SB7

SB 7 – The New Education Law Hitting Us Hard!

By Earl Silbar

CORE member, 2008-2011; retired GED teacher, City Colleges of Chicago; former chief steward, AFSCME 3506

Senate Bill 7 refers to the IL law passed in May, 2011. It was drawn up in secret meetings held from Jan. to April with privatization advocates, legislators, and the IFT, IEA and CTU union presidents. All parties agreed that their members would be kept out of any lobbying or public activity during these negotiations.

 Among many provisions, it established student test scores as 30% of teachers’ evaluations 2 years before state law had mandated; ended seniority for teachers statewide in economic-based layoffs and rehires- instead making evaluations the top criteria; established 2 consecutive "satisfactory" evaluations as the basis for termination; and set the minimum strike vote for Chicago teachers very high - 75% of all members when it had been 51% of those voting.

Contrary to what Kaplan wrote in the MR article (June 2013), the ISO’s Socialist Worker report in 2012, and what many other sympathetic observers say and write, CTU Pres. Karen Lewis did not act alone. In fact, she and all the CTU officers and staff actively fought a proposal that CORE campaign in the CTU, across Chicago and with others statewide to defend seniority in layoffs and rehires. After all, seniority is the most widely accepted way to protect workers from management discrimination and intimidation. The motion proposed defending seniority be part of a larger city and statewide campaign for “quality schools for all”. 

 I made that proposal at the Jan. 2012 CORE meeting after reading material on the CTU website that made clear the leadership’s intent to trade seniority for preserving the right to strike. Karen Lewis, VP Jesse Sharkey, chief of staff Jackson Potter and others spoke against the motion and to allow Pres. Lewis to conduct secret negotiations instead. After a quorum call blocked an official vote, a straw vote showed 22 against and 11 for my motion to that CORE campaign to defend seniority in economic layoffs/rehires and NOT support secret deals.

The Feb. meeting was cancelled with no explanation. After some discussion in March, another quorum call made a vote impossible. After months of vituperative email discussions that drove out and intimidated many, CORE’s April vote was overwhelmingly against the proposal and to endorse Pres.Lewis’s secret negotiations. Part of the explanation for this support lies in the fact that all CTU staff are told to sign a corporate-confidentiality statement that stops them from openly discussing, thus disagreeing with, internal CTU discussions and decisions. In fact, different left groups and formerly-active individuals held such staff positions. Hence, their jobs were tied to opposing this motion and supporting Karen Lewis’s secret deal-making.

When CTU reps presented SB7’s provisions to CTU delegates, they were burned by the hot response, esp. at the meeting held at Kelly H.S. in the largely Black south side. In response, Pres. Lewis renounced her public support for SB7 issued the day they made it public. Instead, the leadership presented a motion to the union’s House of Delegates that sounded like opposition to SB7. In fact, the fine print called for altering the time lines of some limitations as a condition for supporting SB7 as amended. Those amendments sailed through the legislature; the CTU never mobilized teacher-public opposition.