.
“CTU hand-picked Johnson to run, and the union is the reason he won,” Smith said.
As mayor, Johnson has unabashedly embraced the union’s agenda, calling himself an “advocate” for schools to make sure they get more funding and don’t suffer any cuts or closures. The mayor’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment.
Johnson’s advocacy stirred a remarkable round of political turmoil. In July, the mayor demanded that the district take out a $300 million loan to pay for the teachers’ pay hike proposal that began at 9% a year, according to a letter from the CEO’s attorney.
Martinez, who served as chief financial officer before becoming CEO, refused to take on more debt, fearing it would harm the district’s already low credit rating and boost the cost of borrowing. Martinez’s concerns were later affirmed in a warning from an S&P analyst.
In September, Johnson told his appointed school board to fire Martinez, the letter said. But instead of ousting the CEO, the entire board resigned, prompting city council members to issue a statement decrying the “instability to our school district.” Johnson then appointed a new board that, in December, fired the CEO without cause.
An Impasse
The union’s initial long list of demands was breathtaking. It included social justice priorities – gender support and restorative justice coordinators, climate champions, social workers, sanctuary protections for migrants, housing for homeless students, and solar panels – as well as more typical requests for librarians, art and bilingual teachers, and sports programs.
Instead of lifting achievement, a priority associated with conservative educators, CTU leaders frequently say their goal is to bring “joy” to education. “Robust enrichment programs are what kids get excited about and what makes them fall in love with school,” said CTU attorney Latoyia Kimbrough at a press conference in January. “They shouldn’t have countless hours of standardized testing.”
Although the two sides have agreed on many areas of expansion, negotiations have reached an impasse, partly over CTU’s approach to education. Among its demands: teachers should be able to pick their own curricula, including antiracist and social justice-focused materials, rather than use those supplied by the district; teachers should have control over diagnostic assessments that identify students who need extra help rather than use a universal district test that allows it compare results; and the district should push lawmakers to scrap the current evaluation process partly because black and Latino instructors receive less favorable ratings, and in the meantime, evaluations for most tenured teachers should occur less frequently, or once every three years.
Chicago’s sustainable community schools are the apotheosis of CTU’s vision for education. They get an extra $500,000 a year in funding to provide culturally responsive instruction, social services, and restorative justice counseling to address the needs of low-income students. The results of community schools in Chicago and nationwide have been mixed, with some studies showing they boost attendance and academic performance and others demonstrating no improvements.
District leaders are skeptical about the value of community schools and consider them as a way for CTU to hire its allies to provide the extra services, said the former senior district official. But the district agreed to increase the number of community schools to 70 from 20 because it can’t say no to every union demand.
“We can't assume that wraparound services in these schools automatically will result in better academic performance,” said William Corrin, who has evaluated community schools as a deputy director at MDRC, a policy group focusing on low-income communities. “It depends on the intensity and quality of the implementation. This is hard stuff.”
Martinez is pushing against much of CTU’s educational agenda. His view on the importance of high standards with curricula, testing, and teacher evaluations was partly shaped by his years as a student in the Chicago district.
The CEO has overseen a notable improvement in student test scores after a decade of decline in Chicago and many urban districts. During the pandemic, he spearheaded the effort to hire academic coaches for teachers and tutors for students to reverse learning loss. Between 2019 and 2023, Chicago posted the greatest growth in reading among big districts, according to a study from Harvard and Stanford. Still, fewer than a third of students in grades three through eight are proficient in reading.
“It’s very satisfying to see yet another sign that our investments in the classroom are yielding positive results, and that students are moving in the right direction,” Martinez said in June.
A Strike Looms
Martinez said at a press conference in January that these academic gains would be jeopardized if he capitulates to CTU’s wage and staffing demands, which would prompt a wave of destabilizing layoffs.
The union proposal would cost an additional $2.4 billion, the district says, or about $800,000 more than it can cover. The city and state are both running large deficits, and there’s no indication that they will be sending more money to the district anytime soon to cover the difference.
CTU says the district is understating the available resources to pay for its demands. Leaders say the district could draw from its fund reserves set aside for emergencies and borrow more money since it hasn’t hit its debt limit of $13.6 billion. More local property tax revenue for the district is also expected in coming years.
The Civic Federation, a nonpartisan governmental financial research group, recently warned the district against using more debt or cash reserves to cover the contract, which could lead to credit downgrades and ruin.
“The current situation is so serious that a state financial takeover is not and should not be out of the question,” the federation’s report said.
It’s now up to the arbitrator, who is expected to propose a resolution in early February.
But CTU doesn’t have much faith in the arbitrator’s fact-finding process, which it says is biased in favor of the district since it stresses the importance of its financial condition rather than the needs of students.
The union has a few options. It could wait until the mayor appoints a new CEO in five months and hope for a better deal. Or it could strike.
“CEO Martinez has decided to put his personal politics above the interests of CPS students, families, and educators,” CTU attorney Thad Goodchild said at a press conference in January. “We are headed into a fact-finding process that has twice been a precursor to a strike.”
Update: On Feb. 6, the Chicago Teachers Union rejected the neutral arbitrator's recommendations for ending the contract dispute with the school district and can give notice to strike after a brief period.
