Teachers had just won a historic strike. Yet few educators seemed interested in celebrating their accomplishments—they were looking more at how to best position themselves in future fights for public education.
On that day, 79 percent of the educators voted to return to work the following morning. Significant noncompensatory provisions that were mutually beneficial to CPS students and teachers were negotiated. Students were now guaranteed textbooks on the first day of class; teachers’ supplies budgets were more than doubled; and the proportion of a teacher’s evaluation made up by students’ standardized testing scores was held to the state’s legal minimum despite the board’s attempt to increase it. Mayor Emanuel had hoped to introduce merit pay into the contract, but he was denied.
The union also beat back an attempt to increase health-care costs by 40 percent. The union and Emanuel had battled over a longer school day for months and did agree to extend it, but not without annual raises along with a cost-of-living increase, which the mayor had initially fought.
However, the contract was still far from perfect. Karen Lewis admitted as much. “These are austerity times,” she stated on the day of the second vote. “This is an austerity contract.”1
The contract contains some key provisions that have since proven damaging to the union. Much of the negotiation occurred over how much CPS would pay out in benefits to teachers who were displaced from a school that was closed. Neither side had any illusions about what lay at the heart of that debate: how expensive it would be for the district to close schools. The more benefits CPS had to pay displaced teachers, the more difficult it would be for them to close large numbers of schools.
“We lost a significant portion of those benefits,” said CTU organizer Matt Luskin. “We didn’t lose anything near what they wanted, but it became much cheaper to close a school.”
Class sizes had been a central issue in the union’s education reform proposals and public messaging during the strike. CPS had attempted to remove class size ceilings, set at twenty-eight for kindergarten and thirty-one for upper level grades; the union stopped the district from increasing such levels but could not win any contract provisions to lower the ceilings.2
The contract the union ended up negotiating contained both important wins that were mutually beneficial to teachers and students and some deeply flawed provisions with which the Board of Education and the mayor will continue to try to dismantle public education.3
Such losses are common for unions in the twenty-first century. But the momentum the union carried after the strike’s end, into its fights around issues like school closures, was nearly unparalleled in recent labor history. The CTU transformed itself from an organization representing the narrow economic self-interest of teachers into the principal body fighting for educational justice for CPS students—both in the eyes of the public, which came to trust the union’s education reform agenda over the mayor’s, and in the eyes of its own members, like the ones I spoke with as they left the House of Delegates meeting.
The achievements of the 2012 strike are greater than the contract the union was able to negotiate, and its success is not owed to one tactic. The union was successful because its aims were broad and encompassed the aims of Chicago’s entire working class, even while its demands were specific. The CTU took a confrontational stance against the forces pushing for free market–based education reform. Rather than trying to meet such reformers in the middle on their proposals to privatize schools or increase teacher evaluations based on standardized testing—as national teachers unions have done—the CTU was uncompromising in its rejection of the demands of Mayor Rahm Emanuel and corporate reform groups. And rather than allowing such groups to paint the union as a roadblock to educational progress, the CTU put forth its own positive proposals to reform schools, grounded in an unapologetic vision of progressive education that would be funded by taxing the rich. Road maps to victory exist only in hindsight, but the CTU’s program can provide some useful guides to teachers unions around the country.
Targeting Neoliberal Education Reform
The push to transform education into a commodity that can be bought and sold on the free market has mirrored the broader neoliberal turn since the 1980s, which has sought to privatize public goods and sell them off to the highest bidder, destroy unions to eliminate workers’ opposition to this agenda, and eliminate restrictions to the flow of capital.4
In education, neoliberalism has meant a push for the replacement of neighborhood schools with charter schools, expansion of “school choice,” merit pay for teachers, a general demonization of educators and efforts to disempower their unions, and an obsession with standardized testing. Corporate management strategies have come to replace concern for pedagogy; teachers are mandated to be principally concerned with measurable results and value-added assessments through test scores, and principals and entire school districts are judged based on their ability to raise test scores.
Teaching itself has become increasingly contingent work, a profession that chews up young educators and spits them out after a handful of years. Teachers are expected to take on additional administrative tasks, while at the same time their class sizes are growing and their planning periods are being whittled away. Teachers’ morale is at an all-time low, and teachers are leaving the profession in droves: A 2012 University of Pennsylvania study found that the largest group of teachers in public education had one year of experience.5 The goal is to make life so unbearable for teachers that they are pushed out of the profession long before they come to expect middle-income salaries or provisions like tenure. Educating students can then be done on the cheap; the teacher with two decades of experience and a master’s degree can be replaced with a Teach for America volunteer putting in two years in a poverty-stricken elementary school in order to include it on his or her law school application.
Private foundations with massive resources have taken the lead in pushing this agenda under the guise of a concern for the well-being of America’s schoolchildren. Three in particular—the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, and the Walton Family Foundation—play a central role in shaping education reform policy. Unsurprisingly, these foundations, built on the largesse of three of the country’s wealthiest capitalists and their families, are pushing hard for free market reforms in public schools. That these foundations could accomplish this through strategic investments of a few billion dollars every year over the last decade or so in a sector whose cost comes to more than half a trillion dollars every year, with almost no accountability to the broader public, is fairly surprising—a testament to how desperately cash-strapped school districts around the country truly are.6 Waving donations that are equivalent to a tiny percentage of most school districts’ annual budgets in front of superintendents staring down massive budget shortfalls seems to be all that is needed to convince administrators to adopt the free market agenda being peddled by these ultrawealthy philanthropists.
Besides making strategic donations directly to schools, these foundations have helped fund organizations that attempt to style themselves as leaders of a movement advocating for poor children of color in crumbling schools, positioning themselves as the children’s only advocates against cruel organized groups of grownups trying to rob them of an education. Their websites trumpet slogans like “Renewing Schools, Renewing Neighborhoods,” as that of Stand for Children (SfC) does; Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) say, in their statement of principles, that schools “have become captive to powerful, entrenched interests that too often put the demands of adults before the educational needs of children.” SfC and DFER, then, are the saviors for these students.
These organizations have effectively framed the issue as a battle between two groups: organizations like SfC, DFER, charter school advocates, and others who are pushing for reforms in the best interests of children on the one hand and, on the other, teachers unions, which are consistently throwing up roadblocks to students’ well-being in
order to defend their own interests.
The goal of these foundations and the policies they have shepherded into the mainstream consensus is to bring education, as a sector, into line with the goals of capital accumulation. The humanistic goals of education—of creating informed citizens capable of creative and critical thinking—have been erased.
Pushback against these policies must include a willingness to confront not only the Republican Party but also the Democrats. The movement to transform public education is often seen as a phenomenon pushed by the right. But the right-wing agenda for education reform—the emphasis on privatizing and deregulating schools, crushing teachers unions and stripping educators of collective bargaining rights, “value added” assessments of teaching, and a general embrace of free market reforms as a panacea for all that ails students—is also, in large part, the Democratic Party’s agenda for education reform.
The Democrats have seen the rise of a strong neoliberal wing over the last several decades, and an increasing number of Democrats no longer even pretend to placate unions—once seen as a central constituency for the party—or to concern themselves with a broader agenda of equality and social justice. The party’s policies look more and more like those of the Republicans. This is particularly true in the case of education reform, where Democrats have swallowed the right’s free market orthodoxy whole. Much of the party appears to have given up on education as a public project.
Education policy’s hard tack to the right under Ronald Reagan was continued by his former vice president, George H. W. Bush; Bill Clinton and the New Democrats behind him were happy to follow suit. Today, the Obama administration’s policy proposals embrace the kinds of free market reforms and philosophies that were first introduced by the right. Central to Race to the Top, the president’s signature education reform program, are cash incentives for states that allow students’ performance on standardized tests to be tied to teacher evaluations, and a push for merit pay for teachers.
Democratic mayors around the country have gone even further in their embrace of free market reforms. In June 2012, the US Conference of Mayors unanimously endorsed “parent trigger” laws pushed by the right that would, should a majority of parents vote in favor, allow public schools to fire teachers and further privatize schools by turning them over to private operators.7 Antonio Villaraigosa, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, has publicly defended the parent trigger and pushed for near-total power over Los Angeles schools in order to institute corporate reforms with little public oversight—winning him support from then Republican Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Cory Booker, Democratic mayor of Newark, New Jersey, actually explicitly sided with his Republican governor, Chris Christie, on a similar policy agenda, including charter expansion and increased use of standardized test scores for teacher evaluations; he persuaded Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to donate $100 million to Newark schools to be used in an introduction of merit pay for teachers. The two Democratic mayors in charge in Chicago for the last quarter-century have also been national leaders in pushing a neoliberal education agenda.
Democrats have embraced the major philanthropic foundations and their agenda as well. Gates, for example, invested $90 million in Chicago’s Renaissance 2010 program, which was overseen by former CEO of Chicago Public Schools Arne Duncan under Democratic Mayor Richard M. Daley. The program became the basis of the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, overseen by Duncan, who is now secretary of education. As education writer Joanne Barkan has said, Duncan made “the partnership with private foundations the defining feature of his [Department of Education] stewardship.” In their foundation’s annual report, Eli and Edythe Broad write:
[The] appointment of Arne Duncan … as the U.S. Secretary of Education marked the pinnacle of hope for our work in education reform. In many ways, we feel the stars have finally aligned. With an agenda that echoes our decades of investments—charter schools, performance pay for teachers, accountability, expanded learning time, and national standards—the Obama administration is poised to cultivate and bring to fruition the seeds we and other reformers have planted.
Duncan even created a director of philanthropic engagement in the Department of Education—in his own words, “signal[ling] to the philanthropic world that the Department is ‘open for business.’ ”8
From the very top of the national Democratic Party to the local level, the consensus is unabashedly in favor of transforming public education into a market commodity.
Chicago has long been what education policy scholar Pauline Lipman describes as “incubator, test case, and model for the neoliberal urban education agenda”—part of a larger process of restructuring the city to better serve the needs of capital. Since the 1990s, this has been marketed as education reform. The 1995 Chicago School Reform Amendatory Act put the mayor in full control of CPS, with the power to appoint a school board and a CEO, and made an early push for a more central role for high-stakes testing. Arne Duncan, CEO of CPS under Richard M. Daley, crafted the Renaissance 2010 push. By 2009, ninety-two schools had been designated as Ren2010 schools, and some three quarters of them had been converted into charters. The program set up a system of labeling and sorting schools in order to identify those that were to be deemed failures—essentially setting CPS up to become a portfolio manager of schools, obeying the logic of the market by determining which schools in its portfolio were failing and thus needed to be closed.9
Rahm Emanuel and the Board of Education have continued this push, particularly around school closures. In 2013, the board voted to shut down forty-nine elementary schools and a high school program—almost all of which are in African American neighborhoods—while the district continues to advance a plan to open sixty new charter schools. The combination of public school closings and charter school expansion will likely erode the union’s membership, redirect public money to privately run charters that lack basic mechanisms for public accountability, slash teachers’ salaries and benefits, and cause massive disruption in the neighborhoods where the closures would take place.
This agenda has been carried out in Chicago under total mayoral control, with almost no formal accountability to Chicagoans themselves. Ren2010 and the 2013 school closures might have been difficult to achieve if Chicago’s mayors had to worry about public accountability. Writing about Chicago, “a national model of mayoral control,” Lipman says, “Mayoral takeover is a case of the use of the coercive power of the state to enforce a neoliberal program.”10
Chicago is perhaps the most Democratic of all American big cities, with a storied history of a political machine tied to that party. But it was also in the vanguard of the shift to a neoliberal managerial Democratic Party that aimed to placate new constituencies of capital rather than organized community interests or labor. That shift has seen education reform become synonymous with the free market and attacks on organized teachers.
Recognizing the Failure of Teachers Unions Nationally
The two major domestic teachers unions, the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT, of which the CTU is a member), have continually failed to even attempt to resist the Democratic Party’s rightward shift on education. Even as the party is turning against them, they continue giving the Democrats millions of dollars—around $30 million in publicly disclosed donations and outside spending in the 2012 election cycle—seemingly expecting little in return.
There have been rumblings of a potential rupture in the teachers union–Democratic Party coalition for years, as teachers have grown increasingly agitated at the party’s attacks on their profession. Indications of this have cropped up as more and more Democrats are becoming outspoken about their reticence or outright hostility toward teachers unions. Former Mayor Villaraigosa, for example, is not only a former union organizer but also a former teachers union organizer who now, lulled by the calls of the neoliberals, has turned on his former employer. Despite his claim that “I don’t have an anti-union bone in my body,”
he wrote op-eds as mayor saying that although he has attempted to reform education, “there has been one unwavering roadblock to reform: teacher union leadership [emphasis in original].”11
Won’t Back Down, a Hollywood film widely panned as little more than a teacher-slandering propaganda piece (and a godawful one, at that), was screened at the Democratic National Convention in 2012 (and, incidentally, given an introduction by Villaraigosa).12 It was technically an unofficial event but one that required approval from the Obama White House. That a particularly noxious piece of antiunion and antieducator agitprop would be given the green light straight from the top, to be screened at the party’s grand quadrennial event, says a great deal about how little the party seems to be concerned with maintaining even cordial relations with teachers unions.
In case teachers unions didn’t get the message, President Obama’s deputy campaign manager for the 2012 elections tweeted, in response to Republican sniping about the president being supposedly beholden to teachers unions, “Obama’s relationship with teachers’ unions [is] anything but cozy.” It was a revealing statement: Democrats used to at least rhetorically claim their deep commitment to organized labor while betraying it behind closed doors; in the era of neoliberal education consensus, all such pretensions appear to have vanished.
The message from Democrats has been fairly clear: Teachers unions are no longer a needed constituency within the Democratic coalition, so it’s now open season where they are concerned.
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