In-person and Online: Fighting to Fund our Schools: Organizing with Data (Chicago Teachers Union) #685

Presenter: Fighting to Fund our Schools: Organizing with Data (Chicago Teachers Union)

Pavlyn Jankov and Chris Poulos’ talk will focus on the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) Research Department’s use of Python’s Streamlit library to create flexible organizing tools that provide CTU staff and members with easy access to data, talking points, and education on campaigns to tax the rich and fully fund schools. Their talk will provide a brief context of CTU’s and the Illinois Federation of Teachers (IFT) tax the rich and fully funding education campaigns, our use of data tools to augment the internal and external organizing of these campaigns, and some challenges in using these tools.

The CTU and the IFT—representing over 100,000 educators and school staff across Illinois—have made fully funding education from pre-K through higher education and progressive revenue key strategic priorities. While fully funding schools and taxing the rich and corporations have consistently shown strong public support, turning that support into policy is another matter. Public finance policy is obscured by vested interests who use ideologies that protect their wealth and power. A clear example is Illinois billionaire Michael Sacks and others who assembled and spent over $10 million in the matter of weeks in order to defeat a modest tax on Chicago corporations.

CTU’s Research Department has been using data tools as a means to cut past these ideologies and provide staff and members with easy to access data, talking points, and political education to strengthen our advocacy efforts. We will walk through a few examples, including our ProtectingChicagoSchools.com look up tool to show the impact of tax increment financing revenue on schools; our more recent https://cps-budget-calculator.streamlit.app/ that shows how State legislators can prevent budget cuts in CPS by supporting current legislation to fully funding our K-12 schools; and a tool that calculates property tax expenditures created by a megaproject subsidy bill. There are benefits in using Streamlit, such as flexibility and user accessibility, as well as challenges, such as assembling and preparing data and maintaining best practices with “bespoke” development.

This event will be in person, but you can also tune in via livestream. Doors open at 6pm. The livestream and announcements will start around 6:30pm CDT.

In-person: i.c.stars, 750 N Orleans, Suite 500 (5th floor), Chicago IL.

For more information on our in-person events, please see our COVID Policy.

RSVP In-person attendees should RSVP beforehand. As occupancy limits permit, walk-ins will be allowed to enter.

There will be food! We will be serving Costa Rican empanadas, chicken casado and rice from Irazu!