Feb. 02--If you're the parent of a Chicago public school student, you probably felt the earth shake a little Monday afternoon when the Chicago Teachers Union announced it had rejected a contract proposal that CTU leaders only last week had deemed a "serious offer."
Was it a good deal? A bad deal? Who could tell? As CTU leaders deliberated over the terms, Chicago Public Schools officials didn't tell the citizens of Chicago anything about what commitments were being made in their name and at their expense. Chicagoans knew only the bits and pieces that were gleaned by reporters.
Only after the CTU leaders rejected the deal did CPS let the public know that it included a property tax increase -- and a crushing blow to parents who hoped to enroll their children in charter schools.
About that effort to choke charter school expansion:
Chicago opened its first charter school in 1997. Nearly two decades later, Chicago has some 130 charter schools with 61,000 students. The growth has been explosive because so many parents want charter schools for their children.
So what is CPS ready to do in this contract? Promise that Chicago will have no more than 130 schools. No more. And CPS is ready to lobby in Springfield to straitjacket the Illinois Charter Commission, which serves as a de facto court of appeals for proposed charter schools that are rejected by local districts.
But even that wasn't enough for the teachers union, which complained in a news release Monday that the offer on charters had "no guarantees."
Why in the world is CPS bargaining away the right to increase the number of charter schools? More than 400 charter schools opened nationwide in this school year, according to the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools. Nearly 3 million students attend charter schools, a sixfold increase in enrollment in just the past 15 years.
Last year, Chicago's Noble Network of Charter Schools here won the 2015 Broad Prize for Public Charter Schools -- a $250,000 award that recognizes the best charter school network in the country.
This is a growing movement to meet the great and explosive demand from parents and students for innovation, for choices in education -- yet Chicago Public Schools officials are ready to bargain away that opportunity. That is unconscionable.
So, what happens now at CPS? Negotiations continue and the clock starts ticking on a teachers strike, which could come in late May -- if CPS still has the cash to be operating then. CPS officials have warned for weeks that if a contract wasn't reached by Feb. 1, the district would have to issue teacher layoff notices. The CPS statement released late Monday after the CTU rejected the deal made no mention of layoffs, though.
The failure to reach a contract won't create confidence in Springfield. CPS has been poking, prodding, begging lawmakers and Gov. Bruce Rauner to come up with $480 million to close its budget gap.
The failure to reach a contract won't inspire confidence in potential lenders either. Mayor Rahm Emanuel was in New York on Monday, trying to persuade investors to subscribe to an $875 million CPS bond deal that stalled last week. We imagine he, too, felt the earth shake a little when the CTU leaders rejected the contract terms without even putting it to a vote of the union members.
So negotiations go on. But there has to be a reset.
