Chicago Teachers Union history not easily available on the CTU's own website, but BACK ISSUES at Substance have a lot of it...
Members of the 25,000-member Chicago Teachers Union may be able to learn a great deal about Teachers for Social Justice and the current problems in Honduras from their union, but one of the things we cannot learn easily at the union's official website (www.ctunet.com) is the recent history of the union itself. Despite the fact that union membership dues pay for a stenographer to record everything that takes place at the monthly meetings of the union's House of Delegates (HOD), that record appears nowhere on line. Also, back issues of the Chicago Union Teacher, the union's "award winning" monthly magazine, are not available on line. This is in stark contrast to most progressive publications, which have gone out of their way to archive and make available all of their histories. The problem is particularly ironic because the current leadership of the Chicago Teachers Union, elected from the CORE caucus and in power continually since July 1, 2010) was elected on a promise of "transparency." Lack of so-called "transparency" was one of the main reasons why the former union leadership (the "United Progressive Caucus") was ousted by CORE in the hotly contested May 2010 union election (the May voting whittled down the number of caucuses from five to two, and a runoff in June elected the CORE slate, headed by Karen Lewis and Jesse Sharkey).
Those who want to learn some of the facts of the history can go to BACK ISSUES here at Substance. This Substance Website (www.substancenews.net) has been on line since 2008. A previous site (www.substancenews.com) began in 2002 but had to be discontinued in 2007 - 2008, replaced by the new site. The substancenews.com site is still available to some readers. Substancenews.net is available with all articles going back ten full years to 2008.
