What to expect with 3 more years of Stacy Davis Gates leading Chicago Teachers Union

Stacy Davis Gates and her slate of progressive Chicago Teachers Union leaders won reelection on May 16. Illinoisans can expect the union to pursue more money, more power and more radical policies during her continued tenure as union president.

The Chicago Teachers Union has a 60% disapproval rating among Chicago voters – just 29% of voters approve.

The union has been rocked by one scandal after another with its president Stacy Davis Gates at the helm, from Davis Gates threatening violence to a principal to union leaders hiding union financials from its members.

Yet the union’s members just opted for more of the same by re-electing Davis Gates and her slate of progressive union leaders.

That isn’t just bad news for Chicagoans. What CTU does affects the whole state. Now that Davis Gates has retained control for another three years, the union’s leaders will be invigorated to push for more money, more power and an increased infiltration of its radical ideology in public schools.

CTU will demand billions from taxpayers

CTU has already started clamoring for Illinoisans to funnel more money its way.

The union demanded an additional $1.1 billion from state lawmakers in the summer of 2024. Its demand was ignored, but that hasn’t stopped CTU from clamoring for more.

The union hosted at least six lobbying days this spring, encouraging teachers to bus down to Springfield and lobby lawmakers on the union’s legislative agenda. That included a continued demand for $1 billion.

CTU hasn’t stopped there. Now the union is calling for nine new tax hikes worth $7.3 billion. Those tax hikes include the following:

• $725 million: tax on digital advertising.
• $1.2 billion: corporate tax worldwide combined reporting.
• $200 million: tax corporate offshore sheltered income.
• $1.5 billion: close the carried interest loophole.
• $840 million: billionaire wealth tax.
• $1.7 billion: excise tax on capital gains.
• $830 million: raise corporate income tax.
• $175 million: close corporate tax loopholes.
• $150 million: reform the estate tax.

CTU and a coalition of other labor unions and organizations claim the tax hikes are necessary to cover the new state budget shortfall and help expand funding for schools, immigrant services, direct cash assistance and affordable housing.

In the meantime, an April poll revealed voters rank high taxes as the No. 1 issue facing the state.

Nearly half of voters polled said they would leave Illinois if given the opportunity. But CTU clearly doesn’t care.

CTU will pour millions into elections to seek even more power in Chicago and beyond

CTU took over City Hall in 2023 when its nearly $2.3 million in union money secured the mayoral election of former CTU organizer Brandon Johnson. CTU and its state and national affiliates were the biggest spenders on Chicago politics that election cycle, funneling nearly $6.5 million to mayoral, city council, city clerk and city treasurer candidates between Feb. 28, 2022, and May 4, 2023.

After placing a union crony in the mayor’s office, Davis Gates and CTU turned their sights on obtaining control of the CPS school board. The union spent $2.8 million on its endorsed candidates in 2024. It only won three of the nine contested seats, but that isn’t likely to stop CTU. The union has another opportunity for a school board takeover when all 21 seats are up for election in 2026.

CTU doesn’t limit itself to funding Chicago politicians. It’s also a major funder of state lawmakers. As of July 2024, it had spent nearly $1.3 million on the campaigns of then-sitting state lawmakers, including 40 whose districts were outside the city and school district. Lawmakers that year acted according to CTU’s wishes on 6 out of every 10 bills on which it lobbied.

There’s no reason to think CTU won’t continue this game of political quid pro quo.

CTU will continue infiltrating schools with “bargaining for the common good”

CTU’s 2012 strike – the first of five walkouts in a 10-year period – was a turning point in the union’s efforts to put politically motivated provisions in its union contract. In fact, CTU has been an incubator for “bargaining for the common good” – a euphemism for using union contract negotiations to tackle social issues such as racial justice, climate justice and immigration at the bargaining table.

Rather than focusing on wages, benefits and other typically negotiated employment provisions, CTU focuses on getting political provisions into its contract. The scheme allows the union to bypass the legislative process to get things into its contract that might be harder to obtain through proper democratic channels. For CTU, this has included demanding cash for asylum seekers, police-free schools, carbon-neutral buildings and the creation of affordable housing. Its most recent contract includes attacks on parents’ rights, from allowing the district to keep secrets from parents to limitations on charter schools.

CTU’s effort to take this blueprint to other districts isn’t merely hypothesis. After the 2012 strike ended, “[CTU] union leaders planned town halls in other cities across the country, in New York and Cleveland, San Francisco and Tampa, to spread the new gospel” of putting “things on the table that hadn’t been on the table before.”

Davis Gates now sits on the advisory committee that oversees the entity called Bargaining for the Common Good. She is committed to its promulgation and has described it as “an intersectional feminist strategy.”

“Community and worker justice organizations are putting critical race feminism into practice by making broader demands and building power to win bigger victories for gender, racial and economic justice,” she has written.

As Davis Gates focuses on her intersectional feminist strategy, fewer than 1 in 3 students in CPS can read at grade level. Even fewer can do math.

Illinoisans can expect three more years of Davis Gates and her ilk demanding more money from taxpayers, more power over schools and more infiltration of the union’s radical policies in schools. All that, while Chicago’s students struggle.