[Media Bias - CTU Wildcat Strike] What really happened in Chicago?
We still don’t really know what triggered the five-day shutdown of the nation’s third-largest school system — or what brought teachers back into class so quickly.
By Steve Rhodes https://kappanonline.org
January 18, 2022
When the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) went on strike in 2019, I wrote that — among other things — the media generally failed to vet many of the CTU’s checkable claims and presented readers with too much he-said, she-said coverage.
https://kappanonline.org/rhodes-russo-the-untold-story-behind-the-2019-chicago-teachers-strike/
Was the coverage any better this time during the union’s just-ended five-day walkout?
Well, the strike in 2019 was 11 days long and this was five, so there was about half as much time for political mischief and media malpractice.
But we still saw a microcosm of the some of the same media dynamics at play, chief among them a failure by local outlets to vet the union’s actions and claims as thoroughly as City Hall’s.
We still saw a microcosm of the some of the same media dynamics at play, chief among them a failure by local outlets to vet the union’s actions and claims as thoroughly as City Hall’s.
The chief example of this phenomenon might be found in coverage of an internal CTU assessment explaining the relatively quick resolution of the walkout.
The Chicago Tribune obtained an internal union memo in which union officials basically concede that they had lost the strike and that it was, indeed, a strike, not a lockout (a legal difference that is the subject of a complaint the City has filed with the state labor relations board). 
The internal assessment that underlies the story, Chicago Teachers Union approves COVID safety deal to end standoff – Chicago Tribune, was featured in a screenshot from Tribune reporter George Pratt (below).
One of the many beauties of digital journalism is the ability to embed content like tweets and screenshots; the power of seeing original source documents cannot be matched by mere description, excerpts, and quotes.
For other media outlets that might be uncomfortable sharing a competing reporter’s description of documents they do not have in hand themselves, seeing the original allows it to be used in their own reporting as well.
That does not appear to have happened in Chicago.
Above: “Some internal reflections from @CTULocal1 leadership on the 2022 remote learning dispute with Mayor Lori Lightfoot.”
https://twitter.com/royalpratt/status/1481425065438765058
The CTU memo Pratt tweeted offered a rare, valuable glimpse inside the union’s mindset. And yet so far as I’ve seen, no other outlet has covered it.
That fits the general pattern. Historically and in this recent instance, reporters have tended to interrogate City Hall and CPS (Chicago Public Schools) more aggressively than the union — perhaps because interrogating City Hall and CPS is something they do every day in their reporting, as well as the obvious fact that those entities are public, governmental bodies.
But the union is its own political entity in Chicago, with its own agenda, messaging strategies and divisions, and should be treated as such. Perhaps this shows where reporters’ sympathies lie, or reflects reporters’ frustration with years of CPS dishonesty, or perhaps union hyperbole is simply accepted as a given.
Especially in the current environment of the union’s permanent campaign against the mayor, it leaves a lot of ground uncovered.
So while the union may put forth a public narrative justifying its decision to walk off the job — a decision made late one night and beginning the next morning — it’s hard to categorize the move as a “win” when their internal post-walkout communications says things like “We accomplished more than nothing,” “Some members will say, ‘It wasn’t worth it!'” and “We won/held our own on the local narrative.”
Still, most end-of-the-strike stories used a down-the-middle framing on whether the union “won” or “lost” the walkout, without interrogating the union’s swift decision to refuse in-person education or the quick decision to return to school.
The only exception I’ve seen other than the Tribune article was Chalkbeat Chicago putting a teacher’s lament that ‘I have to accept that we lost‘ in its headline.
https://chicago.chalkbeat.org/2022/1/11/22879060/chicago-schools-reopening-covid-union-vote.
This might be the time for the caveat that I generally support unions and particularly thought the CTU was on the side of the angels in its fights against former mayor Rahm Emanuel — and that Lori Lightfoot has been a major disappointment to me, as she has others.
I also have been critical of the union’s current leadership. As to this particular dispute, I suspect I’m like a lot of folks – at least those who don’t have children – in that I truly don’t know whether in-school learning should have returned immediately; I’m 50-50 on the issue at hand.
And again, I get that there isn’t much if any goodwill between the school district and reporters. But that doesn’t make CTU any more truthful.
The union’s rhetoric was frequently relayed to readers, but not questioned in the way it would have been had it come from City Hall. For example, is Lightfoot really “on a kamikaze mission to destroy public education,” as CTU vice president (and rumored mayoral candidate) Stacy Davis Gates charged?
That sort of thing might have fit Rahm Emanuel, who closed 50 schools and seemed partial to charters and selective admissions schools that, while public, behave in a private-ish manner. But whatever Lightfoot’s flaws, and there are many, the union’s unquestioned, continued demonization of the mayor seems not only inaccurate but counterproductive.
“Should Chicago media start a thread of questions we would ask the mayor if she would hold a news conference after 4 (going on 5) days of schools being closed?” asked a local journalist? “Here’s one: Is remote learning worse than no learning at all?”
https://twitter.com/jensabella/status/1480652551959859200
Certainly the mayor should have been available to the media for daily updates. And the questions in this thread are valid, though many of them were CTU talking points that the mayor would say she’s answered. But I didn’t see a similar thread of questions to ask CTU, like if union leadership really believed Lightfoot “detests” Black women?
The union’s rhetoric was frequently relayed to readers, but not questioned in the way it would have been had it come from City Hall.
It’s worth noting that the biggest (potential) bombshell of the standoff came not from an education reporter but from influential state politics reporter Rich Miller, whose Capitol Fax blog/newsletter has been a daily must-read for politicos for years.
Following up on Gov. JB Pritzker telling Bloomberg that he had offered the Chicago school district help during the standoff, Miller asked the governor’s office for details.
“I was told the state had offered SHIELD tests, vaccination clinics and masks for the past several weeks. The city has not yet taken the state up on those offers. Sigh.”
https://capitolfax.com/2022/01/07/covid-19-roundup-134/%5d
SHIELD tests are a saliva-based test developed at the University of Illinois and used in districts throughout the state.
Simply refusing an offer of seemingly free tests seemed incomprehensible, though well within the narrative of a stubborn and bumbling mayoral administration. Why in the world would the city not jump on such an offer?
The answer seemed to have been months old. In September, Chalkbeat reported that “A spokeswoman for the district said the state’s largest school district did not qualify to get the program for free since it separately received federal funding for testing.”
That explains why the mayor tweeted her “thanks” to the governor for his offer to *sell* the tests to the city — which some reports said was illegal because the city would then be double-dipping federal funds.
https://twitter.com/NaderDIssa/status/1479859580213542914
The mayor also favors nasal tests over saliva tests for a host of reasons. Regardless of whether she is right, the issue of the viability of governor’s offer — which seems like a really big deal — has still not been resolved in the media coverage, with some reports saying a deal is in the works and others stating it’s not happening
To be sure, it can be difficult to nearly impossible for reporters to ascertain the facts of such a matter in real-time. And it’s entirely possible that the messages out of City Hall and CPS were confusing. But the lasting impression is that the mayor bizarrely refused help that could save lives for incomprehensible reasons. And maybe that’s true! But we never really learned if that unlikely scenario was so.
So when CTU head Jesse Sharkey stated in a CTU blog post that “We’ve been fortunate that Governor Pritzker has led responsibly, including an offer of hundreds of thousands of SHIELD tests to the district, that the mayor rejected for week,” well, it’s just not clear if that’s the case.
https://www.ctulocal1.org/posts/we-knew-who-the-real-leaders-were-all-along-you-and-your-colleagues/
Grill the mayor, by all means. But grill the CTU, too.
In the end, media reports noted the relatively close margin of the union members’ vote to return to work, indicating a seemingly significant amount of discomfort with the agreement leaders forged. Sharkey claimed the quick return was necessary because teachers were losing pay, which doesn’t seem to track with either the vote (you’d think more teachers would’ve wanted to come back) or past CTU work stoppages that went longer, with make-up days/pay to be resolved at a later date.
While the mayor’s office and CPS should certainly continue to be scrutinized, it would be worthwhile going forward to delve beyond surface quotes into whether the union miscalculated – and if the agreement contained concessions that could’ve been had without walking out, as the 2019 agreement seemed to.
In other words, grill the mayor, by all means. But grill the CTU, too.
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What really happened in Chicago?
