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UNION NEWS
UPC touted the most humiliating contract in CTU history, but...
Partisan bickerings continue to disrupt monthly Chicago Teachers Union
meetings
By Terry Daniels
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 If the UPCers defend
the Reece administration, that means to me that they are apologists for
the bad contracts rammed through the House with no relief for teachers’
impossible working conditions — the1998 contract rammed through a
year early before the old contract was even up, so the mayor could say
he had an early teacher union contract and labor peace in time for his
next election. This was the Reece contract that effectively ended our
bargaining rights and stuck the 4.5 section of the Amendatory Act to us.
Lynch has unfortunately refrained from saying this, both in the press
during interviews and in the Houseuring meetings.
How did Reece’s
pushed-through-early contract do this? It wasn’t just the Republican
legislators; there were the Republicrats like Daley — and maybe Reece
— who wanted the teachers of Chicago harnessed. Reece’s “secret
strategy” of going to the courts backfired — or did he know
all along that it would? — when the courts said that because he hammered
out a contract and bargained under the Amendatory Act, it meant that the
union had accepted the conditions of the Act. And this is the contract
Reece rushed through the House a year early. This too is never stated
at the mikes in the House by PACT activists.
If the UPCers defend
the Reece administration, that means to me that they are in support, like
Reece was, of the Daley and Vallas teacher-bashing and scapegoating policies,
and of the terrorizing of high school teachers with probation, remediation,
and intervention. When present Financial Secretary James Alexander asked
at a House meeting as delegate from Carver Area High School (now Military
Academy) when high school teachers would get relief from these conditions,
Reece shouted, “When the test scores go up!” That could have
been Vallas up on that union hall stage saying that.
My husband, James Daniels,
says that they’re discussing the same problems now as were being
discussed forty and thirty and twenty and ten years ago. They won’t
be able to find a solution because they won’t admit what the real
problem is. The real problem, he feels, is poverty. But Mayor Daley doesn’t
want to be accountable for that. Easier to say that the schools should
solve every societal problem. Easier to point to the one of hundreds of
kids (just a guesstimate) who make it despite poverty — no matter
how modestly — than to admit that poverty hog-ties families and their
progeny.
And then there are the
custodians who had their salaries and benefits busted down through privatization
by the Daley/Vallas initiatives. And the lunchroom workers. Many of these
custodians and lunchroom workers were parents of children in the public
schools. What do you think these Daley/Vallas policies did to those families?
Many custodians went from $15 an hour to $8 with no or greatly reduced
benefits. And the print shop employees...the list goes on.
I was greatly cheered
when I saw in the letter to the delegates announcing this meeting that
in this regard there had been a meeting for the Chicago Public School
unions at the invitation of the Chicago Teachers Union in order to revisit
the idea of having a coalition to advance common causes. Six locals came
and discussed privatization, health care, and a restoration of our bargaining
rights, with a plan to meet again in early March.
But back to a more
direct tie-in between Reece and jobs being lost and the standard of living
for families being decimated. There were the truant officers whose jobs
were eliminated. A secret court strategy to remediate that situation also
failed. There are the physical education teachers under attack.
Now there is the technology
department about to become the next reserve teachers to be “honorably
discharged.”
Remember the Board
meeting where the “Reform” Board of Vallas and Gerry Chico were
going to vote 137 teachers as “honorably discharged” just because
they were at the wrong poverty high school at the wrong time, and on the
wrong side of whoever was picking which teachers would stay and which
would go. It definitely didn’t help if they were the union delegate
or the Local School Council teacher rep. Of course, a certain number had
to go, so that an example could be made of them, for other teachers and
the public. They showed us all that there was no longer any system-wide
seniority in Chicago.
Yes, now Chicago could
say that teachers could easily be fired, and Daley and Vallas and their
media shills, those who like simplistic print and sound bytes, could pretend
that it was the worst teachers at the worst schools who were being fired.
At the same time, they pretended that the social promotion that Chicago
mayors and the Board had always pressured the teachers and the schools
into carrying out was now ended.
They showed parents
that bad teachers were now being fired, so how could the parents squawk
when their child was kept last minute from graduating eighth grade or
being otherwise promoted based on a single test score, ignoring that possibly
“bad” teacher’s other evaluations of the child’s performance.
After the child’s
stay in a “transition center” (now called “academic preparation
centers”), they could pretend the child was remediated. The class
sizes were no smaller at these quickly pulled-together centers, supplies
and books were at a shortage, and after being taught among other angry,
discouraged students who were more than likely acting out more than usual
and exhibiting higher absentee rates, the child was arbitrarily (and quietly
— let’s not check out the remediation) sent on to high school,
possibly in the middle of the next school year where, for example, the
high schools were not even programmed to offer again the missed first
quarter or semester of, say, English I or a particular math class the
child needed. The classroom teacher had to resolve that bind in many schools,
as did the child who again started out at a disadvantage, especially in
classes where the skills to be learned had to be taught sequentially.
The Chicago mayors
and the Board had always been the ones who fostered social promotion in
the face of teacher protest, but the present mayor and Board now took
credit for ending it and blamed the teachers for its existence. They pretended
that the district superintendents (now called regional CEO’s —
as if education were a business) didn’t get on the principals for
failure rates that were “too high,” and that the principals
didn’t call teachers into their offices about their failure rates.
Even if the student was absent too often to possibly do the work, a teacher
was likely to be told that this was no justification for failure. In turn,
the Board deliberately ignored the ridiculously high number of absences
teachers documented on every report, or turned the blame on the teacher
or the school for those absences. They and the principal never said to
the teacher, How could you pass a child with this ridiculously high number
of absences? They said, What did you do wrong to not motivate this child?
Did you give him every opportunity, tutoring, extra credit, or make-up
work? They never took a parent to court for not sending his/her child
to school, as once Amundsen High School tried to set an example of doing,
and as was done repeatedly in some other cities like Gary.
As I’ve mentioned
before in other issues of this report, on February 24, 1999, Tom Reece
stood up at that Board meeting — where they were about to fire 137
teachers — and he said that they were the “Best Board ever…”
even as he appealed to them not to fire these teachers. Of course, never
a breath of, “We will go on strike if you perpetrate this outrage.”
Reece had said once
on the stage at a union delegates’ meeting that the closest he wanted
to get to a strike was a bowling alley. I guess people of the ilk I’ve
described in previous columns told him that teachers didn’t want
to go on strike. And of course no one does. But that doesn’t mean
we wouldn’t strike in the face of egregious injustice, as teachers
in Chicago and around the country have proven time and time again. After
all, we are role models for how people should act in the face of gross
injustice.
Reece had also said
once that unlike Norm Swenson, the union president of the City College
teachers who had gone to jail for leading his union members into striking,
that he, Reece, wasn’t willing to go to jail. He said that as if
we were expected to applaud it. I was disappointed that we didn’t
boo it. But he and his people did control the house. And that control,
and the UPCers who still sit in the House doing the bidding of those who
don’t care about the schools, supported these statements and policies
enough to squelch the voices of our dissent.
A UPCer said to me
at the end of the February (2002) union meeting that such parliamentary
chaos never went on at the delegates’ meetings when Reece was in
charge, and that there was never such a silencing of dissent as there
was here. I told her I had been in the opposition during that time, and
yes, we had been totally shut down at the mikes and in voting outcomes
by Reece, with the help of Reece supporters. I said, No, it was not because
Reece had such an astute grasp of parliamentary procedure, but because
he had the numbers in the House of supporters to do whatever suited his
and their interests. We were just shouted down and intimidated. I should
have mentioned that we wouldn’t have dreamed of making the frivolous
kinds of motions and amendments to motions that the UPC are now engaged
in doing. Disruption for the sake of disruption. Anything to embarrass
and keep the newly elected leadership of the Union off balance.
I accuse the UPCers
of gross opportunism, total lack of union principles or interest in the
good of the union, and pure corruption in their motivation. I hope they
can prove me wrong and show me there’s a new UPC out there who are
about more than their own self-aggrandizement.
The meeting by chronology — you are there
The usual 4:00 p.m.
pre-meeting question-and-answer period was held. In future reports I’ll
hopefully be able to cite the names of speakers more faithfully, as Mary
Beth Foley, a recent teacher retiree and long-time union activist, has
kindly agree to help in the note-taking process.
Among the questions
asked was one about whether the Board could waive the section of the school
code regarding nurses as they were waiving the physical education requirement.
Vice President Heath answered that they could waive only their own codes,
not our contract.
Another question about
Teacher Appreciation Day received the answer that the union was continuing
to press the issue with the Board.
Tina Beacock, delegate
from Kennedy High School, made a statement regarding a Gay/Lesbian Committee
issue, saying that despite the Disability Act, the Board has not for three
years now hired a coordinator for civil rights.
Victor Gonzalez, Director
of Field Staff, answered the next question which was about principals
seemingly being able to move teachers around at will. He said that positions
can only be closed by seniority.
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