Strike for America

by Micah Uetricht

  Yet neither of the national unions appears capable of fighting back. The NEA has recently responded by beginning to fund some Republicans, like a state house candidate in Indiana who hadn’t spent much time on charter expansion or merit pay because he had been busy with bills to ban gay marriage and hunt down undocumented immigrants, or the Pennsylvania state representative who bragged that the voter identification law he helped craft would deliver his state to Mitt Romney in the election.

  The AFT has not started handing out cash to conservatives, but it has not changed its interactions with the Democrats either. Its president, Randi Weingarten, is of specific interest because she has positioned herself as one of the principal voices in education nationally. (A New York Times columnist even floated her name for secretary of education soon after the CTU strike.)13 Weingarten has, in the words of education reporter Dana Goldstein, “tried to carve out a conciliatory role for herself in the national debate over education policy.” In doing so, she has ceded much ground to the reformers’ agenda. Goldstein called her the “marker of the moving center”—a center unquestionably shifting far to the right.14

  In July 2012, for example, Weingarten praised a contract negotiated in Cleveland that introduced teacher evaluations based on standardized test scores before considering either seniority or tenure. She held up a contract negotiated in Newark, New Jersey, that introduced merit pay (paid for with a $100 million donation by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, and specifically designated to institute the kinds of changes trumpeted by corporate reformers) as “a system of the future … that will help boost teaching and learning and will strengthen the teaching profession.” In 2010, she publicly supported a Colorado bill that went further in stripping teachers of tenure protections than any other piece of legislation in the nation in order to make the state more competitive in its bid for Race to the Top funds.15

  And perhaps most jarringly, Weingarten actually came to Chicago on the first day teachers began voting to authorize the strike—not in support of teachers but to speak on the Clinton Global Initiative panel alongside Rahm Emanuel and to praise him for his Chicago Infrastructure Trust, a privatized infrastructure project that is a huge coup for capital.16 So while Chicago’s teachers were engaging in a historic strike vote to push back against free market education reform, Weingarten was ignoring them and supporting a neoliberal mayor in chipping away at public infrastructure.

  These policies and stances come from Weingarten’s view of what effective union leadership looks like.

  “You may look heroic when you yell at people,” Weingarten told Goldstein, “but if you actually find ways to really work together and reach across the aisle, that’s what I want.”

  Weingarten hints at a labor-management cooperation scheme that has been tried and has failed too many times to count, both from a left perspective and on its own terms, throughout American labor history—not only because it is based on a misunderstanding of the opposed interests of the two groups but also because it can no longer deliver the goods for workers. American union leaders have pushed such arrangements particularly zealously since the 1980s, although this did not slow the decline in living standards of unionized workers and the American working class as a whole.

  The unspoken hope is that labor leaders will begin to identify more with the bosses they are negotiating against than with the workers they represent—draining leaders and their members of any sort of fighting spirit. American labor history shows that such arrangements inevitably presage new attacks and demands for concessions from bosses—something much easier to accomplish when the union leadership is in league with the perpetrators of the attacks.

  There is either a naïveté about the nature of the project Weingarten and all teachers unions are up against or an unwillingness to come to terms with it. Education reformers want nothing less than the dismantlement of education as a public good and the ability to reshape it to the dictates of the market. There is no room for teachers unions in this view of education—at least not teachers unions that have any meaningful power over the decisions being made in the education system. The only way to effectively respond to this project is to challenge it head-on, to identify it as detrimental and fight against it unapologetically—and to put forward teachers’ own vision of what progressive education reform can look like.

  Up Against the Democrats

  Central to the task of pushing back against the free market reform agenda was taking on the party that embraced it so fully—the Democrats. The previous union leadership, the UPC, was neither willing nor able to challenge the neoliberal consensus on education in Chicago, as discussed in Chapter 2. The opposite is true of CORE: Years before it even considered running for control of the union, teacher activists were battling the local and national Democratic education agenda.

  A battle against the Democratic Party was actually not such a big leap for CTU members, as two decades of policies attacking public education had produced a clear desire among much of the membership to fight the party.

  “No one in the union had been happy about the Democrats on education, locally or nationally,” Jesse Sharkey said. “So rather than it being a big shift, we essentially just acknowledged what most of our members already thought.”

  As President Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel in response to concerns about autoworkers under the auto industry bailout, once stated, “Fuck the UAW.” Since then, he has proven during his mayoral tenure to have no qualms about inserting the name of any other union at the end of that phrase—the CTU included or perhaps especially. The soil had been tilled before him: School closures and the expansion of nonunion charters had lost the union some six thousand members. But union leadership at that point had still been unwilling and unable to take on Richard M. Daley, who for much of his tenure as mayor had quieted the rank and file by negotiating economically generous contracts with the CTU.

  In contrast, ever since he took office in 2011, the union has named Emanuel as a primary target. He was “clearly anti-teacher from the very beginning,” according to Karen Lewis. In an interview, Lewis quoted Emanuel as having said that a quarter of CPS students were “never going to make it and that he wasn’t going to throw money at the problem.” At another time, she also said that “I don’t think he really cares about poor people, people of color.” A journalist profiling Lewis opined that she was “willing to publicly and rather starkly characterize the battle with the mayor over education reform as a kind of class war.”17

  This kind of oppositional language had rarely been heard from union officials in Chicago, in teachers unions or elsewhere. It painted a clear picture for the public: Rahm Emanuel did not believe in expending resources on a huge percentage of the poor children of color that make up the CPS; the Chicago Teachers Union did.

  Emanuel quickly became a strong target of loathing by teachers. Anti-Emanuel chants rang off the downtown high-rises every day during the strike, and teachers’ picket signs were filled with invective against him.

  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 furthe
r—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.”18

  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:

  It’s ironic to hear someone who’s a billionaire, whose interests in the schools aren’t based in his longstanding work in that school system, talk about how what’s ruining the schools [is] the very people who go into those schools every day and pour their heart and soul into the public education system.… Frankly, if you want to know what’s wrong with the public education system, it’s been a series of efforts of corporate, top-down reform that don’t take the opinions of the actual educators into account.

  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 siz
es, 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.