Guess who won? Lynch. The 51-year-old reformer pushed for bread-and-butter union issues like better pay and health-care coverage–but also for money to reduce class sizes. Her reward: Board of Education concessions and a four-year contract that union members narrowly approved in November. Some teachers, who rejected a less-generous contract a month earlier, still griped. But as a Chicago Sun-Times editorial noted, “what other employers are giving out 16 percent raises over four years?” The new deal also provides $2 million to help decrease the number of students in some overcrowded kindergarten and first-grade classrooms from 34 to a slightly more manageable 28. In a union survey last summer, class size and lack of parental involvement were two major reasons why half of all new teachers left their posts within five years. “Our problem is not attracting people. It’s keeping them,” she says. “We have a brain drain to surrounding suburbs.”
Lynch, who worked 60-plus-hour days to hammer out the latest contract with Board of Ed. negotiators and a mediator, is hardly kicking back now. In January, she intends to ask the Democratic state legislature and the Democratic governor to give her students–86 percent of whom live in poverty–a better chance. She notes that Illinois ranks 49th in the nation in terms of the disparity between dollars spent in rich versus poor districts. That’s because the state relies heavily on local property taxes–which are much heftier in neighborhoods with million-dollar homes than in low-income areas–to fund schools. “Where you live dictates the amount of money spent on your education. That is patently unfair,” says Lynch. “That’s our next level of fighting.” She and her team also want to help get a Democrat in the White House. A new president might lessen what Lynch calls “unfunded mandates” like No Child Left Behind, which she says are “really just an effort to label public schools as failures, to justify bringing in vouchers.” Sounds like Lynch’s battle against brain drain has only just begun.
