In a major labor victory, the Chicago Teachers Union reached a tentative agreement with Chicago Public Schools Monday night that reaffirms sanctuary school protections, protects the ability to teach Black history, gives veteran teachers a raise, and more. The deal comes amid attacks on public education by the Trump administration. “The collective bargaining agreement is a very powerful tool to use, especially in this moment, to ensure that people are protected,” says Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union. She also discusses the new posthumous memoir by former CTU President Karen Lewis, titled I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education, and lessons Lewis shared for the struggle ahead.
Transcript
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AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman in New York, with Juan González in Chicago, where we’re going to stay, because in a major labor victory, the Chicago Teachers Union has reached a tentative contract deal with Chicago Public Schools after more than a year of negotiations without a strike or threat of a strike for the first time in less than — in more than a decade. The full membership still has to vote before everything is final. The deal reaffirms sanctuary school protections, protects the ability to teach Black history and includes raises for veteran teachers and more. This comes amidst attacks on public education by the Trump administration, as well as concerns about ICE agents targeting Chicago schools.
For more, we’re joined in Chicago by Stacy Davis Gates, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, also wrote the afterword to the new posthumous memoir by the former Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis titled I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education. It also has a foreword by the world-renowned abolitionist, author and activist, professor Angela Davis.
Stacy Davis Gates, welcome back to Democracy Now! Explain the contract victory you almost have secured.
STACY DAVIS GATES: Good morning. Thank you for having me again.
This contract provides us with the capacity to move our school district forward in a time of Trump. As you noted earlier, the destruction of the Department of Education is going to have profound impact on the least of these. This contract provides a force field of protection for both our LGBTQIA+ students and our members. It provides academic freedom to ensure that history teachers like me are able to teach about the power of Reconstruction in this country, led by enslaved Africans in the first profound general strike that this country experienced. Beyond that, this contract is a way in which our immigrant students and their families can find safety in sending their children to schools, where we will protect them, as we have already. The collective bargaining agreement is a very powerful tool to use, especially in this moment, to ensure that people are protected, to ensure that their ability to enjoy the public good has some guardrails on it.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Stacy Davis Gates, could you talk about some of the other proposals you were able to win, including more funding for sports programs and sustainable community schools?
STACY DAVIS GATES: Absolutely. Thank you for that question. Dyett High School in the Washington Park neighborhood of Chicago was closed by Rahm Emanuel, who was the mayor of Chicago. In fact, he closed over 50 schools at one time in the city. We, in coalition with the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization, teachers and grandmothers and alderpeople, like Jeanette Taylor, they went on a hunger strike. And in that hunger strike, they won the reopening of their schools. Our union then, in coalition with this community coalition, took their needs to the bargaining table and established community schools. We have expanded the number of community schools as an effort to support and structure spaces that don’t have to close, but provide opportunity. This year, Dyett’s boys’ basketball team is celebrating a state championship.
Again, this collective bargaining agreement provides space for progress. We have a evaluation system in the Chicago Public Schools that has deprivileged both Black children and Black teachers of a very well-rounded experience. What we’ve done is marginalized those impacts and created pathways to get more Black teachers into the system. While corporations like Target are walking away from embracing Black workers and Black employees, we are providing pathways to support more of them.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And could you talk about the difficulty of the negotiations? Clearly, this was an unusual situation, because the current mayor, Brandon Johnson, used to be an organizer with your union, so the union striking against this mayor, who was so close to them, would have been a difficult situation. How were you able to maneuver with the negotiations with the Chicago Public Schools and the Mayor’s Office?
STACY DAVIS GATES: The power of our solidarity has been most vividly illustrated in our ability to strike. Karen Lewis led one in 2012 that was perhaps one of the most galvanizing moments of our nation’s labor history. But beyond that, what we’ve done is that we’ve done a few things. We’ve resisted the impacts of privatization and created spaces, through the strike, through negotiating, through the coalition space, to create power, power that enables us to do a lot of things. Yes, we can fight. We do that very well. And it is that fight, the equity that we build in that struggle, that has enabled this opportunity to push for something that has been more transformative. We’ve changed and enshrined in this contract a budgeting system that creates equity, that is embedded in making sure that children who go to school on the South and the West Sides of the city, that their budgets are prioritized in a reparatory manner. That is in this contract. That’s not just built through the negotiating table. That’s built through community coalition. That is built through supporting hunger strikes. That is built through taking it to the picket line. It is built through bold, unapologetic love for our city’s children.
AMY GOODMAN: I was wondering if you could comment on Karen Lewis. You wrote the afterword to the new memoir by the former CTU president, Chicago Teachers Union president, Karen Lewis, the book titled I Didn’t Come Here to Lie: My Life and Education. It’s also got a foreword by Angela Davis. Can you talk about her life and legacy as a transformative leader and what lessons you think are key to draw upon now?
STACY DAVIS GATES: That is a wonderful question. Thank you.
Karen Lewis is the blueprint for the type of leadership that we need in this very moment. Karen Lewis took the helm of the Chicago Teachers Union when Rahm Emanuel was the mayor of this city, a mayor that used the public good for the rich. In fact, he and Elon palled around here in Chicago. We had a mayor that foreclosed on public education by shutting down 50 schools on Black children on the South and West Sides of the city. We had a mayor who covered up the murder of a Black teenager in the city. We faced a very well-funded, neoliberal establishment that was hell-bent on marginalizing everything that we needed to have life and life more abundantly.
Karen Lewis organized. She found her confederates and the community and organizations like the Kenwood Oakland and people like Jitu Brown and Northside Action for Justice, and built a movement that was based on giving Chicagoans what they deserve, because if you give Chicagoans what they deserve, the children of this city are rooted and anchored in that. And so, what I would say in this moment is that Karen Lewis was fearless. Karen Lewis looked at power and laughed. Karen Lewis created space for coalition. And Karen Lewis led with humility and with a fearlessness of love, care and legacy.
AMY GOODMAN: Stacy Davis Gates, thanks so much for being with us, president of the Chicago Teachers Union, joining us from Chicago.
Stacy Davis Gates is the president of the Chicago Teachers Union and the executive vice president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Before her election as president in 2022, Davis Gates had served as vice president and as political and legislative director. In the Fall 2019, she helped to lead a 15-day strike and to negotiate an historic contract that provides for smaller class sizes, ensures a nurse and social worker in every Chicago public school, secures sanctuary protections for immigrant families, and supports students and families experiencing homelessness. In 2017, Ms. Davis Gates was elected Chair of United Working Families, an independent political organization by and for working-class people and our movements. She also serves as a board member for the Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE). Currently she is on leave from teaching high school social studies, which she did for more than a decade.
Amy Goodman (born April 13, 1957) is an American broadcast journalist, syndicated columnist, investigative reporter, and author. Perhaps most well known as the main host of Democracy Now! since 1996. She is the author of six books, including The Silenced Majority: Stories of Uprisings, Occupations, Resistance, and Hope, and Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America.
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