Chicago’s Public School Meltdown
S1: Sunday night, Sarah Karp was so busy she slept next to her phone with the notifications still singing.
S2: This has been like a marathon right now. It’s like I’ve been on. I’ve been working since, I don’t know way.
S1: Sarah covers education for WBEZ Chicago Public Radio Station. Schools here have been shut down and teachers have been locked out since last week. The city has been negotiating around the clock.
S2: Yeah, last night, the mayor like, totally. She’s like, Well, I might have an update in the middle of the night. So even though I was sleeping, I kept getting up and like looking at my phone to be like, Oh, did she say something?
S1: The educators and parents in Chicago are worried about what the parents and educators are worried about everywhere right now. COVID kids are getting sick. Teachers, too, and it’s hard to know what’s safe. How hopeful are you that schools are going to open up in Chicago this week?
S2: You know, I’m pretty hopeful. But you just never know because even when you get really close to a deal, sometimes that’s when things fall apart. So it’s hard to tell.
S1: Here’s what Sarah does now. The positivity rate in Chicago is hovering around 20 percent. Case numbers are higher than they’ve ever been, and in city schools there’s no vaccine mandate for the kids or the employees. There’s regular COVID testing, but not all kids are getting it.
S2: Like some people, some people are looking at Chicago public schools and they’re like, I cannot understand how you can be open. And then other people are looking at Chicago Public Schools. You know, there are places like, you know, Arizona where they’re not even wearing masks to school and they’re just like, you know, virus, what virus?
S1: So you’re saying Chicago is like a Rorschach test?
S2: Yeah, I think this is something that everybody’s grappling with, like cases of COVID 19 are surging. But how are we supposed to react? Like, how do we live in a world where you’re going to see surges? And I don’t think that there’s like anybody who really knows that answer. Exactly.
S1: Today on the show, a big public fight over what parents and principals everywhere are talking about in private. How do schools live with COVID? I’m Mary Harris. You’re listening to what next? Stick around. I’m wondering if I can ask you to do a little bit of a chronological thing like kind of take me through the last year, a little bit to lead us to this place. I wonder if we could start with you just characterizing the relationship between the Chicago Teachers Union and the city government. Like, how would you describe that if you had to use one or two words?
S2: It’s very acrimonious. That’s probably the best way to to say, Well, you know, in 2019, which was, you know, just about a year in the
S1: before times, before
S2: times, just about a year after Mary Lori Lightfoot was elected, the Chicago Teachers Union went on strike. And there were a lot of hard feelings from that, both on the side of the teachers union and on the side of the mayor. And if there’s one thing that people say about this mayor and I don’t know her personally, but that that she doesn’t really let go of grudges very, very well. So you definitely see that they do not work all that well together.
S1: How did COVID change this relationship or modify it, if at all?
S2: Well, you have to remember. So this was the fall of 2019 that there was a strike. OK, now only what five six months later was March 2020, and now we had schools shut down. And this is how that day played it out. The mayor and the head of Chicago Department of Public Health held a press conference saying Under no circumstances do we need to shut schools. Schools are fine to be open. And then about 20 minutes later, Chicago Teachers Union held a press conference saying schools should be shut. And then, maybe a half hour after that, the governor held a press conference and said all schools must be closed. Whoa. So I mean, that was that was the day one.
S1: This push and pull continued for months. Kids weren’t back in school until April 2021. And while Chicago implemented some safety measures, many worried they just didn’t go far enough. Compare the COVID response in Chicago schools to what happened in Los Angeles. For instance, in L.A., the school board pushed to mandate vaccines for teachers and for students. Everyone got tested weekly to while in Chicago, it was pretty easy to opt out of testing and vaccines. So when Macron showed up in December, the schools got hit right away
S2: right before winter break. We started to see these outbreaks where we had one school where 80 percent of kids were on quarantine. And you know, a lot of the teachers don’t have to be in quarantine because most of them are vaccinated. But, you know, many, many, many classes flipped to remote. But there was nothing from the school district to say like, wow in this school. COVID 19 is spreading like wildfire, and we need to shut down the school and kind of get this under control. Instead, the school was supposed to continue. And parents felt like they were just out there on their own. And even the principal got COVID and wound up having got sick and wound up being at home. And so situations like that, where it seemed like the district wasn’t taking sort of seriously enough and people felt like the schools were just out there on their own trying to deal with huge outbreaks. I think that also contributed to the situation
S1: in Chicago Public Schools. They tried to distribute like 150000 take home COVID tests, right? But did that work?
S2: No, this was another mess. So basically on the last day of school, you know, schools were handing out these at home tests and you were supposed to take them and it was to turn them back in by dropping them off at a place where they could then be shipped to a place where they could be analyzed. A lot of the drop off places where, like FedEx boxes and they wound up like overflowing with tests like the tests were everywhere.
S3: COVID 19 tests kits piling
S1: up at FedEx drop boxes like you could see them like they weren’t in the box, they were outside.
S2: They were like stacked up on the sides. They were everywhere.
S3: Hundreds of kits piled high, unprotected on a snowy sidewalk.
S2: And also, there were some places on the list where you could drop off the tests and they weren’t taking the tests. So like you know, a couple of parents described to me going to Walgreens where they said you could drop off the test at some of the Walgreens and the Walgreens were like, No, we can’t take that. What are you talking about? So, you know, and those parents, you know, they were like some of them drove to a couple of other locations to drop all the tests. Some of them didn’t have a car and just went home. What a mess. There’s a mess. But then here’s the thing so. Forty thousand did get shipped, but all of those forty thousand twenty five thousand couldn’t be analyzed because somehow they didn’t make it to the place to be analyzed, which for some reason was in North Carolina within 48 hours and by 48. If you don’t get it within 48 hours of the test being taken, then they then I guess it’s no good. So, you know, oh oh oh, like a hundred and fifty thousand tests that we’re given out, you know, only about fifteen thousand were actually analyzed.
S1: So like ten percent of the tests that were distributed could actually be analyzed.
S2: It was a mass. It is a mess. You know what I can. Los Angeles do something so massive as testing their kids every week, and we can’t even figure out a way to get half our kids tested before they come to school and the first day after the winter break. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand it.
S1: So how did it get to the point where the teachers were saying, we can’t come in?
S2: I think all these things are adding up, and then I think I think, you know, one of the things is that maybe the teachers felt like, OK, we’re protected, at least because we have, you know, we have we’re vaccinated. And I think that with this new variant and with so many people getting COVID who were vaccinated, that the teachers were not only worried about them getting sick, the kids getting sick, the parents of the kids getting sick. But they were also worried that the schools weren’t going to have enough staff to really make them schools. I mean, we were hearing about, you know, schools where 50 percent of the teachers, 30 percent of the teachers were out because they had COVID last Monday and Tuesday. And so, you know, it’s very difficult for a school to operate. We have a like everywhere around the country. There’s a substitute shortage. So most of those schools weren’t getting substitutes in. Just have like kids sitting in auditoriums, kids, you know, classes that were doubling up, which is not a great thing when you have, you know, COVID going around. So, you know, it just I think that the Monday and Tuesday of last week kind of conferred to a lot of teachers that the school district was not ready for what was going on.
S1: When we come back, the teachers union takes a stand. So at the beginning of January in Chicago, the stage was set. Students were on their way back from wherever they went or whatever they did on vacation, and they were untested. It wasn’t really clear what cautionary measures the schools would have in place to protect their communities and the teachers they were fed up after only a couple of days back in school. The union scheduled a vote on whether teachers preferred to work virtually instead of in-person when teachers overwhelmingly voted to go remote. The district upped the ante. They locked those teachers out of their email and school accounts. And now these two sides are squabbling over how long the teachers will stay home. Who’s going to be COVID tested regularly when they come back? And how bad an outbreak has to be to shut a school down? But Sara Karp. She says politics complicate what the mayor, Lori Lightfoot, is willing to agree to here.
S2: This is the thing that it’s very, very hard to tell where the line between politics and public safety. Is, you know, where idea? You know, I just feel like right now, actually this moment. You know, basically, I think that Lightfoot has a proposal in front of her. If she doesn’t take it, is it that she doesn’t take it because she thinks it’s terrible or does she not take it because she doesn’t like the Chicago Teachers Union and she wants them to look bad because she wants them to look like they’re keeping schools closed?
S1: And you can’t tell. It’s very,
S2: very, very hard to tell. I mean, mix in that that she’s about one more year before she faces re-election. There are some rumblings that maybe there might be a candidate from the Chicago Teachers Union if there’s not a candidate from the teachers union, there’s for sure probably going to be some progressive candidate that backed by the teachers union, that’s not her. Hmm. In addition, the former head of Chicago Public Schools, Arne Duncan, the former secretary of education, has cracked the door open to running. So she’s got like this political pressure on her, so she’s
S1: got real competition, potentially on this issue. Very particularly right. Have union representatives been able to acknowledge the harms of remote learning?
S2: I think everybody in Chicago has acknowledged the harm of remote learning, and I have not talked to one teacher who would say that they want to go back there for a long period of time. And I do not think the union wants them to go back there for a long period of time. I think that for teachers, it was incredibly hard and they were incredibly distressed at how many of their kids were not logging in, not engaging, not participating. And I do not think that the union is at all advocating for a long term remote learning. Their members do not want remote learning for a long period of time. They do not want to go back there. I mean, you know, I’ve talked to teachers when they think about remote learning, they want to cry. I mean, in Chicago, we have some high schools where, like 50 to 70 percent of kids were not showing up on a daily basis. Those teachers? You know, not too many people go into education, except that they like kids and they want to see kids do well, and I don’t think those teachers were happy with that situation at all.
S1: It’s interesting because. I think from the national perspective. There’s dread about remote learning, but also this thought like, oh well, the teachers union maybe wants to flip to remote learning, like if I look on Twitter, the people who are most excited about this fight are people like Ronna McDaniel, the head of the Republican National Committee. Like, I feel like they’re just looking at this as a huge political win for them. It reminds me a little bit of how Chicago was a bit of a pinata in the 2016 presidential election because of gun violence. And I was like, Oh, is this going to be the same thing with schools? Do you think part of what’s happening is people are acknowledging the political harm of remote learning?
S2: Well, you know, this is probably one of the things that the union is most frustrated about because. You know, the mayor has made this into, you know what you’re saying this this idea that that the union wants remote learning and she’s fighting for in-person learning and they, you know, they just they don’t really care about the kids who are going to be screwed by having to go back to remote learning and. You know, the harms that people talk about with remote learning, we’re certainly having to do with remote learning for an entire year or even four months at a time. And what the teachers union has consistently said is what we were looking for is like a week or two until this calms down and until we could get this, these safety mitigations in place. I’ve never heard them say we want this to drag on for months, but I really think that that the the mayor’s been maybe successful in selling this as a debate between remote learning and in-person learning. But I also think that many people on the ground in Chicago understand that that’s not what the union is pushing for. And I don’t think it’s really fair to make that that the teachers union is fighting for remote learning. That that’s what they want is for all kids to go back to remote learning for a long period of time and, you know, be stuck in their bedrooms for months at a time. I don’t think that’s at all the situation,
S1: but it sounds a little bit like you’re saying like Lightfoot twisting the facts. Like she’s saying that the union isn’t bargaining in good faith. She’s saying that they want remote for longer than they do. And she’s making them look bad when really what they want is to make sure the kids coming into school don’t have COVID and make sure there’s a way to keep it that way.
S2: What I don’t want it to come out as as looking like is that the unions are always right or always perfect. I mean, they certainly they have their own rhetoric. They also have political views. You know, they certainly have agendas, you know, like every union. This is a very powerful union. So I mean, those are all true things too. And everybody, everybody’s trying to sell their position, right? But I do think that it’s that that one debate of that the union is pro remote learning and the mayor’s pro in-person learning. I think that that’s, you know, it’s it’s it’s too it’s like two black and white, it’s not an accurate way to describe what the union is trying to say in this particular instance, where, you know, there’s a lot of reasons the got the school district to this point, and there’s a lot of reasons that the teachers are standing up right now, and it’s not because they want remote learning.
S1: Sara Karp, I’m really grateful for your reporting. Thanks for coming on the show.
S2: Well, thank you for having me.
S1: Sara Karp is an education reporter at WBEZ in Chicago. And that is our show. What next is produced by Mary Wilson Danielle, Hewitt, Elinor Schwartz and Carmel Delshad. We are led by Alison Benedict and Alicia Montgomery, not Mary Harris. Go say hi on Twitter. Tell me what you thought of the show. I’m at Mary desk. Meanwhile, I’ll catch you back in this feed tomorrow.
