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Victory for CORE candidates in Chicago Teachers Pension Fund election October 30 signals major shift in the politics of the Chicago Teachers Union

George N. Schmidt - November 01, 2009

In what can only be described as a stunning upset, two Chicago public schools teachers, Lois Ashford (O'Keefe Elementary School) and Jay Rehak (Whitney Young High School) decisively defeated two incumbents to win seats on the Board of Trustees of the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund (CTPF) in an election held in all Chicago public schools and most of the city's charter schools on October 30, 2009.

Above, Jay Rehak (Whitney Young High School, Chicago) and Lois Ashford (O'Keefe Elementary School, Chicago) both spoke against the attacks on the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund (CTPF) at the October 28, 2009 meeting of the Chicago Board of Education. Two days later, Rehak and Ashford were the two candidates elected to fill two teacher trustee vacancies on the CTPF. Endorsed by CORE and supported in a citywide election campaign, the two won against two incumbents (Reina Otero and Nancy Williams) endorsed by Chicago Teachers Union President Marilyn Stewart and two other candidates (Aspasia Demeros and Rose Mary Finnegan) endorsed by former Chicago Teachers Union President Deborah Lynch. In their e-mail thank yous to CORE, both Ashford and Rehak noted that the victory was the result of a massive election effort bringing the facts of their candidacy to most of the more than 600 public schools where the votes were cast by all active duty teachers. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt. The certified results of the election provided by the staff of the CTPF at approximately 9:00 p.m. on October 30 listed the vote results as follows (the first two are the winners and are supposed to be in bold face type):

Jay Rehak, 6,551 votes (23.72 percent). Winner.

Lois Ashford, 4,842 votes (17.53 percent). Winner.

Nancy Williams, 4,799 votes (17.38 percent)*

Reina Otero, 4,115 votes (14.90 percent)*

Rose Mary Finnegan, 3,037 votes (7.74 percent)

Aspasia Demeros, 1,711 votes (6.19 percent)

[* denotes incumbent UPC endorsed candidate].

The election was to pick two of six teacher trustees on the board that oversees the $10 billion CTPF. The voting took place in all Chicago public schools whose classroom teachers and other teacher certificated staff pay into the pension fund. This includes most of the city's charter schools, although observers noted that many of them didn’t vote in the pension election because they apparently hadn’t selected pension representatives for their schools.

Under CTPF election rules, the winners are those with the largest number of votes. A majority is not required in the races, which often feature multiple candidates.

A separate election is being held by mail ballot to select three trustees to represent retired teachers. The results of that election will be known after November 7, when the ballots have to be received and counted by the CTPF.

Two trustees representing the Chicago Board of Education and selected by the seven members of the Board have already been selected by the Board. Prior to the Board's October 28, 2009, meeting, the Board had selected retired banker Alberto Carrero to continue as one of the Board trustees. At the October 28, 2009, meeting, the Board selected Peggy Davis, a lawyer for Exelon Corporation, to continue as the second Board trustee.

CORE Co-chair Jackson Potter (who teaches at Little Village High School) and victorious candidate Jay Rehak (who teaches at Whitney Young High School) celebrate CORE's victory in the pension trustee election on October 30, 2009. The two were at the CORE fundraiser at Rosa's Blues Lounge on Armitage Ave., which turned into a victory party. Substance photo by George N. Schmidt.Historic victory based on hard work, careful study, and organization

The victory of Rehak and Ashford was historic. Reina Otero and Nancy Williams were not only incumbents, but they had been endorsed by Marilyn Stewart, President of the 31,000-member Chicago Teachers Union. The two were also members of the union’s United Progressive Caucus (UPC), which Stewart heads. The UPC even paid for a mass mailing to all eligible voters telling the voters to vote for Otero and Williams. The post card was signed by Marilyn Stewart.

The aggressive campaign began months before nominating petitions had to be submitted. Both candidates had been screened by CORE and selected based on their experience as teachers and their willingness to study the issues facing the pension fund and the massive $7 billion budget of the Chicago Board of Education.

Now more than ever, the CPS budget and the pension fund are related. Because the claim of a huge budget “deficit” had been made publicly by CPS Chief Executive Officer Ron Huberman almost as soon as he was appointed by Mayor Richard M. Daley in January 2009 to succeed Arne Duncan, the issues of the pension fund and the CPS budget were linked. Since February, Huberman has been trying to claim that money CPS is obligated to pay into the teachers’ pension fund will take instructional funds away from the school system’s 400,000 children.

CORE co-chair Karen Lewis (left), who teaches at King High School, took the stage with winner Jay Rehak (right) so that Jay could announce the decisive CORE victory to the Friday night party crowd at Rosa's Blues Lounge. Rehak attributed his victory to the teamwork and creativity of CORE. Substance photo by Kristine Mayle. A complicated history of CPS obligations to the fund, teacher contributions, and the fund’s own investment strategies lies at the heart of the controversy now heating up between the CTPF and the Chicago Board of Education, and Rehak and Ashford could explain to voters that they were the only two candidates who had addressed the complex issues on both sides: at the school board and in relation to the pension fund. Huberman’s objective is to replace the current defined benefit pension plan with what is called a “defined contribution” plan, and the majority of teachers, once they understand the issues, are openly opposed to Huberman’s proposals.

Rehak and Ashford were the only two of the six candidates for the teacher trustee positions to testify on the Board of Education’s massive ($7 billion when operations and capital are combined) budget during the three days of hearings (August 17 – August 19) that CPS held. Both challenged the claims by Huberman that CPS was facing a larger than average “deficit.” Rehak, in particular, raised several other questions that Huberman has avoided as to how large the deficit actually is and how much of it was caused by reckless investment policies at CPS — not at the pension fund.

Rehak received some of the information he used to challenge Huberman and the Board of Education as part of a budget and finances study committee that was established by CORE in February 2009. That committee had been meeting twice a month since February, when it began its study with a review of the Board of Education’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report (CAFR), which a number of budget analysts note is the only honest budget document CPS makes available to the public. [Full disclosure: This reporter participates in the budget study committee and has been monitoring the CPS budget for 30 years, including at one time as an employee of the Chicago Teachers Union].

Beginning in July 2009, he took the podium during public participation at Board of Education meetings to publicly challenge Huberman’s claims about the budget deficit and demand on behalf of the city’s teachers that the Board back off from its attempt to get a so-called “Pension Holiday” via legislation in the Illinois General Assembly in Springfield.

Qualified candidates and careful preparation weren’t the only qualities that resulted in the CORE candidates’ victory, however.

Part of the crowd at Rosa's Blues Lounge that turned a fundraising party into a victory party on October 30, 2009, after hearing the announcement that Jay Rehak and Lois Ashford had come in first and second in a field of six to take the two seats open on the Chicago Teachers Pension Fund Board of Trustees. To the right in the photo above are (from far right) Earl Silbar, who helped coordinate the campaign in the schools through the area coordinators, James Cavallero (Chicago Academy High School) who did a great deal of campaign work, and Carol Caref (Chicago Vocational) who did large amounts of campaign work and worked for the candidates observing the vote count at the CTPF headquarters on the afternoon and evening of October 30. As the word spread that CORE had won, a number of people decided to drop in during the event, increasing the size of the house. Substance photo by Kristine Mayle.“We knew from the beginning we had the most highly qualified candidates in the race,” said CORE member Earl Silbar, who helped coordinate the election campaign itself. “No one else had studied the relationship between the CPS budget and the pension fund like Jay and Lois. We could present that to the voters…”

In addition to speaking at Board meetings, both CORE candidates participated in the annual CPS budget hearings. Rehak spoke at two of the three hearings, on August 17 at Amundsen High School and on August 18 at Marshall High School. Ashford spoke at the final budget hearing at Black elementary school on August 19. None of the other candidates did so, and CORE members suspected that none of them had even studied the CPS budget so as to be able to make the case that CPS was misleading the public about the burden it was facing because of its longstanding pension obligations.

At the same time, CORE decided in advance to run a campaign that was positive, focusing solely on the qualifications of the CORE candidates and ignoring attempts by others to portray them as unqualified or to go, as it’s said, “negative.”

“I think teachers are wise to that route,” said CORE co-chairman Jackson Potter, who teaches at Little Village High School of Social Justice, a small school in Little Village High School. “There has just been too much of it, and people are fed up with that low road.”

CORE builds an election organization in the face of UPC politicking from the CTU headquarters

In addition to having quality candidates, CORE had also spent the previous year organizing across the city and had built a reputation among a growing number of teachers for honest militancy and a commitment to teachers’ needs. Although the caucus’s most visible work had been against the school closings, phase outs, reorganizations, and turnarounds (beginning at the December 2008 Board of Education meeting when Arne Duncan was being hailed because he had been appointed U.S. Secretary of Education). Beginning in January with a massive turnout for its forum on “Renaissance 2010” at Malcolm X College, CORE had been organizing relentlessly.

CORE members attended every hearing on the proposed changes at the 22 schools on what came to be known as the 2009 “Hit List” of schools facing turnaround, phase out, consolidation, and other massive changes. At the same time, CORE members were studying the budget, examining the CTU contract, and doing other organizing as well.

By early summer of 2009, CORE was large enough to promise to support candidates for citywide office in the election which would be held in more than 600 public and charter schools (all public school teachers and principals are part of CTPF; most charter school teachers are as well; all members of CTPF get to vote for trustees in various ways, with the largest number electing the six teacher trustees).

CORE’s steering committee screened possible candidates and selected Ashford and Rehak, both of whom had been active CORE members. Lois Ashford had organized the fight against the ‘turnaround’ of Copernicus Elementary School in 2008 and had joined CORE during the protests against the 2009 Renaissance 2010 changes. Jay Rehak, delegates from Whitney Young High School, had run for the pension trustee position in 2005 and lost at the time and had become active in CORE as well. [Disclosure: This reporter had served as an election watcher for Rehak in both 2005 and 2009 and has begun covering the pension board on a regular basis as part of Substance’s expanding coverage in print and on the Web at www.substancenews.net].

Once the candidates had qualified to be on the ballot by submitting nominating petitions by the October 1 deadline, serious ‘pricnt level’ politics began. Teachers were surprised to learn that their “union” had supposedly endorsed the two incumbents even though the union’s House of Delegates had not voted to endorse the incumbents. In a tricky maneuver which may have backfired, CTU President Marilyn Stewart again invoked what teachers are referring to as the “imperial powers” of her Executive Board and promoted the candidacies of Otero and Williams. A longer article on this part of the election campaign — Another dirty trick by Marilyn Stewart... Stewart again uses CTU 'Executive Board' for her CTU dictatorship... Denies House of Delegates its Constitutional rights by teacher Jim Cavallero appeared on line at www.substancenews.net, see http://www.substance news.net/ articles.php? page=948§ion=Article.

CORE produced a campaign mailing (at a cost of more than $6,000) and responded with a post card promoting Ashford and Rehak. But the essence of the work of the campaign was school-by-school and teacher-to-teacher organizing.

Schools visits by the candidates and a massive campaign

During the final weeks of the campaign, Jay Rehak spent his mornings before work at meetings large and small with teachers in their schools. Meanwhile, dozens of CORE members were crisscrossing the city distributing CORE materials for Ashford and Rehak from school parking lots before school and in the schools’ offices. Despite some efforts on the part of the Huberman administration to block CORE, most principals seemed to realize that the fate of the pension fund affected them as much as their schools’ teachers. Principals are also members of the pension fund, but elect their own trustee (one). Once they retire, principals are no different at the pension than they were during their years in the classroom.

The careful planning that went into the CORE campaign received a fortuitous boost one week before the voting was scheduled. On Friday, October 23, all schools had a “Staff Development Day.” This enabled CORE campaign workers, almost all of whom were active duty teachers and other teacher employees (such as school psychologists and social workers) to take additional time to bring election materials to schools.

By the Monday before the election, October 26, the regular monthly CORE meeting at Manny’s Deli on Jefferson St. near the University of Illinois at Chicago was a bustle of activity as people picked up additional campaign literature and discussed strategy and tactics with four days to go before the voting. Reports from across the city indicated that teachers at almost all schools were very receptive to the CORE candidates’ message. Jay Rehak even made a stirring campaign speech predicting victory, although he later acknowledged that he wasn’t completely confident as the campaign continued in its final week. The meeting itself was chaired by Lois Ashford, who kept the meeting moving through a complex agenda despite her own pre-occupation with the election.

Election work continued throughout the week, down to phone calls on the final nights before the voting. Campaign workers reminded one another that in close elections in Chicago’s public schools, a large number of teachers are so busy that they need to be reminded the night before that a vote has to be cast the following morning. Surprise and elation at Rosa’s Blues Lounge party

A hard CORE crowd (“hard core CORE” as one participant described it) began assembling at Rosa’s Blues Lounge on Armitage Ave. west of Kimball for a night of blues and fundraising for CORE as the votes were still being counted a few miles away. Most of those who came had hopes for the work they had been doing and for the “Jay Lo” ticket, but as they later admitted not great hopes.

Others from CORE had been downtown at the pension board offices observing the arrival of the ballot boxes from across the city and the vote count, which was done at the CTPF headquarters at 203 N. LaSalle St.

After the votes had been counted at the pension board’s LaSalle St. offices, the Executive Director of the CTPF had to call each candidate with the results before the results were released to the public and the press. Jay Rehak and Lois Ashford each received the calls telling them that they had won, but they were also told that they were not to reveal what they knew until everyone had been notified. The tension, according to Rehak, was enormous. Finally, the results became official and Rehak told everyone at Rosa’s. An event had been turned into a victory celebration.

"This was a game-changing win for CORE and all teachers,” said Kristine Mayle, who has been helping lead CORE since the beginning of the caucus in May and June 2008. “The defeat of the incumbents, despite the UPC's attempt to manipulate the membership's vote with their ‘Executive Board Recommendation’ post card nonsense, shows that teachers are tired of games and are ready to elect people that will fight for and represent the interests of the teachers and PSRPs doing the hard work in the classrooms of Chicago. I'm overjoyed — not only to see the payoff of all our hard work in our victory, but also as a teacher whose pension will be under the watch of Jay and Lois," said Mayle.

Mayle is a CORE Steering Committee member who teaches special education at Eberhart Elementary School on the South Side. In 2008, she helped lead a fight against the closing of De La Cruz Middle School in Little Village. The protests managed to get a one-year postponement of the De La Cruz closing the same year that Arne Duncan was doing ‘turnaround’ to Lois Ashford at Copernicus (both the De La Cruz postponement and the Copernicus turnaround took place in June 2008). Mayle was not as unlucky as Lois Ashford, who was fired from a 20-year teaching job when Arne Duncan did “turnaround” to Copernicus, but told Substance “I know what Lois went through. Both of us has to find new jobs at new schools. Not everyone at our schools has been so lucky”.

Above, Billy Branch and the SOBs (Sons of Blues) made the CORE victory party even better with the best blues in Chicago that night. Substance photo by Kristine Mayle.As the blues music got better and better through the evening, the excitement from the victory began to spread. Most of those at Rosa’s had muted their hopes for the election, although all of the teachers had worked very hard. “To tell you the truth,” said retired City Colleges adult education teacher Earl Silbar, “I thought that a strong second place was what we were looking at. I was talking about victory during the final week, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up too high. Everyone said the UPC still had a strong organization in the schools.”

Silbar had been in charge of what became a largely decentralized effort to get out the information about the Ashford/Rehak ticket to the city’s more than 600 public schools. Voting was taking place at every school where teachers were part of the pension fund. This election, a large number of charter schools was added to the list of schools where elections would be held. The CORE solution to election organization was what Silber characterized as “centralized decentralized energy…” Central to the effort were ‘Area Coordinators’, who were supposed to try and coordinate lists of where campaign literature was distributed to schools in the 20 “areas” of CPS. By the final week, however, Silbar said that people were taking literature and bringing the CORE message both in a centralized and decentralized way. CORE kept printing leaflets, while at the same time anyone could download copies of the campaign leaflets in PDF form from the CORE Web site.

“To be honest, I don’t think anyone will ever know how many pieces of literature we distributed, or to how many schools. For all we know, there are 50 or 100 schools out there where a teacher downloaded her own materials, printed and distributed them, and brought out the votes for Jay and Lois,” Silbar told Substance in a phone interview after the excitement at Rosa’s had ended. While Chicago’s corporate media ignored the election and its significance over the weekend, the winning candidates were busy thanking everyone who had brought them to victory by e-mail and phone.

A model for honest, efficient elections in Chicago’s public schools

As the day and evening wore on, CORE observers were becoming more impressed with the efforts that CTPF had made to ensure that there could be no question about the honesty and integrity of the election.

The vote counting at CTPF headquarters was overseen by an organization called “Election Services Corporation.” The only places where problems might have arisen and not been spotted were at the local schools. Messengers paid for by CTPF as part of the costs of the election picked up the ballot boxes, which had been sealed by election officials under the direction of the “pension rep” at every school.

At CTPF headquarters, the boxes were delivered and opened under the eyes of CTPF officials and observers for all the candidates. No one indicated any problems during the course of the long afternoon and into the early evening.

Aspects of the way in which the election and counting were done deserve mention. CTPF’s contractor, Election Services Corporation, had, for example, developed a computer program to determine whether a voter had voted twice. While most votes were done at the local schools, a number of citywide teachers and other workers were eligible to vote at any school using a provisional ballot. A handful of voters tried to vote more than once, and those votes were flagged.

The ballots were scanned once they had been cleared for the final stage of the election. The scanning hardware and software was able to identify the name of each candidate on the six-person ballot and record the vote based on the name. This enabled the ballots to randomize the names, so that no one candidate’s name appeared at the top of each ballot more than any of the others. The efficiency with which the election work had been organized paid off on the night of the voting. While in years past, the vote count had lasted well into the night (and in one cases didn’t end until six a.m.), the votes had been counted by 9:00 p.m. with no objections raised by any of the candidates or their representatives.

Once the candidates had been called by Kevin Huber of the CTPF and received the vote totals, the results were announced to the general pubic on the CTPF Web site and e-mailed to the press.

Test of strength within the Chicago Teachers Union

The pension electon was a clear test of strength within the 31,000- member Chicago Teachers Union.

CTU President Marilyn Stewart and her embattled United Progressive Caucus (UPC) had endorsed Reina Otero and Nancy Williams, both of whom were incumbents. Stewart got the union's executive board, long viewed as a rubber stamp for Stewart (since it's packed with elected and appointed UPC members) to promote the endorsement of Otero and Williams. Even before the union's House of Delegates met on October 7, Stewart had not only gotten Otero and Williams ‘endorsed’ by the Executive Board, but she had done a mailing on behalf of the two incumbents. Although the mailing mentioned that it had been done by the United Progressive Caucus, it was clearly signed by Stewart not as the leader of one union faction, but as President of CTU. At the October 7 House of Delegates meeting, Stewart came in with a recommendation — by the Executive Board — to endorse Otero and Williams. But in an unprecedented move, the House rejected Stewart's recommendation and voted that all six candidates for the teacher positions were qualified and should have the union’s endorsement.

With the completion of the 2009 election for teacher trustees, it is become more and more clear the impact of the election of Ashford and Rehak will have implications within the pension board. Reina Otero was official vice-president of the pension board at the time she lost her position. Nancy Williams was recording secretary. The other four teacher trustees — Linda Goff, Lois Nelson, John O’Brill, and Maria Rodriguez — are all members of Marilyn Stewart’s United Progressive Caucus.

Teachers are raising serious questions about other incumbent teacher trustees as well. Maria Rodriguez, who is still serving as a ‘teacher’ trustee, hasn't been a teacher in five years, instead being on leave from her teaching job to work at the CTU. Maria Rodriguez works for Marilyn Stewart at the Chicago Teachers Union as a field representative. Many teachers are now questioning the pension board policy that allows for such an apparent conflict of interest.

The president of the pension board, John O'Brill, is also what everyone calls a hard core member of the UPC. O’Brill is facing serious health problems and could retire at any time with a full pension (he is one of the oldest active duty teachers in the school system), yet he has not considered stepping down at this time. Although in retirement O’Brill would not be eligible to continue as a teacher trustee, he would be eligible to run and serve as a retiree trustee if he chose after beginning to collect his pension. The other two teacher trustees are Linda Goff and Lois Nelson, both UPC members. On November 6, the results of the election for retiree trustees (three in number) will be announced. There are five candidates at this time. By the middle of November, the composition of the pension fund board of trustees will have changed dramatically, with the prospect of additional changes in the near future. 

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