********************************
From George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance, 5132 W. Berteau,
Chicago, IL 60641; (773) 725-7502.
********************************
Hello Colleagues:
Tom Reece and the incumbent leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union
have been dumped by vote of the union's membership.
Here is some news from Substance that you won't read in the
newspapers for a couple of more days.
The final tallies of the voting in the May 18, Chicago Teachers Union
election will not be announced until Friday, May 25.
At this time, however, tallies of the ballots shows that the
incumbent leaders of the fourth largest local in the American
Federation of Teachers have been decisively defeated in their bid to
return to power.
An opposition caucus -- PACT -- which includes some of the most
outspoken opponents of the Vallas administration and its mindless
commitment to standardized testing has been elected to all major
offices in the 34,000-member Chicago Teachers Union.
First indications of the size of the landslide which took place when
teachers and other union members voted in their schools last Friday
are now in.
With 99 percent of the votes tabulated on what is called the "long
ballot", at 5:00 p.m. yesterday (May 22), the following numbers (and
percentages) were known from reliable sources:
PACT (the challenger slate, headed by Marquette Elementary teacher
Deborah Lynch Walsh) had 11,272 votes, or roughly 56 percent of the
total vote. The United Progressive Caucus (CTU President Tom Reece's
incumbent slate) had 8,746 votes, a bit less than 44 percent of the
vote.
Since the 1970s, the "UPC" (as Reece's caucus is known) has been the
local version of the American Federation of Teachers national
"Progressive Caucus" which is currently headed by AFT president Sandy
Feldman.
Because more than 4,000 CTU members are in categories (generally,
retirees) which are not eligible to vote in citywide elections for
officers, the total number of eligible voters on May 18 was a bit less
than 30,000 union members. The number of teachers and union members
voting has been between 21,000 and 23,000 in most elections and
referendums for the past ten years.
These numbers and percentages are known based on the tally of the
ballots cast on the "long" (convention delegate) ballot at election
time last week. Members of the Chicago Teachers Union cast their
votes on two separate ballots. A "short" ballot is used to elect
candidates for citywide offices (president, vice president, financial
secretary, recording secretary, and treasurer) and the members of the
executive board representing the various "functional groups" (high
school teachers, elementary teachers, etc.) within the union.
A longer ballot is used to elect delegates to the conventions of the
American Federation of Teachers and Illinois Federation of Teachers.
Since 1984, when Substance first began following the details of union
elections, this tally has reflected the outcome of the city-wide vote
for union officers. The percentages of votes on the convention slate
is usually the same as the percentages on the ballot for officers.
This means that the opposition slate has won a victory for all
citywide offices. Details of the elections in the functional groups
will not be available for a few more days. Substance exit polls
(which continue to come in) show that PACT won the high school
teacher vote (at the more than 90
Chicago high schools) overwhelmingly (at some, by votes of 100 or
more to ten or less). PACT has also apparently been winning the
voting among elementary teachers by a slight majority.
When the officers of the Chicago Teachers Union take office on July
1, the president will be Deborah Lynch Walsh, formerly of Marquette
Elementary School; the vice president will be Howard Heath, formerly
of Lane Technical High School, and the majority of other elected
officials of the union will come from a non-incumbent caucus for the
first time in more than 30 years.
The current union leadership has supported Chicago's testocratic
version of "school reform" since Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley was
given dictatorial power over the schools in 1995. CTU president Tom
Reece received the support of Paul Vallas, of the city's business
weekly (Crain's Chicago Business) and, in an unprecedent move for a
local union election, the endorsement of the city's second largest
circulation daily newspaper, the Chicago Sun-Times. In an editorial
on May 17, the Sun-Times told the teachers they should vote for Reece
and continue to act responsibly by following the Vallas
administration.
There will be thousand of details to follow. Tom Reece, Norma White,
Pam Massarsky, Melvin Wilson, Michael Williams, and the other
officers of the Chicago Teachers Union who collaborated with Paul
Vallas and with the teacher bashing and testocracies of the Daley
administration are now entitled to return to their teaching jobs at
the schools where they worked before they went on leave to work full
time for the union. In some cases, these people have not been inside
public school classroom as teachers since Jimmy Carter was President
of the United States.
Deborah Lynch Walsh, Howard Heath, and the other newly elected
officers of the largest union local in Illinois are supposed to take
office July 1. At that time, they will official begin serving their
three-year terms and will be on leave from their teaching jobs.
-------------------------------------
George N. Schmidt, Editor, Substance, 5132 W. Berteau, Chicago, IL
60641; (773) 725-7502.
***********************************************************
--
Jerry P.Becker
Department of Curriculum & Instruction
Southern Illinois University
Carbondale, IL 62901-4610 USA
Phone: (618) 453-4241 [O]
(618) 457-8903 [H]
Fax: (618) 453-4244
E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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