CTU Leaders Continue Push To Leverage Pandemic For Political Gain

CHICAGO — Stacy Davis Gates either thinks she's slick or Chicagoans are suckers.

The Chicago Teachers Union vice president who moonlights as the head of a socialist political action committee went on national TV pitching a plan to pinch off a chuck coronavirus relief money to pay her union's members to knock on doors — like Democratic machine precinct captains of old — as a way to engage families about "hesitancy" to return to in-person learning in the fall.

"What I'm hearing is that their worries, their concerns and anxieties aren't being addressed by our mayor and our school district," she told CBSN.

Gates said the union's plan is to send out its members to ask questions in hopes of better understanding why some families might not want their kids to return to in-person learning next year.

And CTU wants Chicago Public Schools to pay for it out of $2 billion in federal COVID-19 relief funding, Gates said.

It's a con job — another CTU effort to leverage the pandemic for political gain.

The current pandemic reality is there's more vaccine supply than demand. The Food and Drug Administration just approved emergency use of the Pfizer vaccine for kids age 12 and up. And vaccinations have stemmed the tide of coronavirus infection rates to a level that inspired the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to issue new guidance lifting indoor mask mandates in most situations for people who are fully vaccinated.

Even the leader of the American Federation of Teachers — CTU's parent organization — has declared there is "no doubt schools must be open" fully and safely — "five days a week" at the start of the new school year.

Meanwhile, CTU leaders keep pushing the idea that it's somehow unsafe to send their kids back to school buildings in the fall when science and data suggest otherwise.

Even opinion polls show about 80 percent of parents want elementary and high school students to return to in-person learning.

It's as if CTU leaders are exhibiting symptoms of something like Munchausen syndrome by proxy — a disorder where a caregiver fakes symptoms in someone else to personally benefit.

Gates says CTU needs federal coronavirus funding to pay for "engagement, ensure that families who have suffered the most under this pandemic, Black families, brown families, have the ability to recover and are heard in the process."

History tells us CTU leaders don't want to have front stoop chats with parents just to find solutions that might easy a return-to-classroom hesitancy. Throughout the pandemic, CTU leaders have attempted to leverage the coronavirus crisis to further a political agenda.

When negotiating a return to in-person learning, CTU's bargaining team's demands included "rent abatement" and "defunding police."

United Working Families — CTU's shadow political action committee led by Gates and billed as a "serious party-building effort" that "recruits, develops and runs" candidates and organizes to fight for "working people's political power" — leveraged the pandemic to successfully lobby Springfield for legislation that makes it easier for the union to strike.

Could it be just a coincidence CTA leaders are pitching a publicly funded door-knocking campaign as state lawmakers — many who have collected campaign contributions peeled off from taxpayer-funded union dues — are pushing legislation to end mayoral control of the Chicago Board of Education?

Is it really unlikely that CTU union leaders would send members canvassing neighborhoods to engage parents on the topic of the return to in-person learning while also laying the groundwork for preferred school board candidates in advance of legislation to create a new form of government they have they hope to control?

The answer to both those questions is no.

Mark Konkol, recipient of the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for local reporting, wrote and produced the Peabody Award-winning series, "Time: The Kalief Browder Story." He was a producer, writer and narrator for the "Chicagoland" docu-series on CNN, and a consulting producer on the Showtime documentary, "16 Shots."
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