Our History
Our Mission
We, teachers, and other educational personnel in the Chicago Public Schools, being members of the Chicago Teachers Union, do hereby declare this Union to have the following purposes:
01.
to protect and improve the services of the public schools as a social agency for developing the capacities of the young and promoting adult education;
02.
to promote and guarantee efficient and faithful service from us to the public and to insure to us in return for that service a fair reward and a just security;
03.
in accordance with the Agreement between the Board of Education of the City of Chicago and Chicago Teachers Union, to assert, secure, and protect the inherent and fundamental equity in our jobs;
04.
as the sole collective bargaining agent for members of the bargaining unit, to establish and maintain orderly and practicable democratic processes in the management of the Chicago public schools, in accordance with the terms of the Agreement;
05.
to maintain a relationship of mutual assistance and cooperation with organized labor;
06.
to unify the educators of traditional public schools and public charter schools in the City of Chicago, together with other Chicago-area educators that may join with this Union.
07.
to promote racial, economic and social justice in order to achieve educational justice and build community and labor coalitions to achieve that objective.
Officers
Stacy Davis Gates
President
Stacy Davis Gates is the President of the Chicago Teachers Union. She is also the Executive Vice President of the Illinois Federation of Teachers and an Executive Vice President of the American Federation of Teachers.
Before her election to the office of President in 2022, Ms. Davis Gates served for four years as Vice President of the Union. Prior to that, she served as the union’s Political and Legislative Director. In the fall of 2019, she helped to lead a 15-day strike and to negotiate an historic contract that provides for smaller class sizes, ensures a nurse and social worker in every Chicago public school, secures sanctuary protections for immigrant families, and supports students and families experiencing homelessness.
While at the CTU, Ms. Davis Gates has been the architect of bold political and legislative campaigns for the schools and city that all Chicagoans deserve. She has raised millions of dollars to elect classroom teachers to all levels of local government and to challenge school privatizers and union-busters. Ms. Davis Gates has also spearheaded statewide legislative campaigns to pass the strongest charter school accountability measures in the country, push for the restoration of the bargaining rights of Chicago Public Schools employees, and fully fund public education by ending tax loopholes for the 1 percent.
In 2017, Ms. Davis Gates was elected Chair of United Working Families, an independent political organization by and for working-class people and our movements. She also serves as a board member for the Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE), a nexus for organizations working at the intersection of the struggle for racial justice and Wall Street accountability.
Ms. Davis Gates is currently on leave from the classroom, where she taught high school social studies for over a decade at Englewood, Clemente, and Mason Community Links High Schools. She attended Saint Mary’s College, the University of Notre Dame, and Concordia University. Ms. Davis Gates lives on the South Side of Chicago with her husband and three children.
Jackson Potter
Vice President
Jackson Potter is the Vice President of the Chicago Teachers Union.
Mr. Potter has been an education activist since he led a student walkout at his high school, Whitney Young, in 1995 to push for equitable funding for schools in Illinois. As a teacher and union delegate at Englewood High School, Jackson fought school closings when former CEO Arne Duncan called the school a “culture of failure” and started a phase-out in 2005. After playing a key role in organizing for Karen Lewis’s election to the CTU presidency, Jackson served as the CTU staff coordinator from 2010 to 2018, when he left his Union staff position to return to the classroom as a social studies teacher at Back of The Yards College Prep. Jackson was elected to Vice President of the CTU in 2022, taking office July 1, 2022.
Christel Williams
Recording Secretary
Christel Williams is the Recording Secretary of the CTU and a more than 30-year veteran of Chicago Public Schools, serving 17 of those years as a PSRP (Paraprofessional and School-Related Personnel) School Clerk. She has also been an elected delegate, district supervisor, functional vice president and a member of a variety of other CTU committees. Christel was one of the original members of the CTU’s first Organizing Department, and she played a key role in leading the organizing of the 2012 strike. She was also instrumental in the organizing of a three-day march in 2013 and the development of the CTU’s Summer Organizing Institute. In 2017, she became a CTU Field Representative.
She is currently an IFT Executive Board Vice President, has served as co-chair of the IFT PSRP Constituency Committee, and is an organizer of its biannual PSRP Constituency Conference. At the national level, Christel has worked on the PSRP Professional Problems Committee for the American Federation of Teachers and was a member of its Summer Organizing Institute in Houston, Texas.
A native of Chicago’s West Side, Christel was raised by a single mother who retired as a school clerk. Christel graduated from John Marshall High School and proudly serves on the school’s alumni committee. She has three daughters who are all graduates of CPS. Her middle daughter starred for the Marshall Lady Commandos State Championship team under legendary coach Dorothy Gaters. Christel has a 15-year-old grandson, who is an outstanding basketball player and attends a CPS high school, and a one-year-old granddaughter!
Maria T. Moreno
Financial Secretary
Maria T. Moreno worked in CPS as a bilingual education teacher and as a speech-language pathologist prior to her election as CTU financial secretary in May 2016. As an elementary bilingual education teacher, she served as a delegate, district supervisor and strike coordinator. As a district supervisor for Midway Network 1, she worked with the CTU’s organizing department, parents, teachers and community members in the fight to oppose the turnaround of Marquette Elementary School and against abusive and counterproductive network administrators. As a speech-language pathologist, she served as an executive board elementary functional vice president and Big Bargaining Team member. As a rank-and-file member, she was active in the charter outreach committee, clinicians’ steering committee and the CTU Latino Caucus’ policy committee.
