Troy Swanson: Nora, welcome to Circulating Ideas.
Nora Wiltse: Thanks for having me.
Troy Swanson: I’m pretty excited to have you here because you and your colleagues at the Chicago Teachers Union really are leaders, I think, nationally in the fight right now for librarians in our public schools, and I thought our listeners would benefit from learning about some of the work you’re doing.
Currently, right now CTU has made the fight for librarians one of the central points in the contract negotiations, which is why I really wanted to have you here. And I’m excited to talk to you about this work, but first, before we dive into all of that, I thought it would be good to learn a little bit about yourself, so could you tell our listeners how you came to libraries and maybe about your role in the Chicago Public Schools?
Nora Wiltse: Sure. Absolutely. I am from a family of teachers and so was determined to not end up as a teacher and that worked for a while until I was in the middle of grad school for library science, and I just really, I thought I was going to work in in public libraries in the children’s department, and I just was really drawn to the school system. Everyone that’s from my small town is like, “Oh, you ended up right where we knew you were going to end up!” And so I think it was just a bit of a detour to get there, but my two real passions or strengths, I think, are talking to others about literature and working with kids. That seems to work well in this context.
I’ve just started my 23rd year in Chicago Public Schools and when I student taught, I student taught in suburbs and also on the West Side and really fell in love with Chicago Public School kids. I taught West Side. I taught in West Englewood, I taught in Pilsen, and then I taught in North Center, which is very unusual for Chicago Public Schools. It’s a more privileged area. I taught there for 14 years and then lost my job there. I’m now in a high school at King College Prep in Kenwood, so I’m back on the South Side and feel like there’s just something about working on the South Side where you just really feel like you’re making a difference every day and working with fantastic students. This is my third year there.
Troy Swanson: Alright, that’s great. Well, tell us about the state of libraries within the Chicago Public Schools. Do most schools have libraries? Do most schools have librarians?
Nora Wiltse: No. So in Chicago, we have about 500 district-run schools and about 100 charters on top of that, so about 600 schools total, give or take, and we have around 80 librarians. When I started in CPS, we had over 450 librarians and we were working to get up to 100% but then we had some mayoral changes and we had some funding changes and the numbers just plummeted. And so now we’re at about less than 20 percent of our schools have librarians and our high schools are even a smaller percentage. We have about 100 high schools in Chicago, and we have 12 high school librarians.
Troy Swanson: Wow. And so let me ask, what is the determining factor for who gets a librarian and who doesn’t? So you said you’re at King College Prep, are the college prep schools getting librarians because they’re more research focused or is that a silly assumption?
Nora Wiltse: No, and we have IB schools and you would think since they’re so heavily research focused that they would be schools that would have librarians for sure.
Troy Swanson: What are IB schools for listeners who may not know?
Nora Wiltse: Interbaccalaureate [International Baccalaureate]. I was going to say that and then thought, I don’t know, is that right? Interbaccalaureate. I’ve never worked at one, and they have a program, it’s an international curriculum that is very research heavy. So a librarian would be key, one might think, but we have IB schools without librarians as well. We have selective enrollment schools, the schools that are the top in the state, we have Northside and Payton and Lane. They do not have librarians. So there’s not a rhyme or reason within CPS as to how they fund their libraries. They leave it up to each individual principal, but we do see within Chicago Public Schools, it follows trends that are similar to the state of Illinois trends and that are similar to national trends and that being if your school is majority black or brown student population, you’re less likely to have a librarian. And if your school has a higher ELL population, you are less likely to have a librarian. And, of course, as listeners know, those are populations that need librarians the most often, and like I said, that trend follows the state of Illinois trend as well: schools and districts with a higher population of black and brown students or higher population of ELL students are less likely to have librarians.
Troy Swanson: How is that seen with the implications for learning and supporting faculty and advocating for reading? Is there data that connects having a librarian to outcomes or even just anecdotally, what is the conversation like within the CPS librarians?
Nora Wiltse: Well, there’s dozens of research studies that show the benefits of a K-12 librarian. It’s interesting, the benefits are even a little greater in high school libraries. I think a lot of times we assume the younger kids with picture books or whatever need it more, but the research, the test scores correlate even stronger with having a high school librarian. But yeah, there’s dozens of studies that show that having a librarian raises test scores across the board, even when you eliminate factors such as student income, you take poverty out of the picture, there’s still that correlation there. And so we feel like, what an easy win for our district. If you really are concentrating on test scores and if you’re really data driven, then it should be a no-brainer to have librarians because we do have all this data that shows our impact on student learning.
But we also are in a budget crisis at all times, and when you have principals that have a budget that is not enough to fully fund a school, are you going to cut a classroom teacher and have 60 kids in a class in order to have a school librarian? There’s just not enough extra money for the principals to really afford a librarian and that’s why we are working with our union and in bargaining to change the metrics and how I guess I would say change the funding sources, because when we’re leaving it up to the principals and we are just giving principals a set amount of money, it’s just it’s not enough and you can see that in the numbers.
This all kind of started a very rapid loss of librarians in around 2012. In 2011, I think, or maybe 2012, L.A. lost a huge number of school librarians, and it was a big story, and our mayor, Rahm Emanuel, did a very similar thing in a different way. He didn’t say to the school district, “Hey, we’re gonna need to cut our school librarians to save money,” but what he did was change our funding method. Schools used to get like a package: every school has these basics, and then we’re going to build from there, and those basics were a principal, a clerk, a counselor, a social worker, a librarian, a P. E. teacher, and those things went away, and it just went down to a principal and a clerk, and then anything else that the schools wanted, they had to find room for in their budget, and that came along with some big budget cuts at the time. And so, Megan Cusick, who your listeners might know, she worked for ALA and is still in the library world in consulting. She was a CPS high school librarian at the time and she saw these numbers falling rapidly because of this funding change, and she sort of founded our union committee to work on this issue.
Troy Swanson: Well, and that might be a good transition. Could you tell us about the committee and your role with Chicago Teachers Union, however much you want to share, how much you got involved and like what that looks like?
Nora Wiltse: Yeah. So we’ve realized that CPS was pointing the finger at the principals and saying, “Well, it’s the principals who don’t want librarians anymore,” and the principals were saying, “Well, we don’t have enough money to have a librarian. It’s not that we don’t want one.” And so we realized we needed to work at this from a different angle and really get Central Office to put librarians back into a basic package, and so we have been working as a committee of union members fighting that ever since. We have spoken at the Board. We have written letters. We have talked to citywide local school councils, which are kind of a parent and community group. We’ve talked to principals about our importance.
Part of our work is also talking to fellow union members about what we do and about our importance because we’re not only fighting to have Central Office recognize our value, we’re fighting to have co-workers who might never have worked with a school librarian before see value in using the school’s budget for a school librarian. So we had a librarian on Exec Board in 2016 negotiations. No, what was before? There’s been a lot of strikes. So we’ve gone through, I think, four rounds of negotiations now with Chicago Public Schools where we’ve had a librarian on the negotiating team, either through Exec Board or through our committee.
This is my second round being on the negotiating team, and it is incredible to have the voice of a librarian so high up in the union and at the tables with CPS to really, like I said, explain our value. Many start with the assumption that school librarians are outdated because everything you need is online now. So we’re still fighting sort of the basic issues of, “Well, everything’s online!” That doesn’t mean students know how to use it correctly or ethically, et cetera. And we’re still fighting for the fact that, yeah, we really do need print resources in our elementary schools and all the way through. Kids still read books.
Troy Swanson: When I say that CTU has made librarian positions a contract negotiating item, what does that mean, especially for our listeners that may not be in a collective bargaining state or may not be members of a union? How does that look?
Nora Wiltse: When you listen to our president, Stacey Davis Gates, our vice president, Jackson Potter, when you listen to our lawyers, do any press conference talking about our demands, you will hear school librarians be mentioned. In any press release in any blurb that you see school librarians are there as a demand for our union.
We have 25,000 members in the Chicago Teachers Union, and we have about 80 school librarians, so it’s pretty impressive that our union is looking at this, not just as, you know, “What can we do that’s going to make the most members happy or what’s going to keep our members happy?” We are a social justice union and we are looking at, how can we make the school day better for our students?
Our slogan is “the schools our students deserve” and that is what we want to create. We want to create the schools our students deserve. So even though we’re such a small number in our union, we have worked steadily over the years to become a main tenet in what we are bargaining for. And when we’re bargaining, we sit at a table across from another table with CPS Central Office lawyers and they usually listen to me very politely and then do not respond. And in 2019 Jesse Sharkey, our current president asked and said, “You know, so Nora just said all this and she said all this research and everything. Can we all just agree that school librarians are good for students?”
Troy Swanson: And what was the response?
Nora Wiltse: The chief lawyer said, “We’ll need to get back to you on that.”
So we’re not even at a baseline of, “Yes, we’d love to have this.” They won’t even say out loud, “Yes, this is something that we’d like to have for our students.” So, we have different negotiating sessions on different topics, and so I’m not at every negotiating session, but when anything is talking about increased staffing or wraparound staffing, there’s a group of us that can speak to the issues to those lawyers and to those Chicago Public Schools employees that might never have been in the classroom or might have been out of the classroom for a really long time. So we’re able to share and say, “Here’s what this looks like. Here’s language we’re asking for in our contract because this is how it’s going to change the student’s day.”
And so we have a very bare bones structure in CPS right now with classroom teachers, a principal, very little other supporting adults around them and what we’re trying to create in our contracts and gaining little by little over the years is having a robust support system for our students that includes a school counselor, it includes a social worker for every school, which we don’t have now. We share them. Finding an art teacher and a music teacher for every school versus one or the other, and a librarian is a part of what we are asking for.
Troy Swanson: And so when this goes into contract language, it then becomes enforceable by the union, right? Like that’s the power, just to make sure that I’m understanding and that our listeners understand that it can be enforced. It’s not just a pleasantry that they can do what they want to do.
Nora Wiltse: Exactly. So when we have CPS say, “Well, a principal is free to hire a librarian, whenever they want.” Well, okay, we’ve gone from over 450 down to 80, and we lost more librarians again this year. So, principals are telling us they can’t just hire a librarian every year. They have to have some things in the contract, structurally. We’re asking for the librarians to be paid for out of a different budget, out of Central Office’s budget, which they do for a lot of positions so when it’s in the contract, it happens. And we in Chicago have a very fat contract. We wish we didn’t have to have it in writing, but we found that if we don’t have it in writing and we leave it how it is, then we have our systemic racism basically to shorten the chain because we have these schools with majority black and brown students on the South and West Sides, far less likely to have librarians, and we have schools on the North Side where they can fundraise and have parent fundraisers for extra positions, and they have art and music and a librarian. So we have this inequity that exists unless we get it in contract language.
Troy Swanson: Earlier, you had mentioned the term “social justice union” and me being from Illinois and in Chicagoland, you know, I have a sense on what you mean by that, but our listeners may not understand. And I think it’s a really special role that CTU has taken upon itself to step forward and be a leader and advocate, and so can you tell us a little bit more about what that means to be a social justice union and how that looks in practice?
Nora Wiltse: Sure. So I think the example I used of, well, there’s only 80 of us and there’s 25, 000 members. If you’re going to do a union, if you’re going to bargain based off of your member survey, you’re going to have a lot more people say what’s important to them is higher pay versus expanding librarians to maybe two or three hundred librarians instead of 80, right? So when we look at other unions across the country, there are unions that are very similar to Chicago Public Schools that are fighting for things beyond just a paycheck. And then there’s definitely unions that have said, “We’re not getting into all of that other stuff. We’re making it this very simple for our members.”
Karen Lewis was our president who brought this really to leadership. She won over another caucus of leadership, another option for leadership that said, “Hey, we’re just going to stick to what we’ve always done, which is working on pay raises and let that be a day. That’s really all we need to do as a union.” Well, Karen Lewis started this path that has led then to Jesse Sharkey, then to Stacey Davis Gates, presidents, where we bargain for the common good. So we have some aspects of our bargaining, what we’re asking for in bargaining, that really shock people across the city when they first hear we’re bargaining for affordable housing. We’re bargaining for a certain number of affordable housing to be offered in a bunch of our neighborhoods because our students and our families can’t afford to live in the city for much longer.
That’s something that a lot of unions would say is way out of their element and something that they shouldn’t ever take up, and it’s what some of our members feel as well. It’s always a push and pull in the union and a lot of healthy debate, but we have things like that in place because we believe all of these things go together, and when we are dealing in with a district where we have 87 percent of our students living in poverty, growing up in poverty, we can’t ignore the lack of health care resources on the South Side of our city. We can’t ignore the violence that our students endure on the West Side of our city.
I kind of went on for a little bit there, but that is how I would explain a social justice union.
Troy Swanson: Yeah. As an outside observer with many friends in CPS and friends in CTU, I do think it extends where, it’s almost like CTU has become a strong political voice for these issues in Springfield, in our state government, in the city government, whether or not they bargain for everything, but also just to say, “Hey, the learning environments are impacted by all these things, whether it’s violence, transportation, housing, food,” and I think it’s a stark contrast to what you described as a union that just bargains for wages for its members, but that we’re going to be something larger, and I find it personally, very admirable to see the leadership that CTU puts forward.
Nora Wiltse: We have to have a much longer range goal for these things. None of this can be solved in a contract, but we have 17, 000 students that are homeless, that are housing unstable in temporary living situations, so to say that that doesn’t affect them when they walk into our building is really silly and the conversations it’s allowed us to have as educators, it’s almost been healing because we don’t have to just look at teaching isolated from all these other things and ignore that we can come together in our union and we have classes that deal with secondary trauma of helping these students, it’s definitely slow progress, but we have now had, I think, four elections where those leaders, those social justice leaders have won our leadership for our union.
Troy Swanson: And really have been a force across Chicago, having impact on the recent mayoral election.
Nora Wiltse: Right. So when I say we have a long term goals, the example that you can see is that Brandon Johnson was a union organizer for us, and we had a goal of electing a mayor because we knew we were under mayoral control in Chicago, and even with candidates who pledged that they would get rid of that system, they did not, and so, yeah, Brandon Johnson came out of, it’s not just the Chicago Teachers Union and should have said this much earlier, but one of the things about a social justice union, you have to collaborate with all of the other organizations that are already doing this work in the city. So there’s a lot of groups working together and knocking on doors and getting signatures, and Brandon Johnson is now our mayor.
Troy Swanson: Well, let me ask, as of this recording, you are working without a contract, which is not unusual sometimes in bargaining. How are negotiations progressing and how are things looking?
Nora Wiltse: Well, with Brandon Johnson as our mayor, we thought things might go a little smoother than they have been. We are under mayoral control, but in between Brandon Johnson’s mayor’s office and the union office, we have Central Office of Chicago Public Schools, which is the largest central office in the country for an education system, even though we’re only the third largest school system. There’s a lot of bureaucracy there that has been moving at a certain pace, doing things a certain way for a really long time, and part of that is just saying “no” to whatever we bring to the bargaining table and that has kind of been consistent.
And in Chicago politics for Chicago listeners, they might’ve heard some little tips with our CEO Pedro Martinez and the mayor’s office and saying like, “Will Pedro Martinez be able to keep his job?” And that’s partly because it has been a really slow negotiation. We haven’t gotten as far as we thought we would, when we know the mayor’s office has a lot of the same goals as we do for the education of our students in our city. You know, I don’t know whether Pedro Martinez will keep his job. I mean, we’ve been under mayoral control. They’ve all chosen their own CEOs. It’s rare that Brandon Johnson kept the former CEO through the transition, but it has been frustrating.
We have been told there’s no money for anything that might cost money and then on all of our proposals that are non-economic such as giving teachers more autonomy on grading or things like that that don’t cost any money, there’s been a real big pushback on that as well because there’s a lot of bureaucracy that tries to keep the control out of the teacher’s hands. It certainly doesn’t look like a strike is looming, like it’s looked in the past. I don’t see that, but it’s also not super promising right now.
Troy Swanson: Yeah. Inching forward.
Nora Wiltse: Yes, inching, but we are going forward.
Troy Swanson: Yeah, well, and until you stop moving forward, then we’ll hope for the best. One thing that I think has been interesting with these negotiations that I’ve never seen before that I think is worth noting is having open bargaining sessions. I mean, it’s like a real statement for transparency where members of the public can be there for bargaining. Could you describe how that works and how that’s been going?
Nora Wiltse: Yeah, it’s really exciting. There’s some other school districts in the country. I believe Cleveland is one of them that have done this before. And it’s always been one of our goals in CTU is to get some of this bargaining out in the open, because we really feel if the public were to see what’s happening at the table, there’s clear experts in the room, and they are not on the CPS lawyer side. They are on the Chicago Teachers Union side. We have thought through solutions to some of these issues, and we don’t come empty handed, expecting them to wave a magic wand. We come with ideas, right? So we’ve been wanting to get some of these sessions public and with the leadership of Brandon Johnson, it finally it happened this round.
Of course, only certain topics are discussed. They haven’t been openly discussing how much our raises should be or anything like that, but they’ve been really good sessions. I just don’t know how the reach is on the YouTube. You can live stream it and you can also watch the past ones online, but I feel that union members are the only ones that are watching it. So I’m not sure if the message is really getting out to the community, because there’s been some quite embarrassing things on CPS’s end, just some basic questions they can’t answer, just a lack of vision that’s been really clear and I feel like we got it out there. We let people see what we needed them to see, but I don’t know how many people have time in their lives to tune in.
Troy Swanson: Well, even if you’re not a resident of Chicago, at least watching from a distance, an interesting experiment in democracy, like, really transparent, open participatory. I think it’s really great.
Nora Wiltse: It is really interesting to watch, and it’s not all that different than what happens with closed doors. There hasn’t been like a big change in what’s been discussed really, I would say it’s not like the conversations are drastically different. This is what it is.
Troy Swanson: So not a show when it’s public and it’s different behind closed doors. Well, for our listeners, you know, I always think like, especially our K 12 librarians are such an endangered species in so many ways, unfortunately, how could we help support this wider effort to advocate and to see more librarians working with our kids?
Nora Wiltse: Yeah, I’m always asked this and I’m always at a loss. I think it’s a struggle, as your listeners know, for the public good, for public libraries and school libraries, it’s hard to know how to go about this big issue, but no matter where you are in the country, there’s a good chance that your district is losing school librarians. You should let your elected officials know that school librarians are not outdated. This is not something that is in the past. In fact, I’m doing a lot of the tech training for my students and teachers. I’m doing very current and relevant things in my library, and I think the more people reach out and tell their elected officials or their school board members in particular, that this is something that they value, I think that’s really helpful, because we all live in a democracy where we need educated citizens.
I think one of the things that school librarians do that we sometimes might not think about is just the media literacy and the information literacy where we are focused on teaching future voters how to make sense of news articles and how to tell fact from fiction and looking at sources in that light is something that every student should have before they leave their K-12 education.
I think in particular in Chicago, if you can reach out to the school board, that would be very, very helpful.
Troy Swanson: And those of us in higher ed are very grateful for our colleagues in high school and below just cause you do see it when students come and they’re experienced researchers versus those who haven’t had that kind of support. It’s a real thing for sure. If our listeners wanted to be in touch, maybe they have questions or they’re looking to learn more. How can they reach out to you?
Nora Wiltse: They can email me at norawiltse@gmail.com, it’s my name at gmail.com. So I’m sure they can see my name spelled out on this recording, or you can link to it, and I know a lot of people are going through similar things in their district so I always like to connect to other districts and see how others are fighting this and having successes. And I’m also on Twitter @nswiltse.
Troy Swanson: Well, Nora, thank you for your advocacy. Thank you for your time today and your energy on this. I think this is a fight that’s so important, so thank you for fighting it for us.
Nora Wiltse: You’re welcome. Thanks for bringing the conversation to a larger audience.
Circulating Ideas 