Ask any educator why they teach or work in a school in any capacity and they will undoubtedly say it is because of the kids — the students who make us laugh, make us plan and replan our lessons, make us stay late to sponsor clubs and coach teams. The students are what bring joy, occasional frustration, and love to our profession. 

Educators teach because we love our jobs and we know our students deserve so much more. Since Karen Lewis helped transform the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), Chicago Public Schools (CPS) educators also realized that it is not just enough to advocate for our students in the school buildings; we must advocate for our students in their communities. CPS educators want our students to have access to neighborhoods with housing, jobs, and opportunity. Chicago’s educators are bargaining for the common good of our students’ lives in and out of school. 

Our current contract demands are a love letter to the communities in which we teach, to the communities in which we live. We’ve written a love letter to Chicago. 

For the past 18 years, I’ve been a CPS teacher and from my first day of teaching in 2007 to now, I’ve never seen a school that has everything our students deserve. I’ve learned quickly that, in order to get what our students deserve, you have to fight tooth and nail for literally everything — from textbooks and computers, nurses, and functioning athletic facilities to libraries and social workers. You have to fight to get crumbling asbestos floor and ceiling tiles out of the school, to get new HVAC systems so your students don’t freeze or swelter, to get your school cleaned, to offer quality lunch for students, and to keep your school from being closed by terrible politicians trying to privatize our public schools. 

Now in 2024, we’re still fighting. We have a supportive mayor in City Hall with Brandon Johnson. We have supportive people in many elected positions in the city; however, the leader in Chicago Public Schools and his associates are still not thinking innovatively. 

The leadership of our school district should be fighting for state revenue for CPS. The district should be leading, so we don’t have these generational inequities in CPS. The district should be leading to make sure every kid has transportation to school. Educators are really good at planning, leading, and making positive changes for our students, schools and communities. Yet, the teachers are not only working every day to teach and educate our students, we are also having to work and teach and educate the people who are supposed to run our district. It’s beyond offensive; it’s exhausting. 

Pedro Martinez and the leaders of Chicago Public Schools need to step up. They need to join educators, parents, and the community, and fight for true educational equity, or they need to step back and sit down and let us bring in some real leaders, who aren’t afraid. 

I became a social studies teacher because I was inspired by people advocating for causes they believe in. Every person I look up to in my life has fought for things they shouldn’t have had to fight for. Whether they were afraid or not, they still did it, and they found people who were willing to fight with them. That’s what leaders do. 

I have worked at three neighborhood CPS schools on the South Side. My students have never had the resources that they deserved in any of those schools. 

In April, the Chicago Teachers Union submitted our contract proposals for our next contract. I am a part of CTU’s 50-person Big Bargaining Team that meets with leadership of CPS. We present our proposals, explain the current conditions in our schools, and how our proposals will help transform our district. We have even pushed for and held public bargaining sessions that are live streamed so the public can more easily see our proposals and the process. 

The negotiations are going much slower than they should be. Even though we have city officials observing at every session, CPS leaders are not agreeing to, or even countering, too many of our proposals. We are at a stalemate and the question is why? We have a mayor who supports the demands but a CPS CEO in Pedro Martinez who is the hurdle for transformative change for our district. 

The leadership of CPS is acting like they work for former mayor Rahm Emanuel, and not for Mayor Johnson, who actually wants to improve public education. So if the issue isn’t with the mayor, then the issue is with CPS leadership. 

CPS should have a leader who makes things happen, who understands that 30,000 CPS educators want a partner who understands our students’ needs and is committed to making the vision happen. The state owes more money. Let’s collaboratively go fight and get money from the state that we deserve. Let’s collectively create a vision, plan, and transform our schools.

Our governor J.B. Pritzker was in consideration to be a candidate for vice president and he has done some good things for our state, but unfortunately, like far too many traditional Democrats in Illinois, his help with public education leaves a lot to be desired. 

Illinois has never funded CPS appropriately, based on their own funding formula, and now that we’re asking for more money for our schools, Pritzker refers to it as a “bail out.” Stacy Davis Gates, elected president of the Chicago Teachers Union, says to our CTU members, “You can’t bail out something that you never funded to begin with.”

On the state level, we want Gov. Pritzker and the government of Illinois to actually fully fund CPS and Illinois Public Schools. Selected vice presidential candidate Tim Walz fully funded Minnesota Public Schools. We want Gov. Pritzker to do the same here. Our contract negotiations between CPS and CTU are not with greedy teachers, demanding unreasonable things; we are asking for schools with safe drinking water in the water fountains and classrooms that are at a temperature that students can learn in. 

We are asking for the city and the district to lead in retaining and hiring teachers in Chicago. We need the district to believe there is a national and local teacher shortage, which there is.  

We need them to realize the current teacher evaluation system, REACH, is terrible and is not designed to help teachers grow nor improve our craft, but is just a “gotcha” system of bureaucratic checkpoints. REACH is the system in which educators are evaluated for their teaching, except this system has been proven flawed and negatively impacts Black educators specifically and educators who work in schools that need significantly more support. Be innovative, CPS; help us create a new system that educators and principals will actually find useful and help teachers continue to improve. 

At times, CPS seems like they could care less during the negotiations. We have provided proposals to transform the classroom, to reduce class size, to provide more support for our students, proposals to provide housing for our students, and to reduce our environmental impact with Green Schools proposals. 

Our contract demands were created by reading through thousands of proposals submitted by the 30,000 CTU educators across this city. The demands range from the diapering of pre-k students, making the school day better for elementary schools, and helping educators improve our practice, to housing our students and fighting to make our planet better for our students. 

My partner and I have two children who attend CPS. Being a CPS parent is probably harder than being a teacher at times. We have to navigate the super confusing system that is CPS. We had to realize how much of a struggle it is to find a school that works for our kids, to find a school that is well run, well resourced, well supported and safe. While we have an insider advantage because we are both teachers, trying to figure out CPS is still hard. The educators who work in the building aren’t the problem, it is the bureaucracy of CPS that is unwilling to change. 

Parents want a school that has every opportunity and resource that they can get. That is why parents from around the city will do anything they can to get their kids into certain schools, because parents know that certain schools have the resources that every single school should have. Even the schools that have more programs don’t have enough funding; those schools have high student fees for all the activities that exist at the schools. Those schools have only enough funding to hire the teachers to lead those amazing dance programs, drama productions, marching bands, choir, art programs and athletic programs. The school actually can’t fund all the greatness that comes out of all these programs — like recitals, costumes, instruments, microphones, travel expenses, competitions, art supplies- so they make the parents pay fees for those opportunities and experiences.  

We want the district to fully fund our schools, not make the parents pay the difference. We want all schools to have the programs and resources parents want, not just the few selective enrollment ones.

Pay attention to how CPS portrays the contract bargaining sessions. I’ve been in the meetings. I’ve been in the rooms. I’ve watched CPS say no to the things that don’t cost a dollar. I’ve seen CPS leaders not offer to advocate for more funding. I’ve seen CPS leaders claim pre-packaged curriculum is the greatest thing ever and that teachers aren’t really that good. 

CPS says there’s no money. We’ve heard this claim for the past 18 years and for generations before that. Chicagoans have learned that a budget is a political document, and that in order to reallocate money that the city has in another bucket into public schools, actions need to be taken. Students had to protest, boycott CPS and have freedom days in the 1960s to get rid of Willis wagons for Black students. We have seen TIF funds be used for the beautification of already beautiful neighborhoods, but not for our schools. It is beyond time that our district is actually willing to lead and be innovative. “Good enough” shouldn’t even be a phrase that exists in a public school leader’s vocabulary. Read the op-ed in the Tribune by Stacy Davis Gates calling on Pedro Martinez to truly lead.  

This next contract that we get with Chicago Public Schools isn’t teachers trying to take over, it’s a movement to finally give teachers, students, schools, communities, and everybody that we’re in coalition with, the sought after justice that’s been fought for in Chicago’s educational struggle for generations. 

Educators live in Chicago, work in Chicago, send our kids to Chicago Public Schools, and pay taxes. Yet, the elite and think tanks who want to privatize education attempt to portray us as greedy monsters who don’t care about our students. We’ve lost students and have seen empty desks. We go to therapy. We’ve lost the color in our hair. We stay late, we come in early, we coach, and we lead clubs for free. We work with every single student that comes into our door; we don’t turn them away. We lead clothing drives and college fairs. We help students land scholarships and acceptances. We meticulously plan our lessons to accommodate every student’s needs. 

If you think some Astroturf organization, like the Illinois Policy Institute, is going to last any longer than any of its privatizing predecessors, then you are sadly mistaken. These predatory privatizers have no real care or real stakes within Chicago Public Schools; they just want to benefit off of scandalous loan rates or find funds for their CEO pals who want to use a non-unionized charter school to pad their portfolio. Talk about scammers. 

On the city level, we want the school leadership of Chicago to follow the plans that our mayor, a parent with children in Chicago Public Schools and former CPS teacher, put forth. That’s the vision for CPS to work in coalition with educators, parents, and community members. We need CPS to stop acting like it’s 1995 and realize it’s about to be 2025.

Our proposals are a love letter to this city. Fighting for our public school system is our love language and this is our love letter to Chicago.

This piece was originally published on the Triibe, to view it there click here.