Tue May 18, 2010 at 6:22 PMBy: Danny In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms The Sun-Times article contains this 'graph on Stewart's excessive salary and perks:

"Lynch produced documents indicating that in 2007, Stewart received a CTU salary of $143,878 and some $67,700 in benefits and expenses. That same year, Stewart received a salary of nearly $83,000 as secretary-treasurer of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and reaped $28,000 in IFT benefits and expenses."

That $322,578 in compensation for two full-time jobs--neither of which she does well. And her CTU expense account is pensionable! She hasn't even been able to get summer school work made pensionable, but her expense account is.

It's time to send Marilyn Stewart and her UPC accomplices in mediocrity a "pink" slip. Don't feel sorry for her, though, as the pension she's going to receive is far beyond anything the members of the CTU are going to see in our retirements.

Tue May 18, 2010 at 9:15 PMBy: don fraynd MUST go In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms So Ron, you want morre lawsuits with this guy in charge? You, a data guy?
It is time to let this weight go before Darian Alberts kinfolk sue you for wrongful death!

Wed May 19, 2010 at 3:36 PMBy: Danny In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms The words of "Core's plan for ctu" are empty and contrary to what they are doing. As my nanna used to say "Your actions are speaking so loudly, I cannot hear what you are saying."

Sentiments like bringing all the factions together ring hollow when you look at Core's win-at-any-cost-and-claim-all-the-credit behavior.

For example, at the February informational picket, core members wore their core buttons and core wardrobe and even made their own core-laden picket signs, rather than identifying themselves with the Chicago Teachers Union.

And they're doing it again.

After UPC candidate Mary Orr showed up Jackson Potter's grandstanding at the May House of Delegates meeting (core had the none-too-brilliant idea of having the march AFTER the school board hade taken action at the May meeting), Potter wanted to turn it into a campaign event where the presidential candidates from each caucus could deliver a speech.

Orr upstaged him a second time by inserting into the proposal that marchers wear Union Red, rather than their caucus colors.

And what do we get from core?

Large, glossy posters touting the event with the core logo at the bottom. There is no identification that this is a CTU-sponsored march. They just want core to get credit.

Spare me the empty words and lies.

--Daniel van Over

Wed May 19, 2010 at 5:21 PMBy: Teacher's Fight To Open the Books . A Teacher's Fight To Open Up Chicago's TIF Budget
Adam Doster Wednesday May 19th, 2010, 2:19pm

A Chicago high school teacher is preparing to sue the city for refusing to answer inquiries about its tax increment financing budget.


One problem investigative journalists have with the Daley administration's proposed "FOIA reform" is that their requests would be made easily accessible online while City Hall's responses would not be publicized. That's a justifiable critique. It assumes, however, that the administration actually responds promptly to all FOIA requests.

Jackson Potter hasn't been so lucky. On March 27, the Little Village High School of Social Justice teacher and a co-chair of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) filed a FOIA with the Chicago Public Schools asking for student and teacher data on the schools impacted by the city's school turnaround program over the past three years. For close to a month, Potter says heard nothing from the agency. He called to follow up with the city's FOIA Act Officer Cassandra Daniels, whose own website includes a self-imposed 14-day deadline for issuing a receipt of information. Her excuse? "She told me her office had been busy that week," Potter says.

The following month, on April 27, Potter resubmitted his request and broadened his inquiry to include all internal Chicago Public Schools communications regarding the current budget deficit and any information on how tax increment financing districts (TIF) have been used to fund schools in the past decade. The following day, he hand-delivered copies of those requests to Attorney General Lisa Madigan's office, alerting them that the district had ignored his previous pleas.

Days slipped by and CPS maintained its silence. On May 6, the AG's office demanded a written response from CPS within seven business days. Yesterday afternoon, Potter finally received information related to the turnarounds from Daniels. The solicitation for TIF spending data, on the other hand, was ignored completely.

With the help of Terrance Norton, the director of the Center for Open Government at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Potter now plans to file suit against CPS demanding the agency end its silence and produce its budget details. The pair claims CPS is acting in defiance of Section 3(d) of the state's Freedom of Information Act, which requires a government body to comply with the request or provide a written denial within five business days. "Until we get all of the information that's available," Potter says," we will keep the pressure up."

It's no surprise why the city would want to keep its "shadow budget" private. According to an analysis carried out by Robert Ginsburg and Don Wiener on behalf of SEIU's Illinois Council (which sponsors this website), Chicago's TIF system absorbed $552 million in property tax revenue in 2008. Considering that over half of every property tax dollar goes toward schools, it's fair to assume that roughly $300 million of the revenue generated in TIF districts each year would otherwise end up in CPS's coffers. Instead, that money is stashed away for the Daley administration to use as it saw fit.

Like some dissident voices on the City Council, Potter thinks there needs to be more transparency in the TIF process. "We need clear accounting," he says, "so we can see why the city is giving millions of dollars to big businesses and real estate developers." He also suggests cracking open the city's $1 billion TIF piggy bank creatively to provide relief for students and their teachers facing deep cuts. (We offered some suggestions on how to do so last year.)

CORE allies are planning to protest outside Chicago's Board of Education building next Tuesday. We will keep an eye on Potter's suit.

http://progressillinois.com/posts/content/2010/05/19/teachers-fight-open-chicago-tif-budget

Wed May 19, 2010 at 8:15 PMBy: Danny, Please don't Hate! In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms Don't hate!

Wed May 19, 2010 at 9:54 PMBy: message from a a "regular guy" union member In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms CORE PACT or whatever your name is!!! Stop the pathetic infighting. I dont know Pact from core from whatever! Its starting to remind me of FOX vs MSNBC BS.

I support none of you!! I pay my 900 bucks a year! And never see ANY OF you at my school or helping a teacher when they lose their jobl I have been there for 7 years! So I am sure severl leaderships have come and gone!!! You spend more time collecting your fat salaries at the union and 0 time helping the little man!!
Can you guys quit the infighting and help the 1000's of teahers who are going to lose their jobs!!! I'd love to see if one of you canidates would have the GUTS to ask for 1/2 the pay in these tough times!!!!!Or take a 1 percent pay cut for every 100o teachers who are going to lose their jobs!!

Wed May 19, 2010 at 10:00 PMBy: Regular sounds like a UPC Troll. Cut it OUT! In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms No need for trolls on this track!

Wed May 19, 2010 at 10:41 PMBy: Arne Duncan's Race Problem . Arne Duncan's Race Problem
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
http://www.schoolsmatter.info/2010/05/arne-duncans-race-problem.html

Duncan seems to think that he has earned a pass on race issues because his mom tutored poor kids in Chicago. I applaud his mom, but this says nothing about Arne Duncan, whose record on race runs head on with his rhetoric. The larger part of Arne's race problem has to do with the resegregation that he embraces with the apartheid charters that he loves so much that bribing state legislatures to change their charter laws has become a major policy initiative.

The other glaring piece of Arne's hypocritical oath on race deals with teacher hiring, where practice is exactly opposite of the rhetoric he espouses, as Julie Woestehoff points out:

A recent report out of New Orleans claims that that Ed Secretary Arne Duncan wants more black teachers in our schools.

According to nola.com, it's become a "theme" for Duncan this year:
In February, Duncan told leaders of historically black colleges and universities that "we have far too few teachers of color. Only 2 percent, one in 50 teachers today are African-American males. Something is fundamentally wrong with that picture."

Although he didn't spell it out on Friday, Duncan's campaign to recruit more black teachers may be driven by research that found improved test scores for black students who spend at least a year with a black teacher. In past speeches he's mentioned that black teachers are more likely than their white peers to want to work in high-poverty, high-needs schools, the front line for closing what he calls the nation's "insidious achievement gap" between white and black students.

Perhaps Mr. Duncan should look in his own back yard. During his time as CEO of Chicago Public Schools, Duncan oversaw the loss of nearly 2500 African-American teachers, while the numbers of CPS teachers in all other racial groups increased. Take a look at this chart from 2009.

The situation Duncan created became so egregious that a local teacher caucus filed a federal discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which will decide any day now if they will send the case to the Justice Department for prosecution.

Wed May 19, 2010 at 10:52 PMBy: Stewart Out ==> May 21, 2010 In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms danny you are starting to sound like a UPC hack. chill out. work together to win the the election then throw daley out. there is enough work for all of us when we throw stewart out. the push should be to eliminate stewart in the first round. that will send a message loud and clear to daley and the huberteam.

Stewart Out ==> May 21, 2010
Daley Out ==> February 22, 2011

Wed May 19, 2010 at 11:02 PMBy: Joe from CORE Regular Guy Politics is messy, but it is no game. We're in this because we believe it is necessary to save the union and the rights and jobs of its members. I expect that people in the other caucuses feel the same way. Marilyn does make a ridiculous salary--I think all the opposition caucuses are in agreement there. The slate that wins this election is not the union---we the members are the union. The only way we can accomplish what you want is if we all work at it. A great start is showing up to the rally on May 25th--that's something all the caucuses are behind.

Joe from CORE

Thu May 20, 2010 at 1:17 AMBy: teacher displeasure with union president . As election approaches, teacher displeasure with union president may lead to her ouster
by Zak Koeske
May 19, 2010

Chicago Teachers Union members, fighting for their livelihoods, will take their concerns to the polls Friday to elect a union president for the next three years from an unprecedented number of candidates.

“The teachers are treating this as an extremely critical election,” said Julie Woestehoff, executive director of Parents United for Responsible Education, a non-profit advocacy group that does not endorse any candidate. “Teachers recognize that their own personal jobs are on the line in this election. They’re taking it very seriously.”

A record five slates are running for CTU leadership – two of which splintered from the incumbent United Progressive Caucus over a dispute about the union’s 2007 contract – a circumstance Woestehoff said sends a message to the current administration.

“I think the fact that there are so many groups running suggests that there is quite a bit of dissatisfaction and that there’s a lot of frustration. You don’t run for an office unless you feel there’s really nothing else you can do.”

At the forefront of teacher concerns with the current administration is the leadership’s perceived inaction and unresponsiveness to teacher fear over school closings and job security.

“I think the biggest problem with the current administration is that they do not respect membership,” said Karen Lewis, presidential candidate for the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators. “They are very autocratic in the way they run the union. It’s a very small private club, basically. And the problem is that they are absolutely clueless as to what’s happening out in the schools. Members do not feel protected.”

Job security fears abound among CPS teachers, and for good reason.

“Since 2002, CPS has closed 70 neighborhood schools while opening 70 non-union charters, the CTU has lost 6,000 teacher and paraprofessional positions,” CORE media specialist Liz Brown said in an e-mail.

“The basic information that members need to be aware of about how privatization is working against us – these kinds of things are just never, never, never a topic of conversation” with the current administration, Lewis said.

Founded two years ago and citing a lack of respect from union leadership, CORE says it offers a uniquely democratic, grassroots activist caucus.

CORE members differentiate themselves through their rank-and-file model – their ticket was democratically elected by membership – visibility and movement to action.

“We do stuff,” said CORE candidate for financial secretary Kristine Mayle. “We’ve been there at every single board meeting, yelling at Arne Duncan, yelling at Ron Huberman and calling them out on all this stuff when our union wasn’t. Marilyn [Stewart] started going to those meetings after we did.”

Mayle continued, “[The board] closed 60 out of 60 schools with no fight back. And once we got involved, we’ve gotten 12 schools off the closing list.”

CTU press secretary Rosemaria Genova took issue with the accusation that the current administration had not been responsive to teacher’s needs and failed to actively fight school closings.

“[Stewart] has fought against school closings and had a number of schools removed from the list. This administration has been working diligently against the Board to respect the rights of our members. We’ve done what we promised.”

Without identifying CORE by name, Genova continued, “Some of these caucuses are running around saying they’re going to be able to stop the proliferation of charters and school closings – they’re not going to be able to do that. Some people have been taking credit for [stopping] school closings and they haven’t done anything. It’s easy to make claims when there’s no one challenging you to back them up. It’s easy when you’re sitting at a distance and not at the table.”

Genova said that the administration’s main objective for now and in the future will be the enactment of a hiring freeze, something Stewart and the Board are negotiating.

“We want them to stop having these job fairs and hiring outsiders when we’ve got teachers in the system. We feel that that is money that can be better spent in classrooms. If we didn’t have the cost of teacher turnover, we’d be able to put more money in the classroom.”

Even if the union is successful in keeping teachers in the classroom, there has been concern about its work within the community. PURE director Julie Woestehoff said she has been disappointed by the lack of union outreach to parents and community in recent years.

“You have to work together to be successful. I don’t know that this teacher’s union has acted on a strong belief in that,” she said.

One example cited by Woestehoff involved the union proposing to add a non-teaching staff person to Local School Councils, hence eliminating the LSC parental majority without notifying PURE or other parent advocacy groups.

“We’re very unhappy about that. It wasn’t a collaborative effort and the bill would have been much stronger if it had been,” Woestehoff said.

PACT presidential candidate Debbie Lynch said this lack of communication and engagement between the union and the community will change if the ProActive Chicago Teachers and School Employees caucus is elected.

Lynch, who was union president from 2001 to 2004, said that while in office she built alliances with parent, community and reform groups that have since deteriorated under the current administration.

“We had quarterly meetings with constituency groups to support and learn from one another,” Lynch said. “We need to rebuild those alliances.”

Because so many groups are running for leadership and the winner must receive a majority of votes, some expect that Friday’s election will ultimately be determined by a run-off, which would occur in June.

In the instance of a run-off involving incumbent UPC and another caucus, PACT’s Lynch said that she had attended forums with opposition groups who publicly promised to support one another in a run-off between one of them and Stewart to remove the incumbent from office.

Regardless of the election’s results, a mass rally for all teachers is planned for Tuesday at the Board of Education headquarters to protest the school staff cuts and classroom size expansion proposed by CEO Ron Huberman.
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=164842&print=1

Thu May 20, 2010 at 8:13 AMBy: undecided voter In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms Danny from PACT, your negative campaigning is sad and it doesn't make me want to vote for your group. Sounds like from all the comments on the blog, CORE is the frontrunner and you're desparately trying to catch up.

Thu May 20, 2010 at 3:32 PMBy: Sam In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms I love recycling! Today I received a couple of pieces of literature from UPC (Where do they get all that money?).

I threw the UPC literature in the TRASH!

Thu May 20, 2010 at 5:54 PMBy: Joe from CORE In the News: CORE complaint expands, CTU election looms Really? I heard your mother is the splitting image of Leonid Brezhnev and you wet the bed until you were 14.

For some reason wealthy businessmen and political machines don't like sharing their hard earned money with the workers, so as soon as a labor or social movement is successful they attack them as communist dupes. They said it about the Civil Rights Movement too and it was that red baiting that successfully began the destruction of labor unions in 1946 with Taft-Hartley.

Throw any charge you want. We'll stick to the issues. Frankly, I don't care what each CORE member thinks about issues that have nothing to do with running this union. You'll find plenty of right wingers who will say that you're a communist too since you're in a labor union. Me, I was a College Republican who didn't start voting solidly Democrat until 2003 when Bush finally lost me for good.