The two school unions, CTU and SEIU 73, went on a march together in the 2019 teachers strike, solidarity between the teachers and the service workers. Photo: Considered Sources, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Despite the mayor’s threats to retaliate against teachers who refuse to return to in-person teaching,  71% of teachers voted to authorize a strike. 

Is it safe for Chicago’s teachers and students to teach in person? Mayor Lightfoot says the science is clear  and Chicago Public Schools (CPS) have meet safety standards. Why won’t that pesky union trust the science, asks the Tribune’s editorial board?

Not just the teachers — parents don’t think the schools are safe either. It’s not the science that the teachers don’t trust, it’s the mayor and CPS. The union says there have been 64 schools with COVID cases in January alone, even without a mass return to the buildings. CPS said in December that only 37% of students will return to in-person classes, only about a third of Black and Latinx students. Lightfoot’s brilliant plan would have teachers in empty classrooms zooming to kids at home.

CPS and the Tribune editors refer to a short opinion piece by three CDC scientists. Who could disagree with CDC scientists? Leave aside that the studies described in the piece took place in Wood County, Wisconsin, pop. 75,000, and North Carolina, where public health staff from two university medical schools partnered with the schools in a newly created, NIH-funded collaborative.

Under what conditions will schools be safe? The authors say preventing transmission in schools requires action to reduce transmission in the community, such as restricting in-door dining and recreation, which Chicago now allows. The authors also say the schools should not only require universal face mask use and handwashing, but also dedensify the classrooms. Reminder that Chicago schools are notorious for large class sizes.  Many school districts take this concern seriously enough to have children show up only two days/ week in order to reduce the  class sizes; but that isn’t part of CPS planning. And it isn’t likely that CPS has the money or will for “expanding screening testing to rapidly identify and isolate asymptomatic infected individuals” and “options for online education, particularly [for] those at increased risk of severe illness or death if infected with SARS-CoV-2.”

Is there even a scientific consensus about what it would take to send the teachers and kids back into the buildings? There are no agreed metrics. Here’s one that the mayor would find inconvenient: “For schools to open, spread in a community should be below what the CDC considers “high incidence,” or 50 cases of the virus per 100,000 people over a 28-day period, Tara C. Smith, an epidemiology professor at Kent State University, told Vox in an email.”

Only 50 per 100,000, says the epidemiologist. Chicago’s incidence in the 28 days ending 2/2/2021 was 759.*  The CDC considers the number of new cases per 100,000 in the last 14 days  a “core indicator” and “threshold for risk of introduction and transmission of COVID-19 in schools”: in the last 14 days, Chicago’s new cases per 100,000 was 281. The CDC considers more than 200/100,000 indicates “the highest risk of transmission in schools.”

Do I think schools can’t be safe? I don’t know, but I doubt that Chicago Public Schools can make their underinvested schools clean, with small classes and space to distance in classrooms, and adequate ventilation. I don’t think they can get organized to dedensify their large classes with students coming in only two days/week and learning remotely the other days. CPS apparently can’t even process the requests to teach remotely from teachers with compromised immune systems or elderly family in the house.

And I don’t think you can have safe schools with a bureaucracy that won’t consult teachers or principals or support staff  in their planning. Democracy stopped when you left the polling place. We can’t be too easily shocked that the city fathers would try to force teachers to risk their health and their lives; this is, after all, normal for working people in America. But in Chicago we are seeing something unusual, which should be normal — working people defending themselves.

Now that it’s clear that Lightfoot’s bullying failed, will there be serious negotiation? Hard to say from the outside how much is theater. The safest option for the schools would be to wait until teachers are vaccinated, and then extend the school year with in-person teaching into the summer. Sounds like that’s based on science, no?  LA schools Superintendent Beutner says LA teachers need vaccinations before schools can reopen. That seems too rational an option for Chicago politics, with our mayor, like all Chicago mayors before her, bowing to pressure from business interests. Biden so far hasn’t taken sides, but he is promising school reopening in his first 100 days, weeks if not months before vaccines will be available for teachers.

Six dance teachers answered the mayor’s bullying with a music video, dramatizing their need to feel safe in the language of bodies in eloquent motion. Watch “The Moment We’re Safe” here, on the Chicago Teachers Union Facebook page.

We are seeing more news reporting promoting a return to in-person learning — of course, the threat of a strike looms. The framing of the stories pits teachers against parents. The schools are safe, remote learning is “causing a mental health crisis” for the kids, the public is turning on the teachers and parents are “losing it” also, the union “cultivates fear and panic amongst its members,” parents are organizing for reopening, the union is “strike happy”  and just cares about “boosting its power,” and parents are “at the breaking point.” These are the sort of stories we see whenever teachers threaten to go on strike.

Mayor Lightfoot reads from the same anti-labor playbook, beginning with threats and sanctions instead of collaboration. That worked for years, but Lightfoot is facing a different kind of union and she hasn’t adapted. This union has high levels of rank-and-file activism and democratic participation — and broad support from school parents and the rest of us. I saw the creativity and initiative of rank-and-file teachers in the 2019 strike, when teachers, staff and students gathered in the union hall for an “artbuild.” Activist artists came to collaborate with them as they made over 1,000 signs, painted parachutes and silk-screened posters. This union doesn’t just have token picketing of the schools. It has mass action with marches and rallies becoming spectacles, people carrying sculpted effigies, artfully painted signs with funny and pointed slogans. Unions need thus kind of creativity to get their message out when the news media shape their stories to amplify elite interests.

But media stories with anti-union bias have a problem convincing their target audience. After all, who would parents trust to keep their kids safe in the schools? The mayor and CPS, or the teachers?
—Paul Elitzik

*My calculation, but I teach at an art school, so check the math: 20,574 (cumulative cases in 28 days ending 2/2/2021)/2,710,000 (Chicago population) = .00759188, x 100,000 =  759 cases per 100,000. Note that Cook County’s average new daily cases were  28 /100,000 on Feb. 1, according to the NY Times. They don’t give the 14-day rate per 100,000, but if you multiply the daily average by 14 for a rough estimate, you get 392. The Times says “ a county is at very high risk level if it reported more than 160 cases per 100,000 people during the last two weeks. This is equivalent to a daily rate of 11 cases per 100,000 people.” The CDC charts this and other indicators here.

Two articles I found helpful:
Anna North, “What It Would Really Take to Reopen American Schools.” Vox, February 2, 2021.
Jeff Schuhrke, “Chicago Teachers Are Showing the Country How to Fight an Unsafe Reopening.” In These Times, January 27, 2021.

Working on a banner for the CTU’s 2019 strike in the Art Build at the union hall.