In a second term, Trump ‘would slash funding for our K-12 schools,’ predicted Dr. Robert Cassanello (Oct. 4, 2024)
Just ahead of World Teachers Day, local teachers and leaders of unions that represent staff in Orange County public schools gathered at the teachers’ union hall Friday with the Harris-Walz campaign to slam Project 2025, the right-wing policy playbook tied to members of the former Trump administration.
At the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association union hall, University of Central Florida professor Dr. Robert Cassanello and other local educators slammed parts of Project 2025 that could decimate the public education system as we know it, and undercut the labor unions that fight to preserve it.
“[Trump’s] extreme Project 2025 has a blueprint of getting rid of the Department of Education if he’s re-elected,” Cassanello, who teaches history at UCF and sits as vice chair of the statewide United Faculty of Florida labor union, pointed out.
A vocal critic of the GOP’s war on what they see as “ideological indoctrination” in higher education, and faculty like himself, Cassanello painted a grim picture for what he believes would occur under a second Trump administration, should the former President be victorious in the Nov. 5 election.
“He would slash funding for our K-12 schools,” Cassanello predicted, “all the while giving massive tax cuts to the billionaires and big corporations.”
Ron Pollard, president of OESPA, and local educators speak out against Project 2025 (Oct. 4, 2024)
Project 2025, a manifesto published by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, is a 922-page policy playbook developed for the next Republican administration that reaches the White House. Based on the outcome of this November’s election, that could be an administration led by former President and billionaire Donald Trump.
The Project 2025 playbook has been highlighted by Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris on the campaign trail as a preview of what Americans could expect if Trump is re-elected to the White House.
Critical for educators is the part of the manifesto that directly tackles issues regarding education — by in part promoting policies unpopular with public school advocates, some of which have already started to play out in Florida — from efforts to undermine public employee unions to the deregulation of child labor laws and the expansion of school voucher programs that generally don’t improve educational outcomes, even as they divert funds away for public schools and worsen inequality.
“Florida has been a testing ground for Project 2025 ideas,” said Ron Pollard, president of the Orange Education Support Professionals Association, a labor union that represents thousands of non-instructional staff in schools, from custodial workers to bus drivers, cafeteria workers and paraprofessionals. “I want everyone who is listening today to hear this when we say we will never stop fighting against those who think of our children’’s education and safety as just a means to an end.”
Pollard, a former custodian for Orange County Public Schools and former member of the U.S. Steelworkers union, described Harris and her VP pick, Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, as leaders “who understand that our country is only as strong as its students.”
Maira Rivera, a local teacher and vice president of the Orange County Classroom Teachers Association, agreed. “They believe that education is a key to the middle class, and they know that when our middle class is strong, America is strong,” said Rivera, a grandmother of three OCPS students and mother of a daughter who also teaches in the public school system.
Rivera noted several pillars of Harris’ platform that directly touch on issues important to many parents, students and teachers, including access to affordable childcare, advancing the Biden administration’s efforts on student debt relief, and investing in financial aid programs to help make higher education more affordable for families with fewer means.
“I don’t need to remind anyone that Gov. Tim Walz is a teacher and a coach. He knows firsthand what our educators are facing. Or that Vice President Kamala is a staunch supporter of unions and their right to collectively bargain,” Rivera said.
As a result of a controversial law (SB 256) approved by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis last year, more than 68,000 public employees in Florida have lost their union representation and thus the protections and benefits they received under their union contracts. Some of those unions were first established decades ago, but due to stringent new mandates for unions, have been decertified.
Several groups affiliated with Project 2025 contributors or that otherwise sit on its advisory board directly lobbied or otherwise proudly advocated for that Florida legislation, including lobbying arms for the Florida-based Foundation for Government Accountability, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, and the out-of-state James Madison Institute.
The bill was also a priority of the Florida chapter of Americans for Prosperity, a Koch-affiliated think tank that seeks to defund the public education system and drain it of resources.
Pollard, whose union is facing a recertification election as a result of the new regulations (essentially, a vote by members on whether to keep the union or dissolve it), argued Friday that unions are “vital” to the middle class. Research shows public employee unions in particular can help shrink the pay gap between the private and public sectors — a problem that disproportionately affects women and Black workers.
Unions, said Pollard, provide “an avenue for better raises, for better benefits, for the very things that we strive for as family members to feed our children.” Without a union, individual workers lack the power of that collective voice, and the opportunity to demand meaningful change to wages and working conditions at the bargaining table.
“This Project 2025 stuff is designed to take us back to a time when we fought for everything, and had nothing,” he continued. “This country was built on the back of unions.”
Public school employees in one of the biggest school districts in the U.S. have voted overwhelmingly to form unions, capitalizing on a recent Virginia law that allows for collective bargaining in the public sector.
The two votes in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Fairfax County covered more than 27,000 workers, putting them among the largest union elections in recent years. The county’s teachers voted nearly 97% in favor of unionizing, while the operations staff, which includes custodians, food workers and bus drivers, voted nearly 81% in favor.
A spokesperson for Fairfax County Public Schools could not immediately be reached for comment Monday. The election results were released Monday by the two unions representing the workers, the Fairfax Education Association and the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers.
Leslie Houston, president of the Fairfax County Federation of Teachers, said in a statement that the unions would focus on “securing fair compensation and living wages for all.”
Until not long ago, Virginia was one of a small handful of states that barred public-sector collective bargaining, forbidding workers from negotiating over wages and benefits since a state Supreme Court decision in 1977. But as Virginia has shifted from red to blue in recent years, it’s become more welcoming to organized labor, a pillar of the Democratic Party.
Fairfax County Public School buses sit idle at a middle school in Falls Church, Virginia, in July 2020.
AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
In 2020, spurred on by pressure from labor groups, Virginia’s Democratic-led assembly passed a bill overturning the decadesold ban on public employee unionism. The legislation was signed into law by then-Gov. Ralph Northam, a Democrat, giving unions hope they could build membership in the right-to-work state.
The law allows for municipal employees across Virginia to form unions, so long as their local officials approve it. Several Democratic strongholds in the state have since passed resolutions or ordinances paving the way for collective bargaining, including the state capital of Richmond and the Washington suburb of Alexandria.
The Fairfax County School Board passed a resolution giving the green light for union elections last year. The organizing in the school system was a joint effort by affiliates of the country’s two major teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers.
Jo Ann Madison, a Fairfax bus driver, said in a statement Monday through her union that the county’s public school employees would now have “a seat at the table” to bargain over their working conditions.
“We’re counting down the days until we have a legally binding contract,” Madison said.
Public school teachers in Ohio recently got some surprising news in the mail: They were due a “credit” from their union.
Melissa Cropper, president of the 20,000-member Ohio Federation of Teachers, was listed as the sender of the “CREDIT DUE NOTICE.” All educators had to do was fill out the attached form and mail it back for an apparent refund.
There was just one problem. The notice didn’t actually come from Cropper or the union ― it came from the Freedom Foundation, a conservative group whose mission is to get teachers and other public sector workers to drop their union membership.
Anyone who carefully read the form would see that by signing it, a teacher would be authorizing the Freedom Foundation to submit it to their union and employer on their behalf to renounce their membership.
“People are really pissed,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, the Ohio union’s parent group.
Weingarten said she is accustomed to the foundation ― which has ties to GOP megadonors ― “misrepresenting” teachers unions and their work. But she believes the group crossed a legal line this time by listing Cropper as the sender of the document.
“They lie all the time, and their MO is to divide and divide and divide,” she said. “This one was a complete fraud.”
A teacher who quits their union would stop paying dues out of future paychecks. But the mailer didn’t just imply that teachers were owed a credit, Weingarten said ― it also suggested the union’s own leader “is inducing you to drop the union.”
A letter an Ohio teacher received from the right-wing Freedom Foundation. The union has accused the group of “trickery” and fraud.
Courtesy American Federation of Teachers
The Freedom Foundation declined to answer detailed questions about the mailer campaign, such as how many were sent out and how many the group received back from teachers. But Ashley Varner, a spokesperson for the group, defended the use of the mailers in an emailed statement to HuffPost.
“Freedom Foundation informs public employees, including teachers, of their constitutional right to leave their unions and stop paying dues because unions like AFT fail to do so,” Varner said. “The communication with teachers in Ohio was neither fraudulent nor misleading. Randi Weingarten’s claims are simply untrue.”
Nonetheless, the Freedom Foundation backed down from using the mailers after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from the AFT, according to letters provided to HuffPost. The foundation agreed not to send any more mailers, and assured the AFT that it hadn’t distributed any outside of Ohio.
The union’s general counsel, Dan McNeil, said in a letter to the foundation that its “reliance on trickery and deception to further its insidious goals is not only morally repugnant, it is also unlawful.” McNeil alleged that the effort ran afoul of both trademark law and identity fraud statutes, and that it amounted to “federal mail fraud.”
Freedom Foundation executive vice president Brian Minnich wrote in a response that the group “respectfully disagrees” that the letter was meant to deceive teachers. Although the letter’s sender was listed as the union president, Minnich said the return envelope and tear-off form “clearly indicated the return would go to the Foundation.”
“They lie all the time… This one was a complete fraud.”
– Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers
The mailers are part of a long-running conservative effort to weaken public sector labor groups that tend to support Democrats. Republicans in states around the country have taken aim at teachers unions in particular, pushing laws designed to make it harder for the groups to hang on to members and influence education policy.
This right-wing cause got a major lift from the Supreme Court in 2018.
The conservative majority ruled in its landmark case Janus v. AFSCME that public sector workers could not be required to pay any dues to a union, even if the union is still legally obligated to represent them. The decision effectively made the entire U.S. public sector “right to work,” and forced public sector labor groups to change the way they operate and focus more on member retention.
After the ruling in Janus, the Freedom Foundation started pouring resources into campaigns encouraging workers to drop their unions. The recent Ohio mailers were part of a project called “Opt Out Today.”
It’s difficult to unpack how the Janus decision has affected teachers unions nationally so far, in part because membership hinges on school staffing levels that fluctuate. The Freedom Foundation claims teachers have been opting out of AFT “in droves,” but Weingarten says this doomsday scenario has not come to pass.
“They used Janus to try to defund unions. What’s happened in terms of our union is, it hasn’t worked,” she said. “But the amount of time, energy and effort we have to spend correcting the record and dealing with these misrepresentations and out-and-out lies, that takes time away from us servicing the members.”
Weingarten said the Freedom Foundation’s use of the “credit due” mailer is a sign of “desperation.” She noted that in the group’s Oct. 12 response to the union’s cease-and-desist letter, the group said that it had “not forwarded a single request to opt-out received recently” from the Ohio mailer campaign.
The union demanded a list of all members who received the mailers, but it says the Freedom Foundation hasn’t provided one yet. The union suggested in a follow-up letter that it might pursue legal action.
Teachers unions said Wednesday that they are filing a lawsuit in federal court to stop Florida’s new anti-union law from taking effect, arguing that it violates their constitutional rights.
The legislation, known as Senate Bill 256, bars most unions representing government employees from receiving dues directly from workers’ paychecks. It also requires that those unions maintain at least 60% membership in their workplaces to avoid being “decertified” and losing their collective bargaining agreements.
Labor groups have decried the legislation as a political attack by Republican legislators and Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is expected to announce a run for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Unions say the law will make it more difficult for them to collect dues, and will add new accounting requirements that smaller affiliates will find burdensome.
“Governor DeSantis made it clear before the legislative session started [that] he was coming after teachers, staff and professors in Florida.”
– Andrew Spar, president, Florida Education Association
In crafting the legislation, Republicans added a carve-out for unions representing police, firefighters and corrections officers, so that those groups will not be subject to the new regulations. Those unions happen to lean more conservative than the ones targeted by the bill ― i.e., unions for schoolteachers, academics, nurses, sanitation workers and other municipal employees.
Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, argued Wednesday that the law violates workers’ rights to free speech and free association by forbidding them from paying dues how they choose. He said the law amounts to retaliation against teachers unions, and compared it to DeSantis’ ongoing war against Disney.
“We maintain this law is unconstitutional on its face, irrespective of any bad motives on the part of the governor,” Spar said. “However, we do believe there are bad motives. The governor is using this legislation to retaliate against his critics.”
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a controversial anti-union bill into law on Tuesday.
ELIJAH NOUVELAGE via Getty Images
Spar said the goal of the law is to “take away the ability of educators to speak out.”
“Governor DeSantis made it clear before the legislative session started [that] he was coming after teachers, staff and professors in Florida,” he said.
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said DeSantis is singling out teachers for retribution.
“He’s acting more like a dictator in Hungary or Cuba, pretending that he’s not,” Weingarten said. “That’s propaganda.”
The lawsuit was announced a day after DeSantis signed the bill into law, claiming on Tuesday that it will act as “paycheck protection” for teachers. He argued that teachers feel “pressured” to contribute union dues, even though public-sector workers in Florida, like throughout the country, do not have to pay any dues if they don’t want to.
If unions can’t receive dues directly from workers’ paychecks, they will have to set up alternative collection methods, like getting workers signed up for electronic bank transfers. The law does not affect paycheck deductions for other routine fees, like health care or gym memberships.
DeSantis did not address other significant aspects of the legislation, like the fact that it affects other public-sector workers while exempting one of his political allies, police unions. The governor has sought to portray himself as tough on crime, recently leaving the state to speak to police unions in New York and Chicago.
“He’s acting more like a dictator in Hungary or Cuba, pretending that he’s not. That’s propaganda.”
– Randi Weingarten, president, American Federation of Teachers
Union leaders previously told HuffPost they view the GOP’s new anti-union law as part of DeSantis’ broader, so-called “anti-woke” education agenda in Florida. The governor has moved to cut diversity efforts, ban teaching about gender identity and authorize parents to sue schools under a “parental rights” initiative. Labor leaders say teachers unions have wound up in the governor’s crosshairs because they are criticizing such maneuvers.
But the law also stands to benefit Republicans politically over the long term if it ends up reducing membership in public-sector unions, most of which are more likely to support Democratic candidates. Attacks on unions for government employees has helped raise the profile of other Republicans, such as former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, both of whom made unsuccessful runs for the GOP presidential nomination in 2016.
Florida is not the first state where Republicans have tried to weaken teachers unions by banning paycheck dues deduction. Similar laws are already on the books in Alabama, Michigan and Wisconsin. A federal judge recently blocked such a statute from going into effect in Indiana, where teachers unions have filed a lawsuit similar to the one just announced in Florida.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) could head into the GOP presidential primary against Donald Trump with a shiny new conservative credential: destroyer of public-sector labor unions.
Republicans in the Sunshine State are moving ahead with legislation designed to make it harder for government employee unions to collect dues and, well, to exist at all. The bill cleared the GOP-dominated state Senate in Tallahassee last week, despite several Republican lawmakers joining their Democratic colleagues and voting against it.
The bill has not yet passed the state House, which is also under solid GOP command, and it must make it through committee before reaching the House floor. DeSantis, who’s leading a broad attack on what he claims is “wokeism” in education, has publicly backed the bill as it relates to teachers unions.
Unions and their Democratic allies have managed to keep the grab bag of anti-labor provisions at bay for several years. But now they are alarmed — and furious — at the legislation’s advance.
Adding to their fury is the fact that Senate Republicans included a carveout to the bill that protects unions representing police, firefighters and corrections officers — that is, unions more likely to politically support Republicans.
In its current form, the bill would affect teachers, school support staff, bus drivers, janitors and sanitation workers, parks and library employees and others across the public sector whose unions tend to support Democrats.
“The goal of the bill is to eliminate collective bargaining for public-sector workers who the governor doesn’t like,” said Rich Templin, director of politics and public policy at the Florida AFL-CIO labor federation. “Nobody that’s directly involved has asked for this. This is another in a very long line of policies being advanced solely for the governor’s run for the White House.”
Unions are right to find the mechanics of the bill troubling.
The main provision would bar unions representing teachers and other public-sector workers from deducting dues through workers’ paychecks. That’s the primary way workers pay their union dues now. They also use it to pay health insurance premiums, gym memberships and a slew of other deductions that employers allow. Ending it would force unions to create new dues-collection mechanisms, like setting workers up for ACH transfers through their banks.
“The goal of the bill is to eliminate collective bargaining for public-sector workers who the governor doesn’t like.”
– Rich Templin, Florida AFL-CIO
Republicans have pursued bans on paycheck dues deduction in several states in recent years, casting it as “paycheck protection” for workers — teachers, in particular — against rapacious unions. They succeeded in Wisconsin, Michigan, Alabama and Indiana. A federal judge recently blocked the Indiana law from taking effect after teachers unions sued on the grounds the law violated their constitutional right to freedom of association.
The loss of “dues checkoff,” as paycheck deductions are known, is not necessarily calamitous for a union. But as an organizer once wrote in the publication Labor Notes, it creates a “new layer of convincing” when trying to sign a worker up for the union, even one who supports the cause: “Not only must the member or staff organizer move the worker into action, but we also have to convince them to give us their damn bank info!”
What sets the Florida legislation apart is how the dues-deduction ban could work in tandem with a second anti-union provision.
Florida has long been a “right-to-work” state where no worker can be required to pay fees to a union, even if they enjoy the benefits of a union contract. (The entire U.S. public sector is now right to work, courtesy of a 2018 Supreme Court ruling.) But in 2018, under then-Gov. Rick Scott, Republicans added another challenge for the state’s teachers unions: If the number of dues-paying members in a bargaining unit fell below 50%, a process would begin whereby the union could be “decertified,” or purged and its contract nullified.
As part of their new proposal, Republicans would apply that decertification threshold to public-sector unions writ large, and raise it from 50% to 60%. So as unions lost members due to the payroll deduction ban, they could more easily fall in danger of being decertified — unless they represent cops, firefighters or corrections officers.
“It’s pretty clear this is political retribution,” said Andrew Spar, president of the Florida Education Association, a union with more than 150,000 members. Of the unions carved out, Spar said, “I have a lot of friends in those unions, but those unions have supported Gov. DeSantis.”
HuffPost asked Republican state Sen. Blaise Ingoglia, sponsor of the bill, what the logic was for including a carveout for certain unions that happen to lean conservative. A spokesperson pointed to a Senate committee hearing in which Ingoglia said cops and firefighters are “putting their lives on the line every day.”
“They may go to work and not know if they’re coming home that night,” Ingoglia said March 16. “So if you’re getting rid of payroll deduction, then you’re forcing a face-to-face conversation with the employees and their union representatives … I would have a hard time telling law enforcement who worked an overnight from 12 to 8 that she or he would have to not get any sleep and meet their union representative at 11 a.m. to give them their check.”
HuffPost asked a follow-up question: If this bill is really about “protecting” workers’ paychecks, don’t our heroes deserve the same protections that other workers are afforded under the bill? The spokesperson did not respond.
DeSantis has promoted the anti-union legislation as it relates to teachers unions. His office would not say whether he supports a carveout for unions representing police and firefighters.
SOPA Images via Getty Images
A spokesperson for DeSantis would not say whether the governor supports the carveout for cops and firefighters, recommending HuffPost steer questions to the bill’s backers in the legislature. In a press conference where he promoted “paycheck protection,” DeSantis spoke of it solely in relation to teachers unions.
“Since this legislation is still subject to the legislative process (and therefore different iterations), the governor will decide on the merits of the bill in final form if and when it passes and is delivered to the governor’s office,” said the spokesperson, Jeremy T. Redfern.
It is not clear how the legislation’s backers arrived specifically at 60% as an appropriate threshold below which a union would have to apply for recertification with the state. After all, there is a certain logic to the current 50% marker, above which the dues-paying members represent a majority.
Spar, of the FEA, said he believes he knows how 60% was chosen.
“We know he [DeSantis] had his staff call around the state to find out where all the teachers unions were in membership, and he found out they all were over 50%, with many in the upper 50s and quite a few over 60%,” Spar said. “So why set a threshold of 50?”
Warring with teachers unions is nothing new for Republican luminaries. Former Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie were celebrated on the right for their attacks on public-sector unions, though neither managed to ride their anti-union record to the GOP presidential nomination.
But in the case of Florida, labor leaders believe the push to kill dues checkoff is wrapped up in DeSantis’ crusade against what he calls “woke ideology” in schools. He has banned “woke” textbooks, warred with the College Board over African American studies and attacked diversity, education and inclusion initiatives in higher education.
Spar said teachers unions are in the crosshairs because the governor views them as a line of defense against his education agenda, including at the university level.
“The governor has made it clear if he doesn’t like you he comes after you, whether you’re Disney, [prosecutor] Andrew Warren, school board members or the College Board,” Spar said. “The real reason we’re dealing with this bill is because teachers and staff and professors … are people who will band together and speak up on behalf of kids and communities and families.”
“The governor has made it clear if he doesn’t like you he comes after you.”
– Andrew Spar, president of Florida Education Association
Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, called the Florida legislation a “noxious attack” on collective bargaining rights in an email to HuffPost. Weingarten is so concerned about the bill and DeSantis’ education agenda in general that she traveled to a union rally in Miami on Saturday. She said DeSantis is issuing “authoritarian edicts.”
“We have all watched Gov. DeSantis abandon the conservative notion of limited government, but in this session, he appears fixated on stripping away freedoms and silencing those who have raised doubts about his policies,” Weingarten said of the bill.
Templin, of the Florida AFL-CIO, said unions are trying to mobilize against the bill to prevent its passage in the House. But they are already discussing ways they would try to deal with the new system if the bill is signed and survives the nearly inevitable court challenges.
Unions may end up sharing resources to create new systems for dues collection if they can no longer deduct them directly from workers’ paychecks. But Templin said other facets of the legislation would be problematic as well, including a requirement for a new annual audit that unions would have to perform. According to Templin, some local unions are so small that the audit would be an unreasonable burden to staff.
Spar said that Florida Republicans may talk a lot about eliminating red tape and cumbersome regulations, but they appear happy to create more for the unions they don’t like.
“This is an incredible amount of government overreach and intrusion,” he said. “We’re private, democratic organizations … They’re basically saying that teachers and staff and others can’t make their own decisions and they need big government to make decisions for them.”
CHICAGO — If Brandon Johnson, a progressive Cook County commissioner, wins Chicago’s mayoral election on Tuesday, it will be one of the most consequential victories for the United States’ activist left in recent history.
It will also be thanks in significant part to more than a decade of organizing and investment by the Chicago Teachers Union, or CTU.
Johnson, a former schoolteacher turned union organizer and legislative representative, is himself one of the CTU’s nearly 30,000 members. And without the union’s institutional convening power and financial resources, it is hard to imagine Johnson being competitive against the more conservative mayoral hopeful Paul Vallas.
CTU’s influence goes much deeper, however. In conjunction with its allies, the union methodically built the multiracial social movement on top of which Johnson stands.
Now the union is closer than it has ever been to gaining an ally in the Chicago mayor’s office — and delivering a devastating blow to the anti-union school reform movement in the process. Vallas, a former CEO of Chicago Public Schools and longtime critic of CTU, is running on ending what he calls the union’s “stranglehold” on the city’s public school system.
But a union that measures progress in decades is already tempering expectations about what that will mean.
“People will have everyone else believe that if Brandon becomes mayor, that, magically, generations of underfunding, generations of segregation, generations of an equitable application of school funding is suddenly going to be over. That’s not going to happen,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates told HuffPost in a late March interview at CTU’s Chicago headquarters.
“We’re still going to have our needs, and we’re going to have a partner to figure out how we sequence and scaffold and implement and provide, that’s what we will have,” Gates added. “And that’s the starting point. That’s not the endpoint.”
At the same time, a loss for Johnson would represent a significant setback for CTU that could embolden politicians seeking to curb the union’s power.
“If they lose, this will stop the momentum of the CTU having outsize influence in Chicago politics,” said Pat Brady, a Vallas supporter and former chair of the Illinois Republican Party, who has a lobbying and media consulting practice in Chicago. “If it doesn’t stop it, it slows it tremendously.”
The late Karen Lewis, then president of CTU, addresses supporters during a teachers strike in September 2012. Lewis began the process of transforming the union into a political powerhouse.
Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press
From A Union To A Movement
The slow-moving political earthquake that has brought Johnson to the brink of citywide power began in earnest in June 2010. That’s when the late Karen Lewis, a high school chemistry teacher affiliated with the progressive Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE, won her election as president of the union, ousting a leader that had been more accommodating to the Chicago mayor’s office.
After more than a decade in which the city had ramped up the use of standardized testing to assess school performance, allowed non-union charter schools to proliferate and shuttered dozens of unionized community public schools, Lewis vowed to go on the offensive against a Chicago mayor’s office that had been exercising direct control over the public school system since 1995.
In 2012, under Lewis’s leadership, CTU went on strike for the first time since 1987, demanding higher pay and less reliance on standardized testing in teacher and school assessments, but also more funding for art, music, wrap-around social services and smaller classrooms. Brandishing the slogan “The Schools Students Deserve,” the CTU won the support of plenty of parents, some of whom memorably joined the union on the picket line.
“Karen’s coming in and she’s trying to impress upon people that you can survive this onslaught of ‘education deform,’ as she called it,” recalled Gates, a history teacher who joined the union staff as political director in 2011. “And the 2012 strike is emblematic of them saying, ‘Yes, we can.’”
But the 2012 deal that ended the strike also included painful concessions for CTU, such as an increase in the extent to which the assessment of teachers’ performances would be based on their students’ standardized test scores.
“We don’t get here without every election between 2013 and 2023.”
– Stacy Davis Gates, president, Chicago Teachers Union
The following year, then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel pushed ahead with his agenda to shutter schools where enrollment had declined and a high percentage of students were failing to meet his performance metrics. He ultimately closed 49 schools — the largest mass closure in city history.
The shuttered schools were concentrated in predominantly Black neighborhoods on Chicago’s South and West sides. Many people in those communities lamented that students at those schools would have to be bused across town to schools in unfamiliar communities where rival gangs posed a risk to their physical safety.
“That’s one thing they weren’t understanding before,” said Rev. Shun Fox, a minister in the West Side’s Austin neighborhood, where Johnson lives. “The city of Chicago is so sectioned off.”
The school closures “didn’t resonate well with Chicago,” he added.
Lewis concluded from the experience that, absent a more meaningful role in city politics, the union’s membership — and the traditional public school system itself — would continue to suffer a slow decline.
Gates remembers Lewis effectively saying, “We’re under mayoral control, this guy is our boss — let’s take our grievances directly to the voters.”
The union took a two-pronged approach to the task of increasing its political footprint.
First, it began taking the process of recruiting, endorsing and electing candidates more seriously, with an understanding that even losses at the ballot box would help the union build power.
To that end, CTU founded United Working Families, a political party affiliated with the national Working Families Party that serves as a one-stop shop for the union and its allies’ progressive electioneering.
“We are still a union. We’re not a political party,” Gates said. “But we helped to build one.”
Early victories for CTU and United Working Families included the elections of democratic socialist Carlos Ramirez-Rosa and Susan Sadlowski Garza, a CTU member and official, to the Chicago City Council in 2015. Lewis considered running for mayor that year, but her 2014 cancer diagnosis ruled that out.
Brandon Johnson, left, and Paul Vallas share a light moment before the start of a televised debate on March 16.
Chris Sweda/Chicago Tribune/Associated Press
Instead, the union endorsed Jesús “Chuy” García, who is now a congressman. García ultimately lost to Emanuel, but not before forcing him into a runoff election for the first time since runoffs became a possibility in 1999.
By 2018, CTU was helping Johnson win his place on the Cook County Board of Commissioners and Delia Ramirez land her seat in the state House of Representatives. Ramirez, who is now a progressive member of Congress, introduced the state-level legislation that is set to shift Chicago from a school district under direct mayoral control to one governed by a 21-member elected school board. The board, long sought by CTU, would be the largest school board in the country.
And this year, seven of the Chicago City Council candidates whom CTU endorsed have already won their races. Another five CTU-backed candidates are competing in runoff elections on Tuesday.
“We don’t get here without every election between 2013 and 2023,” Gates told HuffPost. “That’s why every election is important.”
Under Gates’ leadership ― first as political director and now president ― CTU also doubled down on a comprehensive progressive policy agenda. That agenda is based on a belief that poverty, segregation and government neglect, rather than teacher quality, are to blame for underprivileged students’ difficulties in school.
The union has accordingly taken strong stances in support of building more affordable housing in the city, imposing higher taxes on the rich and ending police abuses. On the latter front, the union even got behind an effort to expel police officers from city public schools.
“There is no focusing on the classroom if you don’t focus on the social issues that are impacting the students in the classroom.”
– U.S. Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-Ill.)
“People say, well, ‘Why are the teachers obsessed about affordable housing or addressing homelessness, or clinical social workers issues? Just focus on the classroom,’” Ramirez told HuffPost while campaigning for Johnson and two city council candidates in the Belmont Cragin neighborhood. “There is no focusing on the classroom if you don’t focus on the social issues that are impacting the students in the classroom.”
The union has continued to suffer setbacks on the road to greater influence. In 2019, the union endorsed Toni Preckwinkle, president of the Cook County Commission, for Chicago mayor. Preckwinkle lost to Lori Lightfoot, the current mayor, in a landslide.
Soon after, CTU had a chance to flex its muscles against Lightfoot at the bargaining table. When CTU went on strike for 11 days in 2019, the union prevailed on the city to spend hundreds of millions more dollars on reducing class sizes and hiring nurses, social workers and librarians to work in schools that lacked them.
CTU has enlisted allies in these fights, forming a loose coalition of progressive labor unions with local chapters of SEIU and AFSCME, both of which represent a racially diverse group of public-sector and service employees in the city.
Other unions across the country have either rapidly scaled up their political operations in recent years or followed CTU’s lead in making common cause with other unions to pursue a broad, progressive policy agenda. But perhaps no union has done both with as much speed and effectiveness as the CTU, according to Alex Han, a former top official at SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana and co-founder of United Working Families.
“For combining that progressive vision with deep community ties and political power, there is no parallel,” said Han, who is now executive director of the nonprofit left-wing news outlet In These Times.
Brandon Johnson speaks at a campaign rally on March 30. His critics worry that he is too close to the Chicago Teachers Union to govern independently.
Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images
Fears Of A Union Takeover
The strength of the coalition that CTU has assembled is evident in the fact that 90% of Johnson’s $11 million campaign haul has come from unions.
Not every member of CTU is happy about the amount that their union is spending to support Johnson. Specifically, a group of members is suing union leadership for approving the bundling of $8 from each member’s dues to transfer as much as $2 million to Johnson’s campaign. The members allege that the union violated a part of its bylaws requiring greater member input on political spending.
Gates maintains that what CTU did is a standard practice among unions in state and city politics. She argued that the scrutiny she’s facing from within the union reflects a sexist double standard.
“It is difficult for people to grab hold of the idea that a group of women can figure out how to do it just like the boys do,” she said.
A union president in another state confirmed to HuffPost that bundling from dues for political donations is common in state and local elections where it is permitted, even though federal law prohibits the practice in federal elections. (In federal elections, unions can voluntarily seek donations from members and allocate them to a separate political action committee.)
Then, there are the fears that Johnson, if elected, would be too beholden to CTU. The union’s current five-year contract is set to expire at the end of 2024, setting the stage for contentious negotiations with the city sometime in the next year and a half. Those talks will take place at a time when federal COVID-19 relief money will have largely dried up, straining the city’s finances.
“How do you like negotiating when both sides of the argument are the teachers union? You’re negotiating with yourself,” outgoing Alderman Tom Tunney, a moderate backing Vallas, told HuffPost. “Where’s the check and balance on this thing?”
“The unions are concerned about themselves.”
– Rev. Corey Brooks
Tunney also suggested that, in keeping with CTU’s skepticism toward selective-enrollment or “magnet” schools, Johnson would do away with those more elite schools’ application processes. That could, in turn, prompt more educated and affluent parents like those in Tunney’s northern lakefront ward to either leave the city or turn to private schools, Tunney warned.
Johnson, who is still receiving a salary from CTU alongside the pay he receives for his post on the Cook County commission, has repeatedly emphasized that, if elected, he will end his membership in CTU and govern independently. In a March 8 debate with Vallas, Johnson promised to serve as a mayor “for everyone” and that his “fiduciary responsibility” to the city would take precedence over his ties to the union.
At an impromptu press conference at the City Club of Chicago on March 27, however, Johnson struggled to articulate his position on selective-enrollment public schools.
“We cannot afford to have a stratified school district where you have to apply in order to have access to a quality school,” he said.
Pressed on whether his vision for a less stratified school system would require an outright elimination of selective admissions processes, Johnson did not answer. Shortly after the press conference, his campaign issued a statement clarifying that he would seek to bolster funding for community schools, “not end” selective enrollment.
CTU has grown in prominence at a time when the Democratic Party has shifted to the left more broadly and the kinds of “school choice” reforms favored by Vallas have fallen out of favor.
But the debate among Democrats over how best to improve public schools continues to simmer beneath the surface. Those who remain sympathetic to charter schools and to demanding more from unionized public school teachers tend to argue that the persistence of poverty and other obstacles to educational advancement does not preclude the possibility that better teacher quality and school administration can meaningfully improve students’ lives.
Students at Mt. Greenwood Elementary School in Chicago depart after a full day of classes following the strike in January 2022.
Charles Rex Arbogast/Associated Press
“The unions are concerned about themselves,” said Rev. Corey Brooks, a pastor and anti-violence advocate in the South Side’s Woodlawn neighborhood who is supporting Vallas. “They’re not concerned about students. And they’re definitely not concerned about the Black community.”
Brooks soured on CTU during the COVID-19 pandemic, believing that the union kept schools closed to in-person learning for too long.
Specifically, Brooks and other critics blame the union for approving a last-minute strike in January 2022 to insist on a continuation of remote learning amid the omicron wave. The teachers were demanding stricter health and safety protocols from the city, including more KN95 masks and antigen testing for students, though Lightfoot’s team maintained that they were already offering those things.
The relative frequency with which the union has gone on strike has even bothered Fox, the West side pastor, who is supporting Johnson.
“I think they need better leadership,” he said of the union.
Johnson has stood by the union’s decisions on in-person learning. And Gates blames Lightfoot for what she says was the mayor’s refusal to accommodate reasonable safety demands, including that immunocompromised teachers receive exemptions allowing them to continue teaching at home.
“Look, Lori Lightfoot has been repudiated for her leadership in the city,” said Gates, noting that Lightfoot failed to make Tuesday’s runoff. “And now y’all want to come back and talk to me about her leadership during COVID?!”
Inside CTU headquarters, the union practices what it preaches. Masks are still required inside the building.
The union also maintains that its concerns about in-person learning were consistent with the worries of a majority of public school parents. At least some polling suggested that that was true, as an education policy expert at the libertarian Cato Institute noted during the 2022 strike.
Chicago mayoral candidate Paul Vallas has a history of enacting policies loathed by teachers unions.
Nam Y. Huh/Associated Press
‘This Is About Survival’
Regardless, the challenges facing the city’s public school system — and CTU, by extension — are indisputable. The pandemic accelerated a decadeslong decline in school enrollment. Chicago Public Schools enrolled 9,000 fewer students in the current school year than in the previous one. As a result, Miami-Dade County Public Schools in Florida has overtaken Chicago as the country’s third-largest school district.
When I ask Gates if the union has ideas about how to improve enrollment, she harks back to her holistic critique of racist economic policies starving the school system and the families that use it. She specifically faults Vallas, who was Chicago budget director in the early 1990s before taking over as schools CEO, and other business-friendly Chicago officials, for allowing the city to become unaffordable for low-income and working-class families.
“If you don’t have kids in the school, it means you don’t have families in the city. Those things go together,” she said. “And if families aren’t in the city, they don’t have anywhere to live that they can afford.”
In Vallas, CTU has an ideological opponent every bit as pure as the ally it has in Johnson.
Vallas, who ran Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001, is keen to note that he did not close down any schools, but his introduction of probation and other disciplinary measures for schools that he deemed inadequate laid the groundwork for his successors’ more aggressive measures.
After Chicago, Vallas went on to run public school systems in Philadelphia, New Orleans and Bridgeport, Connecticut, where he followed a similar formula of consolidating traditional public schools, allowing charter schools to proliferate and increasing the test-based assessment of teacher performance. Vallas drew praise from some local school officials and politicians in those cash-strapped cities for squeezing municipal budgets for savings that could be used to improve school buildings and shutting down mediocre charter schools, even when it angered conservative allies.
“The Chicago Teachers Union has had a stranglehold over our schools – an absolute stranglehold over the schools … to the detriment of the kids.”
– Paul Vallas, candidate for Chicago mayor
Now Vallas promises to do the same as mayor of Chicago.
“We’ve got to open our [school] buildings, in the dinner hour, on weekends, over the summer and over the holidays, and we’ve got to bring faith-based and community-based organizations to the schools,” Vallas said at a March 27 press conference with leaders of more conservative labor unions that support him. “The Chicago Teachers Union has had a stranglehold over our schools — an absolute stranglehold over the schools … to the detriment of the kids.”
But in the cities where he served as a schools turnaround specialist, Vallas also elicited loud opposition from unions and other local stakeholders, who blame him for making a mess of the budget and then leaving before the political blowback could force him out. Those detractors include Democratic U.S. Reps. Troy Carter of New Orleans and Brendan Boyle of Philadelphia — both mainstream liberals who appeared in a Johnson campaign digital ad titled “Trail of Destruction” that blasted Vallas.
Asked whether investing so much in Johnson’s mayoral bid did not carry significant risk, Gates responded that the union had no alternative, given the dangers of Vallas’ potential mayoralty.
“This is about survival,” she said.
If Vallas wins, some of CTU’s earlier wins could limit his influence over city schools. For example, in the next few years, the management of Chicago Public Schools will shift out of direct mayoral control to an elected school board. But as part of the transition to a completely elected board, the next mayor will still have the power to appoint 11 of the 21 school board members in 2024.
What’s more, the Chicago City Council, which is almost certain to be friendlier to CTU than Vallas would be if he wins, recently voted to expand its power vis-a-vis the next mayor.
Still, I wanted to know what Gates planned to do if Johnson “falls short.”
“He wouldn’t fall short,” she said. “The movement would fall short.”
