In its Nov. 24 editorial “With 4 in 10 teachers ‘chronically absent’ in ’23, are CTU demands fair?, the Tribune Editorial Board continues its agenda of denigrating the Chicago Teachers Union and lowers itself with a series of half-truths and cherry-picked statistics.
There are many things absent from our school district that could be the focus of editorial board advocacy — equitable access to arts, music and sports, libraries in 80% of the schools, unfilled staff positions at the beginning of the school year and an estimated $1 billion in state funding — to start.
However, the editorial board hasn’t addressed those pressing issues. Instead, it dusts off a line of attack from 2014, 2016 and 2019, coincidentally years that the teachers union contract has been under negotiation. This time, it’s ringing the alarm that 43% of CPS teachers have ended up using more than their allotted sick days. They call this “chronic absenteeism” and insinuate that teachers should be ashamed for doing so.
In reality, when numbers aren’t juiced to advance an agenda, teacher attendance at CPS tracks with statewide trends. In CPS and across the state, teachers are making use of their allotted sick time more than before the pandemic. Even when looking at districts with more or less generous leave policies, Chicago is neither the highest nor the lowest when it comes to teacher usage of paid time off.
Data shows an uptick in absences in recent years that corresponds with the continued staffing shortage in our schools: thousands of vacant positions in critical areas of need, increased expectations for educators to play multiple roles in schools welcoming newcomer students yet lacking bilingual staff to communicate with them, understaffing of special education professionals to assist students with disabilities and missing social workers to address the needs of unhoused students or counselors to support students experiencing high degrees of trauma.
The cause of absence, whether it’s medical, familial or the consequence of the well-documented burnout and stress that underresourcing is causing throughout the profession, is not of concern to the editorial board. A workforce that is 80% women is somehow expected to take care of the city’s children on the job as well as take care of their own children, their aging parents if the teachers are middle age, newborns if they’ve recently become mothers, their spouses — let alone themselves — all without using the paid time off district administrators have allotted as reasonable and necessary.
In my own case, I was required to use sick days for the birth of two of my three children and that maternity leave would have included me in the editorial board’s misleading statistics. (Because of a transformative policy enacted by Mayor Brandon Johnson, Chicago Public Schools employees are now included in the 12 weeks of paid parental leave offered to other city employees.)
As Chicago’s mayor creates a new standard on how to treat workers and families better, it seems the editorial board is set to make those same workers feel worse.
Reading the editorial would make one believe that no one is paid better, in the private or public sector, than Chicago teachers. Wrong. The editorial board uses salary comparisons without comparing cost of living or accounting for the 18% inflation in the cost of goods and services since 2021. (Hint: A dollar goes much further downstate than it does in our city, where cost of living is the highest in Illinois).
A recent study determined a resident needs a salary of $94,000 to live comfortably in Chicago, the city’s teachers average a salary of about $86,000. That puts Chicago’s teacher pay below other school districts in the Chicago region. Any competitiveness of a CPS salary for a starting teacher quickly diminishes as educators spend more time in their careers. Suburban districts such as Stevenson High School District 125, Riverside-Brookfield Township School District 208, Lake Forest Community High School District 115, Lake Forest School District 67, Glenbard Township High School District 87 and Maine Township High School District 207 all pay veteran educators more than CPS, creating an incentive for committed educators to leave the district.
Finally, the editorial board finds itself repeating the lines of CPS CEO Pedro Martinez, namely that the CTU’s positions are the same today as our initial proposals were six months ago and are just too expensive for the district. The argument misses two key points.
First, we have already discussed at the bargaining table a variety of ways to use ramps and existing staff models to greatly ease the costs of initial staffing demands while meeting the most urgent needs of our students. Second, there is a cost to run the school district well. Our demands, including increased staffing, are fully in line with the stated objectives of the district’s own five-year strategic plan. The CEO digging in against the staff required for smaller class sizes and increased arts, music and sports offerings and counseling isn’t just negotiating against the CTU; this leader is negotiating against the district itself and ultimately the young people the school system is charged with educating.
CPS officials have touted a 12-to-1 teacher-student ratio as a result of the end of student-based budgeting, for example. However, when the CTU asks for assurances that classes bigger than 28 students receive automatic class-size relief, CPS rejects any guarantees. This response is dumbfounding.
Despite the public claims against our proposals, the CTU and the district actually have already agreed to increase the number of case managers for students with disabilities, English language program teachers, bilingual teacher assistants and counselors. While we have not come to agreement yet on the exact numbers needed to meet the needs of our students, the back and forth is evidence that it is both possible and necessary to increase staffing in these critical areas.
It would be a better benefit for the people of Chicago for the editorial board to emphasize the progress that the CTU and CPS must make together.
Chicago can achieve full funding for our students, staff up our schools in critical areas, ensure salary increases that combat inflation and reward parents with greater investments in their children’s future. But Chicago will be hard-pressed to improve literacy results without libraries. It won’t improve teacher attendance without improving teacher support, recruitment and retention. It cannot improve the development and nurturing of the city’s children if educators cannot take care of their own. Arguing for one without the others is more wishful thinking than it is sound logic. Seeing such an argument as fit to print is what should be cause for embarrassment.
Great educators are working hard to make a difference in our students’ lives and our district. Attacking them in the paper doesn’t help.
Stacy Davis Gates is president of the Chicago Teachers Union.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
