On the heels of a whirlwind few months for public school parents, students and Chicago residents, ongoing Chicago Teachers Union contract negotiations aren’t likely to wrap up any time soon.
In a recent news conference, CTU President Stacy Davis Gates blamed the district’s schools chief Pedro Martinez — who she repeatedly called “the Supreme Being” — for the delay.
“Our union, from the very beginning, has … created the conditions for ‘yes,’” Davis Gates said. “We have tried to seek compromise. We’ve tried to seek alignment … Pedro knows what he’s doing. Perhaps you guys should ask him, is he seeking compromise, or is he seeking a different direction?”
The bargaining stalemate is unsurprising given the current political climate in Chicago Public Schools.
Despite multiple calls from current and former elected officials and education advocates to not fire the CEO, the current sitting school board — appointed by Mayor Brandon Johnson — voted to oust Martinez in late December. The move to terminate his contract came after months of anticipation, amid tense teachers contract negotiations and a bad budget conflict that led the previous board to resign en masse in early October.
Three days later, the mayor announced six new appointees to the board at a news conference where he excoriated people who asked questions about his plan.
“They said that it would be fiscally irresponsible for this country to liberate Black people,” he said. “And now you have detractors making the same argument of the Confederacy when it comes to public education in this system.”
The new body he appointed that day — sans ex-president Rev. Mitchell “Ikenna” Johnson, who resigned in late October amid controversy — fired Martinez without cause on Dec. 20, meaning Martinez can stay in his role for 180 days and receive 20 weeks of severance pay.
But there are many remaining questions about what his duties can and should be as he transitions out of his role. Just a few days after the school board voted to fire Martinez, three members showed up without the CEO’s permission for contract bargaining negotiations at the CTU headquarters near the United Center.
Martinez’s lawyer argued in court the following day that board members were effectively “blocking Martinez’s duties” by sitting in on teachers contract negotiations. A Cook County judge then moved to grant Martinez a temporary restraining order against the school members, giving the CPS chief a small victory in the long fight over the district’s future (despite getting fired a few days earlier.)
To make matters more complicated, the conflict came to a head just weeks after the Nov. 5 general election, in which voters took the first step to expand the school board from a mayoral-appointed to a partially-elected, partially-appointed body. The switch to a hybrid board was championed for years by advocates who said it would lead to a more democratized decision-making process.
In November, Chicagoans chose 10 members from the city’s newly drawn school districts to sit on the new 21-member hybrid school board. The mayor appointed 10 more people in mid-December. That new board will convene for the first time on Jan. 15.
Ultimately, the drama-laden saga is the result of layers of political dynamics in a cash-strapped educational climate that has pitted the city’s leader, a former teacher and union organizer, against the district over its financial decisions.
Some background on how this all began:
The root of the CPS back-and-forth is a lack of money.
CPS faced about a $500 million deficit for this school year as federal pandemic relief funding ran out, and is projected to face similar gaps for the next several years.
At the start of Johnson’s administration in the spring of 2023, CPS, the mayor’s office and the teachers union presented a united front, joining together to mark the first day of school. Martinez and CTU traveled to Springfield together in the spring to lobby for more state funds for CPS.
Meanwhile, district leaders and the Board of Education appeared to work together on policies favored by both Johnson and CTU, voting to shift focus to neighborhood schools and remove all remaining school resource officers, uniformed police officers responsible for safety at nearly 40 high schools.
But after state lobbying efforts to secure more funding proved unsuccessful, the district began planning for the current school year with a deficit of hundreds of millions of dollars. Shortly after, state legislators finalized the Illinois budget with no additional funding for CPS, beyond a mandated annual increase of $350 million to be distributed among districts statewide.
Who are the main players?
Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former CPS teacher, was elected in April 2023. Johnson got his start in politics as a CTU organizer and won the mayoral race after campaigning on a platform of transforming public education. Since his election, the mayor has continued to rely on union support, which is unsurprising since his campaign was mostly bankrolled by major labor groups such as CTU.
Stacy Davis Gates, the president of CTU, taught social studies for over a decade at Englewood, Clemente, and Mason Community Links high schools. She is a staunch believer in organizing and fighting for the rights of CPS students, parents and teachers. In fall 2019, she helped lead a 15-day strike and negotiate a contract. Before she was elected CTU president in 2022, Davis Gates served four years as vice president of the union.
Pedro Martinez was appointed CEO of the district in 2021, previously serving as the district’s chief financial officer for six years. Before joining CPS, Martinez was a superintendent in San Antonio where he received statewide recognition for his hand in making that district the fastest-improving large district in Texas in 2018, 2019, and 2021. Martinez served a brief stint as superintendent in Nevada before he was terminated in 2014 after being accused of deceiving the district about his credentials as a certified public accountant.
How did the CTU get involved?
The CTU contract expired at the end of June. So this summer, CTU — in the midst of negotiations — doubled down on its demands and began focusing its ire on Martinez for not having a plan to fully fund schools.
A CPS memo leaked before the district’s July budget vote hinted at the source of growing strife. Johnson had proposed CPS take out a short-term, high-interest $300 million loan to cover the cost of ongoing collective bargaining agreements and a controversial pension payment. The mayor and CTU argued the loan would help avoid midyear layoffs, furloughs or other cuts that could be caused by the new union contract. Martinez said the loan would be fiscally irresponsible.
The Board of Education sided with Martinez and voted unanimously in late July to pass the district’s $9.9 billion spending plan for the 2024-25 school year, without addressing the union’s demands for a loan.
To pass a balanced budget, which the district is required to do by law, CPS cut about $500 million in non-classroom costs and noted, along with Johnson’s office, that a budget amendment would be forthcoming to account for ongoing collective bargaining negotiations with CTU and the principals’ association.
What caused tension to build?
The budget was criticized by both CTU, which balked at end-of-year layoffs of teaching assistants who CPS had guaranteed to pay, and Johnson, who said he would not accept staff cuts and denounced the lack of a $175 million municipal pension payment to cover non-teaching CPS staff.
CPS countered, asserting that the district and city collaborated on developing and finalizing the district’s $9.9 billion budget before it was approved and noting the district’s prior pension contributions were paid for by City Hall, a policy that changed under former Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
But as negotiations continued over the summer, with the last remnants of federal relief funds set to expire, tension grew between the union and Martinez.
CPS said that obliging 52 of the union’s more than 700 contract proposals would produce a projected deficit of $2.9 billion next school year, up from the $509 million deficit already expected. CTU said the district’s analysis sent the wrong message, ignoring the union’s recommendations for additional librarians, arts programming and support for bilingual students.
Tensions exploded in late September, when Johnson asked Martinez to step down because of the CEO’s refusal to take on the loan the mayor was asking for to fill the budget gap. Martinez did not resign.
In September, Davis Gates posted on social media that CPS was plotting school closures and planning to fund the staff raises by way of furloughs. Martinez swiftly debunked the claim of planned closures as “misinformation” in a districtwide email to staff, which was followed by a resolution the board passed at its September meeting committing not to close or consolidate schools.
What are the stakes of firing Martinez?
During Martinez’s time as CEO of the district, post-pandemic literacy has gone up and there were the highest graduation rates for CPS schools to date. Enrollment increased, after years of decline.
Despite that, CTU leaders and Johnson said repeatedly they wanted Martinez out. They blamed the schools chief for his contribution to the district’s budget deficit.
In October, when all seven Board of Education members decided to exit rather than give in to the pressure to oust Martinez, they paved the path for Johnson to appoint new board members to follow the mayor’s request to fire Martinez, make a contract deal with the CTU and take out a loan.
Though a new board did vote to oust Martinez, it remains to be seen what will happen on the latter two of the aims.
Johnson’s six appointees this fall were: Olga Bautista, Michilla Blaise, Mary Gardner, the Rev. Mitchell Johnson, Debby Pope and Frank Thomas. When they were announced, little was known about their previous political backgrounds or leanings.
Johnson’s appointees were vetted by his staff, he said, and went through another vetting process with CPS. Despite that, the school board’s president the Rev. Johnson resigned on Oct. 31 due to social media posts that were deemed antisemitic, misogynistic and conspiratorial. Soon after, the mayor appointed a new president.
That president, a business consultant named Sean Harden, led the vote to fire Martinez in December.
When will the Chicago Teachers Union have a new contract? What are the sticking points?
The situation is evolving daily. And despite pressure from the CTU to settle a new contract by Christmas and some progress made at the bargaining table, the two sides seem to have a long way to go.
District officials have stated that meeting all of the union’s more than 700 initial contract demands would cost $10 billion over the course of a new four-year agreement.
At a recent press conference, CPS officials said they’ve met with the teachers union more than 74 times, including 23 meetings in December alone. They said they have made progress on staffing increases and that they are holding strong against the union’s ask for 6% raises.
“We need to maintain our current proposal for the fiscal health of the school system,” said Martinez. “Our number one priority is to ensure that we can protect the … staffing that (is) driving our student gains.”
CTU has identified over 80 “big-ticket must-haves,” said Miguel Perretta, CPS’ chief labor relations officer. The district has provided comprehensive responses to more than 66 of those priorities, Perretta said.
“To date, we have asked our CTU partners to memorialize these tentative agreements in writing as quickly as possible,” Perretta said.
Right before, teachers union representatives countered that the district had ignored an opportunity to fiscally boost CPS by dipping into reserves and using tax increment financing, or TIF, surplus funds.
“It is astounding that CEO Martinez and his allies think that their prerogatives supercede those of the mayor and the members of the Board of Education,” said Thaddeus Goodchild, CTU’s deputy general counsel.
As the next stage in arbitration, closed-door fact-finding hearings that were to occur in December, and inform a subsequent report to be released to the public, have been postponed at the union’s request.
Outcome of school board elections may shift the balance of power
In less than two weeks, the 21-person board with over a dozen new members — both elected and appointed — will face several challenges.
There are ongoing teachers contract negotiations to be settled and a search for a new CEO. Dynamics could get interesting.
Voters in the city’s historic school board election in November rejected several union-backed school board candidates in races that opponents of CTU hoped to frame as a referendum on Johnson. CTU won just four out of 10 races, including one that was uncontested. Candidates backed by opposite-minded school choice proponents won three, and the rest went to independents.
When all members join the board soon, CTU-backed candidates will likely still have the majority. That is because most of the body will be appointed by the mayor, a close ally of CTU.
Mainly, the school board will need to come up with a solution for what got the district into this deep conflict in the first place: an unaccounted-for budget gap in a district with an existing deficit.
CPS will receive $311 million in TIF surplus funds this year. But that money likely won’t cover both CTU’s proposed teachers contract asks and a $175 million pension payment to the city.
For the next several months, all eyes will remain on the potential of a high-interest loan — how it might impact CPS teaching and student learning in the short and long term.
