Strike for America (10 page)

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:

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.' ”
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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.
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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.”
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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].”
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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).
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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.

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.)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.