Eleven days is 4,620 minutes. Chicago Public Schools’ (CPS) teachers were on strike for eleven school days, and my partner and I felt every minute of it. We have four children in CPS — a 4th grader, a 1st grader, and twin preschoolers. After obsessively watching Twitter all day for negotiation updates, our evenings were spent concocting plans for the next day: Where can we send the kids? Who can take the day off work? Is any place offering free activities?
But through all the stress and excessive screen time, I always supported the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) because they were focused on the kinds of immediate, material issues that matter to families: a nurse and social worker in every school, smaller class sizes, restorative justice programs, better investments in athletic programs, and more. The lesson in this for policymakers, district leaders, and reform champions is that they need to refocus on the day-to-day, quality of education issues that have fallen out of school improvement initiatives. Choice is good. Graduation rates are important. Test scores tell us something. But much more important than any of that is having well-funded, fully staffed schools that care for and support all children.
By state law, Illinois teachers cannot strike over issues aside from compensation and benefits. Nonetheless, CTU’s slogan in this fight was “On Strike for Better Schools,” a rallying cry that may sound vague, but actually means specific things to different people. There are students who require regular medical assistance. There are thousands of Englisher learners who go without access to bilingual teachers. There are students who urgently need social services in a district that has one social worker for every 1,200 students. And there are countless kids, like my oldest, who have never been in a class of less than 30 students.
At the root of all this is years of budget cuts that have starved our schools of the basic resources, staff, and teachers that they need. It was the search for savings that led CPS to illegally cut special education services , a move that impacted tens of thousands of students, including two of my own children. While Illinois introduced a new school funding formula in 2017, last year its schools still received $6.8 billion below adequacy by the state’s own definition.
Illinois’ Inadequate funding is part of a national trend. A decade on thousands of districts across the countryhave not seen their budgets recover since from Great Recession. Schools are facing teacher shortages, nurse shortages, and even bus driver shortages. And per a 2017 survey, far too many school buildings need renovations to their plumbing and restrooms (31%), heating or air conditioning (30%), and playgrounds (27%).
These are the problems that families really care about because they affect our kids every day, Black and Latinx students disproportionately so. When Mayor Lightfoot called the CTU’s demands “a bail out,” she, like so many others, fundamentally misunderstood our schools’ most pressing needs. Our teachers were not asking to be rescued from their own bad decisions. They were demanding that our schools get at least the minimum funding necessary to educate our children.
That is the lesson I want all education leaders across the country to take from the CTU strike: get back to basics. Fund our schools and fully staff them. Drive resources to the communities and students who need them most. Pay teachers and staff so well that people are clamoring to get into the profession. Repair the buildings and invest in after school programs. The personalized learning programs, new data portals, and new school choice options in the district portfolio are lesser priorities. Families and teachers see eye to eye on this because we both engage with the education system in the classroom. It’s why I supported the CTU in this fight.
Two full weeks out of school and eleven days spent scrambling for childcare have been well worth it because CPS now has a labor contract that starts to refocus the district on the fundamental needs of our schools. And if the last CTU strike was any indication, all the families out there need to be ready. The teachers in your district are going to follow suit.
