Which way, CTU? Election tests union's strategy and solidarity

Chicago Tribune

16-05-2025

A group of dissenting educators is challenging Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates and her squad in a union election Friday.
The opposition slate argues that the current leadership's bullish nature doesn't allow for dissenting voices, lacks financial transparency and has shed union allies. Their presidential candidate, Erika Meza, a 25-year veteran teacher from the Southwest Side, is unhappy with what CTU has come to symbolize.
'There's a lack of solidarity right now. We want to bring that back,' Meza said in an interview with the Tribune. 'We need to make this a decision for the whole union.'
A lot more than split factions in a teachers union is riding on this election. It's about CTU's priorities and values at a time when its popularity across the city has sharply declined. And questions about representation and race have emerged as a subtext.
The election also comes as Chicago Public Schools has an estimated $529 million deficit for its 2026 budget while facing increased attacks on public education from the federal government, presenting challenges for the next leader to navigate.
Davis Gates has a long history with labor and organizing. She has been CTU president since 2022 and served four years as vice president of the union before that. In April, she successfully settled a contract without a strike or a strike vote for the first time in 15 years, under close union ally Mayor Brandon Johnson.
She is known for her unwavering speaking style, which has at times broken longstanding alliances, and she declined to be interviewed for this story. But at a debate two weeks ago between the leadership of both sides, she was unapologetic about her governing approach.
'The call for civil rights was not something that was popular,' she said. 'In fact, I would submit that what has always been legal is the marginalization of women, of … basically everyone, except for cisgender, white, land-owning males.'
In recent weeks, both sides have been gearing up for election day, hosting fundraisers and panel discussions, distributing flyers and speaking at schools. Ballots will be collected early Friday at individual schools and then counted in the evening.
Davis Gates and CTU Vice President Jackson Potter are part of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE. The slate of opposing candidates calls itself the Respect Educate Advocate Lead, or REAL.
Caucuses are groups of union members who offer different viewpoints or platforms on issues like school funding and teacher pay.
Despite the divide in their pitches for CTU members, both caucuses rest under the umbrella of the teachers union and have relatively similar goals.
Still, Meza said there have been some tense moments.
She pointed to a flashpoint between CTU officers at the debate, where Potter made a challenging remark to Alison Eichhorn, who is running against him for CORE's second-in-command post.
Eichhorn had just touted Meza's Latina background when asked about the diversity of the slate.
'I think it's a problem to say, 'Oh, we're going to choose a Latin(a) president,'' Potter countered. 'That feels a little anti-Black to me based on what the district has done and by the leadership of our sister, Stacy Davis Gates, that has fought so hard against schools closing.'
The district recently announced a plan to help its Black student population, which data shows are the furthest behind, despite not making up the majority. The federal government launched an investigation into that plan related to allegations of discrimination.
If elected, Meza would be a Latina woman representing educators in a school district that is majority — 47% Latino. Black students represent roughly 35% of the district's enrollment, 11 percent identify as white, and 4.5% as Asian, and 1.4% as multiracial, according to the most recent data on the district's website.
In an interview with the Tribune a week later, Meza said that although having a leader who is representative of the majority Latino student body is a good thing, her candidacy is not about race. She said one of the reasons she's running is because current teachers union leaders lack recent experience inside schools.
'They have not experienced teaching remotely during a pandemic or dealing with newcomer students,' she said. 'There's a lot of high anxiety among our students that's not easy to navigate.'
Meza, a single mom and a bilingual computer science teacher at George Washington High School on the far Southeast Side, said she enjoys being in the classroom because of her desire to amplify voices and gather information. She was a history teacher for over a decade before she learned how to code.
She said she wants to add more field representatives to support students and staff in schools. She wants to make sure union officers are switching out every few years to ensure they stay connected to the student body, she said.
Davis Gates, meanwhile, is hailing the wins she said she secured in the contract settled last month, ratified with 85% membership participation, a historic 97% approval rate and, importantly, no strike.
Among other steps, the contract solidified teacher raises for veteran staff, promised to decrease class sizes and bolstered school support staff such as librarians.
At a press conference in mid-April announcing the high approval rating, she said the work of previous organizers allowed the contract to cross the finish line.
'This is cumulative,' she said. 'So while we didn't (strike) in 2025, we did it in '12, we did it in '16. … We had to do those games to get the system's attention.'
Former member of the Illinois House of Representatives Clem Balanoff said the contract's high approval rating was significant.
'When I look at other unions, that's really unheard of territory,' he said.
CORE won CTU's leadership in 2010 with the goal of fighting the privatization of schools. At the time, former CPS CEO Arne Duncan and Mayor Richard M. Daley had introduced a plan to shut down under-utilized and low-performing schools by firing staff and converting the buildings into privately run charter operators.
CORE led a successful strike two years later, under the leadership of then CTU President Karen Lewis. Her 2012 strike led to a ripple effect, as teachers unions across the country followed in Lewis' footsteps to replicate the successful rank-and-file approach.
In 2013, former Mayor Rahm Emanuel closed 50 neighborhood schools, feeding momentum for the teachers strike in 2019, strengthened by the support of the Service Employees International Union Local 73. SEIU 73 represents a significant number of workers in schools, including special education classroom assistants, security officers and custodians.
But allies close to Davis Gates say the alliance with SEIU 73 has fractured due to a conflict in the most recent contract proposal that SEIU said would take away special education assistants from its union and give them to CTU.
SEIU threatened to sue over the dispute, and Davis Gates went so far as to speak out publicly against several members of its leadership. Afterward, the leader of a local chapter of SEIU, Dian Palmer, issued a fiery internal message to members accusing CTU leadership of 'bullying and dishonesty.'
The conflict dragged on for months, and though that contract proposal was ultimately dropped, sources told the Tribune that tensions remain between the historically aligned unions.
It's conflicts like these that Eichhorn, who was once a dedicated CORE member, said have caused CTU's citywide approval rating to go down. She said city approval ratings went from 70% at the height of the strike in 2012 to 28%, according to polling released earlier this year by M3 Strategies, a Chicago-based political consulting firm.
'People are frustrated,' she said.
At the debate, when asked about her relationships with other unions, Davis Gates referenced collaboration that occurred when U.S. Secret Service visited an elementary school in Back of the Yards in late January. A Secret Service spokesman told the Tribune their officers were investigating a threat.
'A lot has been said about SEIU,' she said. But 'when those federal agents rang that doorbell, the security guards, who are represented by SEIU 73, alerted the principal from (the Chicago Principals & Administrators Association), who then alerted the counseling staff from CTU, and they all worked in concert.'
Meza and Eichhorn's platform also calls on the union to practice full financial disclosure. They allege that CTU is not being honest with members about how union dues are being spent.
Liberty Justice Center is suing CTU on behalf of four union members, demanding that the union produce an audit after failing to do so for four years. The nonprofit litigation firm's legal positions and priorities often align with conservative and libertarian ideals, including limiting government power and challenging union influence.
'For an organization as large and high profile as CTU to have this requirement and to just so blatantly ignore it is a significant problem, and I would say an unusual problem,' said Dean McGee, the lead attorney on the lawsuit.
Ultimately, the cash-strapped district needs a union leader who can handle money responsibly, said Froylan Jimenez, a CPS civics teacher at John Hancock College Preparatory High School in the Clearing neighborhood who filed an unfair labor complaint against the union over dues money funneled to Brandon Johnson's mayoral campaign.
That means helping CPS ask for more money from the state, Jimenez said.
'Whomever the president is, I think they need to rebuild our relationships in Springfield,' he said.
The fate of the election lies in the ballots that teachers union members will cast Friday.
And Meza stressed that despite the politics, she and Davis Gates are part of the same team: 'She's still my sibling, my union sibling. And she's a fighter.'