Strike for America (3 page)

There was the incumbent United Progressive Caucus (UPC), which had little to say about school closures in poor neighborhoods of color, attacks on teachers, and the advance of free market education reform. While its early roots were in rank-and-file racial justice caucuses within the union, by 2010 the UPC leadership had long atrophied. They paid themselves massive salaries and pensions, used expense accounts questionably, and were entrenched enough to fend off
challengers. Down from its once-lofty ambitions, the old guard came to represent a stale top-down business unionism. And there was CORE—rooted in an organic community-teacher coalition against school closures, a broad left politics, and an uncompromisingly combative and democratic unionism whose raison d'être was in a perceived need to end union capitulation to neoliberal education reform.

The rise of CORE indicated not only a leftward shift in Chicago teachers unionism but also a rejection of a labor model that mandated progressivism from on high. CORE was born out of rank-and-file struggles against unresponsive, regressive leadership; immediately upon taking power, CORE began working to train its members to lead the way in the union. Without CORE's victory, the 2012 Chicago teachers strike would never have come to pass and Chicago teachers unionism would not have appeared on the national radar as a model for struggle. In two years, the caucus's left-wing leadership built on relationships with community organizations that had been years in the making to mobilize in support of its strike. It assembled an incredibly efficient organizing apparatus centered around identifying activist teachers, giving them leadership and organizing training, and having them organize every single teacher in their schools. It formed formal and informal relationships with other organizing campaigns throughout the city, tying the teachers' visions for education reform to broader campaigns for social justice.

At a time when teachers and their unions find themselves under assault, the story of CORE offers some practical
lessons for how teachers can take over their unions to defend public education and how radical democratic unionism of all types can spread.

Chicago is the birthplace of American teacher unionism. The multiple unions that existed in the early 1900s and eventually merged in 1937 to become the CTU were forerunners of teacher unionism throughout the country. The city has also been home to activism by rank-and-file teachers dissatisfied with their union's leadership on issues ranging from general education reform, to pay and benefits, to racial inequity between white teachers and teachers of color. During the Great Depression, for example, after repeated attempts to engage union leadership to help garner months of back pay owed to Chicago teachers by the Board of Education, high school teacher John M. Fewkes led mass demonstrations through the city's downtown—which included the ransacking of multiple banks and pitched street battles with teachers hurling textbooks at mounted police. Teachers were soon given the back pay owed them.
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In the 1960s, progressive white teachers formed Teachers for Radical Change in Education, emboldened by the radical climate at the time and dissatisfied with the union leadership's lack of action on racial justice and educational inequity. At the same time, multiple independent African American teacher organizations were formed to pressure leadership to
advance a broadly progressive agenda and defend black teachers—they included the Black Teachers Caucus and the Teachers Committee for Quality Education. Among their grievances was the fact that the union refused to campaign for the full certification of “full-time basis substitutes” (FTBs)—an almost entirely black group of teachers who worked for years as substitutes because of the racist tests and evaluations required for full certification. These teachers were junior members of the union without full voting rights; they therefore organized a group called Concerned FTBs. After a 1968 FTB strike, which the CTU leadership had officially opposed and begged Concerned FTBs leaders not to go through with, the CTU eventually prodded the Illinois State Legislature into action to allow a path for FTBs to become regular teachers.
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These independent efforts have always terrified union leadership. Men's Teachers Union President C. L. Vestal wrote in a 1932 letter that “the leaders of the teacher organizations wish to do their part to keep our common boat on an even keel in spite of the storm, but the rank and file are becoming even harder to quiet.… They are putting more and more pressure on their leaders to ‘do something.' ”
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The union thus has a long history of rank-and-file members battling calcified, conservative leadership, pushing them to both represent the best interests of teachers and the communities in which they teach.

The United Progressive Caucus is a study in the tension between the poles of conservative and confrontational, staff/leadership-led and teacher-led, self-interested and community-centered styles of unionism. It was formed as an amalgamation of several racial justice caucuses in the early 1970s and held power for nearly four decades. Like much of the labor movement, the union under the UPC eventually lost its broad social justice vision but was willing to occasionally use militant tactics to win gains for members: the caucus led the union through five strikes over the course of a decade and a half, including one in 1987 that lasted nineteen days. UPC leadership negotiated some large economic gains for CTU members, particularly under Jacqui Vaughn, who became president in 1984. After Vaughn's death in 1994, Vice President Tom Reece took her place. Vaughn had what her obituary in the
Chicago Tribune
referred to as “cult-like adoration” from the union's membership; Reece, however, was seen as too prone to capitulation to the Board of Education.

Jesse Sharkey, the CTU's current vice president, who was a high school teacher at the time, saw the UPC leadership negotiate a contract in 1998, a full ten months before it expired, “without so much as a single rally. It was pitiful.” He and other reform-minded unionists were drawn to a reform caucus that would go on to challenge the UPC.

In 2001, the ProActive Chicago Teachers (PACT) caucus unseated the UPC, promising progressive reform. Debbie Lynch, a white elementary school teacher who previously directed the CTU's Quest Center for teacher development, had run as an oppositionist within the union
for years, drawing on the discontent of varied groups of rank and filers. She ran on a platform of ending corruption, increasing the union's role in training teachers, and restoring bargaining rights over noncompensation issues that had been lost in the 1990s—a kind of liberal reform in a union that had drifted into conservatism and lost ground for its members.

PACT's election brought a shift from the conservative UPC. But Lynch's tenure at the helm of the union would be brief, and the 2003 contract fight would seal her fate. She negotiated a contract that, by many accounts, included decent raises but also entailed increases in health-care costs. She sold it, however, not as an imperfect recesssion-era agreement that included some wins and some losses but as a nearly flawless contract; and she attempted to ram approval through the union's House of Delegates. She hired an outside public relations firm to produce several videos to be shown to the union's membership, trying to market the contract as a good deal.

“You asked me to bring home the bacon,” Lynch said at the time, in words that almost any CTU activist and staffer can still repeat today, “and we brought home the whole hog.” Members from both outside and within her own caucus disagreed, feeling that they had been sold a bill of goods, and revolted against the proposal, voting overwhelmingly to reject the contract. Lynch, not wanting to face the press and the Board of Education with the news that her membership had attempted to overrule her, tried to ratify the contract despite the house's disapproval. It
was a fiasco; Lynch's autocratic behavior contrasted sharply with the reform mantle she had claimed. Supporters like Sharkey, who favored democratic reform efforts, left the caucus.

The contract was eventually approved, but Lynch's fate as president was largely sealed. In addition to the members' discontent around the contract, she was unable to neutralize the virulently antireform efforts of much of her staff, many of whom were members of the UPC and were engaging in what Norine Gutekanst, a teacher and PACT executive board member at the time, referred to as a “sabotage movement within the union.” Just weeks before PACT took over the union, the lame-duck UPC president worked with the union's staff to form another independent union—one that would protect the staff from firings while it tried to sabotage efforts to reform the union.

“We erred on the side of having open arms,” Gutekanst, a former bilingual education teacher who is now CTU organizing director, said of the unionized staffers. “And we shouldn't have, because these folks were trying to destroy us.”

“And it was those of us who were on the Left who tended to take those positions,” said Debbie Pope, another former PACT member and current CTU staffer who had taught for several decades.

Lynch, one of the few constant voices of critique of the UPC, had maintained an opposition caucus for several years. But her vision of reform for the union did not entail a radical shift in how the union operated. “Her critique of the old guard wasn't that it was a service model. She just felt that she
could be more competent, hard-working, and honest than them,” said Sharkey.

“She was a classic liberal reformer—a technocrat,” said Jackson Potter, who became a teacher during the Lynch administration.

Without shifting the way the union engaged with its members, introducing a new culture of union democracy and member-led governance and action, and preparing for the inevitable counterattack from the union's conservative elements, the limits of PACT's liberal vision were quickly reached and the group was sunk.

In 2004, the year after the contract's negotiation, the UPC returned to power, with Marilyn Stewart assuming the presidency for the next six years. Like Reece, Stewart failed to capture the imagination of the union's members and would oversee the negotiation of another particularly unpopular contract in 2007—one that saw Stewart ask for the yeses at a House of Delegates meeting, then run out of the meeting
before the no vote could be called. She then declared to reporters that a contract had been settled and a strike averted, while a crowd of several hundred angry union delegates, including CORE members, chanted “No! No! No!” (with some actually burning physical copies of the contract) outside of Stewart's press conference.
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Amid the chaos, a group of activist teachers who had learned from the failures of the Lynch administration were beginning to get organized.

A former history teacher, Jackson Potter is a slender, bearded man who grew up in Chicago yet somehow gained a mysterious accent that much of the city's labor movement finds untraceable. He grew up in a family of radical activists, including a leftist Teamster father and an activist lawyer mother. He began teaching in 2002. Soon, he found himself and his students on the receiving end of neoliberal education reform: His school, Englewood High School on the city's South Side, was facing closure. A union delegate, Potter gave multiple speeches at meetings of the union's House of Delegates to try to drum up support from the union and its members to fight the school's closure. The union, however, continued to do little.

After one meeting, Potter was approached by Sharkey—another delegate and a teacher at Senn High—whose school was threatened with conversion into a public military academy. The two had seen each other at past union meetings, and Sharkey wanted to discuss the possibility of collaborating. In 2004, CEO Arne Duncan and Mayor Richard M. Daley introduced Renaissance 2010 to Chicago Public Schools; it was a plan first to shut down and later “turn around” low-performing and underutilized schools by firing all the former staff and converting the majority into charter schools run by private operators. Sharkey began traveling around the city to talk to groups of parents, educators, and other activists to publicize the upending effects that Ren2010's closures and turnarounds would have on teachers and neighborhood schools.

After Sharkey and Potter continued agitating among the membership and against the leadership around the union's inaction, the leadership relented, creating a committee to address Ren2010. Both Potter and Sharkey were made members of that committee, along with other teachers at schools targeted for closure. They and a few other like-minded teachers organized education forums on the subject, inviting community members and teachers to attend. They persuaded the union to provide buses and do some basic turnout to give testimony at public hearings and a few small rallies, “but that's as far as it went,” said Potter.

Unknown to Potter and Sharkey, the union had formed Chicagoans United for Education (CUE), a communitylabor coalition ostensibly to focus on Ren2010 and school closures, and chaired by a union staffer with little power. No
one from the union had told either Potter or Sharkey—who were among the members most actively engaged in the very issues the coalition was tasked with addressing—about CUE's existence. Like many conservative union leaders, CTU staff were likely wary of activist members who might attempt to push the union's agenda beyond the boundaries narrowly defined by the official leadership. The more union members like Potter and Sharkey pushed, the worse the elected leaders looked—putting them in danger of losing future elections to upstart activists. After those activists agitated to simply be allowed to attend the coalition's meetings, the union grudgingly let Potter, Sharkey, and another delegate at a closing school, Tony Walden of Bunch Elementary, join the meetings on behalf of the union.