Chalkbeat

Sheridan teachers strike: Union and district reach a tentative contract agreement

2026-04-24T16:17:57+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to get the latest reporting from us, plus curated news from other Colorado outlets, delivered to your inbox.

After more than three weeks on strike, the Sheridan School District teachers union reached a tentative agreement Thursday on a new contract with the tiny district south of Denver.

The agreement came after Colorado Gov. Jared Polis stepped in to convene a day of discussions between the district and the union at the state Capitol. Polis had grown increasingly frustrated with the stalemate, warning on Wednesday that the interruption in schooling meant students had “missed weeks of meaningful instruction.”

Most of Sheridan’s more than 900 students are Hispanic and come from low-income families. The district canceled classes at all five of its schools for the first three days of the strike. Schools have been open since then, but officials said attendance has been low.

The Sheridan Educators Association said its members will return to classrooms after the deal is ratified. The union is expected to vote on ratification on Friday and the Sheridan school board is set to vote Tuesday, according to Polis’ office.

Superintendent Gionni Thompson said in a statement that the district shares “the Governor’s urgency in moving forward toward swift ratification to avoid further delays and ensure students return to a stable, consistent learning environment in which each student can thrive.”

Union President Kate Biester, a social studies teacher at Sheridan High School, said in a statement that she “cannot wait to get back to my classroom and my students.”

“While this entire process has been incredibly difficult, I want to say unequivocally that the challenge has been worth it,” Biester said. “Sheridan will always be a place that gives everyone a chance to succeed. We have shown everyone that big things can happen in a small town.”

The union declared victory in a statement Thursday night, saying the tentative agreement “meets our demands to reinstate our contract, a path to recognize classified staff, and an end to the retaliatory and restrictive policies that have caused instability in our schools.”

Sheridan teachers had been working without a contract all school year. The strike began April 1. The union had several demands, including that the district reinstate the expired contract and allow non-licensed staff, such as school bus drivers and paraprofessionals, to join the union.

Tensions between the union and the district escalated as the strike wore on. A week into it, the union announced an effort to recall the entire Sheridan school board. On Thursday, before the deal was reached, the district said it would no longer cover the full cost of health benefits for the striking employees as it had been for the past several weeks.

A spokesperson for the Arapahoe County Clerk and Recorder’s Office said Friday that the Sheridan teachers union had asked questions about how to initiate a school board recall process but hadn’t yet started the proceedings.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

‘We have to stand together and fight’: Sheridan teachers strike over breakdown in contract negotiations

2026-04-02T00:54:17+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to get the latest reporting from us, plus curated news from other Colorado outlets, delivered to your inbox.

To Christen Reyes, working in the tiny Sheridan School District for many of the past 21 years felt like a partnership between teachers, administrators, and the community.

But an important part of that partnership has broken down, Reyes and other Sheridan teachers said, and it’s hurting the district’s more than 900 students, most of whom are Hispanic and come from low-income families. On Wednesday, Sheridan teachers went on strike to protest what they say is the district’s refusal to reinstate the teachers union contract.

“We’ve had disagreements, but we’ve always come to the table for the well-being of all,” said Reyes, who teaches high school English and Spanish.

“And then it became them versus us,” said Esther Rocha-Garcia, who teaches math at Sheridan High School and was standing with Reyes outside district headquarters.

“There’s no partnership because we don’t exist,” Reyes added.

Teachers in Sheridan, located south of Denver, have been working without a contract all school year. The Sheridan Educators Association’s previous agreement with the district expired in July after the two sides couldn’t agree on pay raises. Union President Kate Biester said that when they returned to the negotiating table in August, the district refused to budge.

“How I feel is that we were playing a game,” Biester said, “and they changed the rules of the game entirely and told us that we were no longer a part of it.”

In a statement Wednesday, the Sheridan School District said it is “eager and willing to return to the bargaining table to collaborate with our educators to find common ground.”

The district canceled classes at all five of its schools on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. In a letter to families Tuesday, Superintendent Gionni Thompson wrote that the district would not have enough staff to “to safely maintain normal school operations.”

“We understand that this disruption creates challenges for our students, families, and community, and we appreciate your patience and flexibility,” Thompson wrote.

Thompson, who was hired to lead the Sheridan district two years ago, added that the district is “committed to working in good faith with SEA to reach an agreement that supports our students, values our educators, and is fiscally responsible to our community.”

Like many districts in the Denver metro area, Sheridan’s enrollment is declining. Ten years ago, the district had more than 1,500 students. This year, it’s down to 924, according to the Colorado Department of Education. Schools in Colorado are funded based on student counts, and the 40% decline means Sheridan is receiving less per-pupil funding from the state.

Union leaders with the Sheridan Educators Association said they're planning to strike until the district responds to their demands.

Less funding often leads to lower teacher salaries. Last school year, the average Sheridan teacher salary was $71,797, according to the state education department. That was lower than all of the surrounding districts, including Englewood ($72,803), Denver ($76,901), Jeffco ($80,659), Littleton ($85,405) and Cherry Creek ($94,443).

But Biester stressed the Sheridan union’s strike isn’t primarily about pay.

“It’s just about having our collective bargaining rights back again,” she said.

Those rights are important if the district wants to attract and retain teachers, Biester and others said. Sheridan has a high teacher turnover rate: More than 43% of teachers left between the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years, according to state statistics. By comparison, the teacher turnover rates in all of the surrounding districts were below 20%.

Kelly Landgraf left Sheridan last year after 10 years of teaching social studies and language arts in the district. She took the day off Wednesday from her new job in the neighboring Cherry Creek district to stand on the picket line with her former colleagues.

“The teachers are just turning over, which is terrible for kids,” Landgraf said. “This is such a small community and it’s such a close-knit community that it shouldn’t be this hard.”

Teachers in the Sheridan School District have been working without a contract all school year.

Holding a sign on the sidewalk facing busy Federal Boulevard, Nathan Miller said he was inspired to strike after the Sheridan school board passed a policy in January that union leaders say could make it harder for employees like Miller, who does IT support for the district, to join the teachers union or form their own.

Cars driving by emitted a near-constant stream of honks in support of the strike. Children hung out of truck windows and waved. The teachers waved back and shook their signs. Sometimes they banged on upside-down buckets and chanted, “What do we want? A contract! When do we want it? Now!”

To end the strike, the union has demanded that the district rescind the January policy. It has also demanded that the district reinstate the expired contract and allow non-licensed staff, including school bus drivers and paraprofessionals, to join the union.

Christy DiLuca, a speech language pathologist at Alice Terry Elementary School, said working without a contract has affected not just her paycheck, but her emotional health.

DiLuca has worked for at least seven school districts in six states during her long career, and she said she’s never felt as unappreciated by a district as she does now.

“It’s so disheartening,” DiLuca said. “There’s days when we were all just scared to death and wanting to cry and go, ‘What do we do about this?’ But we have to stand together and fight.

“We’re willing to go as long as we need to.”

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Colorado Springs 11 teachers face warnings, discipline, or termination for strike-related actions

2025-12-10T01:22:05+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to get the latest reporting from us, plus curated news from other Colorado outlets, delivered to your inbox.

Twenty-five teachers in Colorado Springs District 11 received warnings or were penalized by district officials because of actions during the run-up to a one-day strike by the teachers union in early October, according to union officials.

Union leaders say the district’s sanctions are part of a broader union-busting effort that could push teachers out of the classroom.

Angel Givler-Viers, a fifth grade teacher who is active in the teachers union and has a large social media following, faces the most severe punishment. The district superintendent recommended at the Dec. 3 school board meeting that she be fired for insubordination and neglect of duty.

Jessica Wise, a spokesperson for the 22,000-student District 11, said by email that “a number of staff received appropriate communications” following events surrounding the strike on Oct. 8. She couldn’t confirm whether the number was 25.

The flurry of warnings and discipline measures handed out to teachers involved in the strike comes after more than a year of growing tensions between school district leaders and the Colorado Springs Education Association teachers union. The school board voted a year ago to let the union’s master agreement with the district lapse at the end of last school year, a move that enraged many teachers and helped spark the strike.

David Graf, a union official, said in addition to Givler-Viers a second teacher is on paid leave now for actions prior to the strike. A third teacher was on paid leave earlier this fall for materials distributed during the strike but has returned to the classroom, he said.

Givler-Viers has been on paid administrative leave since Oct. 6. Wise said it could be weeks or months before the school board votes on whether she should be fired.

District 11 has about 1,650 teachers. Last year, about two-thirds were in the union, but that number has gone down, partly because many teachers left the district last year, Graf said.

Besides objecting to the end of the master agreement, teachers union members have cited general concerns, such as low morale and lack of teacher voice in district decisionmaking, and specific ones, including a new policy banning most flags, including pride flags, from district classrooms and a recent decision to cut several pages on gender identity out of a high school health textbook supplement.

Wise confirmed that the district’s curriculum department removed the textbook pages in August because they weren’t aligned with the district’s approved curriculum and standards, according to an October Rocky Mountain PBS story.

Wise said the district has made big investments in teachers in recent years, including this year giving licensed teachers a 4% recurring raise and a 6% onetime bonus. The district has also launched a districtwide teacher coaching program and eliminated central office jobs in order to preserve classroom positions, she said.

Givler-Viers, who taught literacy at McAuliffe Elementary and often goes by Dr. G., believes the district’s effort to terminate her is part of a broader effort to silence and scare educators.

“It’s just way bigger than me,” she said. “It impacts all of us. And if they get away with it now, they’re going to continue doing it.”

Social media posts lead to district investigation

Givler-Viers received a letter that outlined four allegations against her on Nov. 21, about seven weeks after being put on administrative leave, said Graf, who’s been involved in the case.

One allegation in the Nov. 21 letter cites unprofessional conduct stemming from inappropriate social media posts. The other three allegations cite issues that arose after she was placed on leave, including that she set foot on district property and talked to district staff in violation of the leave conditions and that she didn’t answer questions fully and truthfully during the district’s investigation.

Givler-Viers said she stood on a step leading to the district administration building to make a speech to union members during a censorship vigil while she was on leave.

Graf and Givler-Viers said the district hasn’t specified what social media post or posts prompted the first allegation.

Wise said the district can’t comment on individual cases or timelines, but said “employees recommended for termination are provided information regarding allegations and findings at the appropriate stage of the process, consistent with those legal requirements, prior to any Board of Education consideration.”

Givler-Viers, who’s taught in District 11 for eight years, has more than 18,000 followers on TikTok. Many of her posts are short videos in which she speaks directly to the camera about issues ranging from the unpaid work teachers do to the challenge of taking sick time as a teacher.

About a week before the strike, she posted a video in which she suggested that parents seeking to support the union keep their children home on the day of the strike. She cautioned that children attending school that day could end up in large classes staffed by central office employees with no teaching experience.

“ … that means your kids could be in a classroom with however many other kids show up, with an accountant," she said in the post, which has nearly 90,000 views.

A week after the Sept. 28 TikTok post, Givler-Viers said she was going over Latin and Greek roots with her students when she was asked by her school principal to come to the office. A district human resources official told her she was being put on administrative leave while she was investigated for her social media posts. She went back to her classroom to gather her personal items and was escorted to her car.

“I just took my cell phone and my car keys and I left, and the kids … they’re like, ‘Are you OK? Where are you going? What’s happening?’” she said.

‘I can’t do it anymore’

Graf said 22 teachers received either a conference memo or a letter of reprimand because they referenced the strike in messages or in plans for substitute teachers who worked on the day of the strike.

A conference memo is one of the district’s mildest responses to an infraction and warns employees about a violation of board policy but isn’t placed in their personnel file. A letter of reprimand is a more serious penalty.

Jim Dobyns, who goes by the first name Talsen, is a physical education teacher at Rogers Elementary School. He received a conference memo around the time of the strike. He said it was the last straw that prompted him to resign. His last day is Dec. 19.

“It’s a terrible working environment to be in when you’re constantly under duress and afraid,” he said. “I just can’t do it anymore.”

The conference memo Dobyns received cited a message he left prior to the strike in the online system for lining up substitute teachers. He wrote, “This leave was posted without the consent of the teacher. You will be required to cross a picket line to accept it.”

Dobyns said district administrators, not him, posted the request for a sub to cover his classroom during the strike.

The conference memo, which was reviewed by Chalkbeat, said, “This unsatisfactory inappropriate conduct negatively impacted the operations of the school and caused harm amongst the Guest Staff and/or District Staff that were covering your classroom on that day.”

Dobyns said he wrote the message in the online system because he didn’t want his sub to be surprised by the strike.

“A lot of subs didn’t know [about the strike]” he said. “A lot of people don’t watch the news these days.”

Dobyns expects more District 11 teachers to quit in the coming months.

“I know from the talk around the water cooler that there is going to be an exodus of educators from D11 come March when hiring season starts,” he said.

Dobyns has a job lined up in home remodeling sales once he leaves the district.

Ann Schimke is a senior reporter at Chalkbeat. Contact Ann at aschimke@chalkbeat.org.

A ‘sick-out’ over teacher pay leads Adams City High School to switch to remote learning

2024-02-14T17:38:02+00:00

This story has been updated with additional comments from Adams 14 officials.

Adams 14 will move students at Adams City High School to remote learning Wednesday after learning many teachers were planning a sick-out, the district announced Tuesday

The action was not organized or sanctioned by the teacher’s union in the district, but by a group of teachers in the high school who are frustrated by a lack of prospects for teacher raises.

A letter circulated by staff that is signed by “Adams 14 District CTA Membership” — implying it is from members of the teacher’s union but not union leadership — states the concern is about how pay is affecting teacher retention.

“Our intention is not to disrupt education, but to voice our concerns regarding teacher retention, fair compensation, benefits, time management, and the overall need for a positive change by leadership,” the letter states. “The constant turnover in staff has hindered our mission to elevate our district from its current status. We acknowledge the financial challenges faced by the district, but we cannot overlook the disproportionate impact on teachers and staff compared to the recent raises and contract improvements that have been enjoyed by district leadership.”

In the current school year, a starting teacher’s salary is $50,500.

Many teachers believe that Superintendent Karla Loría and other district leaders have had recent raises, but there are no public documents demonstrating a school board vote for a raise for the superintendent or other district leaders.

On Wednesday morning, Joe Salazar, an attorney for the district, said he did not know how many Adams City High teachers had called in sick. Asked if teachers would be disciplined, Salazar wrote in an email, “Why would they be disciplined? They have the right to call in sick.”

As for Loría’s salary, Salazar said only that her “base salary” is $250,000. That has been her base salary since 2022, when the board gave her a raise to acknowledge that the district was no longer under third-party management.

Loría’s contract with the district states that she is to receive annual raises that amount to year-over-year change in the local consumer price index. It’s unclear if that has happened.

The Adams 14 school district has had low state ratings based largely on student test scores for more than 10 years, but was released from state orders to reorganize after leaders for the district and neighboring districts said it was not in anyone’s interest to reorganize.

The district has had declining enrollment like many metro area school districts. Some leaders still blame the years the district was ordered to be under management by private company MGT Consulting as the reason for continued budget problems.

Jason Malmberg, the president of the teachers union in Adams 14, said he believes the frustrations stem from the state intervention in the district.

“It’s related to the stress the state has put us under,” he said.

Malmberg said the frustrations facing teachers at Adams City High School are reflective of problems teachers face in high-poverty districts across the nation as it becomes more difficult to stretch budgets to serve children’s needs, and as gaps widen between districts that can raise local funds and districts that can’t.

School districts in Adams County have not had much success when it comes to asking local voters to raise taxes for schools. Adams 14 leaders have long hoped that the community would vote to approve a bond or mill levy request if the district showed improvement.

After MGT, Loría wanted to work with another third-party management firm, TNTP, that also cost the district millions. The contract with TNTP originally called for Adams 14 to pay $5 million over three years. The district last year tried to cut ties with the group early, citing budget concerns and other reasons. The state offered to give the district more money to help cover the contract, but the district eventually signed a new, reduced contract that cost only $395,587 for the second year of work.

Citing budget problems, the district also closed an elementary school and has said it is considering more closures in the future.

Some teachers, however, are concerned about whether the district leadership team has grown too large, including with many of Loría’s former colleagues, and wonder if new contracts have also taken up much of the budget.

In a letter obtained by Chalkbeat that is signed by the superintendent and addressed to a leader of the union at the high school, Loría stated that “the district will take action on all absences related to the planned sick-out.”

Loría also stated in the letter that she agrees that teachers need better pay and that the board is exploring a local tax request to increase revenue to be able to pay teachers more. But she accused the teacher leader of being abusive and violating policies.

“Your conduct and comments with me and certain cabinet members were unprofessional and disrespectful to the point of being abusive,” Loría wrote. “Your conduct was aggressive and defamatory (several times you claimed that the district was lying about the budget and “hiding” money), and you directed personal attacks against me while mansplaining matters of which you are wholly unfamiliar, while pointing your finger at me several times.”

In a reply also obtained by Chalkbeat, the teacher leader responded to Loría’s letter rejecting the accusations. The teacher leader, who did not respond to an interview request, said Loría’s letter had a “perceived retaliatory tone,” and that he plans to seek legal counsel.

Yesenia Robles is a reporter for Chalkbeat Colorado covering K-12 school districts and multilingual education. Contact Yesenia at yrobles@chalkbeat.org.

Detroit teachers union reaches agreement with school district

2023-08-21T02:35:06+00:00

Sign up for Chalkbeat Detroit’s free daily newsletter to keep up with the city’s public school system and Michigan education policy.

The Detroit Public Schools Community District and the Detroit Federation of Teachers union reached a tentative collective bargaining agreement for the 2023-24 school year just hours before the current contract was set to expire, the union announced Sunday night.

The school district and union are keeping the terms confidential until DFT members have reviewed and ratified the agreement, according to the union statement.

Teachers are expected to report to work on Monday, and the first day of school for students is Aug. 28.

The announcement arrived the same day the DFT’s two-year contract expired. The union’s 2021 to 2023 contract was originally set to expire on June 30, but both parties agreed to a contract extension that lasted until Sunday.

It’s unclear how long the new agreement between the union and the district will last. A DFT building representative who spoke on background with Chalkbeat said that the district and the union might agree to a one-year agreement. The teachers union may have made that decision in order to negotiate under the restored teacher bargaining rights signed into law by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer this summer. Those laws will go into effect in 2024.

Wage increases for DFT members were central to the monthslong bargaining talks.

“We in Detroit work against what seems to be insurmountable circumstances every day, yet we make miracles happen,” Lakia Wilson-Lumpkins, DFT president, told Chalkbeat after a district school board meeting on Aug. 8. “We deserve the highest increase ever. One that raises our maximum salary out of last place in the Metro Detroit area.”

In 2021, DFT and DPSCD agreed to a 4% salary increase for veteran teachers, as well as increasing the starting salary for new teachers to $51,000. The maximum salary for a veteran teacher with a bachelor’s degree is $69,000.

In neighboring Dearborn and Grosse Pointe school districts, union members with a bachelor’s degree who were at the top of the pay scale received upwards of $76,000 in recent contracts. In the Birmingham school district, a teacher with a bachelor’s degree who is at the top of the pay scale received over $80,000 in their 2021-23 contract.

Voting begins tonight and will continue until Thursday at noon.

Monday morning, hours before union members will meet to learn the details of the agreement, a group of members rallied outside the Fisher Building to protest what they said was a lack of member involvement in the negotiations. The protest was not sanctioned by the union, Wilson-Lumpkins said.

“We haven’t had a clue about what’s in the tentative agreement,” said Frances Curtis, an educator at Renaissance High School. “You don’t direct people to go to work, to go to a meeting, and you haven’t even shown us our contract.”

Steve Conn, a former DFT president, said he was skeptical that the union and district agreed to a contract “anywhere near where they deserve.”

Ethan Bakuli is a reporter for Chalkbeat Detroit covering Detroit Public Schools Community District. Contact Ethan at ebakuli@chalkbeat.org.

Parents scramble, and voice support, as strike disrupts school in Los Angeles

2023-03-22T17:16:34+00:00

On day one of a labor strike that closed hundreds of Los Angeles-area public schools, Eric Calhoun polled the roughly 45 children in his care. How did they feel about having the day off?

“We want to be in school,” the students told Calhoun, director of the Pan Pacific Park Recreation Center. Los Angeles Unified shuttered its campuses for more than a year at the height of COVID, and the students didn’t want to go back to virtual learning or be apart from their classmates.

This time around, school closures are expected to last just three days, as the union representing school bus drivers, custodians, cafeteria staff, classroom aides, and others, demands higher wages for its 30,000 members, some of whom are among the district’s lowest-paid staffers. Los Angeles public school teachers joined the walkout in a show of solidarity.

As the strike began, the complicated logistics of child care and food distribution underway across Los Angeles County underscored the crucial role schools play in keeping a community running. Parents who spoke with Chalkbeat voiced support for the education workers who keep schools clean and students fed, but they acknowledged the challenges of closing the nation’s second-largest school system.

During a labor strike that closed schools, LA Unified students participate in activities at Pan Pacific Park Recreation Center on March 21, 2023.

Will Lee, who lives in View Park, said child care was top of mind when he received a robocall over the weekend letting him know that a strike was imminent. “We knew we needed to figure it out because we wanted to support the teachers and others who work at the school,” said Lee. He took the day off from his job at a car dealership to care for his daughter, Zippora, 7, and help her with the schoolwork-turned-homework that her teacher had assigned.

For those families who couldn’t wrangle last-minute child care, some campuses offered supervision, and city agencies stepped up. On the eve of the walkout, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced that 30 recreation centers would have free child care for children in first through fifth grade, and many of those locations would have grab-and-go meals. (The Los Angeles mayor does not control LA Unified, which serves the City of Los Angeles and dozens of smaller municipalities nearby. Bass is not a party to the labor negotiations between Local 99 and district leaders, including Superintendent Alberto Carvalho.)

On Tuesday morning, cars lined up at Pan Pacific Park, where recreation center staff stood in the pouring rain, handing out more than 500 meal packages with enough food for three days.

Carol Alvarado, a senior at Hollywood High School, said she supports raises for the education workers seeking them — pointing out their contributions on campus. “Security aides make school a more friendly environment. Cafeteria workers provide lunch to students who have it,” said Alvarado, 17, noting that most students at her school rely on cafeteria food at least once a day, and some of them get breakfast, lunch, and dinner there.

Alvarado worked as a counselor Tuesday at the Pan Pacific Park Recreation Center. The free “Strike Camp,” with its sports, games, and arts and crafts, will run from 7:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. while schools remain closed.

Pan Pacific Park Recreation Center held a “Strike Camp,” beginning March 21, 2023, as education workers walked off the job.

For more than a year during the pandemic, the center served as a temporary homeless shelter — its sports facilities transformed into makeshift dormitories. “We went out of our way to host them during COVID, and now we need to go out of our way to help our families,” said Floyd Thweatt, a coordinator there. “Our parents go to work, and they need a safe place for their kids to be, so they are not just at home, on the couch, watching TV.”

This week’s walkout comes about four years after the union representing Los Angeles Unified teachers, nurses, counselors, and mental health professionals spent six school days on the picket line — demanding higher wages, smaller class sizes, and campuses staffed with nurses and librarians.

LA Unified, which enrolls about 420,000 K-12 students at more than 750 schools, is scheduled to reopen its campuses on Friday.

For now, many parents are relying on the rec centers for support. At the Poinsettia Recreation Center in Hollywood, about three dozen elementary school children raced around the gym, which served as another pop-up child care location.

Picking up her 6-year-old son for the day, Tina Ger said she supported the striking staffers. A native of Berlin, Germany, she noted that labor strikes, more common in Europe than in America, can move the needle for workers. “If it would be a full month off, we’d still support them,” she said of the education workers of Local 99. “It’s really not a good way of treating people so important to education.”

Gabrielle Birkner is Chalkbeat’s features editor and fellowship director.

Philadelphia teachers will get 9% raises over three years in last-minute deal

2021-09-02T18:17:28+00:00

In the first on-time contract settlement in more than 20 years, Philadelphia teachers will get raises amounting to 9% over three years under a new tentative agreement between the district and their union.

Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan said that 93% of the members attending indicated support in a “voice vote” during a virtual meeting Wednesday night. An official vote will be conducted by the American Arbitration Association through Sept. 15.

“I was thrilled to present this contract to my members,” Jordan said during a virtual meeting with reporters. “It’s a strong step forward for the [school district] and the city and a considerable step forward for public education.”.

The Board of Education will vote on whether to accept the tentative agreement at their next meeting on Sept. 23.

In a statement, Superintendent William Hite also described himself as “thrilled” and said he was “excited that months of good-faith negotiations have resulted in a proposed contract that fairly supports the needs of our PFT members” while advancing the district’s goals “for improving student outcomes.”

The agreement was reached in the final hours before the PFT’s one-year contract expired at 11:59 p.m Tuesday, and Jordan said it was touch-and-go to secure a deal.

”Yes, we were on the brink of a strike vote,” he said “Yes, we were serious. But we ultimately achieved an agreement we are incredibly proud of.” The three-year pact was achieved with the help of Mayor Jim Kenney and Deputy Mayor for Labor Rich Lazer, he said. Earlier in the day, Kenney said he was “relieved” at the agreement.

When the state-dominated School Reform Commission ran the district between 2001 and 2017, teachers were prohibited from striking, but they regained that right with the return to local control. During that period, their salaries were frozen for five years. Aside from a weekend walkout in 2000, Philadelphia teachers last struck in 1981.

Teachers will get a 2.75% increase as of Sept. 1 plus a $1,500 bonus, followed by a 3.25% increase plus a $1,000 bonus on Sept. 1, 2022, and then a 3% increase on Sept. 1, 2023, in addition to automatic “step” increases for additional years of experience and advanced degrees.

Under the pact, top pay for teachers with more than 11 years’ experience and a master’s degree plus 60 credits or a doctoral degree can top $100,000 a year for the first time. Starting salaries for new teachers with a bachelor’s degree goes up from about $45,000 annually to $48,000 a year. (School psychologists, as well as experienced teachers with advanced degrees who also served as coaches or department heads, could already earn that much.)

The deal also includes no increases in member costs for their benefit package.

Also important, Jordan said, is a restructuring of the salary scale for paraprofessionals, the union’s lowest paid workers. They include classroom assistants and aides for students with

disabilities. They will get a 10% raise immediately and an “accelerated” pattern of increases during the life of the contract.

“This is an enormous win,” Jordan said, for workers who are “woefully underpaid,” with salaries that can start as low as $15,000 a year. “We talk a lot about equity as a union, a district, a city...this is one important step in bringing some of our lowest paid members, who are a majority Black and brown and city residents, up to a better wage.”

The amount teachers receive to help with classroom supplies will double from $100 to $200 a year, and paraprofessionals will receive $50 a year for this purpose.

Jordan also said there were also changes in some work rules the union had sought. One he said could help stabilize school staff by limiting use of a “special assignment” category for teachers placed in a building outside the regular “site selection” process, which results in some changing schools year after year.

The Board of Education approved a vaccine mandate for employees last month, and the district and union still are negotiating terms for exemptions and consequences for noncompliance, but not as part of the contract. Jordan offered no hint as to how soon an agreement on that would be worked out.

“We did have a separate meeting on that within the last week, and we did talk about our concerns about the policy the school board will ultimately pass,” Jordan said.

Philadelphia district, teachers union reach tentative agreement

2021-09-01T01:27:30+00:00

Two hours before their contract was to expire, the Philadelphia school district and its teachers union have reached reached a tentative agreement.

The union’s president Jerry Jordan informed his members at 10 p.m.: “It’s a deal I’m proud of and one I’m looking forward to bringing you tomorrow.”

Jordan said he will share details with his membership at 6 p.m. Wednesday.

The union’s one-year pact with the district expired at 11:59 p.m. Tuesday.

After tough talk during the day about a possible strike vote by membership Tuesday evening, Jordan postponed a planned press conference from 8:30 p.m. to 9 p.m. and then canceled it altogether after informing members at a virtual meeting that he was hopeful of reaching an agreement.

Earlier in the day, the union, which represents 13,000 district teachers, nurses, counselors, secretaries, and paraprofessionals, said on its Twitter account that “if the district is committed to a contract that values their educators, a fair contract can absolutely be reached today. If they are not...then we will be discussing our next steps with our membership.”

Last year, as the same Aug. 31 deadline loomed, the two sides agreed to a two-week extension to resolve outstanding issues. But they did not reach an agreement until Oct. 21, a one-year pact in which members received a 2% raise, plus step increases based on years of experience and advanced degrees.

That agreement included a safety plan to regulate conditions for a return to in-person learning, which district leaders at the time forecast would begin on Nov. 30.

The safety plan was not part of the main contract but was included in a separate “memorandum of agreement,” or MOA. As it turned out, concerns about adequate building ventilation and other COVID-related safety issues kept students learning from home until March, a full year after school buildings closed due to the pandemic. In-person learning was phased in, starting with the youngest grades and continuing with sixth to ninth grades in April. Tenth, eleventh and twelfth graders didn’t learn in school buildings last academic year. Throughout the spring, only about a quarter of eligible Philadelphia public school students chose to return in person.

Last year, in announcing the one-year extension, Jordan said that in the next round of negotiations, he would seek a four-year contract with significant raises.

This year, the PFT and its other unions are again negotiating COVID safety procedures separately, including the terms of a vaccine mandate, which the Board of Education has voted to impose.

Between 2001 and 2018, when the district operated under the control of the state-dominated School Reform Commission, the union couldn’t strike. Under the Board of Education, it regained its right to strike. (Aside from a weekend walkout in 2000, the last time Philadelphia teachers went on strike was 1981.)

While under state control, the union went five years without a contract, during which members received no raises or step increases. Once among the highest-paid teachers in the region, Philadelphia teacher salaries fell behind surrounding districts. In the current contract, salaries now range from around $45,000 a year for new teachers with a bachelor’s degree to close to $90,000 for those with doctorates and at least 11 years of experience.

The Philadelphia school district has long faced fiscal woes, but its financial picture has improved considerably with the influx of more than $1 billion in federal COVID relief money. However, that money must go toward non-recurring expenses such as personal protective equipment, facilities improvement, trauma support, and academic recovery programs. Those funds cannot be used for ongoing expenses such as salary increases.

The five-year budget plan adopted by the Board of Education in May will not start running shortfalls until 2026 under current spending and revenue projections. After that, the district will need additional funds from the state and city to maintain its current programming.

Last year, Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney floated the idea of a small property tax increase to help fund the schools, but the City Council did not bite. On the state level, the legislature adopted a fair funding formula in 2016 but has not applied it to most of the education aid it distributes to districts. The Board of Education has no taxing power of its own.

A landmark fair funding lawsuit, seeking to force the state to increase its education aid and change how it is disbursed, is scheduled to go to trial in October. Several school districts, civil rights groups, and individual parents originally filed the suit in 2016.

Philadelphia is not a plaintiff, but its Superintendent, William Hite, plans to testify.

Chicago cancels in-person classes Wednesday as teachers announce walkout

2021-01-27T01:32:12+00:00

With hopes dashed for a late-night deal, Chicago teachers will defy district orders to report to campuses Wednesday, forcing the school district to suspend in-person learning for 3,200 prekindergarten and special education students.

The move throws Chicago’s efforts to reopen schools to more students into disarray. If the district responds with disciplinary action against teachers, it would trigger a strike in the nation’s third largest school district, canceling school for 340,000 students.

Chicago Public Schools said the district “had no choice” but to ask all students to return to remote learning beginning Wednesday. Officials said that earlier in the day, they proposed a new round of health and safety measures, including doubling testing frequency for school-based staff to twice a month, offering surveillance testing for in-school students, prioritizing vaccinations for in-person teaching staff in neighborhoods with the highest COVID-19 rates, and suspending in-person learning should the positivity rate of school-based tests reach 3%.

But it wasn’t enough to reach a deal. Major gaps remain on vaccination timelines, the amount of surveillance testing of school staff, and which educators should get accommodations for health and family reasons.

For now, officials said they still planned to reopen schools to a broader group of kindergarten through eighth graders next Monday. But with multiple issues unresolved, hope appeared to dim for the 70,000 students who expect to resume in-person learning.

In a statement, the union called for a mediator to help resolve months of gridlocked negotiations.

Two strikes in two years?

Mayor Lori Lightfoot said she was disappointed that an agreement with the city’s teachers union remained elusive and warned of profound disruption to the district brewing for the second time in two years. The Chicago Teachers Union staged an 11-day strike in 2019 just months after Lightfoot took office.

“This instability and chaos serves no one, and least of all our children,” Lightfoot said. “Least of all our families.”

She cited “three weeks of daily evidence that our schools are safe.” City leaders acknowledged that there have been about 60 cases of students and employees testing positive for the coronavirus since the district started its phased reopening earlier this month. But they said in the overwhelming majority of cases, the district’s safety protocols had prevented in-school transmission of the virus.

The district’s CEO, Janice Jackson, said she believes her district’s safety plan goes beyond any across the country that she has seen.

“We believe our latest proposal to the union can serve as a foundation to a deal,” she said.

Parents appear divided. Some support the union’s push to delay reopening until teachers are vaccinated or more work accommodations are granted. Others are part of an increasingly vocal contingent who are concerned about the impact on students’ mental health and academics and are pushing for the reopening to proceed as planned. Some are caught in the middle, privately lamenting the instability but publicly staying mum at the risk of getting shamed on social media or causing friction with their children’s teachers or principals.

Still, fewer than a fifth of prekindergarten and special education students who need moderate to intensive support returned to in-person learning this month — a development the union has held up as evidence that families remain unconvinced by the district’s safety measures.

Failure at the bargaining table

There are many unknowns, chief among them how Chicago Public Schools will respond to the union’s labor action. The district has said it considers the move an “illegal strike” because it would cancel in-person learning, but taking the issue to labor court to weigh the legality of a strike can be a long process.

Earlier this month, the district “locked out” some teachers who didn’t report to in-person work, but it waited several days to do so, and the number of teachers denied access to their online classrooms fluctuated over the first weeks of reopening. Of the 3,800 teachers who returned to campuses, the district locked out just under 3%, or about 100 teachers.

Both sides laid out the ongoing sticking points in negotiations Tuesday. Whether educators should receive both vaccine doses before returning remained one of the biggest issues in dispute.

Asked why the city does not simply move teachers to the front of the vaccination line, however, Lightfoot said that would be unfair to frontline workers, including those who work in public transit and the city’s libraries, who have been reporting to work.

“How do we say to those folks, ‘You have to go to the back of the line?’” she said.

The district said it had stepped up its offer earlier in the day. Officials said they expanded accommodations for teachers who requested them for health reasons and were offering schools additional options to address gaps in the number of teachers reporting to in-person work. But they did not provide numbers. Of the 7,000 teachers expected to return in the first reopening wave, about 46% received accommodations.

For the first time, the district also included a plan for rapid tests for students and spelled out specific metrics that would determine when individual schools would revert back to remote learning.

Lightfoot also said she is “all for” mediation. She cautioned that the strife would hurt the district’s reputation in the long run — and would undermine efforts to improve the city.

“We won’t get there, ever, with this happening. I hear you, parents. I see your comments on social media. I understand the frustration. We are doing everything we can to make sure we get this deal done,” she said.

The union, meanwhile, said it would continue pushing for safety metrics that it felt best protected teachers returning to in-person work, including a request for all staff to be vaccinated before returning to classrooms, weekly testing, and more telework accommodations for teachers with high-risk family members.

“We are willing to keep teaching, but CPS has said they will lock us out,” said union president Jesse Sharkey in a statement, noting that a broader group of educators would become eligible for vaccinations at the end of February. “We are willing to keep negotiating, but CPS has refused to back down from insisting that 80% of educators and support staff … in every elementary school be back in class on Feb. 1 to serve less than 20% of the students.”

Negotiations with the district, union leaders said, were akin to a dysfunctional marriage, with “a spouse agreeing to marriage counseling only if the other party first concedes the spouse has the right to do whatever they want in the relationship.”

Philadelphia teachers, district reach contract deal, avert strike

2020-10-22T02:03:00+00:00

Philadelphia’s teachers and the school district have reached a tentative contract agreement that includes a 2% raise and what union president Jerry Jordan calls “one of the most stringent safety plans in the nation” to regulate in-person schooling during the coronavirus pandemic.

He noted the health and safety plan is not part of the tentative agreement, yet something his team negotiated as a separate memorandum of understanding, or MOU.

The Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, or PFT, has 13,000 members. Jordan announced that those attending a Zoom meeting Wednesday evening had indicated strong approval for the one-year pact.

The 2% raise is retroactive to August 16. In addition, members will receive their “step” increases, due based on additional experience and advanced degrees, starting on Jan. 4, 2021. “This is a significant win for us,” Jordan said in a press call with reporters, noting that 89% of the members present for Wednesday’s meeting voted in favor of the agreement. Union officials said about half the members were on the call.

He said the pact would cost the district an additional $31 million. “This is not an expensive contract for them,” Jordan said. The overall district budget is more than $3 billion.

The safety plan is in the form of a detailed memo of understanding outlining specific conditions that must be met when teachers and staff return to school buildings, which at this point is slated to happen next month, despite a surge of COVID-19 cases in Philadelphia.

Those conditions cover issues including rules for social distancing, safe building capacity, and the availability of hand sanitizer and masks.

“To be clear, buildings cannot and will not open if it is not safe to do so, period,” Jordan said.

Philadelphia Superintendent William Hite will present to the board of education Thursday his plan for reopening school buildings to about 30,000 pre-kindergarten through second grade students on Nov. 30. Teachers and other staff are expected to return on Nov. 9. The board will not vote on the reopening plan at the meeting.

The MOU contains a dispute resolution system, Jordan said, in which any problems will be solved within days and rely on the mediation of a “renowned” physician who specializes in public health. “This is going to be a very rapid process,” he said. “Our goal is not to have unresolved disputes because this virus is nothing to play with.”

He said the full text of the MOU would be released publicly before Nov. 9.

Of the proposed timetable for reopening schools for in-person learning, Jordan said he is taking school officials at their word that it can be met.

“I can only tell you what the district has said,” he told reporters. At the same time, he added, “what we have seen so far is that we are not ready.”

A point of contention for parents and teachers is whether schools, most of which are decades old, can be properly ventilated to standards necessary to stem the spread of the virus. Hite has said that all buildings are being tested for air quality, but the district has yet to release the inspection reports themselves. Its “readiness reopening dashboard” says that 21% of buildings “are fully certified for ventilation.”

Hite and Chief Financial Officer Uri Monson have said that the district has spent some $70 million on COVID-19-related costs, including signs for social distancing, masks, and sanitizer.

When the union contract expired on Aug. 31, Jordan asked his members for a two-week extension of negotiations. At the time, Hite said he was confident the two sides could reach an accord in that time period. Jordan also expressed optimism — although he accused the district of trying to “shake down” teachers by demanding they sign off on a school reopening plan before discussing possible wage increases.

Still, the talks dragged on for two months. Jordan said that elected officials, including Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney, were instrumental in helping the two sides reach an agreement.

The district “thought they would break us, but it didn’t work,” Jordan said.

Asked for a response to Jordan’s announcement of a pact, district spokeswoman Monica Lewis said via email Wednesday that “at this time, there will be no comment on the matter.”

Jordan said the union sought a one-year extension because of the unusual conditions brought on by the pandemic. He said that the union will be seeking a four-year contract after this agreement expires. “Well be back at the table probably in January,” he said.

The PFT had not gone on strike since a weekend walkout in 2000. Before that, the last strike was in 1981.

During the 17 years that the district operated under the state-dominated School Reform Commission between 2001 and 2018, the PFT was prohibited from striking. During that time, the union went five years without a contract, during which members received no raises or step increases. Once among the highest-paid teachers in the region, city teachers fell behind surrounding districts. Salaries now range from $45,716 to $91,852.

The PFT’s membership includes secretaries, counselors, and paraprofessionals. There are approximately 8,000 teachers and 125,000 students in the district.

The American Arbitration Association will now send out a mailing to all PFT members for formal approval. That process will conclude on or about Oct. 29, Jordan said.

The district and the union disagreed over whether the district could afford to give teachers a raise. Hite and CFO Monson said that the pandemic had battered its usual state and local revenue sources, and forecast a yearly shortfall of $800 million by 2025. The union noted that the district had received more than $100 million in federal coronavirus aid.

Jordan said that while some parents might feel that teachers don’t deserve raises because they have not been in school buildings, the virtual environment has been a backbreaker for them.

“Our teachers and other employees are working harder this year than they’ve ever worked,” he said. “It requires a different set of skills” that they weren’t trained for.

He added: “I understand the frustration of parents” who must upend their lives because the children are home. “This is very frustrating for everyone.”

Philadelphia teachers mulling ‘work to rule’ action as contract talks stall

2020-10-07T11:44:47+00:00

Philadelphia teachers are weighing a job action as contract negotiations have yet to yield an agreement.

Teachers in the school district have been working without a contract since Aug. 31 and are seeking a one-year extension with what Philadelphia Federation of Teachers President Jerry Jordan has called a “modest increase” in compensation.

On Monday, Jordan emailed his 13,000 members, which also include secretaries, counselors, nurses and paraprofessionals, and raised the possibility of a “work to rule” action in which they would do the minimum required within school hours under their now-expired contract. He sought members’ input on such a move.

How “work to rule” would play out while educators and students are teaching and learning remotely is not known.

Last month, Jordan said that the district was trying to “shake down” the teachers by insisting they sign off on a plan to reopen school buildings before discussing a possible pay increase. At the same time, however, he asked his members for a two-week window to continue negotiations and reiterated that he considered a strike or other job action to be a last resort.

Without divulging details, both Jordan and Superintendent William Hite said at the time that they were hopeful about reaching an accord, although they disagreed about whether the district could afford to raise teacher salaries.

Now, following more than a month without an agreement, the rhetoric is ramping up. The district is planning to reopen school buildings under a hybrid learning plan in November, after going fully remote in March and starting the year exclusively online.

“Compensation is the outstanding issue,” said the union’s legislative affairs director Hillary Linardopolous in an email to Chalkbeat.

Before COVID-19, the perpetually cash-strapped district was planning to end fiscal 2020 and 2021 with money in its coffers. But due to a plunge in state and local tax revenue as a result of the pandemic, it is now forecasting a shortfall exceeding $800 million by 2025 to maintain its current level of service and pay additional COVID-19-related costs.

“We know the district has the funds to secure steps, lanes, and across-the-board wage increases for a one-year extension,” Linardopolous said. Steps and lanes are the increases teachers get for accumulating additional years of experience and advanced degrees.

She noted that other city unions have negotiated raises this year. The police union received a 2.5% increase, while AFSCME District Council 47, representing white collar workers, and District Council 33, representing blue collar city workers, each got 2%.

The Board of Education, which governs the district, has no taxing power and relies on the state and city for almost all its revenue. In February, Mayor Jim Kenney had sought a small increase in the property tax rate to help the schools, but the city council never took up the proposal.

When the district was under state control, teachers were forbidden from striking and they went without a contract for more than five years. During that period, salaries were essentially frozen, and many teachers never made up the difference they would have received for additional experience and education. Partly as a result, teachers salaries in Philadelphia, once among the highest in the region, have fallen behind surrounding districts.

This is the first contract being negotiated since the district returned to local control in 2018, ending 17 years under the state-dominated School Reform Commission.

NYC teachers union continues negotiations, but strike vote could come Tuesday

2020-09-01T00:32:52+00:00

The city’s teachers union will spend one more day negotiating with city officials in the hopes of beefing up safety measures before school buildings reopen. But if those talks fall short, the union’s leadership plans to call a strike authorization vote Tuesday afternoon.

Threatening a strike vote is meant to ratchet up pressure on Mayor Bill de Blasio to come up with more rigorous safety measures or delay in-person learning. Classes are scheduled to begin in just 10 days, and the union’s leadership has said that is not enough time to ensure buildings will be safe. Still, if union members authorize the leadership to call a strike, that doesn’t mean one will materialize.

Union officials say that coronavirus testing remains a key sticking point. Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, said that the city should require testing for all staff and students before they attend classes in person. The mayor insists that voluntary testing, provided at no cost at about 200 sites across the city, is enough to ensure infections are properly identified and handled.

“We can’t afford to send students and staff back into any buildings until we have done everything possible — including a rigorous virus testing program — to see that they are safe,” Mulgrew said in a statement Monday evening.

On Monday morning, de Blasio told reporters the city had considered and rejected that idea. “It’s something that we’ve looked at, but believe for a variety of reasons, it is not the best way to get to where we need to go,” the mayor said. “We’re having ongoing conversations with the unions about the best way to do it.”

The union is also worried about personal protective equipment, and problems with building ventilation, according to UFT spokesperson Dick Riley, who did not say what the UFT’s specific demands on those issues are. The union’s roughly 100-member executive board unanimously approved a resolution Monday night that gives the union’s leadership another day to negotiate, officials said.

The executive board’s resolution paves the way for the union’s 3,200-member delegate assembly, which includes representatives from every school, to vote Tuesday afternoon on authorizing a strike.

If the delegate assembly approves, the final decision to call a strike would typically be left to the union’s leadership, Riley said, suggesting the entire union’s membership — roughly 80,000 teachers and thousands of other staff members, including teachers aides, social workers, nurses, and speech therapists — would not vote directly on the issue. It’s not clear exactly what criteria the union’s leadership would use to decide to permit a strike.

Even if union leaders authorize a strike, an actual work stoppage may not happen quickly: Top UFT officials have said they would likely go to court to halt the city’s reopening plans before going on strike.

If the union decided to strike, it would be the first time since 1975 and would also likely be illegal under the state’s Taylor Law, which forces penalties on public sector union employees who participate in work stoppages. The union could lose its ability to automatically collect dues, teachers could miss out on paychecks, and union leadership could even face jail time.

There could also be significant political repercussions if the union is seen as obstructing in-person learning for over 1 million students, nearly 73% of whom come from low-income families and whose educational experience and access to social services may take a significant hit if buildings don’t reopen.

“I don’t think the people of this city ever feel good about public servants not being there when people need them,” de Blasio told reporters Aug. 25.

The mere threat of a work stoppage has been a successful tactic in other cities, including Chicago, where the union appears to have played a role in the district’s fully virtual start.

Calls to delay in-person learning in New York City have grown louder in recent weeks. Even the city’s principals union, which is generally reluctant to criticize the mayor publicly, has said buildings are not yet safe to reopen on time.

“Our conversations with UFT are ongoing and we remain committed to one thing above all: The safety and health of our students, teachers, and school staff,” Avery Cohen, a mayoral spokesperson, wrote in a statement. “Together, we’ll continue to work towards the best possible plan to get our young people back to the classrooms where they learn best.”

NYC teachers union prepares for strike authorization votes this week

2020-08-29T22:04:43+00:00

New York City’s teachers union is rapidly laying the groundwork for a strike to halt the reopening of school buildings, following months of threats that educators would take action over coronavirus safety concerns.

The United Federation of Teachers scheduled a meeting of school-based delegates for Tuesday after suggesting they could vote this week to approve what would be a historic work action, according to emails union representatives sent to members this weekend.

Before Tuesday’s possible vote from the union’s delegate assembly — which includes roughly 3,200 representatives from every public school — the UFT’s executive board is expected to vote Monday to authorize a strike, according to an email sent to Brooklyn chapter leaders Friday night.

“Things are getting real. Based on what is going on, we need to have an emergency Chapter Leader meeting in preparation for a strike,” wrote Brooklyn UFT official Jason Golberg, in the Friday evening email obtained by Chalkbeat.

Accompanying the email is a checklist for school-based union representatives, also known as chapter leaders, to create a strike plan for their own campus. To-do items include identifying strike captains who will assign picket locations in front of building entrances and distribute signs, and creating subcommittees to coordinate social media and communication with members.

The email asks for chapter leaders to submit a strike plan by Monday afternoon.

New York City teachers have not gone on strike for nearly half a century and authorizing one does not mean it will actually happen. Just calling for one, however, ratchets up pressure on Mayor Bill de Blasio to delay the scheduled return to in-person instruction on Sept. 10, something teachers and principals have been loudly demanding. Walking off the job carries big risks, both political and economic, as it would be a violation of state law and could force teachers to forfeit wages and lead to steep penalties for union leaders.

The coronavirus pandemic forced school buildings to close in March, and de Blasio has been forging ahead to reopen with a hybrid schedule. The plan calls for most students to attend in person one to three days a week and to learn from home the rest of the time. But teachers are worried the city has not done enough to ensure buildings will be safe to reopen, and the union has demanded that every school meet a litany of safety requirements and that all teachers and students should be tested for the virus before returning to in-person instruction.

Caren Cleckley, one of the Brooklyn chapter leaders who received Goldberg’s email, said she began reaching out to teachers at her school, Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment, as soon as she got the notice.

“I don’t think anybody wants to strike but there are real concerns around safety,” Cleckley, a biology and chemistry teacher, said, emphasizing the union’s demand that all students and staff get tested before showing up for in-person classes. “We think the mayor is rushing.”

Marilyn Ramirez, the chapter leader at High School for Media and Communications in Washington Heights, said she will gauge how her members feel on Monday. Ramirez, a bilingual special education teacher, said she is still deciding how to vote. She said she will support a strike if that’s what the majority wants, but even preparing for one is “distracting from the work that needs to be done,” such as ensuring ventilation systems are in good shape, and she wishes the summer was spent improving remote learning.

“This is a critical week for all of us, and I want to make a decision that is best for the entire school community,” Ramirez said.

The investigative news site The Intercept first reported that the union’s top brass are expected to deliberate Monday on a strike action. Meanwhile, multiple chapter leaders in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Queens said they had received no formal communication about a strike vote.

“We are preparing for any eventuality to make sure schools reopen safely for students, staff and the entire school community,” union spokesman Dick Riley wrote in an email. The resolutions that will be voted on Monday and Tuesday have not yet been finalized, Riley said, though he noted the procedure for striking typically involves authorizing the union’s leadership to make the final call.

While preparations appear to be moving quickly, the city could still be some time away from an actual strike — if one happens at all. Union President Michael Mulgrew has repeatedly said the UFT would head to court to stop a return to buildings, before calling a walkout.

He has not said what the basis of such a suit would be, but this week a judge in Florida sided with the state teachers union there, which sued to prevent educators from reporting to school buildings. The decision has been appealed and is expected to be tied up in the legal system for months.

Still, the mere threat of a work stoppage in other cities, including in Chicago, appears to have forced officials to scrap their plans for in-person instruction.

A teachers strike here would be historic — there hasn’t been one in New York City since 1975. It would also likely be illegal under the state’s Taylor Law, which forces penalties on public sector union employees who participate in work stoppages. The union could lose its ability to automatically collect dues, teachers could miss out on paychecks, and union leadership could even face jail time under the law.

All of that makes it unclear how an authorization vote would unfold in a union with almost 80,000 teachers, and thousands of other staff members including teachers aides, social workers, nurses, speech therapists, and others.

Will Ehrenfeld, the chapter leader at Pathways in Technology Early College High School in Brooklyn, said his understanding is that the votes next week would give the union’s leadership the ability to call a strike.

But Ehrenfeld, who teaches history, said union leaders have not been clear about what the votes next week would authorize and there are some serious concerns among teachers at his school that a strike in violation of state law could mean lost wages or healthcare coverage. And while he does not believe schools are safe enough to reopen, he’s also unclear on what the union’s exact demands would be in the event of a strike.

“The communication from the union has not been particularly clear and that’s a concern,” he said. “I’m definitely still taking feedback from the membership of my school. I’m leaning toward [voting] yes, but I’m still wrestling with it.”

In many ways, the standoff between de Blasio and the union has echoes of March, when the coronavirus crisis first exploded in New York City. As the mayor fought calls to shutter campuses, Mulgrew also threatened legal action immediately before classrooms shut down this spring, and teachers were organizing their own sickout. Ultimately, neither happened because, facing escalating pressure, the mayor abruptly closed schools.

Bill Neidhardt, a de Blasio spokesperson, said: “We continue to have discussions with UFT. They have the right to call meetings as they see fit and we respect that.”

De Blasio has been similarly insistent on reopening this fall for in-person instruction, arguing that keeping schools closed will be disastrous for learning and for low-income parents who rely on schools for social services and so they can work.

But a fiscal crisis looms that only adds to the monumental task of restarting a school system with 1.1 million children. The education department’s budget has already been slashed by more than $700 million. On top of that, the state has begun to temporarily withhold 20% of payments to school districts, cuts which Gov. Andrew Cuomo has warned could become permanent.

At a marathon public meeting earlier this month that stretched past 3 a.m., schools Chancellor Richard Carranza admitted that, without an injection of cash, students would have to return to remote-only learning. Such a cut would result in 9,000 teacher layoffs, he said.

“This is not smoke and mirrors; this is, if we get a 20% cut, we will not be able to open up our schools for in-person learning,” he said.

Facing a $9 billion deficit, de Blasio is hoping against all indications to win borrowing authority to keep the city running, or for federal relief. Without that, the city will begin sending notices Monday of layoffs to an estimated 22,000 employees across all city agencies because workers are entitled to a 30-day warning. Citing ongoing labor negotiations, city officials have refused to say how many education department jobs could be impacted — a matter that is separate from the projected teacher layoffs from permanent state funding cuts.

Hundreds of principals and their union have called for delay to in-person learning, arguing there is just not enough time to get ready before school is set to begin.

Reema Amin contributed to this report.

Educators rally on national day of action as school reopening debate continues

2020-08-03T23:13:04+00:00

Educators in several cities rallied on Monday during a national day of action to call attention to their concerns about reopening schools as coronavirus cases continue to rise in many parts of the country.

Though educators have held protests in recent weeks, Monday’s event marked the first unified show of force as teachers and their unions continue to play an increasingly vocal role in the debate over when and how schools should reopen.

“I do not want to be the sacrificial lamb, because you’re forcing us to go back into an environment that is dangerous,” said Andrea Parker, an elementary school teacher in Chicago, where many teachers rode in a car caravan from the teachers union’s headquarters to the city’s downtown.

Teachers in some of the nation’s largest school districts participated in the demonstration, including Chicago and New York City, as well as Boston, Denver, Milwaukee, and others.

All of this is happening amid a larger national conversation about what students will need in order to learn this fall, what teachers and other staff will need to feel protected, and what schools can reasonably provide — both in places where soaring coronavirus caseloads have made it impossible to reopen schools, and in places like New York and Chicago, which are not considered virus “hot spots” and are considering some in-person learning.

The demonstrations come shortly after the nation’s second-largest teachers union, the American Federation of Teachers, said it would support protests, lawsuits, and strikes over educator safety. Already, Florida’s teachers union has sued the state’s governor and education commissioner over an order to reopen schools five days a week for in-person instruction.

Some of the common demands for the day of national action, according to a website set up to promote the event, included keeping schools closed “until the scientific data supports” reopening them, providing schools with resources like protective equipment and cleaning supplies, and providing more equitable access to online learning — a necessity as many school districts have decided they will begin the school year virtually.

Teachers also included demands unique to their cities and states.

Milwaukee teachers, for example, tacked demands to the door of the state’s education agency that included a statewide order to keep school buildings closed and an end to standardized testing. Last year, the U.S. Department of Education allowed every state to skip their annual tests, but officials have indicated they’re not likely to do that again this year.

Caravan is @WisconsinDPI to deliver demands to end standardized testing & implement statewide health dept action keeping schools closed. Union presidents are taping letter w/ demands addressed to Supt. of Public Instruction Carolyn Stanford Taylor on door of DPI. #EdEquityOrElse pic.twitter.com/PBZOBxTRzy
— MTEA (@MTEAunion) August 3, 2020

In Chicago, teachers drew attention to their demand to begin the school year remotely, as the school district continues to plan some in-person instruction.

Though contact with a contaminated surface doesn’t appear to be the main way that the coronavirus spreads, schools will still be expected to take on additional cleaning measures — especially if a student or staff member shows up to school sick and a classroom needs to be disinfected.

This has left many educators worried about school cleanliness, especially in cities like Chicago where that’s been a longstanding concern. At the day of action, some teachers said they feared that the additional custodians the Chicago school district has pledged to hire won’t be enough, and that not every school has good ventilation — something many schools across the country are trying to change in an attempt to stop the virus from lingering in the air.

“Cleanliness is not in every single school,” said Maximilian Cole, a special education teacher at Chicago’s Manley Career Academy High School. “That is a problem.”

Many school districts are pushing Congress for more federal dollars to help them cover new coronavirus-related costs. The latest Republican-backed coronavirus relief package contains $70 billion for K-12 schools, but a majority of that money would be tied to physically reopening schools.

In Denver, where students will start the school year remotely, teachers gathered and taped red balloons to their cars — though they blew them up inside their vehicles to avoid breathing too hard on anyone.

They announced an effort to meet virtually with 500 families by the end of the week to hear their concerns about the fast-approaching school year. Their goal is to bring those concerns to district, city, and state officials and advocate for creative solutions.

“Educators appreciate that the district moved back our start date for in-person learning,” said Tiffany Choi, a high school French teacher who heads Denver’s teachers union. “We look forward to working with the district to identify evidence-based metrics for a safe return to school, and to discussions of safe working conditions.”

Tiffany Choi, president of Denver teachers union, addresses crowd from the back of a truck: “Our students deserve safe, healthy and equitable schools.” pic.twitter.com/7r5RBAYiVC
— Melanie Asmar (@MelanieAsmar) August 3, 2020

Seventy miles away in Colorado Springs, educators from a number of school districts held a public will-signing event to highlight their concerns about returning to school. Most districts in the surrounding county are planning to hold classes in person.

Meanwhile, the state teachers union, which hosted the Denver teachers in its parking lot for Monday’s demonstration, has been calling for a remote start to school and for the state to set a threshold for when it’s safe to hold classes.

“The state needs to be providing more clarity, so we can have some consistency,” said Amie Baca-Oehlert, the head of the Colorado Education Association. “There is no place that educators would rather be than back in our classrooms, but we want to do that when it’s safe.”

Influential national teachers union backs strikes as tool in school reopening fight

2020-07-28T16:55:14+00:00

The nation’s second-largest teachers union says it will support strikes over teacher safety as heated discussions continue about whether and how to reopen schools for in-person instruction this fall.

It’s a symbolic move, and many teachers unions lack the legal ability to strike in a traditional way. But it’s the clearest signal yet that the unions will be a major force in school reopening decisions and are readying to block proposals they feel don’t go far enough to protect educators — which could further politicize the national debate over school reopening.

“If the authorities don’t get it right, and they don’t protect the safety and health of those we represent and those we serve, nothing is off the table — not advocacy or protests, negotiations, grievances or lawsuits, or, if necessary as a last resort, safety strikes,” said Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, at the union’s biennial convention on Tuesday.

A resolution, passed by the AFT’s executive council, says the union would back local or state-led teachers strikes over educator health and safety during the pandemic “on a case-by-case basis” and “as a last resort.” It’s an extension of rhetoric Weingarten has used for months, but marks the first time the union has explicitly endorsed teachers strikes as a tactic.

Already, the AFT and the National Education Association, the largest national teachers union, have supported a lawsuit against Florida’s governor and education commissioner, who have ordered schools to offer five days a week of in-person instruction to families who want it. Several large districts in Florida, where COVID-19 cases have continued to rise, have announced their intention to start the year fully remotely anyway.

Teachers have been pushing back against reopening plans in several other parts of the country, arguing that returning to school buildings will be unsafe for teachers and students.

In New York City, a caucus of the teachers union that often fights for social justice issues has asked teachers to protest and is floating a sickout. In Detroit, teachers took part in a demonstration against in-person summer school that blocked buses earlier this month. In Memphis, educators gathered last week for a socially-distanced protest in front of the district’s central office.

Several of the nation’s most vocal teachers unions, including those in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, and Milwaukee are planning to join a national “day of resistance” on Aug. 3. They’re calling on schools not to reopen for in-person instruction “until the scientific data supports it,” and for health and safety measures to be in place when schools do reopen, including smaller class sizes.

In recent days, the Chicago Teachers Union, which has said it wouldn’t rule out a strike over educator safety, launched a public social media campaign calling on the Chicago school district to answer educators’ questions about its plans to offer some in-person instruction this fall.

Educators like Ariam Abraham from across Chicago have questions for @ChiPubSchools and @chicagosmayor
about reopening school buildings this fall. What are YOUR questions? #MakeItMakeSense #DemandSafeSchools #CTUSafeReturn #AskDrArwady pic.twitter.com/Hsnp5Z1o47
— ChicagoTeachersUnion (@CTULocal1) July 24, 2020

But that activism has been tempered by the reality that many schools don’t plan to re-open for in-person learning quickly, and other districts haven’t yet revealed the details of their plans.

Polls show that parents — particularly Black and Latino parents — are also wary of reopening schools. But at the same time, sustained teacher opposition could squelch efforts to offer in-person instruction even in places where the virus caseloads are lower, which could leave some vulnerable students and families without the in-classroom learning they want.

Exactly how risky returning to school buildings will be is also a complicated question. Public health experts are largely in agreement that schools should not reopen their doors in places where the coronavirus is spreading rapidly through a community. Federal officials acknowledged last week that schools may need to stay closed in “hot spots,” which the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention defined as places with testing positivity rates over 5% — a threshold currently exceeded by many states, particularly in the South and West.

In places where the virus is under control, pediatricians and health officials say it’s important for students to return to classrooms, with plans designed to keep staffers safe, since adults are at higher risk of getting severely ill from COVID-19. School districts are now working out exactly what kinds of health and safety protections they will be able to provide, how they will accommodate older teachers and teachers with health concerns, and how to keep students at a safe distance from one another.

Answers are likely to depend on how much space districts have to spread out students and staff and how much money Congress sends to school districts to help pay for new coronavirus-related costs — and if any of it will be conditioned on offering in-person instruction, which could create an incentive to reopen more quickly.

Teachers unions have been at the table in many districts considering those issues. The question now is whether educators will find what districts come up with to be acceptable — and if not, whether they will be willing to strike or take other labor action.

Kisha Borden, the head of San Diego’s teachers union, has said she thinks this moment has the potential to carry on the momentum of the Red for Ed movement, in which teachers led walkouts and protests for higher pay and more school funding.

“You would see teachers standing up, putting their foot down and saying, ‘No, I’m not going to put my life at risk,’” she said earlier this month.

Sarah Darville contributed reporting.

Teacher anxiety is on the rise. Will their unions emerge as a force in the school reopening debate?

2020-07-20T21:46:16+00:00

As virus counts rise and teacher anxiety spikes, one big question is whether teachers unions will emerge as a powerful force in the school reopening debate — and whether a new wave of teacher activism could be on the horizon.

So far, the evidence is mixed. There have been a handful of protests over educator safety in recent weeks, from Loudoun County, Virginia to Austin, Texas. In Chicago, the union is getting louder and planning a “car caravan” protest over teacher safety this week. It was announced shortly after the union called for a return to remote schooling, but the school district said it planned to put most students in schools two days a week.

But many other teachers unions are keeping a lower profile as they hash out the details of school reopening plans, or as rising caseloads make reopening a public health impossibility.

That’s what happened last week as teachers unions in several large school districts, including Los Angeles, Houston, and Broward County, Florida, called for a return to remote instruction a few days before school officials made the call to do so — removing teacher health and safety concerns as a potential flashpoint for the time being.

But as school reopening plans get nailed down, and if teachers are asked to go back into school buildings when they don’t feel safe, more conflict could be on the way. Kisha Borden, the head of the San Diego teachers union, sees the potential for this moment to carry on the message of the Red for Ed movement.

“You would see teachers standing up, putting their foot down and saying, ‘No, I’m not going to put my life at risk,’” said Borden, whose union raised concerns about the San Diego school district’s initial reopening plans before officials announced a virtual start.

Teacher concern is coming from several places. Most important are questions of health and safety: While children appear to be at lower risk of getting seriously ill from COVID-19, there is new evidence that children of all ages can spread the virus, especially older children, which could mean school staff in close quarters are at risk of infection and passing the virus to others.

School reopening plans, and the particular ways schools are pledging to keep students and staff safe, are still up in the air in much of the country. The school reopening debate has also become increasingly politicized, as President Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — a particularly unpopular figure among educators — continue to put pressure on schools to fully reopen for in-person instruction.

All of that butts up against a real concern many teachers and parents have that remote schooling is often inequitable and a poor substitute for in-person instruction, especially for younger children and students with disabilities.

For now, teachers unions are walking a fine line.

Earlier this spring, both of the national teachers unions raised the possibility of strikes over teacher safety. Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, notably told Politico that if schools reopened without proper safety measures, “you scream bloody murder.”

Both the AFT and the National Education Association have struck a more moderate tone lately, as they’ve focused on lobbying Congress to give schools more money to help them cope with new costs and weather upcoming budget cuts.

On Monday, when asked what role teacher activism or labor action should play in the school reopening debate, Weingarten said the focus should be on addressing the surge of cases and getting schools the resources they need.

“If those things don’t come together, you can’t rule anything out when it comes to the safety and well-being of our kids and of the educators that teach them,” she said during a call announcing a lawsuit against Florida’s governor and education commissioner. (Florida has ordered school districts to offer five days of in-person instruction to parents who want it.)

Bradley Marianno, an assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has been tracking how teachers unions and school districts are adjusting their labor agreements during the pandemic. He thinks it’s possible that teachers will strike or take other labor action, but said they may not find the same kind of public support for their activism as they have in recent years.

“After distance learning in the spring, a schooling disruption as a result of a teacher labor action would likely play different,” Marianno said. “How that would look in a case where parents are struggling with what distance learning looks like, in a case where school budgets are already strained by economic shutdowns — it’s risky.”

This is something usually vocal unions, like the Chicago Teachers Union, appear to be keeping in mind. Last week, the Chicago union took an informal telephone poll of members to gauge how they felt about launching a public campaign over teacher safety. The union’s president, Jesse Sharkey, said while a teachers strike is something the union would consider, it would try other measures first, like reaching out to parents and the press, and holding demonstrations, as it did before striking for 11 days this fall.

The city’s parents “are dealing with job loss, evictions, a lot of issues,” Sharkey told union members in a call last week. “Going straight to a line of ‘We have our demands and we’ll strike if we don’t get them’ is probably going to be hard for people to hear.”

In New York City, teachers union officials are threading the same needle. The head of the union, Michael Mulgrew, has generally expressed support for the school district’s reopening plan, which looks similar to Chicago’s, though he told WNYC recently that the union would draw the line if schools didn’t end up with appropriate safety measures.

These questions are especially relevant in Chicago and New York, which were the only two of the 10 largest school districts last week where average daily infection rates were 5% or lower, a public health threshold that many school districts are considering when making their reopening plans, the New York Times reported.

Neither city has told educators much about what specifically lies ahead: who will teach what and where, what kinds of protective equipment they will be provided, and what class sizes might look like.

In other school districts, as teachers have seen the details of plans, concerns have followed.

In Loudoun County, Virginia, for example, incoming teachers union president Sandy Sullivan said some teachers were willing to sign up for the hybrid model but changed their minds when they learned more about how often the district planned to clean buses and student desks. A district survey released Friday showed that about 46% of teachers wanted a fully remote start to the school year, as did the parents of just over half of students.

In Nevada, Marie Neisess, the incoming president of the Clark County Education Association, the largest teachers union representing Las Vegas-area teachers, said specialists like music and art teachers didn’t think it was fair that they would be expected to rotate through multiple classrooms to cover other teachers’ lunch periods, exposing them to more students and more risk.

Marianno, of the University of Nevada, says tensions may flare this fall as teachers unions and school districts try to come to an agreement about what their work days will look like at a time of great budget uncertainty.

An earlier wave of coronavirus relief money has given school districts money to help cover costs like protective equipment for teachers. And while it seems likely there will be more federal money coming to help schools cope with the coronavirus, it’s unclear how much, and whether it will offset state-level cuts to education now or in the future.

“It’s like we’re in a hold pattern,” said Neisess. “We have a plan ready to go, but it requires funding.”

Some of the go-to tactics of organized labor, though, would be harder to use in a pandemic. Rallies and sit-ins, though not impossible to hold, would need to be socially distanced. Holding a “sickout” is hard when teachers are worried they may need those days if they or their family members contract the virus. Asking teachers to work the exact number of hours in their contract is also difficult to pull off when teacher schedules have been upended.

Parent sentiment could also have a dramatic impact on the potential for labor action.

Right now, several national polls show that many parents, especially Black and Hispanic parents, are concerned about sending their children back into school buildings. But if sentiment swings the other way, it could be harder for teachers unions to continue to advocate for all-remote instruction, which rolled out with massive inequities in the spring, often shortchanging low-income students of color.

Some teachers unions are working hard not to alienate the low-income and working-class parents that have often been their allies in labor fights.

Last week, the Chicago union’s vice president, Stacy Davis Gates, said “if this becomes a fight to withhold labor,” that fight would have to include demands to improve conditions in local communities, a strategy known as “common good bargaining.” Already, the Chicago and Los Angeles teachers unions have included eviction protections and financial support for undocumented families in their lists of what it would take to reopen schools.

“This is not just about how many face coverings we can have,” Davis Gates said.

Are Chicago teachers among the country’s highest-paid? A look at salaries and the contract conflict

2019-10-04T18:12:00+00:00

Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot has said that her latest offer to the city’s teachers will make them among the highest-paid educators in the country.

The union has disregarded her offer, insisting the city lower class sizes, add support staff and put those guarantees in writing.

But salary and benefits remain critical, because they are among the few issues that a 1995 law permits the Chicago Teachers Union to strike over.

Under the current Chicago union contract, beginning teachers make a base salary of just over $56,000 a year, while the most senior teachers with extra credentials make $108,242 a year.

Chicago district officials have characterized their current salary offer to teachers — a 16% cost-of-living raise over a five-year contract, with 3% in each of the first three years and 3.5% annually in the next two years — as generous and even “historic.”

The union wants more faster: a 5% annual raise in a three-year contract.

The district is offering to cover health insurance premiums, which are estimated to increase 6% annually, and to keep costs flat for teachers for the first three years.

“This is a significant benefit for CPS teachers and staff,” Lightfoot and schools chief Janice Jackson wrote on a blog post earlier this week. “Under this offer, teachers will continue to enjoy these benefits for five years at about the same rate they are paying now.”

When factoring in steps and lanes — the automatic hikes that teachers get for longevity and educational credits — how will the salary of Chicago teachers match their counterparts in other major urban areas?

In 2017-18, the last school year for which comparable data is available, Chicago ranked toward the top in pay for more experienced teachers — a master’s degree holder with 10 years of experience, for example — and 22nd out of the 124 largest districts for a first-year teacher. The ranking was compiled by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonpartisan policy and research center.
Kency Nittler, the organization’s teacher policy director, said, “Chicago teachers in comparison to other teachers in large districts are being paid relatively well.”

She said that the district’s offer to teachers is solid, and not outside the bounds of what districts regularly offer in negotiations.

Nittler added that, in a difficult work environment, raises may not be enough to retain teachers. That echoes the argument the Chicago Teachers Union has been making in calling for smaller class sizes and more support staff, such as nurses, social workers, and special education case managers.

“Those (calls) are coming from a place of ‘your salary alone is not enough,’” she said.

On pay, the latest public statements indicate the union and City Hall still differ. The union wants to increase the number of steps — to 25 — at which teachers will earn automatic raises for longevity.

But the two sides are apparently nearing agreement on higher minimum salaries for teacher aides and on instituting a schedule of automatic raises — like the “steps and lanes” hikes that teachers get for experience and educational credits.

The district also is offering to raise salaries on average by more than 8% for paraprofessionals and school-related personnel, with an immediate 14% pay hike for hard-to-staff nurse positions.

So what are the signs of a “good” deal? Experts are divided — often by their politics — on the answer.

Daniel DiSalvo, of the conservative Manhattan Institute think tank, said any pay raise or reduction in class size is a win for teachers because it makes teaching better compensated and less difficult.

“If you are reducing class sizes at the same time you are increasing pay, it’s extra generous,” DiSalvo said. He noted that some cuts to public education have been forced on states and districts by ballooning costs of rescuing underwater teacher pension funds.

Others argue that it will take significant pay bumps to compensate for decades of stagnant teacher wages and sometimes deep budget cuts to education.

Sylvia Allegretto, a labor economist at the University of California, Berkeley, argues that teacher salaries must be seen in a broader economic context. She points out that in the 1960s teaching was a relatively well-paid job for women when they had fewer opportunities. Now, women can choose among better paid and competitive jobs, so districts may need to offer more to attract quality candidates.

Pay was key in the wildcat teachers strikes that swept through Arizona, West Virginia and North Carolina last year. Denver teachers struck last winter over how and how much the district paid them. In Los Angeles, teachers rejected the district’s offer for retroactive raises, went on strike, and then essentially agreed to the same pay deal as before, but one that was sweetened by an increase in support services and lower class sizes.

U.S. teachers earn 60% less than workers in other professions requiring comparable education levels, according to a 2017 report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. It’s a phenomenon Allegretto calls the teacher pay penalty.

Some Chicago teachers say the job is impossible not because of low wages but because they feel overwhelmed by paperwork and struggling with too few resources to meet the complicated needs of their students.

That sentiment has been a consistent thread in the run-up to the strike and will likely be a theme on Wednesday night, when the union’s 700-member House of Delegates votes to set a possible strike date.

Have questions about the strike? Take our parent survey and we will get your questions answered.

Correction: This story was updated to say that Chicago’s first-year teacher pay ranks the district 22nd among the 124 largest urban districts, not toward the bottom. Chalkbeat regrets the error.

Another Chicago charter school votes — unanimously — to authorize strike Oct. 22

2019-09-23T22:35:19+00:00

Update: Passages charter school teachers have announced a strike date of Oct. 22

Charter school teachers at Passages Elementary School, a one-site charter that serves primarily immigrant and refugee students, voted unanimously to authorize a strike, setting the stage for the fourth charter teacher walkout in Chicago in less than a year.

The Passages vote, announced at a press conference held at the school on Monday afternoon following the vote, sets the nation’s third-largest school district up for a record level of labor unrest in the new school year, following a busy winter and spring. Chicago’s public school teachers are taking strike authorization votes this week, and the union that represents special education aides and custodians voted overwhelmingly to walk out if negotiators don’t reach a deal.

Forty Passages teachers are asking for higher wages — the union says some staff earn less than $35,000 a year while a 2017 tax form shows the head of Asian Human Services, the non-profit that runs the school, makes nearly $250,000 a year.

“Why do we have to fight to make a salary on par with educators at other Chicago schools?” said Mike Scott-Rudnick, who has taught at Passages for seven years. “Why do we have to fight to make sure teachers can eat their lunch in the middle of the day?”

They also say that the school, which promises small class sizes, can’t adequately provide special education or English instruction for newcomer students, who speak multiple languages. Teachers also want contract language that includes sanctuary protections for immigrant students.

Last school year, Chicago saw three charter teachers strikes at various networks. In most of them, teachers won changes after walking out. At Acero schools, which last winter saw the first-ever charter teacher strike in the country, teachers won pay raises, a class size cap, a shorter school year, and language in the contract declaring schools off-limits to immigration officers.

About 420 students attend Passages, a Level-2 plus school based in Edgewater which offers pre-K through eighth grade instruction to a mostly immigrant and refugee student body. Nearly 70% are from low-income families, and 38% are English language learners.

Asian Human Services, based in the Uptown neighborhood, also offers health care and counseling services to immigrants. Passages boasts a longer school day, small class sizes and a chance for students to connect to the organization’s many social services.

Since opening in 2001, Passages has received a city grant to open an early learning center, where it now offers full-day pre-kindergarten, but wasn’t able to win community or city support for a new high school.

The school’s employees voted to unionize with ChiACTS Local 4343, which later joined the Chicago Teachers Union, in April 2016. It narrowly averted a strike in May 2017. Then in 2018, the school laid off half of its paraprofessionals, according to the union.

Asian Human Services did not respond to a request for comment.

3 out of 4 Americans support giving teachers a raise, the highest in a decade

2019-08-20T04:01:23+00:00

Striking teachers have been successful at drumming up support for a raise, a new national poll suggests.

Nearly three in four Americans think teachers should be paid more, the poll shows.

That points to a potentially strong base of support for the proposals by a number of Democratic presidential candidates to dramatically raise teacher pay and ramp up federal investments in high-poverty schools.

“The tenor of these provocative ideas is resonating with the American public,” write the researchers who released the poll for Education Next, a Harvard-based research journal, which is generally sympathetic to school choice. “Support for increasing teacher pay is higher now than at any point since 2008, and a majority of the public favors more federal funding for local schools.”

But a separate recent poll shows that support has limits, as many say they are also wary of increased taxes. That’s consistent with recent ballot initiatives in Colorado and Los Angeles, where voters soundly rejected tax increases for schools in the wake of teacher protests.

The Education Next poll also shows some evidence of increasing support for policy ideas often at odds politically with teachers’ groups: expanding alternatives to district public schools, like charters and private school vouchers. Although protesting teachers in a number of places have targeted their ire at charter schools or vouchers, that does not appear to have dampered support for these policies.

Overall, Americans still disagree about these issues: 48% say they support charter schools, while 39% percent oppose them, for instance. Democrats are divided, too, with black and Hispanic Democrats more supportive of school choice initiatives than white Democrats.

Here’s more detail about the findings.

1. The public wants to pay teachers more — at least in the abstract.

Education Next, which conducts an annual poll on education issues, asks about teacher pay in two ways. For one group, they simply ask whether public school teacher salaries should go up, go down, or stay the same. Asked this way, 72% of Americans think teachers’ salaries should go up, an increase of several points since 2017.

The poll also asks the same question after telling respondents how much the average teacher actually makes in their state. (Nationally, the average is about $59,000. Neither version of the question mentions that teachers tend to make less than other college graduates.) In this case, 56% want teachers to be paid more.

That’s a 20-percentage-point jump in two years — a large increase that’s likely attributable to the teacher protests that spread through states including West Virginia and Arizona and cities like Los Angeles and Denver in 2018 and 2019.

Some states that have seen teacher protests have substantially increased education spending, which recent research has linked to better outcomes for students. Elsewhere, though, voters haven’t been willing to accede to teachers’ demands. In Los Angeles, for instance, only 46% of voters backed a proposed tax increase for schools — far short of the two-thirds needed to pass — just months after the high-profile strike.

That aligns with another recent poll issued by PDK, a professional organization for educators, which found that most people support increasing education funding — but want to do so by cutting other government programs rather than by raising taxes.

2. More people are making up their minds on charter schools.

More people are opposed to charter schools now (39%) than in 2016 (28%). At the same time, support for charters has followed a V-like pattern — after tumbling to 39% in 2017, it climbed back up to 48% this year.

This offers only mixed evidence for the theory that Education Secretary Betsy DeVos — a school choice advocate whose fumbled confirmation hearing helped make her one of President Trump’s least popular cabinet members — has turned the public against charter schools.

“In sum, the potential collapse of public approval for charters that had appeared imminent in 2017 has not occurred, but opposition has solidified among a significant minority,” write the researchers.

This also means more people have staked out a position on charters. Only 13% of Americans say they neither support nor oppose charters, down from 25% two years ago.

Still, many people are poorly informed about charters, the poll shows. The vast majority of respondents didn’t know — or answered incorrectly when asked — whether charter schools can hold religious services or charge tuition. (Legally, they can’t do either.)

3. Democrats’ racial divide on charters persists.

Between 2016 and 2018, Education Next polls found that white Democrats were growing substantially less likely to support charter schools, while support largely held steady among black and Hispanic Democrats.

The latest poll finds that racial gap is still there. (A recent poll from the pro-charter group Democrats for Education Reform shows something similar, though the margins of error in that poll are quite large.)

Black Democrats tend to back charters (55% support, while 29% oppose); Hispanic Democrats are fairly split (47% vs. 42%); and white Democrats are the most skeptical (33% vs. 57%).

Support among white Democrats has fallen substantially since 2016, and opposition among Hispanic Democrats has jumped from 24 to 42 percent. But among black Democrats, support for charters has increased 10 points since 2016, even though the NAACP has called for a ban on new charters.

Republicans are more supportive of charter schools than Democrats. And combining voters of all political leanings, there isn’t a large racial divide on the issue. That’s in part because strong support among white Republicans balances out the opposition from white Democrats.

4. Private school vouchers see an uptick in support, but voters have generally rejected them.

Education Next shows that public support for vouchers or voucher-like programs has been on an upward trajectory. Fifty-five percent of respondents say they back a universal voucher program, up 10 points from 2017. Forty-nine percent favor such a program targeted to low-income families, a 12-point jump in four years. Here too, black and Hispanic Democrats are much more supportive than white Democrats.

These findings undermines the idea of a “DeVos effect,” since the education secretary has championed public funding for private schools.

“School vouchers have gained popularity since President Trump took office in 2016,” said Marty West, a Harvard professor and the editor in chief of Education Next. “That’s something that I did not expect to see.”

Polling on school vouchers can be tricky, though, as wording matters a great deal. Voters tend to like “tax credits” more than “vouchers,” even though the policies are extremely similar. They also are fans of “choice” but not of “public expense.”

In 2017, for instance, 52% of Americans said they would oppose allowing “parents to choose a private school at public expense,” according to PDK. Asked that same year by Education Next about the same policy, voters supported it 45% to 37%. One key difference was the question wording: Education Next asks whether people back “government helping to pay the tuition” for private school.

Notably, vouchers have seen little success when put before voters directly. Just last year, Arizona voters roundly rejected a proposal to expand voucher eligibility.

“We do not claim that our results are a reliable indicator of what would happen if you put the concept on the ballot,” said West. “Political scientists have shown that there is a strong bias toward the status quo in ballot campaigns regardless of the topic.”

Teachers are ‘ready to fight,’ says new Tennessee coalition inspired by strikes in other states

2019-03-12T21:36:12+00:00

Weary of standardized testing and underfunded schools, and alarmed by the prospect of education vouchers and charter expansion in Tennessee, a group of teacher leaders have organized a new statewide coalition and say they are “ready to fight for the schools our students deserve.”

The coalition, called TN Teachers United, launched last week after meeting with two teachers who helped organize statewide walkouts last year in Arizona and West Virginia.

While a Tennessee walkout isn’t the goal at this point, it remains a possibility, according to the three primary organizers: Tikeila Rucker of Memphis, Amanda Kail of Nashville, and Lauren Sorensen of Knoxville.

“I won’t say that Tennessee is next, but I also won’t say that we’re not,” said Rucker, a former classroom teacher who is president of United Education Association of Shelby County, one of two organizations that represents Memphis teachers.

“I think we have to leave everything on the table,” added Kail, a teacher at Margaret Allen Middle School in Nashville, home to the state’s second largest district. “A lot of people are afraid to talk about it, but we can’t be afraid. I think we’re reaching a boiling point.”

National momentum

In the last year, teacher movements have started small in other states like West Virginia, Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma — with powerful results. But it’s uncertain whether Tennessee’s coalition will be able to grow the grassroots support needed to make demands, even though the states have similar dynamics, including weakened unions, thin labor rights, and business-friendly politics that lean Republican.

Tennessee is a deep red state where teacher strikes have been illegal since 1978 when the last one occurred in Memphis. Teachers unions were further weakened in 2011 when they lost collective bargaining rights under the administration of Republican Gov. Bill Haslam.

Meanwhile, the state rolled out education reforms driven by new academic standards and measures to hold teachers and schools accountable. Those tied teacher evaluations to student test results, a shift that still angers educators who question the validity of scores under Tennessee’s problem-plagued TNReady test.

Haslam also invested $500 million in new funding in K-12 education, including teacher raises, but Tennessee’s per-pupil funding remains one of the lowest in the region and in the bottom half of the nation.

Adding fuel to the discussion is new Republican Gov. Bill Lee’s announcement last week that he wants to create a voucher program, which would divert taxpayer money to pay for private education services, and also make it easier to start new charter schools in Tennessee. Both proposals are opposed by educator groups who would rather see more investments in traditional public schools.

Bill Lee speaks with reporters in November 2018 after his election as Tennessee’s 50th governor, as outgoing Gov. Bill Haslam looks on.

“Given our current governor and the state legislature, things look really grim,” said Kail. “We’re also seeing a decline in people who want to be teachers enrolling in colleges of education.”

Kail and other organizers created a Facebook group and began promoting the new coalition this week by inviting educators to join and complete a questionnaire about their biggest concerns. Within a day, they had more than 200 members — and were growing by the hour. There are no plans to collect dues like a union does.

One organizer said feedback from the questionnaires will drive their next steps. “It doesn’t do us any good to have hundreds and thousands of people who are upset and angry. It’s only going to help if they’re passionate enough to do something about it,” said Sorensen, who teaches at Halls Elementary School in Knox County.

The organizers are following a blueprint used by teachers in West Virginia and Arizona who talked through their strategies during an hourlong video-conference. They convened with Tennessee leaders on Feb. 28 with the help of Labor Notes, a national media and organizing project that seeks to develop grassroots labor movements.

Chris Brooks, a Labor Notes writer who helped facilitate the meeting, said Tennessee is ripe for stepping up its advocacy beyond the tactics of rank-and-file teacher organizations like the Tennessee Education Association.

“They can be conflict-averse and try to talk people out of doing things like a strike, but a strike can be the most powerful tool there is,” said Brooks, a former labor organizer in Chattanooga who also previously worked for the Tennessee Education Association.

Brooks, who has assisted with teacher movements in West Virginia, Arizona, and Kentucky, believes Tennessee is next.

“Conditions for teachers are bad,” he said of his home state. “Schools are underfunded. Students are over-tested. Teachers are leaving the profession in droves. When people are struggling that hard for teachers to be able to teach and students to be able to learn, I think you’ve got the conditions for an uprising.”

But JC Bowman, executive director of the 8,000-member Professional Educators of Tennessee, cautioned against moving toward a strike.

“If you come out militant, you’re going to bring out the militants on the other side,” Bowman said. “Teachers would be putting their jobs on the line. You play chicken with some people, you can lose.”

Splintered teachers groups

Tennessee has at least six professional and advocacy organizations for teachers, some of which represent educators in labor negotiations with local districts.

All three organizers of the new coalition are active in the largest and most powerful group, the Tennessee Education Association, also known as TEA, and have expressed frustration with its pace.

“Over the past few years, we haven’t gotten results by being at the table,” said Rucker.

Beth Brown, a Grundy County teacher who became president of the teachers association last year, said she welcomes the energy of the new coalition and notes that the group’s core beliefs appear to be aligned with those of the Tennessee Education Association.

They include a call for full state funding of public education; opposition to standardized testing as a means to label and punish schools, teachers, and students; a commitment to education equity; and opposition to vouchers in any form or funneling public money into charter schools.

Brown took issue, however, about the effectiveness of TEA’s work.

“We know that, if it hadn’t been for the advocacy efforts of our members during the last decade, Tennessee would already have had private school vouchers and radical charter school expansion,” she said.

Teacher members of the Tennessee Education Association meet Tuesday with Rep. Harold Love of Nashville during an advocacy day at the State Capitol in Nashville. TEA encourages members to use a day of their spring breaks to lobby lawmakers on issues important to teachers. (Photo courtesy of TEA)

Coalition organizers in Tennessee say talk of a strike is building but emphasize that such discussions are premature. First, teachers must do some soul-searching on priorities and recruiting to gauge statewide support.

“The conversation now is about what really drives us. Is it funding or wages? Is it TNReady? Vouchers? Discipline? Or is it all of these things?” asked Kail. “We saw in Los Angeles how teachers tied together a bunch of things with a lot of success.”

The numbers also have to be there, pulling in as many of the state’s 66,000 public school teachers as possible, as well as retired teachers, parents, students, and community members.

“We should never be afraid of our own power,” said Rucker.

Sorensen adds: “We’ve been paying attention to other states and they seem to be getting results. I’d rather not strike. I’d rather stay in my classroom and teach. But it seems like our politicians don’t respond to anything else.”

Getting results: School spending is up in four states that saw teacher protests in 2018

2019-03-06T05:01:44+00:00

In four states where teachers walked out of their classrooms in protest last year, education spending is up, helping to make up for deep cuts in those states in the wake of the Great Recession.

That’s according to a new analysis that suggests the walkouts and strikes made a difference in Oklahoma, Arizona, West Virginia, and North Carolina. The report from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive think tank, found that baseline state funding jumped 19 percent in Oklahoma last year, while North Carolina and West Virginia both saw 3 percent upticks.

Still, some states have a ways to go to reach their 2008 spending levels.

“Most of the teacher-protest states had cut their formula funding so deeply over the last decade that even last year’s sizeable funding boosts weren’t enough to restore funding to pre-recession levels,” researchers Michael Leachman and Eric Figueroa write.

This year’s report, released Wednesday, focuses on K-12 education spending at the state and local levels as the national spotlight remains on stagnant teacher pay.

It shows that in five walk-out states, less money was being sent to schools through state funding formulas in 2019 than in 2008 — an indication that schools there had been squeezed for years. Four of those states saw state funding rise last year after pressure from teacher activism.

“Over a 10-year period, public education funding in Oklahoma had been cut [by] about a billion dollars,” said Alicia Priest, the president of the Oklahoma Education Association. “They were cutting curriculum like fine arts, world languages, AP classes — all the cuts that could be made, had been made.”

But with teacher protests looming lawmakers there passed a tax increase about $400 million to boost teacher pay. “It was a great start,” Priest said.

The report also looks at the combination of both state and local dollars flowing to states between 2008 and 2016. (Combined, state and local funding account for over 90 percent of what schools receive.) Here, there is a relatively good news for funding advocates: By 2016, a majority of states — 26 — were spending more per student than they were before the Great Recession, adjusted for inflation.

That includes Illinois (where funding was 21 percent higher in 2016 than in 2008), New York (15 percent higher), Pennsylvania (11 percent higher), and California (9 percent higher).

But plenty have not recovered. States where state plus local funding was lower in 2016 than it was pre-recession include Arizona (23 percent lower), North Carolina (18 percent), Oklahoma (13 percent), Colorado (1 percent), and Kentucky (0.3 percent) — all states with significant teacher protest over the last two years.

West Virginia, another walk-out state, experienced a 3 percent total funding increase over that time.

A wave of research in recent years has found that increases in school spending improve students’ test scores and graduation rates. Decreases in spending in the wake of the Great Recession led to declines in both.

This week, the American Federation of Teachers launched a national campaign to support education funding increases.

The report warns that some of the states that have boosted spending are relying on one-time funding sources. But those wins have helped inspire a near-continuous wave of teacher activism, including recent city-level strikes in Los Angeles, Denver, and Oakland — which have also focused on issues beyond funding, including charter schools and school closures. “We are worried that there will be backsliding,” said Priest. “After 10 years of cuts, it’s going to take several years of investments to bring class sizes down.”

What exactly is in Denver’s new teacher pay deal? Here’s the nitty-gritty

2019-02-16T00:14:43+00:00

By now, you’ve likely heard that the Denver school district and teachers union reached a deal this week on how — and how much — Denver educators will be paid.

The agreement came just before dawn Thursday, as teachers were waking up and getting ready to strike for a fourth day. Instead, many headed back to their classrooms, to the delight of their students. The Denver Classroom Teachers Association hailed the tentative agreement — which still must be ratified by union members and the Denver school board — as a victory.

“Educators in Denver Public Schools now have a fair, predictable, and transparent salary schedule,” said Rob Gould, a teacher and the union’s lead negotiator.

So what exactly is in the deal? Here’s a breakdown.

A new salary schedule
It will go from $45,800 for a first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree to $100,000 for a teacher with a doctorate and at least 20 years in the classroom next year. It will allow teachers to earn larger raises more consistently than under the previous system.

Here’s how: The new salary schedule has 20 “steps” and seven “lanes.”

In many districts, “steps” correlate to a teachers’ years of experience. Each year, teachers go up a step and get a raise. In Denver Public Schools, it works a little differently. For teachers to go up a step every year, they must receive a performance rating of either “approaching,” “effective,” or “distinguished.” Educators who are “not meeting” cannot go up a step.

“Lanes” represent a teacher’s level of education or training. The first lane is for teachers who have a bachelor’s degree only. The second lane is for teachers who have a bachelor’s degree plus 18 college credits or the equivalent amount of in-district training — and so on, all the way up to a doctorate.

Educators move into the next lane whenever they reach that level of education. Moving a lane nets educators a bigger raise than moving a step.

The salaries on the new schedule are higher than on the current one. For example, starting pay for a first-year teacher with a bachelor’s degree this year is $42,789.

But there’s another reason why this new salary schedule is a big deal. In the past, the Denver salary schedule was used only to set an educator’s starting salary. In other words, when they were hired, they’d be placed on the schedule based on their experience and education.

There were no yearly step raises or opportunities to move lanes. The only ways an educator could raise their base salary were to get an advanced degree or license (a $3,851 raise this year), complete a “professional development unit” training course (an $855 raise this year), or earn a positive evaluation (an $855 or $427 raise this year, depending on a teacher’s years of service).

There was also a huge catch: Teachers with 14 or more years of service could not increase their base pay by completing professional development units; they got a lump-sum payment instead. And a positive evaluation only netted those teachers a $427 raise, as opposed to $855.

This new salary schedule has no such limits, making it a better deal for veteran educators.

Several different ways to move lanes
The new agreement allows teachers to move lanes several different ways. That’s important to teachers because lane movements net the biggest raises. Educators can move lanes by:

Earning college credits. Every time an educator earns 18 credits, they move a lane.
Completing professional development units. One unit is worth three credits, similar to a college class. Educators can complete up to two professional development units per year for the purposes of lane movement.
Earning continuing education credits. (The rules are still being worked out.)
Earning an advanced license. This is most relevant for the non-teachers covered by the contract, such as nurses, counselors, psychologists, and speech language pathologists.
Earning National Board Certification.
Ten years of service in Denver classrooms within the past 15 years.

There are a couple of caveats to that last one. Educators can only cash in their “longevity” lane change once. And it can’t be used to move into the doctorate lane. To be in that lane, an educator must have a doctorate. Those in the lane just before the doctorate lane — master’s degree plus 54 credits — who hit 10 years of service will get a $2,000 bump to their base salary. Those in the doctorate lane who have nowhere higher to move will get the same.

A note about professional development units: Educators who had more than six units “banked” as of Jan. 19 — meaning they completed them but hadn’t cashed them in for raises — can either trade their units for a lane change or receive a lump-sum payment of $1,700 per unit. Educators with fewer than six units banked get the lump-sum payment.

Three incentives
Under Denver Public Schools’ educator pay system, called ProComp (read the history here), educators earn bonuses and incentives on top of their base salary.

The number of bonuses and incentives, and the dollar amount associated with each, has changed over the years ProComp has been in effect. That variability is one of the things teachers found frustrating and confusing about it. This year, for example, there are six incentives and bonuses (and even more confusingly, two of them aren’t even part of ProComp.)

Under the new agreement, there are three incentives:

A $2,000 incentive for educators who work in Title I schools. To qualify as Title I, at least 60 percent of a school’s students must be eligible for free or reduced-price meals. The majority of district-run schools are Title I.

A $2,000 incentive for educators who work in hard-to-fill positions. A team of district staff and union representatives decide which positions qualify for this one. This year, there are 13 qualifying positions, including middle and high school math teachers, nurses, and teachers who deliver instruction to English language learners in Spanish, known as English Language Acquisition-Spanish teachers.

A $750 incentive for educators who work in 10 “distinguished” schools. The same district-union team will set the criteria here. It will be based on how well schools support students socially and emotionally, not on student test scores.

One retention bonus
Educators who work in 30 schools deemed “highest-priority” by the district and the union will receive a $3,000 retention bonus for returning to work at those schools the following year.

The union has openly questioned whether such retention bonuses actually work to keep teachers. To answer that question, the new agreement requires the district and the union to do a joint research study “to examine the root causes of educator retention and turnover” in the highest-priority schools and identify possible solutions. According to the agreement, “the findings shall be utilized to determine if the incentive shall be continued.”

Tuition reimbursement
Educators can receive $1,000 a year to be spent on repayment of student loans or reimbursement for the costs of training directly related to their job. The maximum reimbursement an educator can receive in their career is $6,000.

Cost-of-living raises for the 2020-21 and 2021-22 school years
Educators will get one for the 2019-20 school year, too, but that one was previously negotiated.

Got more questions? We answered some of the most common ones here.

With Loop lobby sit-in, striking teachers union beefs up campaign against Chicago charter

2019-02-13T21:36:57+00:00

Facing a stalemate at the bargaining table with the management of four Chicago International Charter Schools, the Chicago Teachers Union on Wednesday staged an act of “civil disobedience” by blocking entrances and elevators in a prominent Loop high-rise.

The building, at 1 N. Wacker, is home to the London-based accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. A partner in the Chicago office, Laura Thonn, is the board president of Chicago International, or CICS, which oversees 14 charter schools in Chicago through a network of five smaller management groups.

The teachers’ union has made the group’s complex organization chart a central focus in the strike. On Tuesday, CTU President Jesse Sharkey filed a formal complaint letter with the state’s newly elected attorney general, Kwame Raoul, claiming that he was “troubled” by $19 million in management fees that the union has claimed the charter operator invested with the firm of a former board president and treasurer, an investment manager named Craig Henderson, who runs his own firm.

“Depending on when Henderson’s firm first began to provide investment services,” the letter reads, “his firm may have received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the foundation over which Craig Henderson has held considerable power and influence.” Read the full letter below.

“Our findings suggest self-dealing and conflicts of interest at the highest levels of a non-profit organization operating charters schools across 14 school sites in Chicago,” it concludes.

The union cannot bargain over management structure. The sticking points at the bargaining table are pay for teachers and paraprofessionals, class size, and the length of the school day.

The charter network did not immediately respond to requests for comment about the complaint letter. But a spokeswoman from CICS told Chalkbeat Wednesday afternoon that if Civitas, which manages the four schools under strike, agreed to the union’s current demand of 105 percent of the teacher salary schedule for district-run schools, it would be bankrupt within three years.

“CICS is obligated, out of fairness to each of its 8,300 students, to allocate resources equitably to all 14 campuses, which means that any additional funds CICS provides to Civitas, they also have to provide increased funding proportionally to the other 10 campuses.”

In advance of Wednesday’s action, the CEO of the overarching charter network, Elizabeth Shaw, sent an email to staff and board members with the subject line “potential disruption” and urging them to treat the striking teachers “with respect and compassion.”

“Please recognize that these are teachers that educate CICS children at our CICS schools,” she wrote. “While we may have disagreements over what is in the best interest of our schools, it is their right to peacefully demonstrate.”

About 180 teachers and support staff from four schools are on strike. About 2,200 children are affected, though schools are open and staffed by non-union employees.

Following Wednesday’s two hour sit-in, three members of the bargaining team went upstairs to present their letter to a member of Pricewaterhouse’s marketing division. “Our issues have been heard, after nearly 40 of us were willing to risk arrest,” said bargaining team member and CICS Northtown high school teacher Jen Conant.

The union’s chair of the charter division, Chris Baehrend, issued a warning that the current strike could spur others. “CTU still has 13 charter schools in negotiations — there could be seven more strikes before June,” he said. “The charter industry needs to change the way it operates.”

Why Chicago’s second charter strike is one to watch

2019-02-12T02:10:34+00:00

As Denver teachers went out on strike Monday in a pay dispute with their district, charter teachers in Chicago at four schools operated by Civitas Education Partners entered the second week of a strike over wages and support services for students.

With negotiations failing again on Sunday night, teachers braved freezing temperatures to walk picket lines at the crack of dawn outside the downtown headquarters of Chicago International Charter Schools, Civitas’ parent company. They also staged an afternoon rally, focusing on the charter’s unusual management structure, and called for the network’s CEO to join them at the bargaining table.

The strike affects 180 teachers and paraprofessionals and about 2,200 students. Schools are open and staffed by non-union staff — 165 students attended class at CICS Wrightwood elementary on Monday, while no students came to CICS Northtown, according to Chicago International’s figures.

Here’s what you need to know as the strike heads into its second week:

What is the main sticking point in negotiations?

Pay remains a sticking point between the teachers’ union and Civitas Education Partners.

Teachers and support staff are demanding increased pay that rewards their education levels and experience, more counselors and social workers and smaller class sizes. They are also angry at recent changes in benefit structures, including no longer offering paid parental leave for staff.

Union officials said the network has offered teachers an 8 percent raise in the first year of the contract, but only if they agree to staffing cuts in some areas like counseling and social workers.

Management has said that the union has agreed to several points, including counselor ratios and class size. In response, Jen Conant, a CICS Northtown teacher and member of the bargaining team, accused the network of lying.

“CICS continues to demand that our educators trade small raises on already terrible wages for cuts to our students’ education needs,” Conant said. “We have no agreement on class sizes, which CICS wants to increase. We have no agreement on counselor ratios, which CICS also wants to increase.”

Who’s at the table?

At the negotiating table, 14 people represents the union, including teachers, paraprofessionals, the union’s general counsel, and field representatives from the striking schools.

On management’s side, Civitas officials negotiate, led by LeeAndra Khan, the company’s CEO.

But in recent days, the union has called for Civitas’ parent company, Chicago International Charter Schools, to join the talks.

“We want CICS to come to the table and negotiate with teachers,” said Stacey Davis Gates, political director of the Chicago Teachers Union.

Unlike charter networks that run schools directly, Chicago International operates more like a contractor: It hires other organizations to run schools. The network oversees 14 schools run by five charter management organizations, some of which subcontract management to a third operator.

Khan, of Civitas, has insisted that her company makes financial decisions and that Chicago International has no personnel function at striking schools. “CICS is not at the table because CICS is not the employer,” she said.

Why is this strike significant?

This is the third charter teachers strike in the country — the first took place when Acero teachers walked off the job in Chicago in December, and the second when educators in Los Angeles, including from three charter schools, walked off the job for eight days last month.

Bob Bruno, director of the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said by winning some demands, CICS teachers could demonstrate that charter employees can stage — and win — strikes. Teachers in both Chicago’s Acero strike, and in Los Angeles, were able to get many of their demands.

“Maybe the first strike is unique,” said Bruno. But “if CTU [Chicago Teachers Union] is successful with the second one, then it affirms that this is a path that can be productive for teachers.”

Negotiations resumed at 5 p.m. Monday.

1,400 central office employees will be deployed to Denver schools in a strike

2019-02-08T04:19:34+00:00

Denver Public Schools is preparing for a teacher strike Monday, even as district administrators and union teachers plan to return to the bargaining table Friday to see if they can find a last-minute deal.

What does that preparation look like? The district is hiring more substitutes and deploying central office staff. Here’s a breakdown, by the numbers, of who might be striking, who will be working, how many kids will be affected, and what it will cost. All numbers come from the school district.

5,353

The number of teachers and “specialized service providers,” a category that includes nurses, counselors, and others, who are covered by the pay agreement being negotiated by the district and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. They are the ones who would strike — though it’s not mandatory they walk off the job. Teachers can choose whether or not to strike.

1,400

The number of employees who work at the district’s central office who will be deployed to schools during a strike to work as substitute teachers, supervisors, and in other roles.

1,200

The number of substitute teachers the district had in its substitute pool before the union voted to strike. These substitute teachers could be called up to serve in classrooms in the event of a strike.

300

The number of additional substitute teachers the district has hired since the strike vote.

$200 to $250

The daily amount of money the district has said it will pay substitute teachers during a strike.

147 The number of district-run schools that would be affected by a strike. (Charter school teachers are not part of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association. Charter schools would operate normally.) 71,000

The number of students in grades K-12 who attend district-run schools.

21,000

The number of Denver students who attend charter schools.

4,714

The number of students in district-run preschool classes. The district has said it will cancel preschool classes during a strike because stricter state regulations make it more difficult to find substitute teachers for 3- and 4-year-olds.

$2 million

The amount of money the district normally spends per day to pay all of its teachers and specialized service providers. Teachers and others who go out on strike will not be paid.

$400,000

The estimated cost per day of a strike. The $400,000 includes the money to pay substitute teachers, the cost of materials and lesson plans for those substitutes to teach, and the loss of preschool tuition revenue. The families of preschool students who pay tuition won’t be charged for the missed days.

With campaigning aldermen in tow, striking Chicago teachers target statewide charter lobbyist

2019-02-07T20:20:00+00:00

The Chicago Teachers Union stepped up its pressure campaign on administrators of a second striking Chicago charter with a rainy day picket in front of the downtown offices of a key pro-charter lobbying group on Thursday.

The union also used to the picket to stage a moment of political theatre by inviting several of the candidates it has endorsed for alderman and its handpicked candidate for mayor, Toni Preckwinkle, to join the rally. Chicago’s first round of municipal elections are Feb. 26.

“Working conditions for teachers are learning conditions for kids. I’m here to support the teachers and the students they teach,” said Preckwinkle, with the chants of educators repeating “Shut it down” behind her. “I really think it’s important to settle the strike and get the teachers back in the classroom and the children back in the classroom. We can only do that if (Chicago International) comes to the table.”

Pay remains a sticking point between the teachers’ union and Civitas Education Partners, which manages four striking schools under the larger Chicago International Charter Schools umbrella.

CICS management said it had offered a 30 percent raise over four years that would put teachers on par with salaries at district-run schools. The union said that proposal comes with trade-offs that are too high — inequitable distribution of raises, cuts to support staff, and neglect of paraprofessionals.

The strike affects 180 teachers and paraprofessionals at four schools that together serve about 2,200 students.

Lakeisha Poole, the parent of a first grader at CICS Wrightwood named Isaiah, joined the picket line Thursday, hugged her son’s teacher, and tried to shield the little boy from the rain as she described his recent academic progress in the classroom. “It’s all from help from my son’s teacher. My teachers ask for $30,000, and a teacher at (Chicago Public Schools) makes $60,000? That’s not right. These people put their all into our children,” Poole said.

She said the strike week had served as an awakening for her because it highlighted the charter network’s complex management structure and the fees paid toward administration that don’t go to the classroom. She also said parents also received an email early in the week that suggested students would be penalized for non-attendance, but subsequent emails had walked that back. “If Civitas doesn’t get it together, I’ll move him to another school.”

The union is hoping to gain wider attention by moving the picket lines Thursday to the Michigan Avenue office of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, an influential lobbying group that advises charter managers on operations and is active in Springfield on the legislative front.

The group is affiliated with an INCS Action PAC and a related INCS Action super PAC that together reported about $2 million in cash on hand at the end of the 2018.

Here’s a look back at the week on the CICS picket lines:

Teacher pay is sticking point in second day of bargaining
What teachers are saying and the view from inside an empty school on the first day of the strike
Why we may see more charter strikes in 2019 — in Chicago and beyond

Denver teachers set to strike over pay dispute after Gov. Polis declines to step in

2019-02-07T02:50:00+00:00

Teachers in Colorado’s largest school district are preparing to strike on Monday after Gov. Jared Polis announced he would not intervene in a pay dispute between the Denver school district and the teachers union.

Even before Polis revealed his decision publicly Wednesday, the Denver Classroom Teachers Association tweeted: “February 11th, We strike for our students.”

Denver Superintendent Susana Cordova reiterated that the district will keep as many schools open as possible in the event of a strike, but said about 5,000 preschool students, the majority of them from low-income families, would have to stay home because it would be harder to find substitute teachers due to stricter state regulations on preschool.

This would be the first strike by Denver teachers in 25 years. It comes amid a national wave of teacher activism that has seen educators in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and most recently Los Angeles walk off the job to demand higher wages and better working conditions.

In Denver, teachers are also driven by pent-up frustration with a pay-for-performance system they feel has failed to deliver on its promises, as well as with the broad swath of education reform policies that system represents.

But before teachers take to the picket lines, the two sides are tentatively scheduled to return to the bargaining table Friday to see if there is any way to bridge what Polis cast as “small, limited differences.” Legally, Denver teachers could have started their strike Thursday, but by announcing a Monday start date, the union leaves room for more negotiations, which Polis said represents an “11th-hour opportunity” to reach a deal.

“The differences between the two sides are minor, and they will be bridged in a contract,” Polis said, standing between two white boards that laid out the areas of consensus and dispute in the district and union proposals. “The question is, can that contract be delivered before a strike?”

Rob Gould, a Denver teacher and the union’s lead negotiator, said he agrees the two sides can bridge their differences, “but the district has to be willing to bridge them.”

“We wanted to give the district one last effort to meet the needs of our teachers,” he said of the brief window before a strike starts.

Asked whether the district would put more money on the table, Cordova pledged to “continue working on what we can do,” adding that she hopes the union does the same. She expressed frustration that the union did not offer counterproposals during the last two negotiating sessions.

Negotiating, she said, involves “trading proposals back and forth. We think that’s really important. That’s how we’ll get closer and closer together.”

Denver Public Schools and the teachers union have been negotiating the terms of the ProComp agreement, which governs bonuses and incentives that teachers earn on top of their base pay, for 15 months. The two sides are separated not just by several million dollars but by deep philosophical disagreements about how teachers should be paid.

The union wants less money to go into bonuses and more money to go toward base pay. The district has offered to put more money into teacher compensation and create more stability in the bonus system, but it has held firm on offering larger bonuses to teachers at high-poverty schools and certain schools deemed “highest priority.”

Each side believes their proposal will do more to keep good teachers at the challenging schools where they are needed most.

Standing on the steps of the Capitol in the swirling snow at a union press conference, second-grade teacher Septima Bruce said she is “sick and tired” of watching students lose good teachers who are driven out of the district by unpredictable pay.

“We deserve better,” said Bruce, who teaches at Hallett Academy, an elementary school in northeast Denver. “We demand better. We will strike until we receive better.”

Polis stressed repeatedly that teachers need to feel valued and rewarded by whatever deal is reached, a sentiment also expressed by Joe Barela, head of the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment, whom Polis said ultimately made the decision not to intervene at this time.

“We want to get to a point where both sides feel happy and teachers feel rewarded and like they were listened to,” Barela said.

Barela said the structural problem of keeping teachers in challenging schools, where turnover is high and many teachers are just starting their careers, extends beyond the scope of these negotiations and will take more time to solve.

He said the district and the union seem so close that he feared outside intervention would “insert a wedge” and cause the two sides to dig in or move further apart.

Earlier this week, Barela called the last attempt at bargaining “political theater.” On Wednesday, he said he hoped to see more fruitful conversations going forward.

State labor officials or Polis could still change their minds and intervene if a strike goes on for too long or if negotiations don’t seem to be in good faith. Intervention could range from mediation or fact-finding all the way to binding arbitration, which Barela called a “last resort.”

If teachers do strike, Cordova acknowledged the situation for students will not be “normal.”

“It’s never normal when you go into school and your teachers aren’t there,” she said. “When we have large numbers of substitutes, it never feels normal. Obviously, there will be disruptions. If we have teachers on a picket line, that’s a disruption in terms of how kids even enter into a building.”

For kindergarten through 12th-grade classes, the district has been recruiting substitute teachers to fill in, and delivering to schools boxes of lesson plans for them to teach.

Some of those substitutes will likely be employees of the district’s central office, who have been ordered to deploy to schools to fill both instructional and non-instructional roles. Employees who refuse could face corrective action, which could theoretically include being fired.

Union organizers had previously urged parents to send their children to school in the event of a strike to force the district to close schools to underscore the value of teachers’ labor. If certain staffing ratios cannot be maintained or safety issues arise, schools may have to close.

On Wednesday, union President Henry Roman told parents to check with their children’s schools and make the decision “they believe to be in the best interest and well-being of their children.”

Gould, the union negotiator, said he plans to send his own children to school, but that he’s concerned about the potential for high ratios of children to adults and lack of structured activity.

“If it gets to that point, we hope they do close schools,” he said.

Read the full letter from Colorado Department of Labor and Employment Executive Director Joe Barela to the Denver school district and teachers union explaining the decision:

How a once-promising merit pay system led Denver teachers to the brink of a strike

2019-02-06T00:25:04+00:00

Jeff Buck was the very first teacher to sign up for Denver’s revolutionary pay-for-performance system in 2005. More than 13 years later, he is one of a dozen teachers sitting in a conference room at an obscure school district building, trying to unravel what the system has become.

ProComp — “professional compensation” — was supposed to recognize and reward good teachers. It was hailed around the nation as a model for getting districts away from traditional pay structures that prize longevity more than results, and, remarkably, it had the support of Denver’s teachers union.

But educators eventually grew disenchanted. Many said their paychecks went up and down in ways that were hard to predict or even understand. All the while, living in Denver became less affordable. Beyond those pocketbook concerns, many came to see ProComp as part of a series of education reform policies that, in their view, damaged the school system they were intended to save.

Now Denver Public Schools is on the brink of its first teacher strike in 25 years. ProComp sits at the center of the dispute between the district and the teachers union, and Buck is part of the union negotiating team arguing for Denver to pay its teachers “like every other district does.”

Educators in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Los Angeles have gone on strike for higher pay in the last year, but Denver may be the first teachers strike to turn primarily on the question of pay for performance, a key policy in the education reform toolbox.

How did a pay system that once seemed to hold so much promise bring teachers to their breaking point?

“What we got given is a system of Wall Street-style bonuses that mask the erosion of our salaries,” said Buck, a high school math teacher who went door-to-door in 2005 to sell voters on the tax that funds ProComp. “People have finally figured that out. It’s why people are angry.”

Denver Superintendent Susana Cordova has acknowledged that ProComp needs to change, and the district’s pay proposal puts more money into base pay, reduces the size of many incentives, and aims to make the remaining ones easier to understand. She has drawn a line in the sand, though, on $2,500 incentives for teachers at high-poverty and “highest-priority” schools.

Cordova frames this as a fundamental issue of equity, with the bonuses a necessary tool to keep good teachers in challenging schools where students need them the most. The research behind this assertion is decidedly mixed, but for ProComp’s remaining defenders, this point is key. The compensation system enables the district to express its values, with the end goal of raising student achievement for the students of color and those from low-income families who make up the majority of Denver’s 93,000 students but who lag behind their white and middle-class peers on test scores, graduation rates, and college readiness.

The origins

According to a book written by some of the architects of ProComp, the idea to revolutionize how Denver teachers are paid can be traced back to a report called “What Matters Most: Teaching for America’s Future.” Compiled by a now-defunct advocacy organization, the report found that recruiting and retaining quality teachers were the best ways to improve student learning.

The finding made an impression on the leaders of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association and on a former Denver teacher named Phil Gonring, who in the mid-1990s was working on education projects for a local philanthropy called the Rose Community Foundation. (The Rose Community Foundation is a financial supporter of Chalkbeat.)

With grant money from Rose and support from union leaders, Denver Public Schools started a ProComp pilot program in 1999 that eventually included 16 schools. The pilot paid teachers bonuses for meeting student performance goals.

DCTA lead negotiator Rob Gould, middle, addresses Denver Superintendent Susana Cordova, not pictured, during continued negotiations between teachers and administrators.

Other districts around the country had experimented with merit pay, too. But Denver’s pilot stood out for having the support of the teachers union, if not the support of every teacher. Most unions vehemently oppose merit pay, favoring a “steps and lanes” structure that rewards experience and gives teachers raises for earning master’s degrees or doctorates.

That the Denver union was helping design a performance pay system made its leadership pariahs at meetings of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, a Denver school board member told the New York Times in 2005.

Margaret Bobb, a teacher at a ProComp pilot school, pushed her colleagues to sign on. Bobb did not love the idea of pay for performance. Rather, as a science teacher, she saw the pilot as a way to test whether it was viable. Plus, teachers got paid to do it.

“I told my faculty … ‘I’ll take that extra money and put it away as my strike fund, so when we vote on ProComp, we’ll vote it down and I’ll have money to support a strike,’” said Bobb, who retired from the district last year. “I was naive. I did not understand … that when you do a pilot in education, it’s not a science experiment to see if it’s going to work or not. It’s just a little test to see how you’re going to implement it.”

The pilot program caught the eye of other philanthropic organizations, including the local Daniels Fund and the national Broad Foundation. Eventually, a task force of district staff and union teachers, including Buck, began designing a system that could be rolled out to all district schools. In addition to bonuses for student performance, it promised salary increases for teachers who completed training and applied their new skills in the classroom, and incentives for things like working in a hard-to-fill position or a high-poverty school.

To fund it, ProComp backers asked Denver voters to approve a $25 million annual tax increase, adjusted annually for inflation. (The tax is expected to generate $33 million this year.) Before the election, they sought union support.

Young teachers were excited about the chance to raise their pay by earning bonuses. Veteran teachers were wary of a new system.

It took a sophisticated campaign run by political consultants and funded by philanthropies to turn meager union support — early polling showed only 19 percent of teachers were in favor — into a victory. In the end, 59 percent of union members voted in favor of ProComp. In November 2005, Denver voters approved the tax increase by a similar margin.

ProComp was optional for teachers back then. By Dec. 31 of that year, the press reported that 735 of Denver’s more than 4,000 educators had signed up.

A big change

The first iteration of ProComp allowed teachers to earn permanent salary increases for meeting certain criteria. A 2005 Denver Post article gives some examples: a $999 raise if a teacher’s students made substantial progress on state reading and math tests, a $666 raise for taking a training course, a $333 raise for meeting two objectives a year tied to student achievement.

But in 2008, the system underwent a significant change that many teachers blame on then-superintendent Michael Bennet, who is now a U.S. senator. The change increased the size of one-time bonuses, but diminished permanent raises for teachers who’d been with the district 14 years or more — a move that favored newer teachers over more veteran ones.

The union reluctantly agreed to the changes.

“This was the best deal that we could get for our members,” the teachers union president at the time told the Rocky Mountain News. “There were compromises on both sides.”

The limit on salary building turned out to be a significant blow to ProComp’s reputation with teachers. Another qualm teachers have with the system is that the size of the bonuses can fluctuate from year to year, making their paychecks unpredictable.

For example, the bonus given to teachers at “top performing” schools with high test scores, and “high growth” schools where students showed progress, shrunk this year from $2,400 to $1,000.

The reason why illustrates another issue with ProComp. In the early days, the tax generated more money than the district spent, which built up a fund balance. But as the district grew and more teachers joined ProComp, the opposite became true. To get ProComp back in the black, district officials said they and the union agreed to shrink the size of the bonus for teachers at “top performing” and “high growth” schools.

Denver Superintendent Susana Cordova listens to a packed room of teachers during a brief resumption of negotiations between the district and the teachers union.

The criteria for earning incentives can also be frustrating for teachers. If a school’s demographics or rating change, even by a small amount, teachers can lose that money — something union leaders say is driving educators out of Denver Public Schools.

“Teachers don’t want money and incentives they could lose at any moment,” Jess Schneider, an English teacher at the district-run Noel Community Arts School, said at a union rally in December. “We want reliable, predictable, and sustainable pay.”

Special education teacher Maren Jorgensen told Chalkbeat last year that the loss of certain bonuses and incentives meant she was making less money in her eighth year of teaching than she had in her first. She said she planned to leave Denver Public Schools for a teaching job in Minnesota, where she’d be making $22,000 more per year.

The average Denver teacher salary this year is $62,095, according to the district. That includes base salary, ProComp incentives, and other stipends.

Not all teachers oppose the bonuses. Alison Corbett teaches at a high-poverty high school in far northeast Denver and earns several thousand dollars in bonuses each year, including a retention bonus for staying in her position. She said that while the extra money isn’t the reason she took the job, she agrees in principle that teachers who work at tougher schools, with students who are more likely to have experienced trauma, should be paid more.

“It feels like an acknowledgement, a nod of the head,” Corbett said.

Does ProComp work?

On its face, it seems as though doling out more money to good teachers who have harder jobs should attract and keep them in those roles. But University of Colorado education Professor Allison Atteberry, who has extensively studied ProComp, said it’s not that simple.

“There’s these, basically, economics-based theories about why this should help, and then there’s the reality of what happens on the ground — and they’re not really meshing,” she said.

In recent research, Atteberry found that student achievement increased more in Denver Public Schools than in neighboring districts since ProComp started — a phenomenon she said can’t be explained away by demographic shifts within the district or other factors.

Other research has established a link between effective teachers and higher student achievement. Atteberry found that under ProComp, Denver did a better job attracting and retaining teachers deemed effective — as measured by their students’ year-over-year academic growth — than other districts. That is evidence that ProComp worked by at least one metric.

But Atteberry could find no evidence that Denver teachers were more likely to work in high-poverty schools under the system. Her paper is still undergoing peer review.

Earlier research by Eleanor Fulbeck of the American Institutes for Research found ProComp bonuses were associated with fewer teachers leaving the district. But the effect was more modest for high-poverty schools — a 7 percent reduction in turnover compared with a 30 percent reduction for the district as a whole — which, she wrote, suggests the extra money does not offset “more substantial issues,” such as the working climate in those schools.

That is significant because Denver Public Schools officials have argued that the high-poverty incentive is critical to closing test score gaps between more and less privileged students, and to keeping good teachers in challenging schools. Yet research finds less impact for those teachers.

Sharyn Kline, a 2nd grade teacher at Park Hill Elementary school wears pins on her lanyard as she sits in a packed room to listen to continued negotiations between DPS teachers and administrators.

More recently, the district has pointed to findings that retention is up 4 percent at schools where teachers receive a “highest-priority incentive,” and that principals feel the bonuses are important recruiting tools. Research in other states shows pay incentives do improve retention, but that modest incentives produce only modest improvements.

Atteberry noted that although studies show ProComp has had some positive effects, it doesn’t mean teachers’ frustration with their pay is unwarranted.

“Somehow all of that money has left teachers feeling undervalued instead of more valued,” Atteberry said of the bonuses and incentives. “It’s a shame.”

A proposed shift

Both the district and the union are now proposing shifting the way ProComp works, while still honoring the intent of the tax increase voters approved in 2005. The limits on salary-building for teachers with more than 14 years of experience would disappear, and the size and number of bonuses would shrink to put more money into teachers’ base pay.

Both sides want to go back to a traditional “steps and lanes” system of raises based on teacher longevity and education. Currently, the district uses “steps and lanes” only to set teachers’ starting salary, with raises dependent on completing certain training and other factors.

Cordova, who became superintendent last month after 30 years as a teacher, principal, and administrator in Denver, has acknowledged that ProComp needs to change.

“I think ProComp was incredibly innovative and groundbreaking at the time — and it’s complicated, it’s hard to follow, and I think it’s hard for teachers to understand what their salary is going to be like,” she said at a forum in December.

But while the district and the union agree on the concept, they differ sharply on the details. The union’s proposal has more “lanes” than the district’s proposal, which means teachers would have more opportunities for raises. They’d also have more ways to earn those raises, because the union wants training courses to count toward lane changes.

The district’s proposal reserves more money for incentives, including a $2,500 retention bonus for teachers who return to work at one of 30 schools deemed “highest-priority.” The union wants to spend that money to increase the base salaries of all teachers.

An estimate released Monday by the Colorado Office of State Planning and Budgeting found the union’s proposal would cost about $8 million more than the district’s in the first year the new system would be in effect. But the labor dispute is about more than money or even philosophy. It’s rooted in a lack of trust that teachers say stems from more than a decade of school reform experiments, of which ProComp is an especially tangible example.

“They keep moving the cheese,” said Bobb, the recently retired teacher who participated in the ProComp pilot. “The cheese gets moved every freaking year. That’s why teachers have just reached this breaking point of, ‘Quit yanking us around.’”

Erica Meltzer contributed to this report.

Denver teachers union rejects latest district offer as a ‘waste of time’

2019-02-01T03:01:07+00:00

The Denver teachers union rejected the school district’s latest attempt Thursday to avert a teacher strike: a new offer that would boost the district’s proposal to increase what it spends on teacher pay by an extra $3 million, and fund two additional years of cost-of-living raises.

In all, the district’s offer would invest an additional $50 million into teacher pay over the next three years, officials said. But it still doesn’t meet the demands of the union, whose members are prepared to walk out of their classrooms in protest.

District officials had barely gotten through explaining their proposal before union negotiators asked to meet in private to discuss the deal. The crowd of at least 100 teachers and supporters in red T-shirts watching the exchange began chanting, “If they won’t pay us, shut it down!”

When union negotiators returned less than an hour later, they apologized to the crowd for “wasting your time.” Of district negotiators, lead union negotiator Rob Gould said, “They didn’t bring a proposal tonight. They brought a small IOU.”

An hour and a half after negotiations started, they were over.

“The offer you have brought today is an example of your inability to listen to our educators,” Gould told Denver Superintendent Susana Cordova and her team. He reminded her that teachers are ready to strike. “From this day forward, you will have no choice but to listen.”

The district and the union are negotiating how to revamp ProComp, Denver Public Schools’ system of bonuses and incentives that teachers receive on top of their base pay. Thursday was the first time negotiators met since talks broke down Jan. 18 and teachers voted to strike.

The two sides have been in a holding pattern since last week, when the district requested state intervention in the hopes it could help broker a deal. The union opposes intervention. Colorado Gov. Jared Polis has until Feb. 11 to decide whether to get involved. Teachers cannot legally strike while a decision is pending.

The $50 million the district offered on Thursday would break down like this: an additional $20.5 million in the 2019-20 school year, an additional $3 million plus a cost-of-living raise in 2020-21, and another cost-of-living raise in 2021-22. The size of the cost-of-living raises would likely be from 2.7 to 3 percent, said Mark Ferrandino, the district’s chief financial officer.

Both the district and the union want to simplify ProComp, but they disagree on how much money should be invested into base pay versus bonuses. The union favors higher base pay and smaller bonuses, while the district wants to keep certain bonuses more robust.

Before Thursday, the cost of the district and union proposals differed by about $8.5 million (though some estimates put the two sides even farther apart). The offer the district made on Thursday would shrink that gap by about a third.

Superintendent Cordova started Thursday’s bargaining session by emphasizing that she’d prefer to reach a deal before state officials decide whether to intervene.

“As the superintendent and as a DPS parent, I know how much stress this is causing on our entire system,” said Cordova, who has a daughter in high school.

After the union ended the talks, Cordova told a gaggle of television cameras she was disappointed the union hadn’t offered a counterproposal.

“It’s really unfortunate we are where we are right now,” she said. “We’d set up tonight to negotiate from 5 o’clock to 8 o’clock. It’s not even 7 o’clock.”

Union supporters filtered back into the room. A group of children stood behind her, holding signs with messages such as, “I Stand with Teachers.” Adults shouted as she answered reporters’ questions, and a man with a drum started a chant of, “Shame! Shame! Shame!”

Cordova gathered her laptop and left.

But after the crowd dispersed, she and her team returned to stage their own form of protest: sitting at the empty negotiating table, laptops open, until the appointed ending time of 8 o’clock.

Denver teachers are on the brink of a strike. Here’s how we got here and what could be next.

2019-01-30T23:10:15+00:00

For the first time in 25 years, Denver teachers are fed up enough to walk out.

Last week, 93 percent of Denver Classroom Teachers Association members who voted supported going on strike. The vote came after teacher pay negotiations between the teachers union and the school district broke down Jan. 18, leaving the teachers without a contract that governs the district’s complicated salary-and-bonus system.

The day after the strike vote, Denver Public Schools asked state labor officials to intervene and try to broker a deal between the two sides. That request put the strike on hold. The union has since filed a response asking the state to stay out of it.

Gov. Jared Polis has until Feb. 11 to decide whether to get involved. Teachers cannot legally strike while a decision is pending.

While the district and the union wait for the answer, their negotiators are returning to the bargaining table. The two sides are set to meet Thursday at 5 p.m.

How did we get here and what happens next? This Q&A is meant to answer those questions.

Ninety-three percent favoring a strike is a landslide. How many teachers voted?
It’s unclear. The strike vote was an internal union matter, and the union has not released the numbers. Leaders did say the election was conducted electronically by a third party.

Is it certain the teachers will go on strike?
No. A strike could be averted if the union and the district reach a deal.

If it’s not averted, when would a strike start?
It depends on how quickly Polis makes a decision about whether to intervene — and what he ultimately decides. If the state intervenes, that could delay a strike by up to 180 days as a mediator or fact-finder works with the two sides to reach an agreement.

If the state does not act, teachers could strike immediately.

One important note: Polis could stay out of it for now but choose to intervene later.

Is it just teachers who are going on strike?
No. The Denver Classroom Teachers Association represents teachers and “specialized service providers,” which include school nurses, counselors, physical therapists, speech language pathologists, and others. Union members are often referred to collectively as “educators.” In all, the union represents about 5,600 Denver educators.

But not all educators are members of the union. Before the strike vote, the union president said 64 percent of district educators were members. It’s likely higher now. Educators can choose whether or not to strike, regardless of their union membership.

Would schools be closed during a strike?
Denver Public Schools Superintendent Susana Cordova has said schools will remain open if teachers walk out. The district has been recruiting substitute teachers to fill in, as well as delivering to schools boxes of lesson plans for the subs to teach.

But there have also been signs that some schools could close. An internal letter from Cordova to the district’s central office employees says they are expected to deploy to schools to work as substitute teachers or in non-instructional roles unless they face “extenuating circumstances.” Those circumstances could include caring for a child “who is also a DPS student whose school was authorized to close by the superintendent.”

There is no set student-to-teacher ratio that schools must maintain, either by state law or district policy. A district spokesperson said officials will determine whether to close schools on a case-by-case basis: “If we anticipate any risk to student safety based on an inability to provide appropriate supervision, we will close the school or make the determination to offer meals only.”

Even if schools are open, should families send their children or keep them home?
The answer to this question is likely a personal one. Working parents will have to weigh whether they can afford to take time off to stay home with their children or find child care. Some families depend on school to provide meals, mental health support, or nursing care to their children.

District officials have promised that academic learning in schools will continue during a strike, and they have assured families that students won’t be watching movies all day.

The teachers union is encouraging families to send their children to school — but for a different reason. “We encourage parents to send their students to school if their school building remains open,” the union wrote in an FAQ document. “Student safety is paramount for all district schools, therefore the district will be obliged to close schools if safety becomes an issue due to limited staffing.”

The document added, “One major goal of a strike is for school buildings to be shut down as a demonstration of the essential labor performed by educators.”

What about innovation schools and charter schools?
Innovation schools are run by the district, so a strike would affect them. Charter schools are not, so a strike would not affect them. Charter schools would operate normally.

How long would a strike last?
It’s impossible to say. But it is possible to look at history. The last teacher strike in Denver, in 1994, lasted a week. A strike last year by teachers in the southern Colorado city of Pueblo also lasted a week. And a strike earlier this month by Los Angeles teachers lasted about a week, too.

Exactly why are educators ready to strike?
The strike would be an attempt to pressure the district into giving the union what it wants — a new pay structure and more money for teacher salaries.

Denver’s educator pay system, called ProComp, allows teachers and specialized service providers to earn bonuses and incentives on top of their base salary for things like working in a hard-to-fill position or a high-poverty school.

Who qualifies for which bonuses and the size of those bonuses can change from year to year. Educators say that makes their pay unpredictable, and that by funneling lots of money into incentives instead of base pay, ProComp has diminished their long-term earning potential. The union wants a system that invests more money into base salaries and less into bonuses.

Why can’t the two sides agree?
The disagreement is part philosophical and part financial.

The philosophical disagreement is about whether the bonuses and incentives are valuable. Voters agreed to fund them by approving a tax increase in 2005 — so nixing them would mean forfeiting about $33 million in tax money this year. That’s only a portion of the more than $400 million the district spends on teacher pay, but neither side wants to lose it.

Instead, the union wants to shrink the size and number of the bonuses and incentives, while the district is pushing to keep certain incentives more robust.

For instance, the district wants to offer a $2,500 bonus to educators who work at a high-poverty school as a way to ensure vulnerable students have good teachers. The union’s proposal calls for that same incentive to be $1,750, with the difference going to base pay.

The two sides also disagree on how much of the district’s $1 billion budget should be spent on educator compensation. Both agree it should be more — but they differ in how much more.

When negotiations broke down on Jan. 18, about $8.5 million separated the cost of the union and district proposals on their face. Different analyses have yielded larger cost differences.

District officials have so far proposed investing an additional $20 million into teacher pay, partly by promising cuts to central administration. Union leaders want to continue to negotiate for more than that. The cost of the union’s proposal is about $28 million.

‘This was wrong,’ says Denver schools chief of email threat to immigrant teachers

2019-01-26T00:17:16+00:00

Less than three weeks into her tenure as Denver schools superintendent, Susana Cordova stood in the lobby of the district’s downtown headquarters Friday afternoon and apologized.

Ringed by television cameras, Cordova said she was shocked the evening before to learn that a district human resources employee had sent an email to schools on Tuesday that said immigrant teachers working in Denver Public Schools on visas would be reported to immigration authorities if they participated in an impending teacher strike.

“This was wrong,” said Cordova, flanked by three Denver school board members. “I cannot begin to express how shocked I was to learn of this message, and how deeply sorry I am for the anxiety and fear this has caused our educators, our families, and our community.”

The district will not report to authorities the names of any employees who walk off the job, Cordova said. Of the district’s approximately 5,600 educators, 128 of them are here on H-1B and J-1 immigrant visas, a district spokesperson said.

Immigrant educators have the right to participate in a strike, Cordova emphasized. “They can exercise that right without fear that they will be reported to immigration,” she said.

The email, which was leaked on social media, sparked admonishment from teachers, parents, community leaders — and even Denver Mayor Michael Hancock. The mayor took to Facebook Friday morning to say the message, even if it was a mistake, was “unconscionable.”

“DPS must take immediate and corrective action,” he wrote.

No employees were put on leave as a result of the email, Cordova said. The district is taking steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again, she said. She did not elaborate on what they are.

The email was particularly jarring in a school district with a large number of immigrant students whose school board has passed numerous resolutions vowing to create a welcoming environment and protect students from heavy-handed immigration enforcement.

The Colorado People’s Alliance, a racial justice organization that shared the email on Facebook, wrote: “If DPS claims to want to welcome and protect their immigrant students, why are they lying to and intimidating their immigrant teachers about their right to strike?”

People also took to Twitter to condemn the district.

“How do you ‘erroneously’ send out a letter threatening your immigrant staff?” tweeted one person. “Straight thuggery.”

“I work with teachers that received this threatening email,” tweeted another. “Sickening.”

Shelley Flanagan, a reading intervention teacher at Valdez Elementary, a dual language school, said several of her colleagues took the district at face value that they could not strike.

“They believed what they were told,” she said. “We believed what we were told.”

All of this comes at a time when tensions between the community and Denver Public Schools, which have long been strained, are particularly high. The Denver teachers union voted earlier this week to strike after teacher pay negotiations with the district fell apart.

The strike is temporarily on hold while Colorado Gov. Jared Polis weighs whether to grant the district’s request for state officials to try to broker a deal between the two sides.

In the lobby Friday, Cordova tried to explain what led to the erroneous email being sent. In preparing for a potential teacher strike, she said district officials asked a law firm specializing in immigrant visas whether a strike might have negative impacts on immigrant teachers, “and how we could take the appropriate steps to protect them if they choose to strike.”

The law firm advised the district it would have to notify the U.S. Department of Labor of the strike. That message was “misinterpreted” by human resources staff, said Cordova. She added that she doesn’t think there was any “malicious intent” behind the email, though the employee who sent it did not follow the district protocol for such communications.

Denver Public Schools is a diverse urban district with about 93,000 students. Roughly 70,000 of them are students of color, with more than 50,000 students identifying as Hispanic.

Cordova acknowledged that the threat expressed in the email, even if erroneous, has damaged trust between the immigrant community and the district. The superintendent said she is “fully committed” to working to repair that trust.

She also pointed to several recent actions the district has taken to support immigrant students and families. Shortly after President Trump was elected in November 2016, the district assured families worried about heightened immigration enforcement that it would not share students’ immigration status with federal authorities. In early 2018, the Denver school board passed a resolution pledging to “stand shoulder-to-shoulder” with undocumented students.

Denver Public Schools was also the first school district in the country to hire educators granted work permits and exemption from deportation through President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known colloquially as DACA.

“As a school district, we have been resolute in our opposition to sharing any information that could negatively impact the rights of our immigrant populations,” Cordova said. “Sharing such information would run directly counter to our core beliefs.”

Her comments were echoed by the three school board members in attendance: Lisa Flores, Jennifer Bacon, and Barbara O’Brien, who is vice president of the board.

“We do not believe in intimidation,” Bacon said, “and we do not believe in discrimination.”

Negotiations poised to resume as Denver teachers plead with district to raise pay

2019-01-25T06:07:16+00:00

As Colorado’s governor weighs whether to intervene to head off a teacher strike in the state’s largest school district, Denver teachers packed a school board meeting Thursday night to press their demand for higher pay. They marched on the sidewalk in front of district headquarters, chanted in the lobby, and took turns giving sometimes emotional testimony to the board.

“I’m striking because I spend 182 days a year supporting and helping raise other people’s children, but my husband and I can’t afford to have children of our own,” said Bridget Stephenson-McKee, a third-grade teacher at Force Elementary, as she fought back tears.

Denver Public Schools Superintendent Susana Cordova said Thursday that the district and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association have agreed to continue negotiations while they wait to hear if state officials will intervene. A date for negotiations has not yet been set; Cordova said the two sides are working on it.

Union President Henry Roman said that to make any progress toward an agreement, the district needs to come to the table with more money. The two sides are separated by about $8 million.

“They need to be ready to bargain,” Roman said.

Meanwhile, the district continues to prepare for how to keep schools open if teachers walk out. Cordova sent a letter Tuesday to employees who work in the central office making clear the expectation that they will be deployed to schools to work as substitute teachers or in non-instructional roles, such as hall monitors.

Central office employees, who include many administrators, will not be allowed to take vacation or personal leave from “now through the strike period” unless their time off was previously approved or they face “extenuating circumstances.”

Employees who refuse to follow the directive could face corrective action, district spokesperson Anna Alejo confirmed. District officials did not specify what corrective action means in this instance, but generally, it could include getting fired.

Teachers are also reporting pressure to stay on the job. On social media, some shared a letter from a district human resources employee that said immigrant teachers here on visas would be reported to immigration authorities if they don’t show up to work. The district later apologized, saying the human resources employee was mistaken.

The district must report a strike to the U.S. Department of Labor, but it will not tell the government the names of employees who choose to walk off the job, Alejo said. Immigrant employees cannot have their visas revoked for going on strike, according to a fact sheet prepared by the law firm that processes visas for Denver Public Schools.

Cordova previously said teachers have a legal right to strike and that “bad behavior” from administrators would not be tolerated.

Teacher pay negotiations fell apart last Friday when the union rejected the district’s latest offer. Union officials announced Tuesday that teachers voted overwhelmingly to strike.

On Wednesday, district officials requested intervention from the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment. Union officials say they don’t want state intervention, which could delay a strike for as long as six months, though they have not yet filed a formal response. Once the union notifies state labor officials of its position, Gov. Jared Polis has 14 days to make a decision. Teachers cannot legally walk off the job until that decision is made.

Polis, a Democrat, has encouraged the two sides to keep negotiating in the meantime. A decision to intervene could be politically fraught, as many of the same progressive groups that swept Democrats into office in November also back the teachers union.

The district and the union are negotiating how to revamp the district’s pay-for-performance system, known as ProComp. It pays teachers bonuses and incentives on top of their base salary for things such as working in a high-poverty school or a hard-to-fill position.

But teachers say those bonuses make their pay unpredictable, and that funneling so much money into incentives over the past decade has gutted their base pay. The union wants a system that invests more money into base salaries and less into bonuses.

The district is pushing for certain incentives it sees as key to ensuring vulnerable students have good teachers, including a $2,500 bonus for teaching at a high-poverty school.

The district’s last proposal was to invest more than $20 million additional dollars into teacher pay. The union’s proposal calls for investing closer to $28 million in additional money.

At the legislature, House Majority Leader Alec Garnett lobbied Joint Budget Committee members to turn a mid-year adjustment in school funding into an opportunity to give Denver — along with other districts — more money to help them meet teacher demands.

Garnett said he thought there might be an opportunity to close some of the gap between the district and the union, but the answer was no. Moving money around for this purpose would have complicated budget consequences. State Sen. Rachel Zenzinger, an Arvada Democrat who serves on the budget committee, said it’s not the role of the legislature to head off a strike.

On Thursday night, the teachers who marched on the sidewalk, crammed into the school board meeting, and filled an upstairs overflow room demanded the district find the money. “What do we want? Fair pay!” they shouted in the lobby. “When do we want it? Now!”

Rebecca Ryan, a teacher who works at Gilliam School, a public school inside a youth detention center, gave a poignant example of how low pay has affected her family. A single mother of three children, Ryan said she has to rely on food banks because she can’t afford groceries.

“Look me in the eye,” she said to the board, “and tell me why it is okay that you guys have all this money you’re putting in central administration, and I can’t feed my (expletive) children.”

The teachers in the audience erupted in cheers.

Erica Meltzer contributed reporting.

As charter strike enters second day, Chicago agencies offer care for students out of school

2018-12-05T04:30:00+00:00

Negotiations between the Acero charter school network and its 500 teachers stalled Tuesday night, prompting union officials to announce that the nation’s first-ever charter strike will extend a second day.

Meanwhile, public and community organizations such as the Chicago Park District and the YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago stepped in to help the families of some 7,000 students whose schools will be closed.

Acero management did not offer a comment on Tuesday.

The 500-member union representing teachers said that Acero management and teachers remained “far apart” on class size, compensation for paraprofessionals, and sanctuary school language in the contract.

In Spanish and English, Acero officials offered its families guidance through robo-calls and messages on Acero schools’ websites and answering machines. The Rauner YMCA in Little Village and Lake View YMCA opened from 7 a.m. to offer daycamps to students ages 6 to 12.

Only five children showed up to the Lake View location on the strike’s first day, but Aileen Tormon, the YMCA’s director of communications, said the organization expected that number to increase if the strike wasn’t resolved.

“We anticipate a larger number of children coming to the Y for programming tomorrow,” she said on Tuesday.

At the Chicago Park District, eight parks have been staffed to accommodate up to 540 students, a spokeswoman said. Families were encouraged to register online for child care offered from 8:30 a.m. to 3:30 p.m. at McKinley, Dvorak, Piotrowski, Riis, Warren, Independence, Gage and Humboldt parks.

For some in the majority-Latino communities served by the Acero network, the walkout reminded them of the ongoing concerns about equity and resource distribution in their neighborhoods.

Maria Mauricio, a parent with first- and third-graders at Acero’s Veterans Memorial School Campus, said she has chosen the network for her children because she believed that the school with a Level 1-plus rating, the district’s highest, would offer a better education than her neighborhood elementary schools in West Lawn.

But when she volunteered at the school, she saw firsthand the large class sizes and overworked staff.

“I have so much respect for the teachers. I don’t know how they can handle so many students,” said Mauricio, who joined teachers on the picket line on Tuesday. “It concerns me because I wonder how much attention they are giving my child.”

Around 95 percent of the network’s students are Latino, and almost half are English language learners. Acero serves a heavily low-income population as well — around 93 percent qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, a proxy for poverty.

How Karen Lewis’ own story follows the arc of Chicago’s contentious education history

2018-11-26T20:30:49+00:00

This fall marks 55 years since a massive student boycott to protest segregation in Chicago schools, and six years since a strike aimed at improving conditions for teachers. A new book by University of Illinois at Chicago historian Elizabeth Todd-Breland examines that history that unites those two events — and how that history relates to the racial politics of education policy change in Chicago. This excerpt is from the epilogue of “A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago Since the 1960s.”

In the fall of 1968, a black student boycotted Kenwood High School on the South Side of Chicago for several consecutive Mondays. She did not act alone but was part of a movement of tens of thousands of black students at high schools across the city.

These were not spontaneous walkouts. Her father drove her and her friends to and from organizing meetings where the students outlined their demands for more black teachers and administrators, the incorporation of black history into the curriculum, and improved facilities at predominantly black schools in the city. Her parents worried that she would be arrested but encouraged her and supported her activism. Collectively, these boycotts nearly shut down several predominantly black schools in the city and compelled the superintendent of schools to concede to a number of the students’ demands.

In 1968 this lone student’s voice would not necessarily have stood out among the many young voices of protest in the city. In the 2010s, however, it would be difficult to miss her. This high school student was Karen Lewis (née Jennings), future president of the Chicago Teachers Union and the face and voice of the 2012 Chicago teachers’ strike that once again brought the city’s education system to a halt and elicited concessions from previously intractable city authorities.

Karen Lewis’s political trajectory maps onto much of the history documented in this book. Her parents were black migrants to Chicago who became CPS teachers. While not on the front lines of black teacher organizing, her parents were part of a generation of black educators who struggled against racist barriers to certification and leveraged the hard-earned benefits of unionization for employment gains.

Lewis attended Kenwood, a high school born of desegregation debates during the mid-1960s and founded as an intentionally integrated school. But Lewis’s protests at Kenwood in 1968 were for Black Power, not integration.

When she first started teaching chemistry in CPS in the 1980s, Lewis admired [Chicago’s first black Mayor] Harold Washington and CTU President Jacqueline Vaughn as leaders and symbols of black political power, but she wasn’t particularly involved in the union. Lewis’s political trajectory underscores the permeability of different black political ideologies and the importance of understanding black political perspectives historically, intergenerationally, and relationally, rather than oppositionally and out of context.

Lewis benefited from the earlier struggles of black teachers, but the bulk of her teaching career during the 1990s and 2000s coincided with the decline in black teacher organizing. Lewis worked at two selective enrollment schools: majority-white Lane Technical High School on the North Side and majority-black King College Preparatory High School on the South Side. She supported the idea of using magnet and selective enrollment schools to promote integration but also acknowledged the failure of that strategy.

Mayor Richard M. Daley had brokered labor peace with the CTU while stratifying public schooling with new charter, selective enrollment, and magnet schools. In 2008, dismayed by increased privatization and attacks on public education, Lewis started attending reading groups, speaking out at Board of Education meetings, and working to restrict charter school expansion with a new CTU caucus, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators. Lewis recalled that working with this group “reminded me of my student activism days in the sixties, so I felt like I was right back to where I started from. It was just like this full circle thing.”

The emergent Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, initially organized by white leftist teachers, participated in citywide progressive coalitions and organized alongside parent and community groups across the city that were pushing back against school closings, the proliferation of charter schools, and issues related to racial and economic inequality that impacted CPS families, the majority of which were low-income black and Latinx families.

In 2010, CTU members voted to replace the by-then complacent CTU leadership with Karen Lewis and the other members of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators. This signaled a renewed commitment to the type of community organizing forged by Lillie Peoples and other black educators during the 1960s and 1970s. The insurgency of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators developed from the ground up with teachers, parents, and community members working together. Teachers were once again organizing in the communities where their students lived, fighting back against city education reform plans that disproportionately impacted black communities.

As a primary antagonist of the corporatist regime in the city, Lewis’s trajectory is firmly situated in Chicago’s long history of black protest politics and community organizing. However, running parallel to this history is the formidable history of more top-down autocratic political and corporate power.

Nationally, Republicans and Democrats have come together to support neoliberal education reform policies. These policies encouraged reforms that prioritized competition, privatization, school closings and “turnarounds,” charter school expansion, and a reliance on standardized testing. Democratic president Barack Obama, a Chicagoan and the first black president of the United States, ran on a platform of change in 2008. However, in the realm of education he largely advanced the policies of his predecessors, nationally and locally: Republican President George W. Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind law at the federal level and Democratic Mayor Richard M. Daley’s Renaissance 2010 education reform policies in Chicago.

Together these policies opened the door for high-stakes testing, school closings, and the expansion of “school choice” through charter schools. Obama appointed Arne Duncan, CPS CEO and Paul Vallas’s successor, to serve as the U.S. secretary of education, further elevating Chicago’s corporate-style education policies as a model for education reform efforts nationally.

Duncan oversaw Obama’s major education initiative, Race to the Top, which mirrored on the national level many of the policies that Daley and Duncan had administered in Chicago. Race to the Top required states looking for federal education funds to compete, and emphasized new standards and accountability measures, charter school expansion, and test-based assessment of teachers and schools. While Chicago policies and officials contributed to the Obama administration’s national political agenda, Obama administration officials also cycled back to Chicago—most significantly Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s White House chief of staff.

Buoyed by Obama’s blessing, Rahm Emanuel was elected mayor of Chicago in 2011. Emanuel furthered Mayor Daley’s Renaissance 2010 plans, embracing corporate education reform and “school choice” plans that opened new charter schools and “turned around,” consolidated, or closed more than 150 public schools, including the closure of approximately 50 schools in 2013— at the time the largest intentional mass closure of schools in recent U.S. history.

In engineering the school closures, Emanuel argued that the logic of corporate reorganization and the market necessitated right-sizing measures to remedy the city’s failing school system. However, Emanuel and his school officials toggled inconsistently between justifications for closing schools based on under-enrollment or “under-utilization” and closings because of academic underperformance.

As had been the case for decades, black students, parents, and communities were dissatisfied with the status quo in many of their under-resourced neighborhood schools. However, they questioned why the schools had to be closed instead of improved. The CTU and community members also questioned definitions of under-enrollment that assessed full utilization at over thirty students to a classroom. In accounts by city and school officials, the history and policies that displaced and depopulated black communities and produced under-enrolled schools were erased.

Adapted from A Political Education: Black Politics and Education Reform in Chicago by Elizabeth Todd-Breland. Copyright © 2018 by Elizabeth Todd-Breland. Published by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher.

Chicago’s Acero teachers vote 98% to authorize first-ever charter school strike

2018-10-30T23:48:31+00:00

Teachers at 15 Acero schools overwhelmingly voted Tuesday evening to authorize a strike, setting the stage for the first walkout in the nation by teachers at a charter network.

With a 96 percent turnout of the estimated 500 union-represented Acero Teachers, 98 percent of members voted to grant a strike authorization. The teachers union can now announce a strike date if contract negotiations reach an impasse, according to the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ChiACTS).

Acero, formerly named UNO, is the largest unionized charter-school operator in Chicago Public Schools. Its contract with teachers expired Aug. 2 and was extended until Oct. 3. But talks have been stalled, union officials said.

If teachers do walk out, it could be the country’s first charter school strike, union leaders said.

At issue in the contract negotiations are higher pay, increased diversity among teaching staff in majority Latino schools, smaller class sizes, better special education services and teacher evaluations.

Chicago International Charter Schools teachers will also take a strike authorization vote Friday.

Why Chicago charter educators say now is the moment for historic strike

2018-10-24T22:12:18+00:00

Caroline Rutherford is an art teacher at Donald J. Marquez Elementary, which is run by the charter operator Acero Schools. When Acero teachers take a strike authorization vote next Tuesday, she said she’ll participate because she feels it is the only way to push management to recognize her needs in the classroom.

“We don’t want 32 kids in our classroom,” said Rutherford, who teaches kindergarten through eighth grade.

Teachers from several charter operators, including Acero and Chicago International Charter School, announced Wednesday that strike authorization votes are coming next week because contract negotiations have stalled.

At issue in the contract negotiations are teacher pay, class sizes, and better special education services. The Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff, which represents 34 charter schools in Chicago, said 19 will hold votes to authorize a strike against the companies that run the schools. Acero teachers will take their strike authorization vote on Tuesday, while Chicago International Charter Schools teachers will take votes on Nov. 2.

In a statement, Helena Stangle, chief external affairs officer of Acero, told Chalkbeat that the company would do its best to avoid a strike: “We have worked in earnest to reach an agreement that provides a reasonable and competitive compensation package to our teachers and staff, while maintaining the best possible educational outcomes for our students.”

Acero, formerly named UNO, is the largest unionized charter-school operator in Chicago Public Schools. Its contract with teachers expired Aug. 2, but was extended until Oct. 3.

Charter unions are a relatively new phenomenon. Chris Baehrend, who is chair of the charter union, said that charters have never gone on strike before, but they are ready for this to be the first time. “We are using our collective action to put the industry in its place.”

At a press conference Wednesday outside the Acero board meeting, teachers told Chalkbeat they want to see charter management fees diverted for classroom use. Sarah Jones, a second-grade teacher at Octavio Paz Elementary, part of the Acero network, says that her students spend recess running up and down the sidewalk.

“Really we’re just looking for the money that the network has to be put into our classrooms. We want a playground,” said Jones. “I teach second grade, they desperately need a place to play. I am hoping that is something we can get.”

For Luz Serrano, who teaches ninth-grade social studies at Acero’s Major Hector P. Garcia M.D. High School, the issue is smaller class sizes.

“There is not enough time, and there are not enough adults,” she said, “even with assistance from special ed teachers, even with assistance from paraprofessionals, to be able to reach all the students.”

Teachers from the 34 charter schools voted to join the Chicago Teachers Union last summer but each school is organized under a separate contract. CTU President Jesse Sharkey said Wednesday that charter teachers and paraprofessionals were “woefully underpaid and overworked” and highlighted “a perilous lack of funding for basic services.”

The president of the Illinois Network of Charter Schools, Andrew Broy, said in a statement to Chalkbeat that he was disappointed to hear about the call for a strike authorization vote, and that the reasoning for the vote was erroneous.

“Charter public schools continue to be underfunded relative to other public schools,” Broy said. “INCS is therefore saddened by CTU and ChiACTS leadership in moving to authorize a strike vote, potentially disrupting the lives of thousands of students and their families.”

Crumbling Detroit school buildings will cost $500 million to repair. It’s money the district doesn’t have

2018-06-22T16:38:07+00:00

The buildings in Michigan’s largest school district have been so neglected and so poorly maintained for so long that a new review put the price tag for bringing them up to current standards at half a billion dollars — money the district says it doesn’t have.

“We would have to dramatically cut personnel to even put a dent in this problem,” Superintendent Nikolai Vitti told the school board’s finance committee during a meeting at the district’s Fisher building headquarters Friday morning. “And even then, we would not be able to make substantial improvement.”

The review, whose results one school board member called “tragically awful,” was conducted over the last several months by an architecture and engineering firm called OHM advisors. It assessed the condition of the 106 buildings that currently house district schools, including roofs, interiors, and systems like plumbing and electrical.

It found that nearly a third of school buildings are in an “unsatisfactory” or “poor” condition, while roughly a third are considered in good repair.

The review did not take into account 19 vacant buildings that the district owns and is responsible for securing and maintaining so that they don’t become a danger to the community.

That means that the “unbelievably frustrating” picture painted by the review “undershoots” the problem, said school board member Sonya Mays, the finance committee chairwoman.

What makes the situation even more extreme is the fact that the Detroit district does not have the same ability to borrow money for construction projects that other Michigan districts do.

When the state spent $617 million to create the new Detroit Public Schools Community District in 2016, the new law freed the new district from millions of dollars in debt that had hobbled the old Detroit Public Schools. But it put restrictions on the new district’s ability to borrow money.

Instead, the $617 million included $25 million for buildings improvements — including some pressing repairs that became national news that year when teachers walked out of their classrooms to protest building conditions, shutting down schools for days.

Vitti said much of that $25 million has been spent or is committed this year for projects like the the repair of the roof at the Palmer Park Preparatory Academy, an elementary school that’s been closed for months since a leaky roof triggered a mold problem. Students at the school finished out the school year in a different building.

“The $25 million is literally a drop in the bucket of what the overall need is,” Vitti told the finance committee.

He called for an urgent discussion to figure out which buildings should be repaired, which ones should be replaced, and which ones should be considered for closure.

“What we’ve done in this review is at least define the problem,” Vitti said. “Now that we have solid data … we will have to think broadly and deeply” about what to do next.

Options could include returning to Lansing for additional help from the state or partnering with businesses or philanthropy to raise private funds for repairs.

Vitti noted that if nothing is done to repair these buildings, the cost of bringing them up to acceptable standards will swell to $1.2 billion by 2023.

“If we don’t make a high level of investment, which frankly we do not have the revenue to do, this problem only compounds itself in the years to come,” Vitti said.

Scroll down to see the presentation Vitti gave to the finance committee, which includes specifics on which schools are most in need of work.

Fifty years ago, teacher oustings that led to New York City’s massive teacher strikes

2018-05-10T10:00:33+00:00

Fifty years ago, 19 letters forever altered the course of New York City’s public schools.

On May 9, 1968, the community school board in Ocean Hill-Brownsville sent termination letters to 19 educators, most from J.H.S. 271 — setting in motion a chain of events that would lead to bitter teachers strikes and eventually a total reorganization of the nation’s largest school system.

A picture of J.H.S 271 from the New York Times magazine. This article is from the New York State archives.

“I think it’s fair to say this is the spark,” said Nick Juravich, a postdoctoral fellow at the New-York Historical Society who has studied the teachers’ dismissal. “This is when what has been a simmering conflict becomes an actual confrontation.”

At the core of that conflict were themes familiar to New York City schools today — racial tension, battles over who should control the schools, and fights over teachers’ rights — but with much higher stakes.

On the heels of failed integration efforts in the 1960s, communities of color — distrustful of the city’s centralized education bureaucracy and frustrated with schools’ poor performance — had spent several years pushing for local control of their schools. By 1967, they had a broad base of support, including Mayor John Lindsay and editorial boards.

“The present system has been failing our children for too long,” a WABC “radio editorial” said in 1967. “The [decentralization] plan has its risks — but it also has one great advantage: It gives the city’s parents a genuine opportunity to do something about their children’s education.”

To test the idea, the city created experimental community school boards in three neighborhoods, including Ocean Hill-Brownsville. But it quickly became clear that the union and local boards had different ideas of what constituted local control.

In May 1968, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville board asserted its newfound strength by dismissing the 13 teachers and six administrators, who were allegedly not on board with neighborhood’s decentralization project. Adding to the tension, the majority of the dismissed educators were white. The move caused chaos, as the central Board of Education told the educators to ignore their dismissal notices and return to work.

It also enraged city union leader Albert Shanker, who said the teachers were victims of “vigilante activity” who had been denied due process, according to a New York Times story from the time.

A piece written by a representative of the United Federation of Teachers called the firings “illegal,” the argument for them “a cruel hoax,” and suggests that much of the animosity towards the teachers is being “controlled by a small group of militants.”

The event set the stage for racially charged conflict between the mainly white and Jewish teachers union and the predominantly black and Hispanic Brooklyn neighborhood. For instance, a black teacher went on the radio and recited a student poem with a Jewish slur, an incident the unions publicized, according to a Daily News story from 2017.

Here’s how the Times would later describe what happened next:

By fall, that dispute had escalated into citywide strikes to protect, the union said, the contractual rights of teachers. Adding to the heat, in a year when there were race riots around the nation, was the fact that a largely white teachers’ union and a predominantly white central power structure were pitted against a black and Puerto Rican community. An uneasy truce finally sent teachers back to work in November.

The New York Times published the city’s proposed decentralization plans. This article is from the New York state archives.

Out of the ashes of the conflict, a new state law required the city’s education department to put together a full decentralization plan. A sprawling map printed in the New York Times in December of 1968 shows some of the first depictions of the school system split into 30 school districts.

The new structure, finalized in 1970, would eventually divide the city into 32 districts with control of the elementary and middle schools, while high schools remained under the control of a central system.

Juravich said that the plan did not satisfy many black and Hispanic parents, since the new districts were too large and lacked certain controls over the hiring of teachers. The boards also became hotbeds of corruption — used to “turn many districts into pork barrels and political bases,” as the Times would later describe.

That structure, of course, did not last forever. In 2002, Mayor Michael Bloomberg convinced the state legislature to grant the mayor control over city schools. While the city is still divided into 32 community school districts, local school boards no longer have much sway over how schools are run.

The Brooklyn middle school, J.H.S. 271, was closed for poor performance in 2008. Today the building houses Eagle Academy for Young Men II, Mott Hall IV, and Uncommon’s Ocean Hill Collegiate Charter School.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that Juravich said the new districts were too large, not too small.

Pueblo teachers are cleared to strike after state regulators decline to intervene

2018-05-02T22:56:50+00:00

Teachers in Pueblo could be on strike as soon as Monday after the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment declined to intervene in a dispute between that district and its unions.

Members of the Pueblo Education Association and the Pueblo Paraprofessional Education Association in the southern Colorado city voted to strike last month after the school board rejected pay raises. Under Colorado law, the unions filed notice of their intent to strike with state regulators, who had the option to intervene to mediate the dispute.

In a ruling issued Wednesday afternoon, Alexandra Hall, director of the state Division of Labor Standards and Statistics, said neither party had submitted a proper request for intervention, and in light of that fact, the division would not intervene.

Because the unions have already filed their notice of intent to strike, there are no legal barriers to the teachers walking off the job at this point, state officials said.

“If circumstances change, we will re-evaluate them,” Hall wrote. “If all parties ask us to intervene to assist in resolving the remaining economic issues, we will.

“We are mindful of the practical disruption of a strike at the end of a school year, especially for graduating high school seniors. The chief responsibility for such disruption rests with the PEA, PPEA, and School District, and we urge them to keep working toward a resolution of this dispute.”

Teacher strikes are rare in Colorado. Denver teachers walked off the job in 1994. Pueblo teachers have never struck before, though they came close in 1998, when state regulators did mediate a resolution. The department’s decision comes less than a week after thousands of teachers rallied at the Capitol for more school funding, an event that was not a strike because teachers used their personal leave to engage in political activity.

In her decision, Hall said she didn’t think the tools available to the division, such as mediation or arbitration, would make a difference at this time.

Pueblo teachers union president Suzanne Ethredge said teachers plan to be on strike starting Monday. They’ll be picketing at several schools, along main roads in Pueblo, and at the district’s administrative offices. Ethredge said they’re hoping for a swift resolution.

“We are certainly hoping it is days and not weeks,” she said. “We hope no more than three to five days.”

Teachers and paraprofessionals in the district want the school board to agree to an independent fact finder’s recommendation for 2 percent cost-of-living raises and an additional $30 a month toward health insurance premiums. Teachers in the district earned an average of $47,617 this year, according to the Colorado Department of Education.

Ethredge said the dispute goes beyond pay, though. Educators want more of a voice in decisions that affect their classrooms, she said.

“We understand it is a disruption, and it’s an unfortunate step that we wish we had not had to take,” she said. “We believe for the long-term health of the district, we need to do this. Educator voices have not been heard on decisions that affect classrooms and students. We hope that, although drastic, the strike will help break that cycle.”

In a statement sent via email, spokesperson Dalton Sprouse said district officials believe the Department of Labor could have asserted jurisdiction for the sake of the public interest. Officials also suggested there could be raises next year.

“We believe that in the 2018-2019 school year, our finances will be more stable, and one that would allow us to provide additional compensation to all employees,” the statement said. “In the event of a strike we will make every effort to continue our educational programming where possible and will take the necessary steps to ensure the safety of our students. We will continue to work to resolve this dispute as soon as possible.”

Since the strike vote on April 20, Pueblo teachers have staged a series of “sick-outs” that have closed at least one school every day, a district spokesman said.

In an email sent earlier Wednesday, before the state ruling, district officials warned teachers that using sick leave in this way was not an allowed use and said that teachers who don’t show up to work will lose both pay and health insurance benefits for those days.

“Effective immediately, members of the professional staff who use excused leave to participate in either ‘sick-outs’ or a strike will be subject to a full salary deduction for each day of absence based on the staff member’s current daily rate of pay,” the email said. “Also, during any period of salary deduction, staff members will be subject to a suspension of benefits.”

This story has been updated to add comments from union president Suzanne Ethredge and district spokesperson Dalton Sprouse.

Sponsor of teacher strike ban won’t jail teachers, but unions are still a target

2018-04-28T01:23:17+00:00

Update: State Sen. Bob Gardner pulled this bill Monday, April 30, saying a lengthy hearing was not in anyone’s interest this late in the session.

Rather than punishing teachers who strike in Colorado, the Republican sponsor of a bill aimed at keeping disgruntled teachers in the classroom plans to amend his legislation to target only their unions.

State Sen. Bob Gardner of Colorado Springs introduced his bill a week before thousands of teachers were expected to arrive at the Capitol for two days of action. This isn’t the first time he’s introduced legislation to restrict the ability of public sector workers to strike, and he decided back in February, when West Virginia teachers walked off the job, that it was time to try again in Colorado.

“I think teachers are very valuable,” he said, comparing them to government workers who perform vital functions, like firefighters and snow plow drivers. “That’s why I don’t want them to strike.”

There already are limits on teachers’ ability to strike. They have to inform state regulators of their intent, and those regulators can intervene to try to broker an agreement. There’s a lengthy cooling off period before teachers can walk. Teacher strikes are relatively rare in Colorado, but when they do occur, Gardner said, “it’s been very difficult.”

The introduced version of the bill says that teachers who violate an injunction to return to work could face fines of up to $500 a day and be jailed for up to six months. They could also be fired with no right to a hearing.

The teacher backlash came fast and furious.

Colorado Education Association President Kerrie Dallman said it was “a clear attempt to limit the voices of educators who are planning to exercise their First Amendment rights and stand up for their students in the face of years of underfunding.”

Gardner doesn’t think the jail provision is as controversial as it was made out to be. Violating an injunction represents contempt of court and jail is always a possible penalty for contempt of court.

“Courts would be very reluctant to jail teachers,” he said.

Nonetheless, Gardner plans to strike that portion of the bill.

“The narrative has been captured by the union,” he said.

In both the original and the revised versions of the bill, unions that strike would face fines of up to $10,000 a day and more significantly, loss of the ability to represent teachers and collect dues for a year. Their collective bargaining agreements would be rendered null and void.

This bill, which is scheduled to be heard in a Senate committee on Monday, will not become law in any form. Democrats who control the House killed a bill earlier this year that restricted union activity by public employees, and this bill goes much further.

Senate President Kevin Grantham, a Cañon City Republican, said he’s not sure there’s enough support to even get the bill out of the Senate.

Gardner said he knows the political realities, but he believes strongly that public sector workers shouldn’t strike.

“The teachers union is in my view the most powerful lobby in this building,” he said. “They are not without a voice.”

Why these Colorado educators are prepared to strike: ‘Teachers are walking into classrooms that are not funded’

2018-04-23T22:47:58+00:00

Teachers in Pueblo are prepared to join a national movement of educator activism and walk out of their classrooms later this year if their demand for a 2 percent raise isn’t met.

Members of the Pueblo Education Association, the southern Colorado town’s teachers union, voted last week to authorize a strike after the local school board rejected a third party recommendation that the district provide the cost-of-living pay increase the teachers were seeking during this year’s contract negotiations.

As part of its rationale for rejecting teacher raises, the board cited other budget priorities, a desire to protect funding reserves, and raises given to most teachers in the past two years. The average teacher salary this year in Pueblo is $47,617, according to state data.

The board’s vote came after the district recently decided to go to a four-day week, in part as a cost-saving measure.

The extraordinary vote — the last teacher strike in Colorado occurred in 1994 — took place as teachers across the country have left their classrooms over demands for better salaries and more school funding. So far, teachers in West Virginia and Oklahoma have staged weeklong strikes. Arizona teachers are also preparing to leave their lesson plans behind.

“I think both movements, both nationally and locally, show that teachers have had enough,” Suzanne Etheridge, the Pueblo teachers union president said. “Teachers are walking into classrooms that are not funded.”

For the moment, Pueblo teachers are still in their classrooms. A strike can’t take place until after the state decides in early May whether it will step in to broker a deal.

Etheridge, in an interview with Chalkbeat, discussed the circumstances that led teachers in the 16,000-student school district to take such “drastic” action, how the national climate is fueling their effort, and how the looming strike could be resolved.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. (Click here to read the district’s statement on the union’s vote to strike.)

Negotiations between the union and the district have been tense before. What’s different this time? Why did you go all the way to taking a vote for a strike?
I think what’s different this time is the true lack of openness during this round of bargaining. Although the district has accused us of never coming off our demand for 2.8 percent, which was our initial request, they also stuck to zero the whole entire time. There were also some issues, some discussions we should have had but never happened. We were invited to one budget summit that consisted of a sit-and-listen to somebody lecture the school board. So, it was just the real lack of openness and transparency through this process.

What finally tipped the balance was when the school board took its vote. Some of the comments made really angered our teachers. It felt like we were being publicly lectured asking for a cost-of-living increase. One of our board members went on about the value of younger teachers versus more experienced teachers, when we’re all valuable. There should be none of those lines drawn. We felt like some of the comments were very caustic in nature. I watched teachers’ faces at that board meeting. I watched the disappointment. I watched the hurt. I watched the anger. Our members after that were very, very upset.

You said in another interview that this wasn’t just about money, but about respect. How have Pueblo teachers been disrespected?
Educator voices are not part of the decision-making in our schools right now. At one of our schools, which is in turnaround status, they just had their lesson plan format changed for the sixth time this year. It’s the middle of April! We have very little input at the district level. We have made three open records request for the district’s staffing model for next year. And still, we’re just told no, that it’s still fluid. When they ask questions, they’re very often met with not only resistance, but are sometimes punished. It’s those sorts of things that have just added up for teachers.

There’s a five-member board. Two of the members were endorsed by the union. How did your relationship with the board break down?
The board members who voted against the fact finder report aren’t hearing teachers. What we’re trying to tell them is that a budget is about choices. And we don’t agree with some of the choices they’re making right now. One of the choices was that the instructional budget was cut, but business services had their budget increased, so did human resources. That’s a choice. The district is spending a lot of money on a law firm out of Boulder. That’s a choice. Administrators received a cost-of-living increase this year, teachers are not. More importantly our paraprofessionals have not. It’s those kind of choices we’re looking at in our budget analysis and saying, “Wait a minute.” We’ve also found money where we believe the district is over-budgeting and has some money available.

The school board president, Barb Clementi, a former teacher whom you did endorse, wrote in The Pueblo Chieftain about her vote against giving teachers a raise: “There is no question that our employees deserve more, and yet we are in a grim financial situation. Since three educators were elected to the board, teachers, paraprofessionals and other educators have seen two raises and three step increases in pay. We are struggling to continue to fund those increases in the coming budget and will undoubtedly see cuts to staff and programs in order to do so. It is fiscally irresponsible to dig an even deeper financial hole by raiding our reserves, which are meant to cover one-time emergency expenses, or by further cutting staff and programs.” I know you’re suggesting that the district doesn’t need to use reserves to pay for these raises, but more broadly, why is she wrong? Is it just possible that it’s just not the teachers’ turn for a raise? Was a guarantee of a raise next year never part of the conversation?
No, it was not. At least not until now, after all this has got rolling. We still have next year’s contract hanging out there. It’s been mentioned in some informal conversations, “Well, there’s next year.” The problem is, those raises, the past two years only came after this same process — long, drawn-out negotiations. Steps (or years of tenure) are not a raise for all of our employees. There are some places people are frozen. What the district also fails to recognize, is that in all of its years, it’s never once been on the state’s watchlist for fiscal risk. They’ve always been very healthy financially. They’ve maintained stable ground. We’ve tracked reserves through the years, and this is the first year you can see a little bit of a decrease. But that’s because the district made a choice to move some money to address facility issues, which we also understand. The other thing they neglect to mention is that the district continues to get more money from the state despite declining enrollment. They are getting additional money, and they’re set to get more money. School finance is looking a little better in Colorado for next year.

Should teachers expect to get raises every year?
I think there are ways that we need to start looking at our traditional salary scales. That should be something on the table at a future point. Do I think some of the structures of our salary schedules are a little outdated? Yes. I think there are ways we can change that to make the money a little bit better. What people also need to understand is that schools are funded by the state based on cost of living. So, I think it’s reasonable for there to be something. Does it need to be a 10 percent raise? Not necessarily, because we are dependant on state funding.

Teachers, in a lot of cases, have the same level of education as attorneys, physicians assistants, nurses. And those people can expect raises. They have a high level of education and so do our teachers. Teachers have been deprofessionalized by the lack of funding, by the lack of raises. Do I think teachers deserve to come into a profession and take care of their own families, to pay off their own students loans? Absolutely.

We’re at a moment of national unrest and action by teachers. Do you think your members are feeling embolden by that? Would your members have voted to strike if it there wasn’t this national conversation?
I think we’d still be heading here, even without the momentum. But do I think the national momentum has helped? Absolutely. I think both movements, both nationally and locally, show that teachers have had enough. Teachers are walking into classrooms that are not funded. We have teachers who (can only make) 100 copies a month from the building copier. And yet, they see 125 to 150 students a day. That’s the kind of thing teachers are tired of. My daughter-in-law, she’s a teacher, the decorations in her classroom are bought with her own money. Teachers for the last five to seven years have been put in the situation of having to buy basic supplies such as paper and pencils because schools have been so underfunded. It’s all part of the same issue. It’s about respect. No other professional would be asked to buy their supplies like teachers do.

Pueblo is the only urban school district in the state to not have voter approval for additional local funding for its schools. What do voters in Pueblo and Colorado need to know about how the financial situation is contributing to this moment?
Colorado has fallen further and further behind in school funding. Current estimates suggest we’re either 46th or 48th in funding schools. Which is really tragic considering our economy — at least in the northern part of the state — has been healthier than it’s ever been.

The other piece of this, for districts like ours that have not passed a tax increase: We’ve hurt ourselves. School districts have had to pass local tax increases to keep the cash flow coming in to do things like keep up facilities, supplies, and technology.

We desperately need one. We need a long-term, well-thought-out plan for a mill levy override and perhaps a bond issue to be able to get our schools up to date. There was supposed to be a committee to get this started. And we were supposed to be part of that committee. But it hasn’t happened.

Getting back to the potential strike, teachers at a local middle school recently staged a “sickout.” One parent responded: “If the teachers want to strike, fine: strike like the steelworkers strike where they don’t get paid a damn dime. But for them to use sick time and screw over all these kids, who’re aren’t in school today because of that? That’s wrong. And they expect the community to take them seriously?” What do you say to that parent? Are you at all concerned that this could backfire, are you worried that the district could just drop the collective bargaining all together?
That’s always a concern. That’s something we hope doesn’t happen. The association did not plan what happened at Corwin International Magnet School. I didn’t even know about it. I read it on Facebook and in the news like everyone else.

What I would say to that parent is that we’re not walking out to harm our students. In reality, we’re planning a strike to help our students. One of things that this district struggles with is high teacher turnover. It’s one of the highest rates in the state. We have positions filled this year by teachers who have come out of retirement for limited contracts. We have teachers in classrooms on alternative licenses. Finding a special education teacher in the city of Pueblo is like finding a needle in a haystack. We believe that if we can get back to work openly, honestly, and collaboratively with the school district, where we can compete salarywise with districts surrounding us, then we can keep highly qualified teachers in our classroom. That’s what we’re after. Our goal is not to harm students. But we feel like to benefit our students, we have to take drastic opinions right now.

What is the long-term solution, so a strike can be avoided and you’re not here next year?
We have made a conscious decision: We feel a 2 percent raise is fair. It’s off of our initial proposal by almost a full percent. We’d like to be able to come back to the table with some sort of real labor-management partnership collaboration agreement so we’re not here again. It’s going to take some real work. It might even take some outside help to repair our relationship. However, when we do come to the table again, I’d like to see come forward a real partnership agreement. Not one that is just written on paper.

What’s the nationwide or state solution to this moment of educator unrest?
Funding formulas across states need to be changed. States need to take a long hard look at how they fund schools. I believe Colorado’s is archaic. Will money solve everything? No. But it’s a big piece of it. We also have to get teachers to the table when education decisions have been made.

After high court rejects case, Jeffco must release names of teachers who called in sick in protest

2016-08-02T21:43:07+00:00

The Colorado Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a state appeals court decision holding that sick-leave records are not part of a public school teacher’s confidential personnel file.

The denial of certiorari means that Golden parent Kathy Littlefield will finally get the names of teachers who called in sick from four Jefferson County high schools over two days in September 2014.

Some of the teachers said at the time they were taking “collective action” to protest school board policies. When Littlefield requested the teachers’ names, the Jefferson County Education Association sued to block their release. The union lost in district court, and the Colorado Court of Appeals upheld the lower court’s decision in January.

“I still want the names,” Littlefield said Monday. “Those teachers could transfer to the school where my kids are at, and I’d like to know who they are. I think other parents would like to know too.”

By Tuesday, Littlefield had already received some information on teachers who called in sick, Jeffco Public Schools spokeswoman Diana Wilson said. She added that Littlefield may receive more after the school district finishes researching her request.

Attorneys for the union contended that teacher-absence records are private and protected from disclosure under the personnel files exemption of the Colorado Open Records Act (CORA). The records sought by Littlefield, they claimed, are “a classic example of information maintained because of the employer-employee relationship” that must not be disclosed to the public under CORA.

The Court of Appeals, however, held that this phrase in the open-records law – “information maintained because of the employer-employee relationship” – refers to information “of the same general nature as an employee’s home address and telephone number or personal financial information.”

The appellate court noted that “a teacher’s absence is directly related to the teacher’s job as a public employee.” It added that sick-leave records pertain to language in CORA that requires disclosure of “any compensation, including expense allowances and benefits, paid to employees by the state, its agencies, institutions, or political subdivisions.”

Because the Court of Appeals’ ruling stands, it is now a binding decision that may help determine the outcome of a separate government-employee records case pending in Arapahoe County District Court.

A judge last week heard arguments in that case, which involves complaints and disciplinary actions against Cherry Creek School District bus drivers, requested by 9NEWS for recent stories on school bus safety. As in the Jeffco case, government-employee unions have sued to block the release of the records, claiming they are part of a driver’s confidential personnel file.

9NEWS attorney Steve Zansberg, who is president of the Colorado Freedom of Information Coalition, disputed that argument in court, noting the Court of Appeals’ narrow construction of the personnel records exemption. The exemption applies only to “information that is highly personal and private,” he said, not to information related to a public employee’s job performance.

The CFOIC has intervened in the bus driver records case on the side of 9NEWS as have The Denver Post, KCNC-TV, KDVR-TV, KMGH-TV and the Associated Press. The CFOIC and several news organizations submitted friend-of-the-court briefs in the Jeffco sick-leave records case.