Strike for America (14 page)

The CTU strike shows that strikes are still labor's most powerful weapon. But they cannot lead to victory for labor—particularly in industries like education, transportation for children, and other sectors involving “care work”—by simply halting work without having those who depend on that labor on their side. Labor's opponents depend on their ability to malign organized workers by claiming that they are acting selfishly, without regard to the
harm their actions will cause to the communities who depend on them. But because the teachers organized closely in those communities for years before their strike—with genuine empathy for community concerns and a willingness to shift focus and tactics on the basis of those communities' wishes—those accusations rang hollow when the strike came.
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The UPC, the union's old guard who maintained power for decades and would not fight—either by itself or with organized community groups—against the board's neoliberal agenda, did not disappear during CORE's tenure. They reappeared in 2013 at the head of a coalition of caucuses, the Coalition to Save Our Union (CSOU), within the CTU—a coalition that included ProActive Chicago Teachers (PACT), the liberal reform caucus that held power for one term in 2001. PACT moved from a union agitator for reform throughout the 1990s and 2000s into partnership with the forces that sought to roll back the gains won and the movement built by CORE. The coalition's platform focuses on losses around bread-and-butter issues in the contract negotiated during the 2012 strike, like pay, benefits, and the cost of health care.

The UPC's repeated inaction on school closures and refusal to work alongside community groups were among the principal reasons for CORE's initial formation, along with its
inability or unwillingness to take the union out on strike for a quarter century. But the CSOU tried to run to the left of CORE on school closures and the strike, claiming that the union's leadership should have stayed on strike until they won a moratorium on school closures. The union, the CSOU also argued, should focus more on servicing its members than forming a movement.

Chicago teachers had little interest in retreating from the broad movement they had helped to build; and CORE was decisively reelected, winning 79 percent of teachers' votes to the coalition's 21 percent.
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It is clear, then, that the CTU's agenda of left unionism is not being foisted on an unwilling or apathetic membership. Having seen what social movement unionism was capable of achieving, an overwhelming majority of Chicago's educators opted to go on trying to beat back an education policy of austerity in Chicago and the United States as a whole.

This huge level of interest in militant, democratic unionism on the part of educators themselves is what is required for the CTU or any union to mount an effective challenge to neoliberal education reform and neoliberal policies generally. Union leaders with strong left politics but an inability to educate and politicize their members will not be able to create a groundswell of resistance at workplaces and within communities—and will likely be hounded by those within the union who would rather focus on advancing members'
self-interests alone.
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If community-union coalitions are going to be able to fight austerity, they will need to inspire the kind of widespread consciousness-raising at the rank-and-file level that has been seen within the CTU.

For at least another term, the CTU will continue to pursue a broad progressive agenda and help lead a citywide movement for educational justice. But the poststrike maneuverings of the city's Board of Education (and the union's inability to halt them) are continuing. In particular, these efforts involve the closing of forty-nine public elementary schools and one high school program, almost entirely on the city's South and West sides in black neighborhoods in 2013, and a recent round of budget cuts that have totaled $162 million as well as mass teacher layoffs. All of these defeats raise the question of whether the kind of unionism that led to victory in the 2012 strike will be enough to halt the continued dismantlement of public education.

Shortly after the union's victory in the strike, the Board of Education announced its plans to shut down a massive number of public schools. It had already closed 110 schools since the late 1990s, usually a few each year. The board initially claimed that it had its sights on over 300 schools to be closed in 2013 alone; later, it shifted that number to some 130;
finally, fifty schools were closed—the largest mass school closing in American history.

The justification for the closings has shifted wildly in short periods of time, oscillating in response to changing political winds or the exposure of one rationale as being dishonest or simply false: initially, schools were described as “failing” and therefore had to be shut down; after teachers and communities pushed back on this label, the justification became about an “underutilization crisis” and the efficient use of the district's scarce resources. Since the district's finances are scarce (the CPS board claims that it is facing a $1 billion budget deficit over the next three years), money has to be allocated efficiently—and this means the closing down of schools it claims are underutilized.

All of the board's justifications for these closures were repeatedly dismantled both by activists and the mainstream media. The board initially claimed, for example, that schools were massively underutilized because 145,000 school-age children had left the city over the previous decade; reporters quickly pointed out that the district's own numbers showed that less than 29,000 students had left the district during that time.
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In schools it planned to close, the district cited huge percentages of underutilized classrooms, claiming that 140 schools were half-empty; independent analysis soon pointed out that the board's numbers were deeply flawed, based on
packing classrooms with as many as thirty-six students, counting special education classrooms with fifteen students as severely underutilized, and other dishonest statistical maneuverings.
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The district initially claimed it would save $560 million by closing schools, but the board was soon forced to admit that even with optimistic cost projections, it had exaggerated those costs significantly; the district also had not included the over $200 million in loans to improve receiving schools and the $25 million annual cost of servicing those loans.
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And while it was claimed that the closures were about creating better education opportunities for students and that all students whose schools closed would attend better-performing schools, investigations by mainstream media outlets quickly found this to be false, with both of the city's major dailies reporting that around two thirds of students at slated closures would now attend schools that, according to district metrics, performed no better than their old schools.
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As with so much of public policy governing public goods in the age of austerity, Chicago school closures are designed not to strengthen public education, but to dismantle it.

Closures are an example of what education scholar Pauline Lipman has described as the neoliberal state's “intervention … on the side of capital, first to destroy existing institutional arrangements, and then to create a new infrastructure for capital accumulation.”
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Public schools are shuttered under the guise of crisis and then immediately replaced by charter schools—often in the same buildings the public schools once inhabited: Some 40 percent of public schools closed since 2002 are now being run by private operators. Those charters then conduct aggressive outreach campaigns to draw students away from neighborhood schools that still exist, leading to additional empty seats in those schools, which are then labeled as underutilized. The district speaks of an “underutilization crisis” justifying its need to close 100 schools, yet it plans to open sixty new charters to accommodate 50,000 students.

The same spirit seen during the strike was rallied against school closings: In November 2012, teachers and community activists staged a sit-in on the fifth floor of City Hall, outside the mayor's office, demanding a moratorium on school closures and resulting in eleven arrests; the weekend before the final closings vote in May 2013, the union led a three-day march to all fifty-four schools slated for closure
(four schools were removed at the eleventh hour); high school students whose schools were not being closed led multiple walkouts to protest the closings; City Hall and the Board of Education saw unannounced civil disobedience actions from teachers and activists in the week before the closure vote; protesting parents and teachers were dragged out of the Board of Education's meeting to vote on the final list of closures. At one point, inside of a South Side elementary, parents confronted a logistics firm hired to inventory the school before its “turnaround,” actually knocking books out of staffers' hands and guarding the school's computers and other items in a classroom to prevent the firm from continuing its work.
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Public opinion polls found, as they did during the strike, that a strong majority of Chicagoans backed the CTU and opposed Emanuel's plans.
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But teachers did not have the kind of leverage over the board that they had during the strike. And Mayor Emanuel likely saw the closure battle as one he could not afford to lose. The closures will likely cause upheaval to CPS students and their families, further devastation to communities that have long borne the brunt of disinvestment, and the loss of thousands of jobs for members of the CTU and other unions.

The closures targeted the South and West sides of the city, but a decision to shift the way the district funded schools led to budget cuts so massive that the district could no longer
meet meet the schools' most fundamental needs, such as providing supplies of toilet paper. CPS decided to shift the way it funded schools from granting block amounts for a given number of teaching positions to allocating money on a “per-pupil” basis (a move advocated by the Broad Foundation, one of the principal foundations pushing free market education reform).

The result was $162 million in budget cuts and 3,168 layoffs, including about 1,700 teachers. While many of those teachers were rehired, the classroom-level cuts have left many principals unable to meet the basic provisions legally mandated by the teachers union contract, like keeping class sizes below twenty-eight for elementary schools and thirty-one for middle and high schools. At the beginning of the 2013 school year, many teachers reported class sizes topping forty. Arts and physical education teachers and librarians, which many public schools never had to begin with, have been laid off in disproportionate numbers. Principals report that they will likely be forced to lay off veteran teachers because they cannot afford them—not as a one-off act but for as long as per-pupil budgeting remains in place. This will continue because principals will be forced to staff classrooms with a set amount of money and will be unable to justify hiring and keeping more experienced (and more expensive) teachers.
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The CTU fought both school closures and the shift to per-pupil funding, and it lost on both fronts. The implications of
those defeats are fairly uncomfortable: Despite organizing at the community and rank-and-file levels, taking on the mayor and the Board of Education and the free market reformers, filing lawsuits and taking over public hearings, leading mass marches and civil disobedience actions, and winning the hearts and minds of a strong majority of the Chicago public, the CTU suffered stinging defeats. No matter how well-organized communities and workers are, the overwhelming power of free market forces and their representatives in public office may still triumph.

Still, in the fight against closures, the union strengthened its broad coalition with the community and other unions. And that coalition, along with the union's strike and general antagonism toward the neoliberal wing of the Democrats since 2010, has successfully created a political crisis in a city long accustomed to political stasis. School closures have opened up a rare space in the city council for members to break as a bloc, albeit tepidly, with the mayor. A progressive coalition has emerged within the council, speaking out against the school closings and lending its weight to other union and community fights; calls for Toni Preckwinkle, the somewhat progressive president of the Cook County Board, have gone up from newspaper columnists and grassroots groups.

The CTU has announced plans to wade into city politics. The union has announced that it will register 100,000 new voters in the city, ostensibly in an attempt to take on Mayor Emanuel and other city council members backing him. The union's contract expires in 2015—timing that could create
another political crisis for Emanuel should the union again turn contract negotiations into a pitched battle over Emanuel's education policies. And such a battle could help unseat him if a strong progressive candidate were to run. (In response to a media report about Emanuel's massive war chest, the union's political director Stacy Davis Gates told a Chicago newspaper, “He's going to need every damn dime.”)
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There have also been rumblings of rank-and-file teachers running for city council and other positions in the city. As this book goes to press, the union continues to debate its course of action internally, with organizers aware of the conservatizing effect that electoral politics often has on social movements. But the feeling is that the union has no choice but to attempt to unseat the mayor and his political allies if public education is to be maintained in Chicago.

This shift to electoral politics is necessary because of the highly undemocratic ways in which education policy is currently crafted in Chicago. Like other large American cities undergoing free market education reform, including Washington, DC, and New York, Chicago's school board and CEO are appointed by the mayor and are thus completely unaccountable to the city's residents. During the battle over school closures, the union and community groups ran a months-long campaign utilizing a wide array of tactics to convince the Board of Education not to close the slated fifty-four schools; in the end, the unelected board, accountable
only to the mayor and his wishes, closed fifty. If other mass closings or similarly devastating policies are to be avoided, legislative shifts will be necessary. And if the kind of internal democracy and militancy that have characterized CORE's governance of the union are to be maintained, the CTU will have to wade into electoral politics very carefully.