Her skills as a tough negotiator will also be essential in 2003. The CTU’s four-year contract expires in June, and the state budget is strapped. That means that Lynch’s primary target will be Mayor Richard M. Daley–who controls Chicago’s 600 public schools. Even more daunting are the demographics of the nation’s third largest school system. More than 85 percent of Chicago’s students live in poverty, and many good teachers prefer to work in better-paying suburbs. Half the CTU’s 36,000 members have more than 10 years of experience, yet the average salary is only about $50,000.
Lynch was born in Chicago, one of eight children. She worked her way through col-lege packing Oreos and Chips Ahoy for Nabisco (a union job, of course), and went on to earn a master’s degree in special education at Chicago State University and a Ph.D. in educational-policy analysis at the University of Illinois at Chicago. After teaching special education, she worked for the American Federation of Teachers in Washington, D.C., and then returned to work for the local union in Chicago.
She says her biggest disappointment so far came when schools chief Arne Duncan said he would close three elementary schools for chronic academic failure. “Fourteen hundred poor minority children were displaced from their neighborhood schools,” she says indignantly. “The teachers union had one-hour notice.” Still, she remains an optimist. In her union office she keeps a needlepoint pillow that reads: TEACHERS PLANT SEEDS OF KNOWLEDGE THAT WILL GROW FOREVER. She’s doing her best to cultivate the garden.
