Weiss v. Chicago Teachers Union

Case Update: September 2026—Lawsuit Forces CTU to Publish Missing Audits; LJC Will Appeal to Secure Future Transparency

The Liberty Justice Center’s lawsuit achieved an important victory for Chicago Teachers Union members: CTU has now posted its complete financial audits on its member portal. But because CTU continues to deny that it must publish the complete audits each year, LJC is appealing to ensure that members do not have to file a new lawsuit every time CTU decides to withhold them.

When LJC filed this case in October 2024, CTU had not published the required annual audits since 2020. During the litigation, CTU offered shifting and contradictory accounts of those missing audits. CTU initially maintained that the audits had been completed. It later acknowledged that they were not complete, before ultimately stating that they had been completed in December 2025—more than a year after the lawsuit was filed.

The litigation thus revealed that CTU had told members and federal regulators that completed audits existed when, according to CTU’s later litigation position, they did not. Only after the lawsuit, a congressional investigation, and scrutiny from the U.S. Department of Labor did CTU post the complete audits on its member portal.

On September 11, 2026, the Circuit Court of Cook County granted summary judgment to CTU. The court deferred to CTU President Stacy Davis Gates’s interpretation that the bylaws permit CTU to publish only condensed summary pages while making the complete audits available for in-person inspection.

LJC will appeal that ruling. Although the complete audits are currently available on CTU’s portal, CTU has not agreed that it must keep them there or publish complete audits in future years. Under the trial court’s ruling, CTU could return to publishing only selected summaries, forcing members to begin the same fight again.

CTU members should not have to sue their union every year to obtain basic financial information. LJC’s appeal will seek to establish that CTU must honor its annual commitment to its members by publishing the complete audits consistently—not merely when litigation and outside scrutiny force it to do so.