This Chicago Teachers Union boss endlessly provokes the right. She’s about to expand her power.
Later, however, she acknowledged that the union should be expected to “show our work” to the public, given the high price paid by taxpayers who fund schools and pay teachers’ salaries.
“I’m not shying away from responsibility,” she said.
She said she gauges public opinion based on her interactions with the community. Older black women in particular, she said, thank her for speaking out without fear, saying they never had the opportunity to do so.
In a recent episode that attracted national attention, an unusual message was posted from CTU’s X account. It read in part: “Rest in power, rest in peace, Assata Shakur. Today we honor the life and legacy of a revolutionary fighter, a fierce writer, a revered elder of black liberation and a leader of freedom whose spirit lives on in our struggle.”
Shakur, a member of the Black Liberation Army, was convicted of murdering a New Jersey state trooper in the 1970s. Armed members of the Liberation Army helped her escape from prison, and then she fled to Cuba.
Seeing the message, Weingarten picked up the phone and called Davis Gates.
“I was concerned when I saw the memorial to Shakur,” Weingarten said. “For everything else Shakur did, she killed a cop.”
The post sparked backlash from conservatives nationally, but also from members of the Chicago City Council.
“The Chicago Teachers Union is celebrating a Marxist, cop killer and fugitive from justice,” DeSantis wrote on X in September. “It’s a shame for schoolchildren stuck in a broken system and forced to listen to this left-wing nonsense. An advertisement for school choice.”
When asked why an official CTU account would send such a message, history professor Davis Gates remained unapologetic, saying Shakur looms large in history and was someone his students had studied. She learned it herself.
Perhaps the leading critic of schools outside of the Illinois Policy Institute, a libertarian group, and the Chicago Policy Center, a group whose job is to regularly track CTU’s finances and policy decisions, is Paul Vallas, the former Chicago schools superintendent, former Chicago budget director and mayoral candidate who lost to Johnson.
“It’s a political party, they don’t care about children,” Vallas said of the CTU. “The Chicago Socialist Party is the Chicago Teachers Union.”
“They have more non-teaching employees than teachers, and they have almost 11,000 more teaching employees than the city has police officers,” Vallas said. “So this is a union that is taking an ever-increasing slice of the taxpayer pie and performing abysmally. And that’s why people are walking away with their feet.”
Facing questions about a vast inventory of schools operating at less than a third of capacity, as well as low test scores and a declining population, Davis Gates spoke of deep-rooted challenges. Neighborhoods are not walkable, she said, and funding for groups that helped students get to school safely has been cut. Communities around schools lack grocery stores, jobs and other anchors that could retain current black families and attract others.
Critics, however, complain that the CTU has stood in the way of tough choices that could advance progress.
In 2024, Davis Gates called standardized testing “junk science rooted in white supremacy,” when, on a radio show, she was pressed by union members’ complaints about poor reading and math skills in schools.
His response inspired a Wall Street Journal editorial that called the remark “convenient for the union because it absolves teachers of responsibility for failure. If the tests are racist, then black students are doomed to fail, so failure is inevitable and it doesn’t matter how or what is taught in the school. So give the union a big raise, regardless of student performance. Who is the real systemic racist here ?”
A year ago, she accused a journalist of being a “stalker” and said she didn’t consider herself a public figure. “Surprising outburst from controversial teachers union boss after being confronted by reporter,” the Daily Mail wrote in a corresponding headline.
In today’s climate, Davis Gates says she’s inundated with hateful attacks. Death threats and racist and sexist hatred reach him on social networks, by email or by physical mail. One Christmas, she said she received a card in the mail that said, “F— you n—- b—-!” Davis Gates no longer opens her own mail.
A competitive basketball player and runner growing up — including an all-American sprinter at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana — said it all made her go “hard in the paint.”
Ifeoma Nkemdi, a 5th grade teacher at Chicago’s Newberry Math & Science Academy, said that while she admired the late Karen Lewis, the former CTU president, Davis was talking about “dramatic and theatrical things — performative — rather than concrete things that can be measured.” Nkemdi separated from the union itself, a process she described as painful due to pressure from Davis and others. Nkemdi sought legal assistance from the Illinois Policy Institute, which regularly attacks CTU and Davis Gates.
“I feel like she’s trying to cement her own political status here in Chicago. It’s a little bit ‘do it my way, this is my mark on how to do this,'” Nkemdi said. “I see it and I feel like we all need to be more transparent and we need to learn how to collaborate and communicate in a positive way. And I don’t think she has that style at all.”
