Strike for America (11 page)

All that is wrong with American education reform should not be placed solely on the shoulders of Rahm Emanuel; his policies reflect a larger free market consensus that must be challenged. And there is always a danger in holding up a single politician as the primary enemy to be defeated. But the union's decision to target Emanuel specifically represents a significant break in union–Democratic Party relations, both in Chicago and nationally: The CTU was unafraid to name a major national power player in the Democratic Party as an enemy and therefore to go to battle with him over his support of neoliberal reforms.

Like its mayors, Chicago's city council members or aldermen are Democrats through and through: forty-nine of the council's fifty members belong to the party. And like their national party, they seem to have strong right-wing currents throughout their ranks. Days before the strike, nearly two thirds of the council signed a letter to Karen Lewis begging the union not to go out on strike.

Some signatories, like Alderman Joe Moreno, went
further—during an interview on Fox Business News, Moreno agreed with a host who suggested that the city “blow up the traditional schools and have more charter schools.” He then stated, “We're trying to reform education. Any time we talk about reforming education—doing charter schools, doing turnaround schools, which I totally support—we get pushback from the Chicago Teachers Union. They're a conservative union.”
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Moreno portrays himself as a progressive council member, but he is of that peculiar brand of twenty-first-century liberalism that does not include supporting workers on strike and encourages expansion of the market into public education. Thus, after teachers and activists highlighted Moreno's comments, rank-and-file CTU members confronted the alderman directly with pickets in front of his office, organizing actions independently of the union. (Since then, the alderman—likely rattled by the mobilization against him after his comments—has attempted to make amends with the union and other grassroots groups throughout the city.) Other ostensibly progressive city council members who opposed the strike (like Joe Moore, an alderman once named the “Most Valuable Local Official” by
The Nation
) faced similar actions throughout the city.

The union has even taken on what is a sacred cow for most American unions: President Obama. The CTU did not vote to endorse Obama's reelection campaign for president, an uncommon move for any American union. The political
action committee voted to endorse his reelection campaign, but a contentious debate on the floor of the House of Delegates resulted in no action on an Obama endorsement.

The strike itself was timed to present a political crisis for the president. As the presidential campaign approached a fever pitch less than two months before the presidential elections, the teachers walked off the job in Obama's hometown, causing a minor crisis for the president that could have escalated if the strike had dragged on. And while it was not made explicit during the strike, the CTU was fighting policies that were central to Obama's education reform agenda.

The president's signature education legislation is Race to the Top, a federal competitive-grants-based program that is largely based on Renaissance 2010, encouraging school turnarounds, increased use of standardized testing to evaluate teachers, and merit pay. The union successfully prevented the Board of Education from introducing merit pay in Chicago and pushed to reduce the proportion of a teacher's evaluation based on standardized tests to its legal minimum. Halting turnarounds and closures is now the central piece of the union's agenda.

And during the national convention of the AFT in July 2012, as Vice President Joe Biden addressed them, CTU members in red shirts stood on the floor of their national union's convention handing out fliers to other members and holding signs reading “Stop Race to the Top.” CTU President Karen Lewis was the only member of the AFT's executive council who did not sit on the convention's stage during Biden's address, seen in videos and photos from the
event, standing on the convention floor with her arms crossed.
¹⁹

While most American unions have been terrified to break with any sections of the Democratic Party, even those pushing neoliberal policies that are throwing those unions' very existence into question, the CTU has not. That willingness was key to its ability to win its strike and build power.

Targeting Billionaires

While the push for free market education reform is a project with clear intentions of eradicating teachers unions in order to reshape education according to the dictates of capital, few teachers unions have been willing to publicly identify it as such—or to identify as their enemy the wealthy capitalists who are pushing it. The CTU, however, has been willing to unequivocally identify neoliberal education reformers as enemies of public education. Thus the CTU has put the issues at stake in efforts to reform public education in stark contrast—and made clear whose side the ultrarich reformers are on.

A widely circulated video entitled “Chicago Teachers Union vs. Astroturf Billionaires” was indicative of the union's willingness to isolate and attack the billionaire reformers, highlighting the personal and ideological ties between Mayors Richard Daley and Rahm Emanuel, corporate reform groups
like Stand for Children and Democrats for Education Reform, and far-right groups affiliated with the Tea Party. Another video included a mock-children's cartoon, telling a “bedtime story” of the “fat cats” who had attacked the teachers and attempted to pillage the public school system in Chicago. The video goes as far as describing “a new evil fat cat land[ing] in Chicago,” Emanuel, who flashes across the screen as a devilish-looking cat, who “brought in a whole litter box of evil fat cats from all over the country.” Meanwhile, caricatures of other nefarious-looking cats appear, representing Stand for Children, billionaire Bruce Rauner, and others.

Rauner, a retired private equity fund manager who has taken up the dismantling of public education as a hobby in the way many retirees take up golf, began to emerge as a prominent voice around education reform during the strike. A close adviser to Mayor Emanuel, Rauner is a strong backer of charter schools—his donations to a prominent local charter network resulted in his name being affixed to a school in the city's West Loop, now called Rauner College Prep. He frequently appears in public to attack the union and was responsible for bringing Stand for Children to Illinois in 2011. (SfC would later go on to pass SB7, as described in
Chapter 2
.)

The union has confronted Rauner publicly. Karen Lewis wrote an op-ed in the
Chicago Tribune
addressing Rauner specifically, concluding, “Obviously he knows absolutely nothing about education.” And shortly after the strike's end, Jesse Sharkey sat next to Rauner on a local news broadcast
and calmly argued that wealthy reformers like Rauner were actually pushing public education's decline through their attacks on teachers and collective bargaining.
²⁰
Sharkey stated:

At one time billionaires like Rauner and corporate reform groups like Stand for Children could make their case for free market education reforms unopposed; if teachers unions had any kind of response to the accusations leveled against them, they were often mealy-mouthed, reinforcing the narrative that wealthy reformers were pushing changes while teachers unions acted as roadblocks. The CTU has changed the narrative on education reform in
Chicago, both in media portrayals and in the minds of CPS parents.

If more teachers unions were willing to make their case directly to the public—that the wealthy capitalists funding education reform efforts in this country are acting against the interests of public school students and must be stopped, as the CTU has done—what passes for education reform in this country could see a marked shift.

Proposing Positive Policy Visions

The union members would not have been able to position themselves as the true representatives of the interests of Chicago's public school students if they had not been willing to articulate an alternative vision for what Chicago public schools should look like. In February 2012, the union released “The Schools Chicago's Students Deserve: Research-based Proposals to Strengthen Elementary and Secondary Education in the Chicago Public Schools.” This forty-six-page white paper rebukes education reform as it has been carried out in CPS and nationally and lays out the union's vision for education reform. This vision includes an unapologetic shoring up of education as a public good that gives no credence to any of the free market or high-stakes-testing-obsessed schemes in vogue in the mainstream education reform dialogue.

The report's first sentence reads, “Every student in CPS deserves to have the same quality education as the children of the wealthy.” It demands smaller class sizes, stronger and
better-staffed “wraparound services” like nurses and social workers, and the provision of basic facilities like libraries in all schools. It cites the widespread overburdening of special education teachers and argues for additional resources for their students. It directly challenges what it refers to as the “pedagogy of poverty,” the transformation of teaching into a practice largely focused on preparation for standardized testing. Recognizing the very real crisis in many poor schools, the report demands additional funding for such schools rather than closures.

And in a welcome departure from much of twenty-first-century liberalism, the document rejects the logic of austerity, which justifies the underfunding of public resources by pleading budget shortfalls. It is unapologetic in the audaciousness of its demands, proposing funding for these proposals through tax increases for the rich, progressive tax policies (including an end to the regressive practice of school funding based on property taxes), a financial transactions tax, and an overhaul of the TIF system that has taken millions from public institutions like schools and funneled them to corporations.

The paper is the union's public response to both the corporate reform agenda and teachers unions' grudging capitulation to it. It is a proposal that cedes no ground to the neoliberals and advances its own agenda for school reform. While the CTU is on the defensive overall, as nearly all unions currently are, its policy proposals for education reform are a labor movement rarity: a union attempting to reshape public discourse by advancing its own vision for
what society should look like. Most unions do not move past the defensive crouch they are forced into by bosses on the attack and politicians pushing austerity. The CTU is insisting that the union and its members know what the American education system should look like; at a time of labor's timidity, they are making steps toward going on the offensive.

Collective Bargaining for the Common Good

The CTU had made gains for students a central part of its public rhetoric around its fight with the mayor and the Board of Education and a core reason for the strike. At the bargaining table, however, the union also negotiated gains that extended far beyond teachers' compensation. It employed what labor strategist Stephen Lerner has called “collective bargaining connected to the common good.”
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A key provision of SB7 was to significantly limit the scope of legally strikeable issues for teachers. Under the law, teachers could strike only over wages, benefits, and some aspects of evaluation. This provision was pursued by the union's enemies because they recognized the union's potential to use the strike as a referendum on the state of public education as a whole and, particularly under the union's new left leadership, as a weapon to extract contractual gains on noncompensation issues that affect students.

That these neoliberal groups would not only attempt to outlaw a strike but also keep a strike's legality limited to extremely narrow parameters is an explicit recognition of Lerner's argument: “Expanding the goals and demands of organizing and collective bargaining is the key to winning individual campaigns, a stronger labor movement, and a more just society.” In effect, groups like SfC recognized not only that teachers' ability to withhold their labor was a powerful weapon but also that a strike which made an issue of the conditions under which children were being educated would be extremely difficult to discredit and defeat.

Mutually Beneficial Achievements

Yet the union did expand its goals and demands during the strike. It took the proposals it had put forward in documents like “The Schools Chicago's Children Deserve” and made noncompensation issues a key piece of its case to the public and a central matter in its 2012 strike (despite the fact that the latter was illegal). Even in the union's press release announcing the work stoppage, President Karen Lewis said the strike was about “getting a fair contract which will give our students the resources they deserve.” Outside the union's headquarters the night before the strike, Lewis said, “As we continue to bargain in good faith, we stand in solidarity with parents, clergy, and community-based organizations who are advocating for smaller class sizes, a better school day, and an elected school board.” The union maintained this message without running afoul of the law.

And these concerns were not mere rhetoric. The union actually did use its bargaining position to win real gains for students in its contract.