The Chicago Teachers Union Is Showing Us How to Fight Trump

“The contract is a force field to protect against Trump’s attacks on public education,” Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Vice President Jackson Potter wrote in Labor Notes. In April, a record 85 percent of CTU members voted by 97 percent to approve the contract, which includes new protections for academic freedom, affirms sanctuary language to protect undocumented immigrants, enshrines rights of and protections for LGBTQ+ students and employees, lowers class sizes for all grades, increases prep time for elementary school teachers, and adds hundreds of support positions back to schools — 300 school counselors, 400 teaching assistants, 215 case managers, 30 bilingual support staff, 68 technology coordinators, 90 librarians, and 24 fine arts teachers. These gains are remarkable, especially at a time when schools across the United States are facing what the New York Times called “their biggest budget crunch in years.” As CTU President Stacy Davis Gates explained on Democracy Now!, “The collective bargaining agreement is a very powerful tool to use, especially in this moment, to ensure that people are protected, to ensure that their ability to enjoy the public good has some guardrails on it.”

Indeed, the CTU has acted as one of the strongest guardrails for Chicago Public Schools (CPS) and public education generally for the last 15 years. In 2010, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) won leadership within the CTU and brought social justice unionism from the margins to the mainstream of teacher union politics. CORE took on some of the most powerful neoliberal Democrats at the time: Arne Duncan, who as the CEO of CPS turned over public schools to charter operators at a rate of about 20 per year, had recently been promoted to serve as Obama’s secretary of education; Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, resigned in 2010 to become mayor of Chicago and continue the neoliberal assault on Chicago’s public schools, implementing the largest mass school closure in U.S. history in 2013.

But CORE was determined to transform CTU into a fighting union. Unlike other union reform caucuses that dissolved themselves after winning leadership, CORE maintained itself as a hub of rank-and-file organizing and as a check on the union leadership, which they knew would be under immense pressure from the power brokers of Chicago. The new leadership lowered union officers’ salaries to that of the rank-and-file. Instead of hiring external union staffers, they recruited CTU teachers and professionals — many of whom were hired to run the CTU’s new organizing and research departments. They conducted regular trainings in the ABCs of organizing and transformed the work of union delegates from simply reporting from the leadership to members, to organizing members to solve issues at their schools and mobilizing for broader struggles. The CTU issued a crucial set of research-based proposals to win The Schools Chicago’s Students Deserve and built important coalitions with parent and community organizations to bring this vision to fruition. Maybe most importantly, the CTU led two massive, successful strikes in 2012 and 2019 that brought thousands of Chicagoans, wearing the CTU red, into the streets and onto the picket lines, dramatically utilizing labor’s most powerful weapon to rebuild Chicago’s public school system after decades of devastating attacks.

In 2014, the CTU, along with SEIU Healthcare Illinois & Indiana, Grassroots Illinois Action, and Action Now, founded the United Working Families (UWF), an independent vehicle to recruit, train, run, and win elections “with Black and Latinx candidates who come from the rank and file of our movements for racial, social, and economic justice.” The alliance won several campaigns for state and local offices. These electoral wins transformed the political landscape in Chicago and Illinois, setting the stage for the huge gains in the 2025 contract. At the state level, UWF secured the passage of two crucial bills in 2021, one that repealed a 1995 anti-union law that effectively prevented Chicago teachers from negotiating over anything other than pay and benefits, and another that replaced the mayor-appointed school board with an elected one, although it won’t be until January 2027 that all school board members in Chicago will be elected. Locally, the UWF played a key role in electing six members of the Democratic Socialists of America to the Chicago City Council in 2019 and former CTU organizer Brandon Johnson as mayor of Chicago in 2023.

But the CTU leadership did not count just on their relationships with politicians to secure their new contract. They utilized the contract campaign to deepen their democratic practices. As CTU Vice President Jackson Potter explained, “Members were highly engaged in the negotiation. They submitted over 700 proposals (10 times more than in 2019) and doubled their participation in bargaining through union committees. The CTU’s largest ever bargaining team (65 rank-and-file members) not only led negotiations but initiated the first open bargaining ever, with four two-hour sessions accessible to members and the public.”

“A force field to protect against Trump’s attacks”

For teachers, perhaps the scariest parts of Trump’s education policy have been the revoking of sanctuary status protections from immigration enforcement in schools and the torrent of anti-LGBTQ+ policies, eliminating rights for transgender students. 

The Chicago contract reaffirms sanctuary language won in the 2019 strike that ensured school officials would not ask students or families about their immigration status, would not share information with ICE agents, and would not allow ICE agents into schools unless they have a signed criminal warrant from a federal judge. Provisions won in the 2019 contract also protect undocumented teachers, including providing paid days off for immigration appointments. The 2025 contract not only adds 30 bilingual support staff, but also funds complete reimbursement for up to 300 teachers seeking bilingual or English as a second language endorsements. Sylvelia Pittman, a Black educator at Nash Elementary School, explained, “Now teachers that look like me, that have been teaching just one language their whole career have the opportunity to learn a new language, as well as break the barriers between Black and Brown . . . for the educators to be able to communicate with the students as well as form those relationships that are so needed between the parent and the teacher.”

According to the LGBTQ+ news outlet the Advocate, the new contract “codifies some of the most comprehensive LGBTQ+ protections ever included in a public school labor deal.” The contract protects the use of students’ and staffs’ preferred names and mandates all single-occupancy bathrooms be labeled gender-neutral. Furthermore, each school will designate a gender support coordinator — a staff member who receives training and release time to support LGBTQ+ students. For teachers, the contract expands health care coverage, including infertility, abortion, and gender-affirming care.

And as Trump’s executive orders threaten to pull funding from schools that teach about Black history, gender and sexuality, and Palestine — an expanding list of topics deemed “radical indoctrination” — the CTU contract includes new protections for academic freedom. Zeidre Foster, CTU’s grievance director, explained on Chicago Tonight, “It allows our teachers to use their professional judgment and teach the truth.” In fact, Potter pointed out to Rethinking Schools that, thanks to organizing, city and state laws mandate teachers to teach certain subjects and the new contract reinforces this. “We are required to teach ethnic studies and Black history,” he emphasized. “Teaching the Reparations Won curriculum about the police torture in Chicago, teaching climate science, LGBTQ+ contributions, and genocides — old and new, this is now explicit in our contract as well.”  

At a press conference for Chicago’s May Day march, Davis Gates pointed out that in Chicago, “They didn’t have to ban books, because they took away libraries in schools. But labor in coalition with community, with families, parents, and students created a space of resistance where we now are rebuilding our libraries in our schools.” Indeed, the 90 new librarian positions added to schools in the contract over the next three years guarantee a librarian in every school.

And although the Trump administration has enacted a flurry of executive orders rolling back environmental protections, including several that pull back funding schools and colleges have used to address climate change, the CTU contract establishes a labor-management Green Schools and Climate Preparedness Committee to implement a host of important environmentally friendly upgrades to schools. “It was just this year that we got asbestos taken out of our old building from a kindergarten class,” said Onahan Elementary teacher Gary Augustyn. “I grew up in Chicago, I went through CPS and I know a lot of these buildings . . . need to be updated, checked, cleaned out, just to make sure that it is safe for students and teachers. . . . It’s very exciting to see that we’re moving toward a cleaner future and a healthier future for our own lives and the generations to come.”

For Davis Gates, the contract wins should be an inspiration to others hoping to fight Trump’s agenda. “You have people running the country right now whose intention is to enrich the rich,” she told the Progressive. “We want the world to know that if you ally yourself with others, and you understand the power of solidarity, then you can withstand this. And not only can you just survive it, you can actually see a day where you expand democracy.”

“The whole buffet”

One of the charges often leveled against social justice unionists has been that fighting around so many issues makes it difficult to make gains on traditional sticking points like pay and benefits. But the new CTU contract trashes that argument. With a cost-of-living adjustment of 17 to 20 percent over four years, tied to inflation, the new contract grants the largest raises and step increases since the start of collective bargaining for Chicago teachers in 1967. It expands dental and vision care and grants 12 weeks of paid parental leave to all school personnel — the best K–12 parental leave policy in the nation. 

CTU’s vision for public schools can be seen most clearly in the number of “sustainable community schools,” increased from 20 to 70 in the contract. Each new sustainable community school is offered up to $500,000 per year in extra funding to provide wraparound services, extracurricular activities, restorative justice, job training, and community events. One of the earlier sustainable community schools, Walter H. Dyett High School for the Arts, has become the model for CTU’s vision of how to rebuild a school system devastated by disinvestment. Rahm Emanuel closed the school in 2015, but it reopened a year later after a 34-day hunger strike by parents and activists who garnered support from the CTU — including current mayor Brandon Johnson, who joined the hunger strike for its final 10 days. The school now has a high graduation rate and a championship basketball team amongst other strengths. 

When one adds in the lowering of class sizes and increase in prep time for elementary school teachers that will transform working and learning conditions across Chicago, it becomes clear why the CTU has called this contract “transformative.” “It was the whole buffet,” said Davis Gates. 

Nevertheless, amongst the CTU leadership, the contract is not seen as an ending but a beginning of a larger battle ahead. The contract is purposely lined up to expire in May 2028, at the same time as the United Auto Workers’ (UAW) contracts with the Big Three automakers. In one of the most serious calls for a general strike in the United States in decades, UAW’s president Shawn Fain told the UAW’s national political conference in 2024, “We want everybody walking out just like they do in other countries.” The CTU jumped on board organizing to align contracts for the date and partnered with the Baltimore Teachers Union to bring a resolution to the AFT, which overwhelmingly voted in support. The American Postal Workers Union also passed a resolution in support. While it remains to be seen how many locals across the country can line up their contracts to expire in May 2028, as Davis Gates told the Nation, “You’ve got the UAW and CTU doing it, and we don’t bluff.”

 In March, the CTU brought together 200 organizers, labor and community leaders from across the country, to begin strategizing for May Day 2025 and beyond. As a result, May 1 saw more than 1,000 protests across the country. “It’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s the billionaires against the rest of us,” Potter told Rethinking Schools. “One of our greatest powers is withholding our labor. They can’t run the economy without workers. And that means if these attacks keep going along the lines that they’ve already happened, we’ve got to be ready to take strike action — probably much sooner than 2028.”

One thing is clear: The CTU has provided a blueprint for those hoping to fight Trump’s all-out assault on public services. As Davis Gates stated in a press conference after the contract vote: 

This contract is a testament to the resilience, the leadership, the organization, and the clarity of the people who are going to have to help push back and resist this moment. . . . We’re rebuilding what was stripped away through closings, consolidations, and privatization. This contract is a rebuild. So if people want to understand how to survive DOGE, you go on strike. If people want to understand how you survive DOGE, you create community coalition. The people that are being hurt the most are the ones that you go and link arms with, right? You take them to the Social Security office all the way somewhere else, and you tell them that they can fight for more, and you organize them to it, and you organize their families to it, and you build movement.