Chicago teachers' strike enters eighth day, 300,000 students miss classes
More than 300,000 students in the US city of Chicago will miss another day of classes as teachers in America’s third-largest school district have been on strike for over a week.
The strike entered an eighth day on Monday, as the teachers’ union and public school district failed over the weekend to resolve a deadlock in contract talks over class sizes, support staff levels and pay.
The strike began on October 17, and the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU), which represents the city’s 25,000 teachers, has been without a contract since July 1.
Each side blamed the other for the impasse. Chicago officials say a large gap remains between the two sides.
CTU President, Jesse Sharkey, said the city's latest offer is $38 million short of what the union is seeking in its most recent proposal.
Mayor Lori Lightfoot and the Chicago Public Schools’ chief executive, Janice Jackson, blasted the union in a joint news conference on Sunday for not accepting the school system’s offer.
“We are enormously disappointed that CTU cannot simply take yes for an answer,” Lightfoot said before listing the specifics on offer, including “a big, 16 percent raise for teachers.”
But the union blasted the mayor’s assertions that the schools had met much of its demands, declaring that Lightfoot used “bad mayoral math” to describe the schools’ offer.
Striking teachers rallied again later on Friday at Chicago’s Buckingham Fountain, however.
The strike is the latest in a wave of teacher work stoppages across the United States since last year.
It has been called the “Teachers’ Spring” in the United States, with educators staging an unprecedented wave of protests demanding increases in pay and school budgets.
“It’s like the Arab spring, but it’s a teacher spring,” Toni Henson, a geography teacher, told the Guardian newspaper in May.
According to the National Education Association, a group representing public school teachers in the United States, the average teacher salary in the country decreased by four percent from 2008‒09 to 2017‒18, after inflation adjustment.
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