Stacy Davis Gates was elected president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers Saturday, putting more than 100,000 teachers, college faculty and public employees from across the state represented by the union with her as she plans to demand more funding for schools and universities.
As has been the practice in the past, Davis Gates will continue leading her own local, the Chicago Teachers Union. Even as she has faced criticism for divisive rhetoric, she said the CTU has experience bringing together people who work in vastly different schools and uniting them around common purposes. She insists she can bring that energy to the state.
“We have to show people how to practice democracy, how to work across our differences, how to create solidarity based on our collective needs, and I don’t think it’s a better place to do that than with teachers from all over this state,” Davis Gates said in an interview with WBEZ.
Davis Gates and her slate did not face any challengers and were elected by consent at the IFT convention Saturday in Rosemont. Her slate represents Southern Illinois, the northern suburbs of Chicago and higher education workers.
She replaces Dan Montgomery, who is leaving to become executive director of the American Library Association. He ran the IFT for 15 years.
Davis Gates has forcibly advocated for increased state funding for schools, especially over the last two years with Chicago Public Schools facing budget deficits. Schools in the state overall are less adequately funded than they were last year, according to the state’s own formula. Her agenda will expand with the IFT. Statewide union organizations like the IFT organize members and lobby legislators, provide training for members on things like how to bargain with administrations and they support locals in contract fights.
As IFT president, she said she will campaign for more higher education funding. She said colleges and universities are severely underfunded, which drives up costs for working families.
She also said bread-and-butter union issues will be front and center, like health insurance costs and problems with the current pension system.
Her election will rile some. Davis Gates has been a lightning rod for the right, and she is known for divisive rhetoric. Some groups have criticized the prospect of her controlling a statewide union. They also have questioned whether CTU’s aggressive tactics and rhetoric will work outside of Chicago. Having the CTU president run the IFT is not new. That was the common practice until it changed 20 years ago.
But Davis Gates’ IFT agenda is similar to the platform for the Illinois Education Association, the largest teachers union in the state. The IEA also has a new president after its leader, Al Llorens, died unexpectedly in September.
“Al’s focus was on two main goals: to continue our work to become a racially, socially just organization and to build a robust organizing culture so that we can best serve all of our students and members,” said Karl Goeke, who will serve as IEA president until Llorens’ term expires in the spring of 2026. If he’s elected this spring, he said he will focus on reforming the retirement system, among other things.
Robert Bruno, a professor and director of the Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, said it is significant for Davis Gates to assume the IFT presidency.
“It does enable CTU to have greater influence in moving the statewide body to really address the inadequate level of spending on schools,” he said. “The dilemma is always how do you get downstate [representatives] to vote to increase funding. To have IFT, it does kind of muscle up their capacity to challenge the thinking that it is only a Chicago issue.”
Bruno also notes that poverty has moved out of Chicago and Davis Gates is well positioned to make the case for more funding on behalf of small, poorer districts.
Davis Gates said her caucus, which has been in power for 15 years, chose not to be at the helm of the IFT 20 years ago because they trusted Montgomery and former president Karen Lewis was focused on “saving Chicago schools.”
Davis Gates plans to use a shared leadership model, spreading the work and the power among her team.
Cyndi Oberle-Dahm, who is president of the Southwest Area Council and was elected IFT executive vice president, said many of her 6,000 members in southern Illinois are in districts which, like Chicago, are facing funding cuts as federal COVID-19 relief money runs out. She also worries about the Trump administration’s cuts to the Department of Education.
“I think it’s going to put us in crisis mode,” she said. The Southwest Area Council encompasses locals in the southern part of Illinois.
Oberle-Dahm said most of her members don’t spend much time thinking about the CTU, but if they have questions, she stresses the commonalities.
“They are educators, they are social workers, counselors,” she said. “They are doing the same things that we’re doing. They’re just doing it in a much bigger school district with a much larger union.”
Pankaj Sharma, president of the North Suburban Teachers Union who was elected secretary-treasurer, said there’s a lot of respect among their membership for what Davis Gates and the CTU have been able to do in Chicago.
“She has tons of experience, has had tons of success,” said Sharma, who was elected as secretary-treasurer. “She knows how to organize and mobilize people.”
Sharma and Oberle-Dahm want IFT to focus on changing pension rules that require people who were hired after 2011 to wait until they are 67 years old to collect a pension and reduce the amount of money they can collect. They say it is preventing young people from teaching in Illinois schools and causing others to leave the profession early.
Sarah Karp covers education for WBEZ. Follow her on X @WBEZeducation and @sskedreporter.