Chicago’s top teacher on defying Trump’s fascist invasion

“Trump declared war on three million people.”

Welcome to a Monday morning edition of Progress Report.

Today I bring you the first piece in what will be an ongoing series of interviews and features from occupied American cities. We kick off in Chicago, the so-called war zone, according to Donald Trump, where the community resistance has been historic and inspiring.

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Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates got a timely promotion this weekend when she was elected to run the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Chosen unanimously by her fellow educators, Davis Gates gives the statewide union an outspoken and politically powerful leader at a moment in which teachers have taken a frontline role in the resistance to the federal government’s ongoing invasion of Chicago and other immigrant-heavy communities.

The 48-year-old history teacher, a close ally of Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson, has become an obsession of conservative politicos and special interests, and also shown a willingness to criticize Democrats who she thinks shortchange urban communities and public schools. An appearance with Gov. JB Pritzker signaled unity over the most pressing issue facing the city, state, and teachers alike: rapidly encroaching fascism and the extralegal terrorizing of children, parents, and innocent residents otherwise.

I spoke with Davis Gates and the union’s new executive vice president, Cyndi Oberle-Dahm, who hails from downstate Illinois, about the fascist challenge, how teachers are handling being on the frontlines, what politicians must do, and the impact on children.

Progress Report: It must be incredibly difficult on your teachers having to go through all of this.

Davis Gates: Hell yeah, it’s difficult. It’s difficult seeing people break the law. It’s difficult being a party to the type of fascism that is running rampant in our streets in Chicago, but it’s not just in Chicago. The murder of the first immigrant, a father, was in Franklin Park. That’s local 571 in the IFT. They’re in the western suburbs, and now they have to hold not just the trauma of the moment, but the legacy of the moment.

The practicality of keeping people safe is hard enough, but teachers are supposed to make sense of the world. How do they talk to kids about that?

Davis Gates: I don’t know how you talk to kids about goddamn helicopters landing on their roofs. I don’t know how you talk to kids about being zip-tied in an immigrant line. How do you talk to kids about that? I know how to talk to them about the people doing it to them: they’re fascists, they’re monsters, and they are wrong. We have to figure out how to hold their trauma. That’s why the Chicago Teachers Union, some years ago, said that every school has to have a nurse and a social worker.

They talk about the violence in Chicago, they caricature it, they amplify it, they make it hyperbolic, and then they come here and they terrorize children. They withhold money from black students because of their fucked up politics. They do things that are harmful, that are violent, that are dangerous, all the while saying that they believe in family values and patriotism. I’m a patriot. My grandfather fought in the Korean War; my other grandfather fought in World War II. And let me tell you about those men: they didn’t fight so you can zip-tie seven-year-olds’ hands behind their back.

How do teachers handle when that happens, when kids get disappeared? Do you have protocols?

Davis Gates: What’s different in Chicago is that we’ve dealt with levels of fascism for a very long time. Jon Burge, a rogue Chicago Police Department commander, he kidnapped people on the South Side of Chicago for some time. In fact, the City of Chicago has been on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars because of this behavior.

So there is some infrastructure here in Chicago to help people figure out how to hold the complexity and the trauma of this moment, so what you see here is this insane amount of solidarity. With this new role with the Illinois Federation of Teachers, I hope to understand how we do it in the suburbs, how we do it downstate, and what are the levers and what is the language of that space because they care about human beings too.

Cyndi, how are teachers and leaders handling it in the suburbs? What has changed?

Cyndi Oberle-Dahm: Well, as teachers and educators, our students and their families come first. We always have that level of empathy, and we’re always a safe space. I do think one thing that is happening is that our folks downstate don’t feel that level of threat, but this president has brought that level of threat. So all it is serving to do is unite us to further stand together to protect our kids.

What does that mean practically? This is new ground in a lot of ways for your members.

Oberle-Dahm: We don’t have as much of the history of trauma as the city of Chicago. That being said, we have very underrepresented students. We’re right next to East St. Louis, Illinois. We’re right in where Cahokia Heights is, and we’re right by a city called Fairmont City, which has almost 80% immigrants who are coming in to do seasonal farm work. We’ve got a lot of orchards, and this has really devastated those communities.

We have not yet seen or felt the impact of agents pulling students from our streets. Our community members just simply aren’t leaving their homes. We’re coming together, and it’s making us stronger in this moment.

So what does that look like, coming together? Is it a matter of like neighborhood watches, checking in on people?

Cyndi Oberle-Dahm: Neighborhood watches, faculty and teachers’ aides, paraprofessionals seeking out more training, getting to learn their rights, banding together. Many of our administrations in the school districts where I live didn’t really have any plans in place for what to do for our students. So, it empowered the teachers, and it allowed the teachers’ unions to rise to the occasion to provide training and to be of better service to their members.

Stacy, I know you have a close relationship with Mayor Brandon Johnson, a former teacher and union member. How has that relationship impacted your response and the city’s response to all of this?

Davis Gates: His leadership has just been tremendous. It’s been the right tone. It’s been the right urgency and it’s been the right type of protection. All of this is unprecedented, and he’s building a forcefield around Chicago. He’s sending over a half billion dollars to the school district because the Trump administration is punishing the Chicago public schools for repairing harm that they’ve done to black children over time.

I think it’s going to push our governor, our Speaker of the House, and our Senate President, and if it doesn’t, then we’re going to push them.

Push them to do what?

Davis Gates: What we need is in this moment is a state budget that reflects the needs of children who are in a war zone. Donald Trump declared war on almost three million people, and the surrounding suburbs have been under siege. Our leaders are going to have to work together to figure out how to build a force field around Illinois through a state budget similar to what the mayor of Chicago is doing.

That’s the charge that we have for state lawmakers in this moment; they have a legacy of underpayment to our public institutions, like schools and higher education. And now they have this added burden of Trump’s behavior.

So what would you like to see the state do?

Davis Gates: Like bigger budgets, taxing the billionaires that Donald Trump gave a tax break. Why do they get a benefit and we get a burden? If this is America and we are sharing the pain, then they’re not picking up enough of it. They get a tax break, SNAP gets a reduction, and Medicaid gets a reduction, and Medicare gets a reduction, and the Department of Education is defunded so we don’t have protections for our special education students or our queer and transgender students. That’s not fair, and I know fairness is priority in the lives of our members and the families that they serve.

So while billionaires get tax breaks, families in the suburbs get higher property taxes. While corporations get a free ride, my members in Cahokia, they get to negotiate unfair insurance premiums. We want the governor, the Speaker of the House, and the Senate President to help us figure out what’s fairer to make sure that we are honoring the public servants all across the state who are helping us through probably one of the toughest periods that this generation will survive.

What do you think this does to kids, long-term, emotionally and in terms of their education?

Davis Gates: Well, it challenges the learning process because why would parents send their children to school to be in danger, and why would they go to the school community when they’ve seen their neighbors detained and kidnapped?

So attendance is going to continue to be an issue. I think one of the other things that we have to understand is what impacts it will have on the trust and the fidelity that they have to this democracy project. We’re supposed to protect and support our young people, and if we can’t as institutions, then how do they build trust? How do they understand us as a hallmark of democracy?

We are responsible for how we continue to perpetuate this democracy. That’s why we’re working very hard to make sure our kids have what they need. If they come for immigrant children, then they come for queer children. If they come for queer children, then they come for black children at some point because that’s how this continuum of fascism works. So we’re going to stand in the gap right now because we understand sequence as educators.

Kids who have their parents taken, what kind of resources are there for them?

Davis Gates: Not enough because we don’t have enough resources on a good day to offer children the to offer children the type of support that they need. To offer children the type of trauma support that they need just from being on social media. We are having a difficult time understanding and meeting the needs of children just because of Instagram. Now we’ve got to tell people that our country’s president has declared war on them and we’ll figure out how to do it, but there’s no manual for that.

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