By George N. Schmidt

Three years ago this month, in January 2003, the House of Delegates of the Chicago Teachers Union voted overwhelmingly to applaud the Chicago Board of Education’s ending of the CASE (Chicago Academic Standards Examinations) examinations and to hail me as a hero for my work in ending the CASE test. A copy of the agenda for that union meeting appears on this page.

I refused to cash the check. The October 2004 letter, which I answered stating that I refused to cash the check or to accept the union officers’ attempt to deprive me of my rights within the CTU, was the first serious instance I faced of the blacklisting by city, school board, and union officials that my family and I have been confronting since then.

On October 12, 2004, I wrote a letter to the financial secretary, outlining my request that I be allowed to continue my union membership. That letter is also published on this page. Instead of a response (or a hearing scheduled, as I requested), I received an e-mail message from attorney Lawrence Poltrock. After an exchange of e-mails, I realized that the problem was not going to be solved in a reasonable manner, and that I was not going to get my hearing before the Rules-Elections Committee (on which I had once served as secretary).

Aside from a strange demand from the union’s auditor that I cash the check I was refusing to cash in order to allow the union to clear up its bookkeeping, I heard nothing more from any union official about these matters after I ceased exchanging e-mails with Poltrock.

For more than a year, I maintained my silence about this state of affairs. Things were quite difficult at times during those months. In September 2004, our youngest child, Joshua, was born, after an intense series of exchanges with the CTU and school board over medical insurance. In addition to making sure that family matters came first, I also had hoped that as the smoke cleared after the tumultuous summer of 2004, there might be some sanity in union affairs. At least, I hoped, in the face of the attacks on unions and working people, some recognition would come to the new leadership at the CTU that solidarity begins at home.

Instead, things have gotten worse and worse. Even if the claim of the current CTU officers that they received a majority of the votes in the runoff election of June 2004 reflects historical fact (and there are many who will never believe that), Marilyn Stewart, Mark Ochoa, and the others came into power with fewer than the majority of union members having voted for them, and with, at best, 50 percent of the vote.

After more than a year of trying to deal with these questions in relative silence, I’ve decided that they reflect more on the actual state of things in Chicago and in our public schools than many of the “news” stories we cover here in Substance each month.

Since I am writing this for an audience that includes Chicago Teachers Union members who were not even born when I served on my first union committees, when I filed my first union grievances, or when I first ran for union president, some detail and history are needed. Some of those union members were in elementary or high school when I received 40 percent of the vote for president of the union in 1988 against Jacqueline Vaughn, so a great deal of perspective is needed. And since I have presonally defended more CTU members in the face of more problems at the local school level than all of the current officers combined, there is a moral obligation for me to speak out now about this situation, just as seven years ago there was a moral obligation on the part of all of us high school teachers in Chicago to condemn — with clear examples — the unprofessional, insulting, and in some cases racist contents of the CASE examinations. Unionism is based on an ethical standard that sometimes faces serious challenges at times like this, when all of the media portray ridiculous “market” values as the only values worth having.

There is another reason, however. As we have already reported in Substance, in April I requested that the Chicago Board of Education remove my name from its DO NOT HIRE list so that I can resume teaching in Chicago. My remarks at that time were published here in Substance (May 2005, page Twenty-One; available on line at www.substancenews.com / Mambo/ content/view/119/81/). That request to the school board should have be supported by the Chicago Teachers Union, in accordance with the January 2003 resolution, passed by the union, calling on the school board to reinstate me with back pay and benefits to my teaching job. Instead, it is now apparent that the leaders of the union are not only refusing to recognize my right to union membership, but are actively supporting the blacklisting that has befallen me in my attempt to resume my public school teaching career in Chicago.

Each month, I sell Substance at the House of Delegates. I have been told by union officials that I will be arrested for trespassing if I try to enter the union meetings, even as a visitor. For the past several months, I have watched (or been told) as union officials have gone into the monthly CTU meetings to give lectures to the delegates about unionism, and to prop up the often illegal and regularly insipid activities of the people currently running the CTU. One month, it’s Jim Dougherty of the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Another month, it’s Dennis Gannon of the Chicago Federation of Labor. Each of them lectures the House of Delegates on the principles of unionism and repeats, almost ritualistically, that Marilyn Stewart and her “team” are important leaders of labor in Illinois.

As those who have lived and studied labor history well know, the enemies of labor have long used blacklists to maintain control over working people. The Chicago Board of Education’s DO NOT HIRE list is such a blacklist, and it should be opposed by the CTU in many cases, not just in mine. In the coming months, here, on our website, and in the book I will be publishing with a national publisher, I’ll be documenting how the opposite is true in the CTU today.

View CTU agenda in PDF format