Seven Days that Shook the Windy City: Reflections on a Chicago
Teachers Strike

by Bob Simpson

October 2, 2012
Daily Kos

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/10/02/1138397/-Seven-Days-that-shook-the-Windy-City-Reflections-on-a-Chicago-teachers-strike


    "The CTU is teaching the USA a lesson in working class
    love and solidarity. It's a transformational moment for
    the membership of the CTU and its allies. How can they
    transform the horn honks, the raised fists, the friendly
    waves and the kind words of encouragement into a political
    force to be reckoned with?"

It was of course, more than a Chicago teachers' strike; it was
a city-wide working class protest. Parents and concerned
community members walked the picket lines. Workers of all
types who passed in their trucks, buses, taxis and passenger
cars joined in with honking, friendly waves and fist raising.

There was serious carb-loading and elevated caffeine levels
for days as strike sympathizers brought muffins, cookies,
donuts, pop and coffee to picket lines. Labor professor Steve
Ashby organized a scheme (originally used in the Madison
uprising) where strike supporters called in pizza orders to
help feed the legions of volunteers who came to the Chicago
Teachers Union(CTU) Strike HQ in the Teamsters hall on the
West Side.

In response the mayor and his allies launched an expensive
propaganda campaign against the strike that even the best
efforts of the CTU and its allies could never match in its
reach and scope. TV and radio ads blasting the union were all
over the air waves. The local corporate owned news media was
almost uniformly hostile. The national media was no better.

Their money was wasted in Chicago's working class
neighborhoods. Chicagoans backed the teachers by a substantial
majority. As CTU president Karen Lewis put it,"Let's be clear
- this fight is for the very soul of public education, not
just only Chicago but everywhere."

Volunteers from Wisconsin and as far away as California worked
long hours stapling picket signs, painting banners, selling
tee-shirts and collating strike materials, necessary tasks to
keep a strike of 26,000 workers going. One day a United
Airlines pilot in full uniform showed up to volunteer her time
stapling picket signs. I restrained an impulse to salute her.

Facebook and Twitter lit up

Chicago Teachers Union(CTU) social media whiz Kenzo Shabata
went sleepless in Chicago to get the message out in the 24-7
endless news cycle. Stavroula Harissis energetically directed
the social media team for the Chicago Teachers Solidarity
Campaign (CTSC), a close ally of the CTU and an outgrowth of
Occupy Chicago.

Striking teachers and their numerous allies on the picket line
enjoyed sharing the many morale-boosting photos, inspiring
YouTube videos, hilarious memes, and informative articles that
the social media teams posted. From across North America and
around the world messages of solidarity poured in as social
media workers struggled to keep up with the sheer volume.

The strike required both tough negotiating and a organizing
battle plan

While CTU president Karen Lewis,VP Jesse Sharkey and the other
top leadership were huddled with the legal team and
negotiating with the Board of Ed, the CTU's organizing
director, Norine Gutekanst, a veteran Chicago teacher, oversaw
the complex logistics of the strike. She arrived well before
dawn at Strike HQ to ensure that the 26,000 strikers and their
allies received the materials, info and inspiration they
needed.

Armed with her laptop, cell phone, an art gallery worth of
constantly updated wall charts; plus a small army of CTU
staffers and regional strike coordinators, she and her team
exemplified the old WWII saying, "The difficult we do today.
The impossible may take a little longer."

What is so different about this union's leadership?

The current CTU leaders come from a rank and file caucus
called the Coalition of Rank and File Educators (CORE). With a
history going back to 2008, CORE has a clear vision of union
democracy, quality education and social justice. Organized
from the ground up, teacher by teacher, school by school, CORE
offers a new paradigm for Chicago's labor movement, which has
many members, but very little actual movement.

CORE's model challenges the Chicago labor tradition of back
room deals and topdown union leadership. The democratic way
that the membership was involved in all aspects of the strike
sent a clear message that this was a labor uprising as well as
an educational policy rebellion.

The rising of the women is the rising of us all

The strike was also, as feminist Gloria Steinem noted early
on, very much of a women's uprising:

    "As an 87% female workforce, and one that is nearly half
    Black and Latino, the Chicago Teachers Union know what
    their students need. This is why this country needs
    unions, collective bargaining, and mayors who recognize,
    honor and fairly pay the people our children know - and
    who know our children."

Many of the striking teachers were also moms. I saw many
strollers being pushed and children being led by the hand in
the massive teacher marches through downtown. It was mostly
the women of the neighborhoods who joined the teachers on the
picket lines and brought snacks to the strikers. They
organized activities to keep the children busy with
educational tasks and went door to door explaining the issues
of the strike and why it was a strike FOR children not AGAINST
children.

As a result, CTU President Karen Lewis came under blistering
sexist attack as Derrick Clifton of Northwestern University
explains:

    Discussions often drifted away from teachers' demands,
    becoming referendums on Lewis's perceived femininity,
    appearance and attitude.Reuters characterized Lewis as the
    "fiery, frumpy former teacher leading Chicago's striking
    teachers."

    That's while online comment boards flooded with
    denigrating characterizations of Lewis like "Java the Hut"
    or a "potential left tackle on the Chicago Bears'
    offensive line." Others pulled out the ages-old stops used
    to dismiss feminist and female leaders as hairy-legged,
    man-hating lesbians...

The sexist and racist attacks on Lewis and her union are only
a part of a multi-million dollar attack on public education
led by some of the wealthiest individuals and corporations in
the USA. Among them are Bill Gates of Microsoft fame and the
Walton family who owns Walmart. An amazing number of Wall
Street hedge fund operators are behind the charter school
privatization movement. David Brain a multi-millionaire real
estate mogul, was asked what business his clients should
invest in:

    "Well, probably the charter school business. We said it's
    our highest growth and most appealing sector right now of
    the portfolio. It's the most high in demand, it's the most
    recession-resistant. And a great opportunity set with 500
    schools starting every year. It's a two and a half billion
    dollar opportunity set in rough measure annually."

A few of these people are motivated by some ill conceived and
misguided ideas about education, but most are simply in it for
the wealth that can be extracted from public funds and from
the labor of teachers whose unions have been weakened or even
broken.

The corporate bullies did not get the last word

In Illinois the bullies include billionaire financier Bruce
Rauner, whose money helped push through legislation make it
nearly impossible for teachers to directly negotiate the most
important part of their job, a quality education experience
for students. Wealthy lobbyists even pushed through
legislation that made it illegal for the Chicago Teachers
Union to strike unless the union received a 75% authorization.
No other teachers union in the state has that restriction. The
corporate bullies were surprised when the union received over
a 98% authorization of those voting, something the bullies
thought was impossible.

It was a massive repudiation of the whole corporate
"educational reform" project and its unscientific "teach-to-
the-hi-stakes-test" curriculum, its neighborhood school
closings, its privatization of education and its ugly
propaganda campaign against union teachers.

When a Stanford University team studied the corporate
reformers charter school nostrum, they found that charters
often did worse than public schools, sometimes better and most
of the time showed no difference. Where charters did do
better, couldn't public schools have equaled or surpassed them
if they had the smaller class sizes and the resources that get
lavished on the charters?

Decades of corporate failure preceded this historic strike

Anyone who has studied the history of corporate school reform
in Chicago knows of its repeated bumbling failures dating back
to the early 20th century. This is well documented by Dr.
Dorothy Shipps in her book School Reform: Corporate Style:
Chicago 1880-2000:

    To a remarkable degree, Chicago's corporate leaders have
    shaped the city's schools while constructing its economic
    and downtown development priorities, its response to
    racial segregation, and even its urban mythology. The same
    corporate club whose leaders' persistence impressed me in
    1991 has led, abetted or restrained nearly every attempt
    to improve the school system in the 20th century...if
    corporate power was instrumental in creating urban public
    schools and has had a strong hand in their reform for more
    than a century, then why have these schools failed urban
    children so badly?

Nobel Prize winning author Samuel Beckett once advised people
to: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." Corporate Chicago
seems incapable of even meeting that modest goal. The
corporate bullies talk constantly about "standards" but of
course never apply that to their own actions.

Why Chicago's working class backed the strike

Chicagoans backed the teachers by a substantial margin,
documented not only by the honking horns and raised fists, but
by two polls taken during the strike. Parents with children in
the public schools were even more supportive of the teachers.
Black and Latino parents were the most supportive of all,
while whites backed the mayor by a narrow margin. Today, only
8.8% of Chicago public school students are white.

The disparity between the gleaming new schools in the affluent
whiter areas of Chicago and the neighborhood schools in the
poorest Black and Latino working class communities was there
for all to see. For retired Chicago teacher and former
assistant principal Steve Serikaku poverty is THE issue:??

    "I know how hard it is to work in Chicago. It's almost
    laughable the budgets neighborhood schools are given. When
    you're in a poor area, the needs of the students are so
    great that the school alone cannot address them, but we
    don't have the resources to bring in qualified people-like
    social workers and psychologists-to address the issues.

    I can understand why parents want to get away from certain
    neighborhood schools, but I would rather that the school
    system and the city work to prevent the kind of damage
    that is done to children from poor areas. To me, it's a
    cruel farce to have No Child Left Behind when we leave
    whole neighborhoods behind."

In Chicago as in other major cities, poverty is heavily
racialized. A significant number of the white working class
have left the city for the suburbs and people of color make up
a much greater proportion of Chicago's working class today.
Whites, by and large, tend to be more affluent, especially as
gentrification gallops across the areas adjacent to the
downtown Loop area.

Every dollar that goes to the corporate leeches is a dollar
the Chicago public schools never receive

The big banks and corporations who push gentrification and
school privatization must bear heavy responsibility for the
poverty that afflicts the city. They demand huge tax breaks
and public subsidies. They turn TIF funding (Tax Increment
Financing), which is supposed to help the poorest
neighborhoods into a financial bonanza for themselves. They
often pay poverty wages and outsource good jobs away from the
city.

Penny Pritzker, who sits on Chicago's school board, is part of
the wealthy Pritzker family who owns the Hyatt hotel chain.
There is a Hyatt going up in South Side Chicago right now that
received a major public subsidy. Hyatt is also engaged in a
nasty union busting campaign against its own workers, trying
to drive down their wages and push them into the ranks of the
working poor.

Chicago has been labeled (accurately in my opinion) as the
most segregated city in the north. You can't escape race in
this town any more than you can escape the clutches of The
Hawk, that cruel winter wind off Lake Michigan that seizes
you and chills your body down to the very corpuscles.

Chicago's bitter racist past

Chicago is the city where Martin Luther King had rocks thrown
at him in Marquette Park for protesting segregated housing.
Black Panther leader Fred Hampton was assassinated in his bed
on the West Side by police after being drugged by an
undercover informant. Hampton had been organizing a
multiracial "rainbow coalition" of disaffected working class
young people to confront poverty and racial division.

It is the city where in 1919, a bloody pogrom was launched by
racist whites after a black swimmer drifted into the "white"
area of Lake Michigan's ironically named Rainbow Beach. The
riot eventually cost 38 deaths and 537 serious injuries. 1919
Chicago race riot

Blacks moving into homes in white areas were often met with
angry mobs or dynamited houses with little or no protection by
the police

During the 1960's blacks launched massive demonstrations and
boycotts protesting school segregation and classroom
overcrowding. Black teachers went on strike in 1968 against
the Board of Education whose racist administrators
consistently failed blacks in oral examinations to prevent
them from gaining full certification.

I remember going to Chicago school board meetings in the
1970`s when angry hissing racist whites filled the room to
overflowing and spoke out loudly against blacks coming to
"their" schools.

During the 1980's when Harold Washington was twice elected
mayor, Chicago was dubbed "Beirut on the Lake" because of its
bitterly divided racial politics. I was teaching in a Catholic
school in a then all-white Southwest Side neighborhood when
Washington was declared the winner of the mayoral race. Every
single black parent kept their kids home the day after the
election for fear of racial violence.

This brutal history is a tragedy worthy of a Shakespeare or a
Sophocles, a working class divided by race and at war with
itself. Chicago's ruling elite has always profited off of
ethnic division and the color line has been the most
profitable of all. The ideology of white supremacy is what
maintains their vast wealth and power.

The financial elite profits off of destroying neighborhood
schools

Today Chicago neighborhood schools in the poorest black and
brown communities often limp along without libraries, science
labs, computer labs, music, world languages or art as teachers
struggle with overcrowded classes.

Students in neighborhoods torn apart by street violence and
the crushing burdens of poverty do not get the social services
and counseling they so desperately need. Some students exhibit
the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but have
nowhere to turn in their despair and rage. Some of the worst
violence has come in communities where neighborhood school
closings have created even more social turmoil.

The corporate school reformers put these neighborhood schools
on a bread and water diet, then scream failure in order to
close them and create private schools in their place. CPS
Chief Operating Officer Tim Cawley doesn't even bother to hide
that fact: ??

    "If we think there's a chance that a building is going to
    be closed in the next five to 10 years, if we think it's
    unlikely it's going to continue to be a school, we're not
    going to invest in that building."

The closing of neighborhood schools is closely linked to the
gentrification of Chicago neighborhoods and the generation of
profits for the banking, real estate and construction
industries. This is explained in Dr. Pauline Lipman's book The
New Political Economy of Urban Education:

    In Chicago and other cities, policies to close schools and
    replace them with schools targeted to the middle class are
    integral to both production and consumption of
    gentrification. Closing schools pushes existing residents
    out of neighborhoods primed for gentrification. The new
    schools that replace them, like new police stations and
    libraries, are key to attracting new investment, and once
    real estate development is underway, they are part of
    place marketing the area to a new class of home buyers.

Just who is this middle class they want to bring back to the
city?

Particularly since the death of Mayor Harold Washington and
the ascension of Mayor Richard M. Daley, the mantra for City
Hall has been to bring the middle class back to the city. It
is well understood that "middle class" is a euphemism for the
affluent white professional middle class. They don't mean the
white people who once toiled in the steel mills and assembly
plants closed down by the USA's corporate elite during the
terrible days of the Reagan 1980's.

This being the 21st century, the affluent middle class of
color is included as can be seen in the gentrification of the
Bronzeville neighborhood, but the real prize is making Chicago
a whiter wealthier city. Making gentrification largely white
and affluent is easier now because the disastrous 2008
economic meltdown hit middle class people of color like a
financial Katrina. As an example, white wealth is now 20 times
that of black wealth.

But why look to the affluent white middle class who decamped
to the suburbs? Call me crazy, but aren't there many thousands
of people (mostly of color )living in abysmal poverty right
here in Chicago who would love to get an honest chance at
joining the middle class?

So why the hell aren't City Hall and the LaSalle Street
financial elite directing investment into economic development
for the people who already live in Chicago and really need it.
Why not raise their income levels and improve their
neighborhoods? Parental income is the best single indicator of
likely school success, so why not raise those?

This of course would also mean investing serious money in the
schools to create what the Chicago Teachers Union calls "The
Schools Chicago's Students Deserve," the name of the union's
educational reform plan that has been ignored by the corporate
owned media.

It is a bitter irony that nation's wealthy elite, who think
outsourcing and poverty wages are sound business practices,
and whose casino capitalism caused the 2008 financial crash
and the massive mortgage foreclosure crisis, now want claim
ownership of our schools.

CTU activists love to remind the public that Mayor Emanuel's
kids go to the uber-expensive University of Chicago Lab
School, whose principal is no fan of hi-stakes testing and
believes that, "Physical education, world languages, libraries
and the arts are not frills. They are an essential piece of a
well-rounded education." The student-teacher ratio at Lab
School is 10 to 1.

If that is good enough for Rahm's kids who live on the city's
North Side in Ravenswood, then why isn't it good enough for
the students in East Garfield Park, Grand Crossing, Little
Village, K-Town, Uptown or Englewood? Just askin'.

Resistance to educational apartheid was at the core of the
strike

The answer was given by CTU Black Caucus leader Brandon
Johnson at a post-strike forum on Chicago's West Side where he
and other strike leaders assessed what they had learned from
the Seven Days in September. Mincing no words, he named the
corporate attacks on schools in black and brown communities as
educational apartheid, with all of the savage cruelty that the
word implies.

He spoke with pride about how the CTU membership expressed
their support for a strong stand against this kind of racism
saying," "If this struggle, this fight, does not have a moral
consciousness about the obvious racism, we do not have a
fight, ladies and gentlemen."

He also spoke about a conversation he had with legendary West
Side educator Dr. Grady Jordan who told him early on, "Black
teachers fought hard. This is a direct retaliation to what we
built in the 60's and 70's. They're trying to kill you, son.
What are you going to do about it?".

According to Johnson, 45% of Chicago's teachers were black in
1995. Now it is down to 19% with less than 2% being black
males. This shocking decline is mostly due to school closings
and the spread of charters. Many of their replacements have
been young inexperienced white teachers, the teachers most
favored by charter school operators. This is a direct attack
on the already precarious financial status of the black middle
class.

Given these grim racial realities is it any wonder why there
was such an outpouring of support from black and brown working
class people? The CTU's efforts spotlighting educational
apartheid have also inspired many whites. People have come to
view teachers as advocates for their communities, an honor to
be sure, but one that also comes with great responsibility.
The CTU has a community board made up of 20 of their
neighborhood and labor allies across the city, allies who push
the teachers into militant action in defense of neighborhood
schools.

During the walkout teachers talked about what the strike meant
for the aspirations of Chicago's working class and for the
teachers across the nation who expressed solidarity. Just the
act of wearing a CTU red shirt on the street, in the local
coffee shop or on the El platform was cause for people to
start intense conversations, not only about education, but
about their own struggles in our so-called economic recovery.

This was a strike based on a deep love for the city and its
people

    Video - How A Political Poem Was Bullied Out of Me
    from Molly Meacham http://vimeo.com/49491299

    [This poem expresses the love Chicago teachers have
    for their students. It has brought forth both tears
    and cheers wherever Molly Meacham, a Lane Tech English
    teacher, performs it. Vimeo.]

The CTU is teaching the USA a lesson in working class love and
solidarity. It's a transformational moment for the membership
of the CTU and its allies. How can they transform the horn
honks, the raised fists, the friendly waves and the kind words
of encouragement into a political force to be reckoned with?

Across the city, postal workers, cops, firefighters, nurses,
janitors, technicians, social workers, bus drivers, rapid
transit operators and many other workers are asking the
following question, "How did the teachers do it and how can we
replicate that at our own workplaces?"

These are questions that demand answers and people are already
meeting around the city to grapple with them. I am sure of one
thing, Chicago now has something of great value, a multi-
racial working class movement the likes of which could
transform not only the schools, but become a urban liberation
movement with national implications.?

But one swallow does not make a spring and one strike does not
make a revolution.

CTU Chief of Staff Jackson Potter looks at the struggle this
way:

    "This next period is really critical. There are a lot of
    dangers and opportunities ahead and it will determine in
    no small part whether all of us can do something with this
    momentum."

Carry it on...

[Bob "Bobbosphere" Simpson is a retired Chicago high school
teacher who taught on the city's South and West Sides. He
spent the 7 days of September volunteering at the CTU Strike
HQ.]

Sources Consulted

Now We Know Our ABCs, and Charter Schools Get an F by Paul
Buchheit
http://truth-out.org/buzzflash/commentary/item/17527-now-we-know-our-abcs-and-charter-schools-get-an-f

Sexism and the Chicago Teachers Union Strike by Derrick
Clifton
http://www.nextgenjournal.com/2012/09/sexism-and-the-chicago-teachers-union-strike/

Displacement, segregation, safety: Chicago schools have a long
ways to go. by Yana Kunichoff
http://www.chicagonow.com/chicago-muckrakers/2012/09/cps-reform/

New Stanford report finds serious quality challenge in
national charter school sector
http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/National_Release.pdf

School Reform: Corporate Style: Chicago 1880-2000 by Dorothy
Shipps
http://www.amazon.com/School-Reform-Corporate-Style-Government/dp/0700614494

Gloria Steinem supports Chicago teachers on strike by Gloria
Steinem
http://www.ctunet.com/blog/gloria-steinem-supports-teachers-in-chicago-strike

The Chicago Teachers Union is poised to lead in the next
school-reform fights by Micah Uetricht
http://prospect.org/article/advanced-placement

Corporate Agenda Behind Public Charter Schools By Aaron
Regunberg
http://www.rifuture.org/the-agenda-behind-public-charter-schools.html

Students Suffer in Low-Performing Charter Schools by Karen
Lewis
https://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/09/14-1

Poll Shows Substantial CPS Parent, Racial Divide on Chicago
Teachers Strike by Whet Moser
http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/The-312/September-2012/Poll-Shows-Substantial-CPS-Parent-Racial-Divide-on-Chicago-Teachers-Strike/

CPS: Poorer-performing schools less likely to get funds by
Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2011-12-15/news/ct-met-cps-buildings-20111215_1_urban-school-leadership-cps-operating-officer-tim-cawley

"I See Everything Through This Tragedy" by Alex Kotlowitz
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/social-issues/interrupters/i-see-everything-through-this-tragedy/

The New Political Economy of Urban Education: Neoliberalism,
Race, and the Right to the City by Pauline Lipman
http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7291354-the-new-political-economy-of-urban-education

The Great Recession in Black Wealth: White wealth reaches
historic high of twenty times black wealth by Jeannette Wicks-
Lim
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2012/0112wicks-lim.html

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