Anyone reading the Chicago Union Teacher (the CTU newspaper) or viewing the Chicago Board of Education meetings on TV would have thought that Chicago Teachers Union President Marilyn Stewart was really opposing “Renaissance 2010” and Mayor Daley’s privatization, militarization, and charterization schemes. In her press releases,

 Stewart sounds militant, especially when and where it’s safe. Stewart has even had some CTU officers at community meetings talking about all how privatization and charterization are bad things. Talking is one thing; doing’s another. Is talk all that the Chicago Teachers Union could be doing as 2005 end and 2006 begins and Chicago becomes the second most privatized and charterized big city public school system in the United States of America (after New Orleans)? A closer look at what the union is actually doing — as opposed to what Stewart is saying (often with the help of scripts prepared by her publicist, her union newspaper editor, or her legislative lobbyist) — tells the real story.

    Marilyn Stewart is talking tough against Renaissance 2010, charter schools, and other privatization schemes, but her union is actually doing nothing. Consider: In the past 18 months, Stewart has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of union money on lawyers to preserve her job, to attack her internal critics, and to uphold her right to fire union employees when she wants to. Not one dollar has been spent on lawyers to try to block Renaissance 2010, charterization, or privatization.

    While Stewart talks “job security” while bashing her predecessor, her grievance department actually spends most of its time looking for excuses not to write up, file, and publicize grievance outlining just how bad things have gotten. Excuses abound, especially in the high schools, where the most draconian cuts in 15 years had gutted programs and set the stage for “failure” (at least in the general high schools) when PSAE test results come in next year.

    Stewart talks big about unions. Last summer, she defended the AFL-CIO. In September, she worked overtime to stop an NEA raid on the CTU. We agree on the importance of unions and some of our staff have suffered the consequences of our uncompromising unionism — at the hands of Marilyn Stewart’s administration, ironically. 

    If working considitions in Chicago charter schools are so bad, we have the following question: Why is no one from the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) organizing the teachers and other staff at Chicago charter schools? 

    Take Stewart’s favorite example of political corruption in charters, ASPIRA. For the past three years, ASPIRA has been operating a Chicago charter (Mirta Ramirez, at 2435 N. Western Ave.) that is one of the most shoddy things on record. This year, ASPIRA began operating the “New Haugan”. Stewart and her lieutenants harp about the “New Haugan” in public speeches and editorials in the CTU newspaper. They claim, among other things, that ASPIRA is forcing teachers to work 12-hour days and six-day weeks, with pay and benefits less than CPS teachers. Why not unionize them, then?

    Stewart recently told her members in Chicago that the union had blocked a “raid” on CTU by dissident CTU members backed by the National Education Association’s Illinois affiliate, the IEA. Stewart had the energy to marshall the considerable resources of the IFT to protect her union from raids, just as she got the support of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) in July 2004 to install her as union president, despite questions about vote fraud that persist to this day.

    So why isn’t part of Stewart’s strategy to organize unions at Chicago charters with IFT and AFT help — rather than drafting, revising, and repeating speeches, editorials, and talking points about how bad things are in the charters? Isn’t a union supposed to organize the unorganized? Why hasn’t CTU -- or IFT, or AFT -- gone out and organized Chicago’s charters? Could it be because Stewart and her colleagues don’t want to organize because their entire strategy for holding power is not to act like a union but to blame her predecessor for every problem?

    If organizing the unorganized is beyond the ability of the Chicago Teachers Union and its staff, even with help from IFT and AFT, what about basic research? A lot of the charter debate is based on confusing propaganda by charter school zealots and their corporate supporters. On November 22, the Chicago Tribune, still as anti-union as ever, ran a page one artitorial replete with dozens of distortions about Illinois charter schools. The AFT has a significant study on charters, debunking charter claims of academic prowess. But there has long been a huge hole in the research in Chicago. Stewart has done nothing to fill that hole. Admittedly, a union leadership that can’t get its facts straight about the simplest details of its own history is in a bad position to research anything else, but with a $22 million annual budget, Stewart might at least be able to keep her Website up to date and perhaps use it to begin to assemble charter whistle blowers. If Substance can begin this process (and we have), CTU should be doing ten times as much with its resources. Instead, every day more fatuous opinions and inaccurate “facts” are bandied about.

    Research on the failures of Illinois charter schools (90 percent of which are in Chicago) is easy. They have been corrupt from the first day they opened. The “good” ones are often replete with cheap publicity stunts. ASPIRA’s “laptop” promise, first made at Mirta Ramirez and now extended to the new Haugan, is just one of a hundred examples. Chicago charters this year are this year the cutting edge of political patronage, crony capitalism, mendcious marketing, and the privatization of public education in Chicago. It’s a massive giveaway, highlighted by the brand new buildings now housing charters (the most famous, the “New Haugan Middle School” on W. Leland, although there are a dozen others). Every charter school in Chicago has inflated its marketing claims and could be debunked with a little serious analysis. The charter hucksters are making claims like they were a new brand of detergent competing for shelf space at Target.

    Chicago’s parent union, the AFT, issued one of the most trenchant reports debunking the bogus claims of charter schools across the USA two years ago. The AFT is still conflicted over charters, however. Recently, the United Federation of Teachers (AFT’s New York City local) received a $1 million grant from the union-busting, teacher-bashing Broad Foundation to help launch two UFT-sponsored charter schools in New York City. Is this why critical charter school research is out in Chicago, too?

    In October and November, Marilyn Stewart spoke forcefully at the meetings of the Chicago Board of Education against the expansion of charter schools under Mayor Daley’s “Renaissance 2010” program. At least it doesn’t look like CTU will be falling into the New York charter trap. There are at least three ways CTU could move from talk to action immediately:

    1. Even the simplest research could debunk the outrageous claims of the charters in Chicago. Do it and publish it. Defend public schools being dumped on by neighboring charters. Example: Chicago charters force entering students to sign agreements enabling the charters to dump students who cause trouble or might lower test scores. Good Counsel (er., Chicago International Charter School, Northtown Campus) dumps its “bad” kids on nearby Mather. Noble Street Charter dumps its problems back into Wells High School. This research is easy for CTU. 

    2. Many charters are engaging in practices which in a public school would be labelled by an alert media as outright corruption. One north side charter school routinely solicits its students and their families for tours and trips, as if it were a travel agency and not a school.  One of those trips took students and some staff to Turkey last June at a cost of more than $4,000 per person. It also appears that the trip was a junket for a former CPS official now touting charters.

    3. Chicago should demand that the number of charters here be controlled again by law, rolling back the “campus” fraud. There are presently more charter schools between 135th St. and Howard St. (and Lake Michigan and Harlem Ave.) than there are in all the rest of Illinois. CTU supposedly has some whiz bang lobbyists in Springfield. How did the charter hucksters get a legislative blank check to clone all over Chicago?

    CTU lobbyists are allowing Chicago to get away with a major violation of Illlinois law. Before the school board approved 15 new charters November 16, Chicago already had more than 30 charters (depending upon how you count). The law says Chicago is capped at 30! Critics charge that Stewart and Ted Dallas, her patronage chief, are really interested in patronage. Stewart’s actions on charters — forget her tough words — prove it.