Chicago Teachers Union representatives will gather at their West Town headquarters on Wednesday to consider calling the city’s latest strike, as a deal with Chicago Public Schools remains elusive and hours dwindle before a union-imposed deadline.

Talks resumed Wednesday morning, but CPS announced classes are canceled Thursday because of the anticipated walkout, leaving little optimism that last-minute negotiations would avert a strike. Despite talk of some progress at the bargaining table, neither side had reached consensus on multiple issues, including pay, staffing and the potential duration of a contract. Neither Mayor Lori Lightfoot nor CPS CEO Janice Jackson joined this week’s critical talks, a signal of the ongoing split.

“This is not something we do lightly, this is something we do with a heaviness in our heart,” Sharkey said. “We feel as though, right now, the only way that we have to make important long-term changes in the schools that are going to affect all of us, is to do a short-term strike that is going to cause some difficulty and pain.”

A dizzying number of factors brought Chicago to the brink of its latest teachers walkout. But they boil down to politics, time and money.

There’s the politics of a street-fighting union that won some control over Chicago Public Schools in past contracts — and intends to win more. There’s Lightfoot’s philosophy, shaped in part by experience at the pinnacle of Chicago’s legal field — and her landslide election victory this year. There’s also a fundamental tension, probed during CTU labor unrest between 2012 and 2016, over how much union policy influence should be part of a contract.

“There’s a lot at stake, and that makes it harder to say yes to a deal because there’s really long-term implications to how power would be distributed within the public school system,” said Robert Bruno, a professor and director of the labor relations program at the University of Illinois who studied the CTU. “And there isn’t a lot of time.”

CPS and the CTU agreed to a negotiating schedule that crescendoed this fall. But officials settled the timetable under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, leaving Lightfoot and the union less time to bargain after the new administration took office and assessed the depth of city government’s problems.

The school district’s more peaceful budget outlook stands in sharp contrast to recent fiscal crises that left officials wondering if CPS could make payroll — much less pay for pricey labor deals. More money on the table today means more topics to battle over. That struggle could now halt classes.

“This is not about power,” Randi Weingarten told the Tribune on Monday, minutes before the president of the American Federation of Teachers stepped onstage at the Chicago Temple to exhort hundreds of cheering union supporters before a march around City Hall.

“This is about the conditions that people need,” Weingarten said. “That kids need to learn, and teachers need to teach. The real issue is that it takes getting to the brink of a strike to actually have these issues dealt with by mayors.”

Before 2012, when the CTU and former union President Karen Lewis launched the city’s first teachers strike in a quarter-century, labor deals tended to focus on bread and butter. Pay and benefits.

Illinois law largely bars the union from striking over concerns such as school nurse staffing or privatized services. CPS and the CTU can instead agree to negotiate over those topics.

Yet Weingarten watched as Lewis and union leaders pushed for contract language that addressed hiring and other staffing practices both in 2012 and during the fight over the 2016 deal. The CTU also won terms that limited the growth of independently operated charter schools and offered extra support for certain neighborhood schools.

Pay gains were modest. Emanuel was able to set new parameters tying teacher evaluations to test scores and locked in his signature longer school day initiative. The union said it was still able to fend off attempts to institute merit pay and lock in new practices for laid-off teachers to find new jobs.

“Contracts are policy documents, they dictate a substantial amount of district school policy, and they always have,” said Katharine Strunk, an education policy professor at Michigan State University. The CTU’s demands still have advanced beyond bread-and-butter concerns, she said.

“Things like thinking about counselors, nurses, social workers and even housing. These are all policies that could be included in a (collective bargaining agreement) that do affect the working conditions of teachers and make teaching easier or a harder occupation,” Strunk said.

Now it’s 2019. Lewis and Emanuel are no longer in office. Lightfoot’s winning campaign included an education platform aligned with the CTU’s desires. But a core conflict persists.

“What’s remarkable here is how little really has changed in terms of the nature of the dispute between CTU and CPS,” Bruno said.

“There still remains a fundamental conceptual distinction between how the parties see the right approach to staffing and class size issues, and where they should be properly housed,” he said. “CTU believes that it’s perfect to put them in the collective bargaining agreement. The mayor’s office and CPS disagree. So there’s a real struggle.”

Lightfoot already has made promises and budgeted for hundreds more educator positions, but the union wants them written into the contract.

In a joint statement Monday, Lightfoot and Jackson said the city “expressed a willingness to find solutions on these two core issues that would be written directly into the contract” but that “no measurable progress was made on any other issue” during a critical day of talks.

Emanuel-approved property taxes today help pay off enormous CPS pension debts and infrastructure projects. State aid helps cover other pension and day-to-day expenses, and the Illinois education funding formula could pump more money into Chicago’s population-losing school system.

After two contracts with modest pay raises, the union is looking to make up ground.

The city has offered educators 16% raises over five years, on top of annual “step” increases CPS teachers receive, and has reduced the cost of employee health care contributions from initial offers. Health care and compensation are still concerns from the union, in addition to negotiations over staffing.

“We don’t have any reason to agree to a 3.2% raise for five years unless you can tell us that we can teach in front of a class where we can actually make a difference, where there can be a nurse in our school, where there can be social workers, where we can have a librarian that can help teach people reading, where we can have the things that our children deserve,” Sharkey told supporters on Monday.

Lightfoot’s administration also said last week that it would commit to spending a total of $3 million to reduce class sizes in fourth- through 12th-grade classrooms, and build a pipeline for nurses, social workers and case managers over five years. More money would go toward tuition assistance to train nurses and bring teaching assistants to kindergarten through third-grade classrooms, the city said.

“To us, what they’ve been saying is ‘take the money,’” Sharkey said Monday.

“I want you to ask the question: Why is it that they dangle the money in front of us, and then call us greedy that we don’t just take their dangled offer and shut up about everything else? Because they don’t pay us enough. They don’t pay us enough to shut up about the quality of schools.”

Credit rating agencies have taken notice.

Fitch Ratings joined Standard and Poor’s this summer in upgrading their still junk-level views of the school district’s credit.

But the pending CTU contract negotiations means a potential higher credit rating from S&P is on hold, the firm’s analysts said in August. A contract that boosts the district’s expenses too far would be viewed unfavorably.

“A successful settlement, in our view, would neither create a budget gap nor disrupt the board’s recent financial progress,” S&P analysts said. “In our view, any agreement that materially increases expenditures beyond anticipated revenue growth, is a credit negative.”

Ultimately, Strunk from Michigan State said the CTU will have to play both “the long game and the short game.”

Hiring commitments could boost the union’s ranks of dues-paying members, and policy changes could set standards for future contract negotiations. The challenge will be finding contract terms that union members can see as successful.

“The long game is marginal increases and marginal changes over time add up over the course of multiple negotiations,” Strunk said.

“But the short game has to be, you also have to make your membership feel heard and feel victorious. Especially if you’re going to go on strike. There has to be a reason that the community that’s supporting your strike and the teachers who are on the front lines believe that they did that.”

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