Teacher Layoffs Every Year Make No Sense by Fred Klonsky

 

The news that CPS was laying off 443 teachers this week hit me in the gut as it always does.

As a young teacher I was a victim of Reduction in Force every year for the first four years of my teaching career. Nobody said I was a bad teacher. They just said I was fired.

For a young teacher the first years are brutal anyway. This pandemic year? I can’t even imagine. And then be hit with a RIF (Reduction in Force) Notice. Widget. Cog in a wheel. Thing. Nobody. 

CPS says that they have no choice since they don’t know what the enrollment will look like in the Fall. But they also say that they will likely add 2,000 positions when schools open. This is likely true. So the layoffs make no sense.

It is also likely that the teachers who are let go have no guarantees that they will be among the 2,000 who are rehired. And I can tell you that being told you will likely be called back doesn’t make the feeling of being fired less painful. It was painful even the fourth time they let me go. Only to call me back again in August.

What kind of system treats its employees this way? Who fires people every year knowing they will likely ask them to return. And then fires them again. Brings them back. And fires them again.

The teachers union leaders complain each year but they never seem to want to challenge the basic assumption. They’d rather try to make points in their continuing battle with the mayor. Everything I read says there is a teacher shortage. Enrollment in college teacher prep programs is down 22%. Senior teachers are retiring and there’s fewer new teachers in the pipeline to replace them.

Where is the incentive to enter the teaching profession? It’s certainly isn’t the salary or the Tier 2 pension reductions or a sense of stability or empowerment. The assumption that needs to be challenged by our union leaders is why are we laying off any teachers at all? 

I say keep them all and find a place for them to do what they are trained to do: teach! What’s the worst that could happen?  A group of kids would have two professionally trained educators in a classroom available to them instead of one?

Imagine!

https://preaprez.wordpress.com/2021/06/23/teacher-layoffs-every-year-makes-no-sense/

"The Chicago Teachers Union believes the best way to guarantee the safety of our school communities is to begin our school year virtually"

President Donald Trump, U.S. Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and their corporate cronies are pushing to reopen schools with in-person teaching this fall. Our members, like educators around the country, also want to return to their school buildings—just as desperately as students and parents want them to. We all stand for safe and equitable reopening of our schools.

Unlike Trump and DeVos, however, the Chicago Teachers Union believes the best way to guarantee the safety of our school communities is to begin our school year virtually.

Our new report, “Same Storm, Different Boats: The Safe and Equitable Conditions for Reopening CPS in 2020-21”​​​ examines what parents, students and teachers throughout the city of Chicago will need to return to in-person education, and do so safely.

But let’s remember, there is no safe way to re-open anything during a pandemic. The only plan CPS has available right now is one that mitigates harm. Which means there is still risk and people will still encounter harm. So what does this mean in practice?

WHAT THE MAYOR AND CPS NEED TO PROVIDE

The lack of a negotiated set plan that spells out criteria that mitigates the maximum amount of risk leaves us no other choice but to say that we cannot return to in-school, classroom instruction, and must continue remote learning until we clarify how to keep students, educators and school communities as safe as possible.

Our students, their parents and our school communities need stability, agency, support and leadership. CPS needs to implement critical health, safety and staffing measures to protect them.

Specifically, school buildings need to be kept clean and sanitized. There is currently nothing we have seen from the district that guarantees a modicum of safety. There must be widely available masks and other PPE, which includes face coverings for students and additional protective equipment for educators, janitors, nurses and all school staff.

There must be adequate staff on hand in each building—nurses to perform health checks and deal with emergency situations, and counselors and social workers to deal with the trauma inflicted on students and their families by the pandemic.

There must be adequate social distancing, especially for situations in which masks won’t work. We already know that students will have a difficult time wearing masks throughout the entire school day, so it’s critical to maintain a safe distance of six feet between people and desks.

Educators need prep time and self-directed days, and a moratorium on teacher evaluations.

Moreover, our evolving knowledge of this disease tells us that close and prolonged contact with someone who has the virus in a poorly ventilated space is high risk, so the district must specifically take steps to address an airborne pandemic. This includes basic steps like making sure there is plenty of fresh air flow in schools, or even holding some in-person classes outside, where the risks are demonstrably lower.

Lastly, there must be options for people who cannot participate in school—both students and staff—who are immuno-compromised or have other underlying health issues that make coming into school buildings too risky for them.

At this time, it’s not clear how the mayor’s handpicked Chicago Board of Education will respond to these demands. Los Angeles, and San Diego have all recently released plans to reopen based on fully remote learning with some in-person instruction for students with various special needs, but whether the mayor and the school board in Chicago will implement these common-sense measures isn’t yet known.

But schools have to be reopened safely—they can’t be reopened on the basis of political expediency, without criteria and without regard for the lives of the educators, or frankly the lives of students and their families. Sure, younger kids do not seem as vulnerable to this virus as older people, but many students live with middle-aged parents, or immune-compromised siblings, or with grandparents.

The unsafe reopening of schools will surely claim the lives of our loved ones. And we already know that the vast majority of CPS’ student body comes from marginalized Black and Latinx communities that have already been hardest hit by the pandemic, so prematurely reopening schools could further fan the spread of this disease in these already devastated neighborhoods.

REOPENING CRITERIA

Every day, Chicago and Illinois experience an uptick in COVID-19 cases and positivity rates, and most concerning are the numbers going up among youth aged 10-19. Our union is choosing certainty over confusion and delay, and we need confidence to move into our school year. That confidence will not come without clear criteria on what constitutes safety for our schools.

How do we assess whether it is safe to return to schools in the fall?

Back in March and April, Gov. J.B. Pritzker said schools should reopen when Illinois enters Phase Four. Two key metrics of Phase Four are cases going down every day and contact tracing of 90 percent of new cases within 24 hours.

Illinois fails on both counts. Over the last 30 days, cases are on the rise across the state.

THE DISPARATE IMPACT OF COVID-19

We are losing valuable time. The safety we need requires immediate resources, imagination and collaboration. Our union must be and should be in position to improve remote learning for English Language Learners, special education and early childhood education. Our time would be much better spent perfecting our practice and creating platforms to ensure student success under the new normal.

There is a jarringly disparate rate of COVID-19 infection, severe illness and death in Black and Latinx communities, where Black Americans are dying at twice the rate of whites, and structural racism and inequality mean people live with economic and social factors that increase health risks.

Individuals living in these communities are more likely to have “essential” jobs, insufficient housing and health care, and higher levels of pre-existing health conditions. The deaths of essential workers—nurses, bus drivers, meatpackers and Amazon workers—are considered “collateral damage” by Donald Trump, but we do not believe that essential workers are expendable workers.

Essential workers are the parents of our students. In some cases, essential workers are our students. The president and his sycophants think it is reasonable to expect essential workers to die in disproportionate numbers.

We do not.

Ninety percent of CPS students are students of color. Reopening schools as COVID-19 rages across the country is nothing less than a dangerous gamble with the lives of people who come from communities most devastated by this pandemic.

Trump is asking us to accept that the lives of our students and the lives of educators are less worthy of safety, health and dignity. In fact, he is compelled to push that view so that he and other billionaires can add to their vast fortunes. Why else would he demand schools open without providing the funding and resources needed to do so safely?

This also explains why Black and Latinx parents—from Minnesota to Florida—express more hesitation than others about sending their children back to school. The communities most ravaged by this disease know that it is deadly serious, and with the explosion of cases across the U.S., there is real and growing fear about sending kids back into physical classrooms.

UNION CONCERN AND THE COMMON GOOD

The mayor and CPS must begin to see stakeholders—parents, students, educators—as partners. There is no way to create a plan in this moment that ignores our needs. We are not the problem. Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos are the problem. The Union will fight to make any school plan as safe and reasonable as possible. We are going to unite with parents and other unions to present the strongest legal, labor and political front to protect our schools and each other.

We are not going to let political expediency coming from the federal government, the mayor or anyone else endanger our lives.

We need to spend the remainder of the summer fighting for the schools our students deserve, even if we do not return to them in the fall.

All students, but especially our students on the South and West sides of Chicago, must have access to broadband Internet and devices. Their families need Universal Basic Income, with real collaboration to expand the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), and extend unemployment benefits and the moratorium on evictions. A large concern about returning to classrooms is about protecting the health and safety of the vulnerable populations we serve.

It is also, however, about our own health and safety. After all, many people are arguing that educators must prove ourselves worthy by returning to work for the good of the nation and its economy.

But we will not allow Trump and the corporations that back him to abuse us or our students for a buck. We will use the power of solidarity and the power of our union to defend ourselves, our students and their families at all costs.

-The Chicago Teachers’ Union

An Open Letter to Hillary Clinton, from a Chicago Teacher

Dear Madame Secretary:

I am writing to you today from Chicago on behalf of all the children, families, and staff in the middle of a massive manufactured crisis brewing in the Chicago Public Schools. A crisis in major part worsened by your friend, Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

I am a special education teacher at an elementary school on the far South Side of the city in a high-poverty African-American community. Thanks to Rahm Emanuel's increased attacks on neighborhood public schools like ours, we are living under truly abhorrent conditions for teachers and students alike. My school is a survivor of his vicious, racist school closings from 2013 where the school down the street was forced into ours creating chaos and disruption for all involved.

We have been beaten down by at least five separate rounds of budget cuts over the past 2 years since, with yet another round of cuts on the way. These cuts have seen lost teaching positions causing large class sizes (41 kindergartners in one classroom!), split classrooms (more than one grade in a class), and the laying off of other vital staff members. We no longer have a Librarian. We lost a much-needed clerk. We lost our Climate and Culture Coordinator and our mentoring program. CPS even has stolen our social worker and psychologist for all but a day or two a week despite the high number of children who have experienced trauma and need therapeutic services.

And we are indeed experiencing trauma. We are a school located in the middle of a neighborhood facing massive spikes in violence, thanks to Rahm's racist policies causing a lack of housing, jobs, and opportunity. Just yesterday, I sat huddled in my classroom, protecting my students during a lockdown as violence swirled around us, leaving a man dead on our streets just down the block and 2 others injured. As I comforted my students, crying and scared in the dark, the obscenity of Rahm's call for teachers to sacrifice MORE tore through my thoughts. Children at my school are in mental health crisis. Yet Rahm and his unelected school board have cut the very healing services we need now more than ever. As teachers, how can we allow these horrid conditions to stand?

Not only has Rahm gone after neighborhood schools, particularly in Black communities, but now he and CPS are coming after our most vulnerable population: students with special needs. CPS has changed funding formulas and procedures to access vital special education services in an attempt to save money for their crisis off the backs of our most fragile learners. We have seen harmful disruption in special ed services, with massive lawsuits brewing. Teachers are being laid off, support personnel are being lost, busing and transportation is being cut, and CPS has created a mountain of bureaucracy designed to prevent access to services. We are at criminal levels of harm to students.

Would you allow your granddaughter to attend a school suffering these types of assaults?

You say, "Black Lives Matter." Well now is the time for you to show that the Black Lives of children, children with disabilities, children living in poverty here in Chicago...that those lives matter to you. That the lives of Black Educators who are being laid off or pushed out of teaching in droves matter to you.

You say to teachers, "I'm with you." I heard you speak at the AFT National Conference this summer where you promised us that you are on our side. Well, in Chicago we are under attack, an attack led by your party's out-of-favor embarrassment, Rahm Emanuel. As the chosen candidate of the Democratic Party, we ask that you intervene directly. If you ask teachers to say, "I'm with her" then you need to show us that you truly are with us in our time of dire need.

Teachers in Chicago are on the eve of the second teachers' strike in four years. Members voted overwhelmingly to authorize a strike because we see the unacceptable reality of underfunded, sabotaged schools every day. We are willing to stand up and fight for the schools our students deserve. While we deserve fair compensation and should not shoulder the burden of the elite's created fiscal crises, this strike is about so much more than our pay.

Secretary Clinton, I invite you to come walk the picket line at my school should we go out on strike beginning on October 11th. Show us which side you are on. The wealthy bankers that profit off of Rahm Emanuel's privatization schemes or the families and teachers of Chicago?

It's time for you step up and show what kind of president you will be.

Sincerely,
Katie Osgood
Special Education Teacher
CTU Delegate at a CPS Elementary School

from Ms. Katie’s Ramblings

Why the Chicago Teachers’ Union Rejected the Latest Contract Offer/ Rally Against Mass Layoffs Today Feb. 4

“After much deliberation, the Chicago Teachers Union rejected the Board of Education’s most recent contract proposal because it does not address the difficult conditions in the schools, the lack of services for the neediest students or address the long-term fiscal crisis that threatens to gut public education in the city. Moreover, educators do not believe the Board will honor its promises because it has lacked the will to join with parents, students, community and others in identifying existing revenue solutions that can stabilize the district.

“‘Chicago Public Schools (CPS) challenges are a revenue-based problem because two of the three biggest cost drivers are things that have to be paid: pensions and debt service (which includes the swap termination payments),’ said CTU President Karen Lewis. ‘The third biggest cost driver is charter school proliferation—and though they’ve promised to halt charter expansion, there is a state commission that can override their decision. There are no guarantees.’ 

“Lewis said CTU members have given more than $2 billion back to the district over the last five years, including $500 million from the 4 percent raise that was rescinded in 2011; $500 million from layoffs over this period, including from the school closings; and $1.2 billion from the three- year partial pension holiday between 2011 to 2013. 

“‘Simply signing a contract with CPS will not bring them a windfall of resources from the state,’ Lewis said. ‘We have to exhaust every option available, which includes terminating those swap deals, returning the TIFs to the schools and a financial transaction tax that could bring hundreds of millions of dollars to the city. Without some real movement on the revenue problems, we can’t trust that they will honor any words offered in a four-year contract deal.’

“It should be noted that the CPS bond sale went south last week because investors are skittish about the real financial challenges the district faces. The downgrades came after investors' concerns about the city’s inability to raise revenue. Also, the district is using short-term credit lines to manage cash flow because its cash flow is so limited. The money from property taxes is already spent - those short-term lines have to be repaid. 

“‘CPS has been living on borrowing for too long,’ said CTU Vice President Jesse Sharkey. ‘Now to turn around and blame teachers and staff for that debt while letting bankers off the hook is not acceptable. We think bankruptcy is a bluff, but if it isn’t, the mayor and his handpicked school board need to examine our commitments to progressive revenue.’

“CPS’ uses this math to plug its budget hole:

• $200 million from the state for pensions
• $150 million from the state in a school aid formula change
• $170 million from a new local property tax levy for pensions
• $150 to $175 million from eliminating the teacher’s pension pickup and from increased healthcare costs.

“‘That's about $700 million of the claimed $800 million deficit,’ said Sharkey. ‘They want us to foot two chunks of that through property tax increases and classrooms cuts. We need a big fix to school funding at the state level through progressive taxes on wealthy people. The Board cannot continue to balance its budget on teachers and students by cutting our compensation and eliminating vital education services such as special education.’”

From CTU’s Communications, February 1, 2016