CTU President Karen Lewis
Standing Up For Chicago's Teachers

In this blackboard jungle, Chicago's teachers--especially African American teachers--are catching spears on all sides.

The culprit of the classroom chaos, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis argues, is the corporate education model (i.e., crowding classrooms, closing schools, diverting public funds to private schools), which has resulted in massive teacher firings, and the sudden deathÑas in school turnarounds--of inner city schools.

Adding fuel to the corporate education model is successful charter schools, such as Urban Prep, which made national headlines after 100 percent of its male graduates successfully enrolled in college. Urban Prep receives funds from the Board of Education and private donations, as it is a non-profit organization. At issue: public funds that charter schools receive comes from that same pool of money that Chicago Public Schools rely on.

Nonetheless, Urban Prep's success adds weight to the argument that the public-private model works; and the movement to privatize and turnaround poor performing public schools is going strong.

There has been bad blood between the Chicago Teachers Union and the Board of Education before, but never quite like this.

Truthfully speaking, the Chicago Teachers Union and the Board of Education were never really into playing nice for the cameras. When there was a dispute, John Q. Public knew about it; the on-camera melee would continue for days, as the teachers dubbed the contract negotiations insulting and the Board of Ed dubbed the teachers spoiled.

But the Chicago Teachers Union always had a hold card--the teachers' strike--and sooner or later the issues would be resolved.

As ugly as it used to be, those were the good ole days. These are different times, indeed, and the state's record budget crisis has opened old wounds and created new ones.

These days, the Board of Ed and Mayor Richard M. Daley have the hold-card.

"What John Q. Public doesn't know is that teachers are terrified," says Lewis. "Everyone is afraid. There was a time that if a principal told you something that was pedagogically incorrect, you would stand up, you would say, 'Are you kidding? No, this isn't going to work, this is what works."

Lewis continues, "People do not respect our professional judgment. They don't believe that we know what we're doing, so we've got this set-up where principals come in and say, 'It's my way or the highway, and, 'you need to go.'"

One of society's more degrading sentiments about teachers--'those who can, do; those who can't teach,'--is very prevalent, Lewis adds. "Think about how people are rewarded; the farther you are from kids, the greater your salary. And in "our" culture, you must be smarter or better if you're making more money and that mentality is there."

Lewis argues that this disrespect of teachers is deeply ingrained in the Chicago Public schools system. "We have principals who have been in the classroom for less than three years and they get out because now, to stay in the classroom and to have a career in teaching, or to have a passion for teaching, you're looked down upon," she states. "You must not be any good because if you were, you would have gotten out of the classroom."

Now, it seems, the powers-that-be want to kick teachers out of classroom--especially the experienced Black teachers.

Last June, the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) filed charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC); the complaint was that "African American teachers suffer a disproportionately adverse impact as a result of the school turnarounds."

"Schools that were closed were primarily in African American, low socioeconmic areas," says Lewis. "The majority of [affected] teachers were older African American women, and they became the poster child of, 'we've got to get rid of these people.'

We noticed a sharp decrease in the number of African American teachers over the age of 40, so we filed an EEOC lawsuit. Age 40 is at least 15 years of experience or maybe more, and is a good indicator of people with experience.

The other thing we noticed was that the age of experience of the average teacher was dropping significantly. So, what we see is that the face of the teacher coming into CPS and being thought of as quality does not look like the student in the areas where they are going to teach. We took this, quite frankly, as an attack."

Lewis concedes it's frustrating not to know how many teachers will be affected by the job cuts. "It changes everyday. Wouldn't it be nice to know this? I've seen numbers as low as 1,200 to numbers as high as 2,700. That's what I'm looking at."

To make matters worse, teachers who are fired may not report it to the union.

"Some are so devastated by this, some are so embarrassed by this, because again, what they want is public humiliation of teachers ... 'so we're going to get rid of the unsatisfactory teachers.'"

But the conspiracy is even deeper than race; Lewis believes that the teaching profession, as a whole, is being refigured with career time limits in place.

"The overall plan is to destroy teaching as a career," Lewis states. "The plan quite frankly is for people to come in and work for five or six years, and then leave because this profession is so hard, you can't do it well for twenty or thirty years. So we should be getting in a fresh crop of young, smart people. This is what we're doing now. This is the plan."

The Blindside

The former King High School chemistry teacher seemed genetically predisposed to take the helm of the $28 million office and lead the fight for its 30,000 members; her parents, Martha and Geoffrey Jennings, were educators.

Meek schoolgirl she was not. Lewis confesses: "I just always been feisty even when I was a little kid."

In the second grade, Karen confronted a classmate, smeared paint over his shirt and was kicked out of school. "They put me out and made me go to Kozminski," she laughs. "So I graduated from Kozminski and then I went to Kenwood."

When Lewis' father, who is on the Hall of Fame at Kenwood, came to teach there, Lewis changed schools again. "He came to Kenwood during my junior year, which had a lot to do with me leaving early," she recalls. Lewis completed high school in Massachusetts, and graduated in the Class of '74 from the prestigious Dartmouth College.

Lewis didn't initially plan to become a teacher. "I flunked out of medical school, at the U of I," she says. "So my parents said, 'why don't you sub until you figure out what you're going to do? And I started subbing until I got my education hours so that I could teach chemistry, because that's what I loved."

While teaching chemistry at King High School, Lewis ran for CTU president.

Once in office, Lewis became the blindside, seemingly out of nowhere, she began demanding answers to the uncomfortable questions; and she says that once CTU brought up the TIF (Tax Increment Financing) funds, the news headlines changed.

"Right now the schools are quite entitled to about $250 million in TIFS; they should just have that money. Mayor Daley must have these TIFs declared surplus, and then that money should revert back to the taxing bodies and the agencies, where it should go."

She explains, "So, when that conversation got started, we started talking to parents and community organizations and broadening the base of support about properly funding public education in Chicago, because that's where the problem is, and we're getting different press all of a sudden."

Teachers were cast as being unflexible; but their reasoning is that firing teachers and closing schools aren't the state's only optionsÑthe money is out there, somewhere.

"The biggest problem is the state is six-to-eight months behind on paying its bills," Lewis explains. "They owe us at least $260 million, at last count. The Board of Education asked us for $100 million in concessions, but our members voted not to do that. And they did it on the day that Arne Duncan announced that $106 million would be coming to the state to rehire teachers. Not only did they get the $100 million they were asking for, they got $6 million extra. But they don't want to use that."

Lewis recalls a recent budget meeting when Board of Education President Mary Richardson-Lowry detailed the concessions taken by non-union employees and then questioned what the Chicago Teachers Union will do to help the effort.

"As she was talking about what they had done for cost-cutting measures, that non-union employees had taken furlough days, [Richardson-Lowry] said, 'Had any other employees made sacrifices?,' Lewis recalls. "I said, 'I want to set things straight here, you all stole $1.2 billion of our pension money. You call it pension relief; we call it a steal. For this year, it's $400 million and that is a concession, and it's still not enough for you.'"

Standing Up for Teachers

"We had an interesting conversation about how education has changed and they were quite shocked--they didn't know how the business end of school is going," Lewis reflects. "They had been CPS teachers and extraordinarily proud of their profession--and they are really appalled at how teachers are being vilified."

Bad press--and a nasty e-mail--has been about the brunt of threats that Lewis has personally received, but she doesn't focus on that. Lewis vows that she will continue to ask those uncomfortable questions; and she will continue to represent her members.

"The one thing I can say about myself is that I'm fearless when it comes to certain things," she says. "Absolutely fearless. And it's easy to be fearless when you know you're doing the right thing."