When American Federation of Teachers’ Chicago local boss Karen Lewis isn’t looking to rally an opponent to challenge Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s re-election bid, or teaming up with the likes of once-respectable education historian Diane Ravitch to politicize tragedies such as the Newtown massacre, she is always engaging in some form of class warfare rhetoric, especially against the philanthropists who are among the big players in the school reform movement. Typical is her call earlier this month for the Second City to levy a so-called LaSalle Street Tax on commodities trading activities on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange and Board of Trade that would go for addressing the virtually-insolvent teachers’ pension’s officially-reported underfunding of $9.6 billion as of 2013 (and, according to Dropout Nation estimates to be released this weekend, more-likely to be between $12.5 billion and $15.5 billion, or far higher than official numbers suggest).
From where Lewis sits, “the top one percent and the institutions that handle their money” should be the ones bearing the responsibility for the financial mismanagement of the pension over which her union and Second City officials have presided for the past three decades. The fact that most of the taxes would fall upon people and institutions that aren’t even based in Chicago — including the national AFT itself — doesn’t factor into her thinking. Sneered Lewis in a speech earlier this month before City Club of Chicago: “The wealthy do not want to pay their fair share.”
But Lewis’ faux progressive chatter about opposing supposed plutocrats can’t be taken all that seriously — and not just because she heads up one of the most-influential players in education policymaking in both Chicago and Illinois. As the Chicago Teachers’ Union’s 2012-2013 filing with the Internal Revenue Service shows, Lewis is also one of the very affluent she rails against.
Lewis collected $136,890 in compensation from the AFT local in 2012-2013, a two percent decline from her base pay in the previous year. But this isn’t the only check Lewis collects. The Illinois Federation of Teachers, the AFT’s state affiliate, also paid her $64,506 during its 2012-2013 fiscal year to serve as one of its vice presidents, according to the union’s filing with the U.S. Department of Labor. [The AFT paid her nothing, according to its annual filing.] Add in the $18,687 Lewis collected in so-called nontaxable benefits from the union, and her total compensation was $220,083 last fiscal year, easily putting her among the top five percent of income-earners (or making more than $167,728, according to data from the Internal Revenue Service); she also earned nearly five times more than Chicago’s median household income of $47,408 (as of 2012), according to the U.S. Census Bureau, and more than Emanuel’s $204,726 salary as Second City mayor in 2012. [Let’s also note that none of these numbers include any salary she may still collect from Chicago’s traditional school district even though she is no longer working in the classroom. Add that in and Lewis is likely earning nearly $300,000 a year.]
Lewis wasn’t the only six-figure player on the Chicago Teachers Union’s payroll. Six other AFT local big wigs (of nine listed on the tax form besides Lewis) were either among the top 10 percent of the nation’s wage earners or close to it. This included Lynn Cherkasky-Davis, an administrator for the union whose $212,888 paycheck (not including non-taxable benefits of $19,198) was the highest on the list, Field Representative Anthony Lopez (who got $160,677) and his boss, Sara Echevarria (who pulled down $156,132) and Recording Secretary Michael Brunson (who collected $115,127 from the union). [Brunson and Echevarria also collected smaller paychecks from the AFT’s Illinois unit.] Jesse Sharkey, who is Lewis’ understudy in class warfare activity, was paid $93,595, according to the IRS filing. While Lewis’ and Sharkey’s salaries dropped slightly, Lopez, Echevarria, and Brunson Brunson and Echevarria also collected smaller paychecks from the AFT’s Illinois unit. Which explains why the AFT local’s salary costs were $6.6 million, a nine percent increase over the previous year.
Meanwhile the Chicago AFT is doing quite well for itself. The union generated revenue of $31 million in 2012-2013 — or the averag a 3.4 percent increase over the previous fiscal year. This included $2.9 million in subsidies from the AFT’s Illinois affiliate; this, by the way, doesn’t square with the $3.2 million the state unit reports that it ladled to the Chicago local. The national AFT kicked in another $623,391 in subsidies. Its surplus of $1.2 million last fiscal year was double the $687127 accrued after expenses in 2011-2012. The IRS filing makes it difficult to determine how much union of the union’s revenue (and ultimately, dues forcibly paid to it by teachers in Second City classrooms regardless of their desire to be a member) goes to political spending. But the AFT local paid $131,972 to political consultancy Lake Research Partners; the union’s PAC generated revenue of $566,196 in 2012-2013 and spent $455,808, according to Part XIII of its IRS filing. Expect the union and its PAC to spend even more over the next two years as part of its effort to oust Emanuel from office.
As your editor always says about AFT and National Education Association bosses, I doesn’t begrudge Lewis or her compatriots for their paychecks. I don’t begrudge anyone who earns their keep. At the same time, as I always say, it’s not about money, but what is done with it that matters most. And let’s be clear about this: What Lewis and her fellow traditionalists do with the money they control is support amoral policies that condemn the futures of far too many of our children, especially those from poor and minority communities in the Second City and elsewhere.
As she made clear two years ago during the Chicago AFT’s month-long strike — and continues to remind all of us with her efforts to stop the expansion of charter schools — Lewis has long ago shown that she is less-interested in improving the futures of Second City children than in perpetuating the failed policies behind the city’s (and the nation’s) education crisis. For all of Lewis’ class warfare rhetoric, she is hardly interested in helping poor and minority children — especially those who are black like her — actually gain the knowledge they need to emerge from poverty into the middle class.
At the same time, Lewis is also not all that concerned about addressing the concerns of high-quality teachers within the AFT locals rank-and-file, especially younger instructors who are paid the least and the first to lose their jobs during layoffs. Her unwillingness to move away from degree- and seniority-based pay scales to performance-based compensation (as well as demanding pay increases while being unwilling to allow for objective performance management based on student test score growth data), shows that she would rather keep the Chicago AFT’s coffers fat rather than help good and great teachers attain real rewards for her successes in improving student achievement. Her rejection of any pension reform that involves moving away from obsolete defined-benefit pensions to a hybrid approach that features defined-contribution plans and cash-balanced funding that guarantees a savings rate shows that she could care less about helping younger teachers attain better options for retirement savings.
Meanwhile the fact that Lewis refuses to take responsibility for the AFT local’s role in mismanaging the Second City’s teachers’ pension — which, given that it controls all but four of its board seats, is essentially a division of the union — is particularly egregious. For all of Lewis’ complaints about Emanuel’s modest plan to reduce cost-of-living increases for pensioners, the union’s LaSalle Street tax plan would do little to actually address the pension’s long-term insolvency. That Lewis also proposes that the pension should float $5 billion in pension obligation bonds and then investing it in the stock market in hopes of generating enough money to address the underfunding is absolutely irresponsible. As Illinois state officials and others can attest, that approach will only lead to financial ruin and even greater burdens for taxpayers and children to bear.
Karen Lewis is clearly doing well for herself. But is she doing right by teachers, taxpayers, and children? Not so much.
Photo courtesy of the Notebook.