Strike for America (12 page)

Nearly six hundred new art, music, and gym teachers were to be added to the teaching force—a particularly critical gain in a school system where, at the elementary level, for example, only 25 percent of neighborhood schools had both art and music teachers. For the first time, textbooks were guaranteed on the first day of class—many teachers throughout the city had actually begun previous years without them. The board was attempting to negotiate the elimination of class size caps; the union not only kept such caps in place but won $500,000 to attempt to reduce class sizes. A committee was created and allotted another $500,000 to hire additional special education teachers.
²²
The union even negotiated an increase in a classroom supply budget of 150 percent.

Beyond negotiating contract provisions that were beneficial mostly to students, the union successfully made the strike about American education reform. They made the obsession with standardized testing a subject for debate—a direct challenge to both the right and the Obama administration's education policy, as Race to the Top expands the use of standardized testing in evaluating teachers' effectiveness. The union successfully pushed for a hiring pool for teachers who had been laid off through no fault of their own; 50
percent of new hires must come from that pool. As a result, CPS cannot remove longtime teachers at will in order to replace them with younger, cheaper teachers. This provision will help to reduce the constant churn of teachers that is seen at the city's charter schools, which puts an inexperienced workforce at the helm of classrooms throughout the city. The union made a central issue of the declining numbers of educators of color in a school district that has over 90 percent students of color, thus defending both educators and students of color within the schools as well showing a larger willingness to name CPS's policies as deeply racist and promoting “educational apartheid.”

Highlighting Racial Justice

Education reformers have openly addressed the undeniable fact of the miserable conditions for poor public school students of color around the country. After the Department of Education released data showing massive educational inequality in US schools, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan stated, “The undeniable truth is that the everyday educational experience for many students of color violates the principle of equity at the heart of the American promise. It is our collective duty to change that.” While some of their ideological ilk have been loathe to even mention the existence of racial inequality, Duncan and other neoliberal reformers have explicitly and effectively positioned themselves as
the
defenders of communities of color while also often positioning themselves against the teachers unions, whom they
portray as defenders of the status quo and thus of racial inequality. For the most part, teachers unions have stood by idly as reformers like Duncan appropriated the mantle of the civil rights movement.

The reluctance to name and attack racist schooling policies while racial inequalities have widened and parents have waged fights against them has created a vacuum into which neoliberal education reformers have stepped. Reformers have only been able to portray themselves as inheritors of the legacy of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement because teachers unions have not. While not all parent and community groups accept the reformers' claims at face value, those who do can hardly be faulted: Reformers are appealing to communities' deep desires to change a schooling system that has failed them for decades.

The problem stretches far back. While teachers unions have supported community-led struggles for racial justice throughout their history, they have too often been actively hostile to them. An example is the teachers strike in the Ocean Hill–Brownsville section of Brooklyn in 1968, when black community groups entered into open battle with AFT locals on strike. Today, there is no street fighting between black parent activists and teachers union members, but there is little active support by the latter of the former's struggles. Most teachers unions do little to actively embrace the causes of community groups fighting for racial justice in public schools and would never describe the conditions in urban public schools around the country as “like apartheid,” despite the overwhelming evidence that this is the case. Even
progressive-minded union locals are afraid to push their membership on the issues of racial inequality, and they would never want to engage in genuine power-sharing with community organizations that might push them to take risks that don't sit well with union staff.

The CTU is one of the few teachers union locals around the country willing to name the policies of its district—in which 91.2 percent of students are students of color, 87 percent are poor students, and 90 percent attend schools classified as “hypersegregated”—as racist. In speeches, policy papers, and statements to the press, the union has described Chicago's schools as “apartheid-like.” In a June 2013 speech at the City Club of Chicago, Karen Lewis said, “Rich white people think they know what's in the best interests of children of African-Americans and Latinos.… There's something about these folks who use little black and brown children as stage props at one press conference while announcing they want to fire, lay off, or lock up their parents at another.”
²³

The union has supported community groups in filing Title VI civil rights complaints with the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights around school turnarounds and closures in black and Latino neighborhoods. Its November 2012 report in particular, titled “The Black and White of Education in Chicago,” attacks CPS for exacerbating racial inequality by examining the racial composition of neighborhoods and
schools targeted for closures and turnarounds; it points out that the larger a school's population of students of color, the more likely it is to be shuttered. Since 2001, some 88 percent of CPS students who have been affected by closures or turnarounds have been African American.

Teachers of color have long been the ones willing to work in these hypersegregated conditions. But according to the union's data, the percentage of black teachers in CPS has declined from 45 percent in 1995 to 29 percent in 2011, leading to a lawsuit filed in late 2012 against the district by three fired black teachers and the union. The steep decline in the number of teachers of color in CPS schools has serious implications for the black “middle class” in Chicago as well as for students of color; as it organized in the years before the 2010 election, CORE agitated around this issue and has made it a central organizing task since taking office.

Brandon Johnson was once a middle school reading and social studies teacher and is now an organizer for the union. He realized the extent to which black teachers were under attack in Chicago through his conversations with activists who had fought for black teachers to become full members of the union and full employees of the CPS during the Civil Rights era. A retired teacher who had witnessed the struggles to bring black teachers into full membership in the union told him, “This is in direct retaliation to what we built in the '60s and '70s. They're trying to kill you.”

“I was really livid,” Johnson said, “to think that there was a system that does not value an entire race of
teachers—especially when 90 percent of students are students of color, and a good portion of them black.”

The union's Black Teachers Caucus was an independent rank-and-file organization that agitated against the conservative union's leadership during the Civil Rights and Black Power eras, fighting for both improvements in black students' learning conditions and the betterment of black teachers, most of whom had been limited to being “full-time basis substitutes.”
²⁴
In order to continue that fight, Johnson helped restart a Black Caucus—which he now heads.

The union has made the issue of racial inequality central to its day-to-day work in a way that speaks to the concerns of both teachers of color and parents in communities of color whose children bear the brunt of decades of disinvestment in their schools and neighborhoods. By doing so, they have wrested the banner of racial justice and the trust of communities of color out of the hands of the neoliberals in Chicago.

Social Movement Unionism in American Labor

Most American unions have long seen their central task as the defense of their members' interests. This contrasts sharply with unions throughout the rest of the world, many of which see themselves as defenders of the interests of the working class as a whole. Labor scholar Kim Moody describes the two models—business unionism versus social movement
unionism: “The former's vision does not extend beyond ‘bread-and-butter' issues related to workers' compensation; the latter identifies itself as a vehicle for society-wide transformation on issues that affect communities beyond individual workplaces.”
²⁵

The tension between those two visions has been present since the birth and throughout the history of American teacher unionism. Since its earliest days, liberal and radical members have attempted to push unions' agendas to the left, toward a unionism that defends public education and fights for progressive reform; conservative unionists have stuck to fighting over compensation and have largely won out.

Social movement unionism that aims to push a broadly transformative agenda for all should be pursued because it is, from a left perspective, the proper thing to do. But for labor as a whole and teachers unions in particular, the experience of the CTU shows that it is also the
only
thing to do. Teacher unionism cannot survive the attacks it is currently facing by neoliberal education reformers without answering those attacks head-on, taking up an agenda that both defends teachers
and
fights for students' and communities' best interests through a defense of public education.

Just as conservative business unionism and liberal reform unionism has failed to “bring home the whole hog” for members in contract fights over the last decades, so have they failed to help create broad movements for justice that engage
the working class beyond unionized workers. Teacher's unions' fates in the twenty-first century will rest on their ability to represent the concerns of the students, parents, and communities they serve while arguing forcefully that free market forces do not serve these groups. Anything less will be suicide.