CTU Loses Credibility Blaming Push For Reopening School On Racism

Mark Konkol
Updated ·4 min read

CHICAGO — The push to reopen some city schools by Mayor Lori Lightfoot and public schools chief Janice Jackson, both Black women, is "rooted in sexism, racism and misogyny," according to a tweet posted by the Chicago Teachers Union, whose president is a white guy.

It's just the latest public display of ironic, out-of-touch hypocrisy by CTU leaders who seem dead set on destroying all credibility in their argument that students and teachers should continue remote learning until the coronavirus crisis is under better control.

The Twitter backlash was so swift and furious that the anonymous people who control the CTU's social media account deleted the preposterous post that survived as a screenshot.

CTU responded with something like an apology that could have used editing from an English teacher: "Fair enough. Complex issue. Requires nuance. And much more discussion. More important, the people the decision affects deserve more. So we'll continue give them that. Appreciate the feedback of those truly in the struggle."

Let's be real. CTU leaders aren't "truly in the struggle." They've launched a political war aimed at establishing influence over Lightfoot's administration to gain bargaining power that doesn't exist in the union contract. It says so in the request for an injunction blocking schools from reopening.

What's happened since is that CTU President Jesse Sharkey and Vice President Stacy Davis Gates have struggled to offer compelling evidence that reopening some schools in January will create a coronavirus superspreading situation when statistics, anecdotal evidence from Chicago private schools and epidemiologists suggest it unlikely.

They make vague proclamations alleging a political conspiracy without evidence to back it up.

“Everything about what they are doing is wrong,” Davis Gates said in a statement. “Teachers, clinicians, paraprofessionals are all being backed into a corner because they want to provide guidance and support for safety, but CPS and the mayor have decided to go it alone, which means they’re not centering the needs of our most vulnerable students because they refuse to engage.”

Are Chicagoans supposed to believe that Lightfoot and Jackson are lying about taking advice from the state's leading epidemiologists, including public health commissioner Dr. Alison Arwady and Dr. Jennifer Layden, who previously served as the Illinois Department of Public Health's chief medical officer?

And the root of Lightfoot and Jackson's motivation for reopening schools is "racism, sexism and misogyny?"

If that's true, that's worth a public discussion. So, I reached out to get the union's take on the complexity and nuance of "racism, sexism and misogyny" driving public school coronavirus policy that they say deserves more discussion.

I hoped for a public statement or an angry call back, so I could ask more questions: What specifically is racist, sexist and misogynist about wanting kids to return to school during the pandemic? Who are you calling racist? And was the tweet posted Sunday after a bottomless-mimosa brunch?

The lack of a reply wasn't a shock. CTU leaders aren't known for engaging in thoughtful public debates on complex topics. They also don't respond to questions about obvious hypocrisy and the anonymous team of social-media gargoyles who bully, steamroll and gaslight anyone who opposes the union's overtly socialist political agenda. They shrug off criticism with silence.

Consider the CTU's other controversial tweets this year. A Scooby-Doo parody meme depicted Mayor Lightfoot bound with rope. In August, a CTU tweet egged on protestors who set up a guillotine outside Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' house.

"We are completely frightened by, completely impressed by and completely in support of wherever this is headed," the CTU tweeted about the Bezos protest and later deleted.

Even the off-color cartoon meme of hog-tied Black mayor and the Bezos-beheading joke pale in stupidity to the Twitter claim that a school system run by Black women is motivated by race and gender to put students and teachers at risk of contracting coronavirus in classrooms.

It's no wonder City Hall hasn't publicly complained about CTU's social media vitriol.

The more extreme CTU's Twitter rhetoric becomes, the less relevant they are.



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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This article originally appeared on the Chicago Patch