Acero charter school teachers walked off the job in Chicago on Dec. 4, beginning the first charter teachers strike. By that Friday, Acero Schools officials were saying that the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) was “violating” the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Act. The CTU for their part, tried not to laugh out loud at the clearly desperate attempt (by what amounts to “management” in a charter school scenario) to paint teachers’ actions as anything other than righteous. Here’s how CTU president Jesse Sharkey responded to Acero’s allegations in a statement to New York magazine:
“Acero’s management is desperate, and our pressure is working. There is nothing illegal about our strike over wages, benefits, class size and other conditions that are mandatory subjects of bargaining under the federal labor law that governs this contract. Acero CEO Richard Rodriguez is a political hack trying to build his personal empire and the size of his wallet at the expense of our students. A growing groundswell of parents, neighborhood residents and elected officials are rejecting his spectacular greed, just as the courts will reject this desperate move to hoard power and public dollars at the expense the children in these schools and the educators upon whom they rely.
This is a pathetic and predictable ploy. Our bargaining team is at the table now and intends to work through the weekend to win a fair agreement.”
Damn. As LaborNotes.org points out, Acero charter schools CEO Richard Rodriguez is paid more for supervising roughly 8,000 students than than the Chicago Public Schools superintendent is for overseeing more than 350,000 students. The Chicago Tribune reports that Acero’s rhetoric was all bark and no bite.
More than 500 teachers and support staff will return to 15 Acero campuses across the city Monday after walking off the job and missing four days of school last week. The workers will vote in the coming weeks to approve the contract, which promises better pay and hours for teachers as well as smaller class sizes and sanctuary school protections for the majority Latino student body.
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The tentative agreement was reached about 5 a.m. Sunday after nearly a week of staff picketing. Acero management has also dropped a complaint it filed against the union with the Illinois Educational Labor Relations Board, a spokeswoman said.
A big movements across the country right now aims to unionize charter school educators in order to take away some of the exploitative power that’s so often abused by privatized businesses.
Strikers want to “put a check on privatization and the idea that schools are a business,” said Joanna Wax Trost, a seventh-grade English-language teacher at Acero’s Marquez Elementary School.
“What we are fighting for is bigger than the short term,” she said. “We could potentially let the people who want to privatize and the charter proponents know that there is a potent force to stand against you and protect the kids.”
To understand how ugly Acero tried to get, they claimed that picketers threatened to call ICE on a substitute teacher being brought in to break the strike. However, according to Acero, one of the CTU’s “bad faith” demands was to have language defending sanctuary school policies. You don’t get to have it both ways: either these strikers are anti-immigrant and threatening people with deportation, or they’re asking for pro-immigrant policies to be included in their contract. Those two things are mutually exclusive. Other things that the teachers are demanding include better pay and more diverse staff hirings.
Of course, while charter school teachers, families, and students are happy that the union is fighting for their education, the charter school system is still trying to position themselves politically and ideologically with big business.
The Illinois Network of Charter Schools criticized the involvement of CTU, which it said has its own political interests and motives.
“While the CTU attempts to stifle charter growth and limit innovation and flexibility in the classroom, INCS will continue working to preserve these values and partner with charter public schools to enable students to succeed in the classroom and in life,” spokeswoman Melissa Ramirez Cooper said in a statement.
When you hear management say things like “limit innovation and flexibility in the classroom,” you have to consider what they mean by the words “innovation” and “flexibility.” Anyone who has ever worked in a business knows that those are words used by management when they are telling the people that work for them they aren’t going to provide the resources needed to get the job done. What charter schools like Acero want teachers to be “fleixble” about is class size, long hours, and emotional and physical labor. Is there anything more “innovative” than trying to figure out a way to teach twice as many students as is reasonable while having less classroom resources and arbitrary “standards,” all while barely being able to afford to house yourself?
The CTU unified with the Chicago Alliance of Charter Teachers and Staff (ChiACTS) back in 2014 and threatened to strike back in 2016, before negotiations became fruitful and a short-term settlement was reached. ChiACTS says of the 34 charter school educators it has organized, 33 are set for new rounds of negotiations on contracts, which might explain why Illinois Network of Charter Schools is still trying to say that paying educators a meaningful wage is bad for education.
