Education
Chicago Teachers Have a Tentative Contract Agreement. From Pay Raises to Class Sizes, Here’s What It Includes
Video: Joining “Chicago Tonight” are Thad Goodchild, deputy general counsel for the Chicago Teachers Union and member of the union’s small bargaining team; Zeidre Foster, director of grievances at the Chicago Teachers Union and member of the CTU’s small bargaining team; and Vicki Kurzydlo, a CPS teacher of more than 30 years and member of CTU’s big bargaining team. (Produced by Andrea Guthmann)
The Chicago Teachers Union announced a tentative contract agreement with Chicago Public Schools officials Tuesday, capping nearly a year of tense negotiations that pitted union leaders allied with Mayor Brandon Johnson against CPS CEO Pedro Martinez.
CTU leaders called the four-year deal a “historic achievement” that represented the fulfillment of promises Johnson made to transform CPS into a school district that offers a well-rounded education to every Chicago child and security to its employees.
A group of 65 educators who helped negotiate the contract, known as CTU’s big bargaining team, unanimously endorsed the proposed deal, sending it to the union’s 730-member House of Delegates for approval. If the agreement wins the support of a majority of the delegates, the agreement will go to the union’s nearly 30,000 members for ratification.
The tentative agreement represents the first time in 15 years that the union’s leadership, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, known as CORE, has reached an agreement with CPS officials without first taking a strike vote. In 2012, CTU went on strike for seven days. In 2016, a late-night agreement averted a second walkout under former Mayor Rahm Emanuel. In 2019, an 11-day strike followed the breakdown of negotiations with former Mayor Lori Lightfoot.
The agreement must also be approved by the 21-member, partially elected Chicago Board of Education, which must also figure out how to pay for the deal.
CPS officials said the proposed contract “recognizes the significant contributions of educators” while also reflecting the school district’s budgetary constraints.
“Our CPS bargaining team has negotiated in good faith every step of the way and stayed true to our values for public education,” Martinez said in a statement. “We made sure that this agreement respects the hard work of our talented educators and reflects what’s best for students.”
The proposed contract includes raises for teachers, more services for the district’s most vulnerable students and protects the academic freedoms of CPS educators amid attacks from the Trump administration, CTU leaders said.
“Everyone wins with this document,” CTU President Stacy Davis Gates told WTTW News. “It is a legacy for everyone and we should all be proud of it.”
Mayor Brandon Johnson hailed the deal, telling reporters at City Hall he was proud to join former Mayor Richard M. Daley as the only mayor in recent Chicago history to land a teacher’s contract in his first year in office without triggering a strike.
"This is a complete transformation and a move away from school privatization, layoffs, closures, the so-called turnaround motto,” Johnson said. “So yes, this contract does reflect the values that I ran on and what the people of Chicago expected from my administration.”
What’s in the Potential Contract?
Martinez at a press conference Tuesday said the total cost of this proposed agreement is expected at around $1.5 billion over the four-year life of the contract. The cost of the first year alone should come in between $120-125 million, he said.
Under the terms of the agreement, teachers will see raises of 4% to 7.5% in the first year and 4% to 8.5% each during the remaining three years of the deal, depending on their level of education and tenure, officials said. Demands for pay increases above the 4% cost-of-living raise for tenured teachers will result in automatic pay hikes for teachers with at least 14 years of experience until they reach their 25th year of service, officials said.
CTU leaders also said the contract will expand services offered to special education, bilingual and unhoused students; expands sports programming as well as the number of libraries and librarians; increases access to career and technical education opportunities; and includes investments in green technology for school buildings.
Quintella Bounds, a special education case manager and member of the union’s bargaining team, said she’s struggled “physically and emotionally” over the past year trying to handle the responsibility of juggling the 189 students on her caseload between two schools.
Under the new contract, that total will be capped at 75 students, Bounds said.
“When I saw it, it brought tears to my eyes,” she said. “Because now I know next year I can do the job that I am hired to do and the job that God has led me to do. That is just groundbreaking.”
The deal also includes enforceable class size limits, setting the maximum number of students in first through third grade classrooms at 28. Fourth through eighth grade classes can have no more than 30 students before additional staff members are automatically added, union officials said.
In high schools, the class size cap will be 28 students for core classes and 31 students for arts, music or gym classes.
“We saw this as an opportunity to really transform the lives and experiences of the students of the city of Chicago,” said Zeidre Foster, a member of the CTU’s bargaining team. “We believe this contract will make it better for the students ahead.”
The union said it also ironed out some of its final sticking points — elementary teacher prep time and the teacher evaluations — after CPS agreed to increase professional development time and to advocate for state law changes to address the racially disparate impacts of the current evaluation system.
CTU leaders have been adamant any new contract must act as a “force field” to protect CPS teachers and students as President Donald Trump moves to dismantle the Department of Education and the federal government has begun targeting school districts that support transgender students — including CPS.
This proposed deal includes first-time provisions which make clear educators are free to supplement their curriculum in line with state standards on discussing things like culturally responsive teaching, Black history and the contributions of the LGBTQ+ community.
“People will want to say we’re doing a victory lap, what they miss is that schools should already have what we negotiated,” Davis Gates said. “What we negotiated in 2025 should have been there all along.”
The Long Road to a Deal
Negotiations began on a promising note last spring with the sides agreeing to open some bargaining sessions to the public for the first time ever. Though a potential teachers strike never appeared on the horizon, tensions between the union and school district began to grow more serious for months as the sides blamed one another for failing to reach an agreement.
Union officials repeatedly said Martinez prevented a deal from being reached months ago calling him the “main obstacle to reaching a settlement.”
Johnson told reporters a week and a half ago that a new contract agreement between CPS and CTU was close after a high-profile meeting at City Hall that represented Johnson’s first public participation in efforts to land a deal. Johnson is a former middle school teacher and organizer for the CTU who rose to prominence during the 2012 strike during former Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s time in office.
Martinez on Tuesday shot back that he was grateful to “finally” see urgency from the union in recent weeks because district negotiators “weren’t seeing that for the last few months.”
“I am just happy that whatever it took to create more urgency,” he said when asked about Johnson’s role in getting the contract over the finish line. “I welcome it because … we should have had this contract months ago.”
At least 14 of the 21 members of the CPS board will have to vote to amend its 2024-25 budget to cover the cost of the new contract, which expired in June. CPS has an additional $139 million to spend from the city’s tax-increment financing districts after Johnson declared a surplus.
Despite intense pressure from Johnson, the CPS board refused to cover a $175 million payment to its pension fund for employees who are not teachers, with a majority of the board refusing to take on additional debt.
Martinez has opposed that borrowing or any funding plan he believes would put the district in further financial distress.
“It’s irresponsible,” he said. “There are solutions, and solutions that, by the way, (Johnson) campaigned on. This, for me, is a lot of stress that should not be created.”
It is unclear whether CPS will have to borrow additional funds to cover the cost of the agreement with CTU. An agreement with the union representing principals has yet to be reached.
The final act of the CPS Board made up of members appointed by Johnson was to fire Martinez without cause, leaving him in office until June.
CTU deputy general counsel Thad Goodchild said this round of negotiations with CPS presented an “unprecedented situation,” pointing to the new partially-elected school board and the fact that, for the first time, CTU was not facing off against what he termed an “adversarial mayor.”
Still, he said, it wasn’t always the most collaborative process.
“It was difficult, right?” Goodchild said. “Every problem that exists in every corner of the city, students are bringing through school doors with them every day and our members are on the front lines of that. And it’s still the case that the school district doesn’t get anywhere near adequate funding from the state of Illinois.
“So trying to address all those problems within the confines that exist was difficult, but I think we can be proud of the work we did together.”
