The Chicago Teachers Union unveiled its blueprint for improving public schools Thursday–calling for smaller elementary class sizes and more art and computer offerings–in an apparent effort to broaden the narrative around its negotiations with the district.
There was no mention of pay raises, though the report said teachers need “competitive salaries and benefits.” Last summer, the Board of Education voted to deny teachers a contractual 4 percent raise.
At a news conference, the union also proposed more music, physical education and computer classes and full-day kindergarten across the district.
Zev Eigen, an expert in labor relations and an assistant professor at Northwestern University School of Law and Kellogg School of Management, said the union’s emphasis on students and parents is an attempt to counter a perception that it’s concerned mainly with wages and working conditions.
“They’re standing up for things that are beyond their own self interests,” he said.
Even so, the union’s proposals would require the district to add more than 2,100 teachers and about 2,580 support staff, such as nurses, counselors and school psychologists. If the district were to implement all of the union’s suggestions, it would cost $713 million, according to the CTU report.
Last year, CPS managed to close a $712 million deficit. CPS chief executive Jean-Claude Brizard has estimated the deficit would be $362.5 million in the coming fiscal year and may to balloon to almost $1 billion in 2014, when pension costs increase.
The union’s report identified $796 million in possible new revenue sources. The largest contributions would come from a six-cent flat tax on purchases in the financial markets and a larger tax on capital gains for the wealthiest 5 percent of households. Those changes would generate up to $477 million each year, the report said, but both require a change in state law.
“It’s not about the money, it’s about priorities,” said CTU president Karen Lewis. “There is money. It’s about what you do with it.”
Robert Bruno, director of the labor education program at the University of Illinois at Chicago, said this is the first time the CTU has released a report of this kind during contract negotiations. The report was issued in a 44-page, colorfully illustrated glossy booklet.
“The union, I think, struggles to kind of break through the rather large media message that comes from the mayor and CPS,” Bruno said. In some ways, the union is “stepping away from the bargaining table and stepping into the public domain where they want to have this larger discussion,” he said.
Bruno said the paper could prompt the district to agree to something called “interest-based” bargaining, where the two sides redefine the rules of negotiation to explore what’s best for everyone. This could make many of the subjects currently not on the table, such as the length of school day and class size, fair game.
That is not likely. A sweeping education reform law that passed last year, which Mayor Rahm Emanuel pushed for, gives the mayor and his schools team more leverage at the bargaining table and essentially leaves only wages and benefits on the table.
“It’s more of a publicity piece, and publicity pieces tend to gear up toward less of an interest-based bargaining,” Eigen said of the document.
District spokeswoman Becky Carroll responded to the CTU report in an e-mail. “For too long, the system has not put the needs of our children first and we are united with our teachers to use resources in the most effective way,” she wrote.
Both sides have characterized the negotiations, which started in early December, as difficult and sometimes hostile. The district’s priorities have been heavily focused on a longer school day and year, closing and turning around low-performing schools and expanding the city’s charter school network, where teachers are not typically unionized.
“We believe if we all focus on education of our children that we will all come to the same place,” Lewis said.