Strike for America (5 page)

Recognizing the insurgent caucus's vastly superior ground game, the UPC actually turned to CPS officials to try to prevent CORE and other caucus challengers from organizing, colluding with principals to stop caucuses from campaigning on school grounds. The union worked hand-in-glove with the administration to maintain its leadership positions, leading to confrontations between principals and CORE activists at schools as well as threats of arrests.

Debbie Lynch, the former CTU president, filed a lawsuit against these practices so that her own caucus, PACT, could campaign. Email correspondence was subpoenaed for the case, which revealed that CTU officials had named CORE activists like Potter in exchanges with CPS to single them out for discipline because of their campaigning. Again, Potter was shocked.

“The fucking union was working with management to displace members!” he remembered. “There was an
active collaboration between the union and management to take us down!” The conservative leadership was willing to go to surprising lengths to prevent the radicals from winning.

The lawsuit was successful, ending the prohibition of campaigning on school grounds by caucuses. CORE continued making their case to CTU membership, and on CTU's election day, May 22, 2010, CORE took 31 percent of the vote to the UPC's 32 percent, with three other competing caucuses winning the rest. CTU bylaws required an outright majority to win an election, leading to a runoff vote that CORE won handily, taking over 60 percent of the vote. The dissidents had triumphed.

Immediately after she got news of the victory, Presidentelect Karen Lewis outlined her caucus's vision.

“Corporate America sees K–12 public education as a $380 billion trust that, up until the last ten or fifteen years, they haven't had a sizable piece of,” Lewis stated. “Our union … didn't point out this simple reality: What drives school reform is a singular focus on profit. Not teaching, not learning—profit.” That drive for profit was what the union would directly confront.

“This election shows the unity of 30,000 educators standing strong to put business in its place: out of our schools,” Lewis said.
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Upon her election as CTU president, Lewis stated that CORE would “change this into a democratic union responsive to its members.” Restructuring began immediately.

Union leadership sought to activate its members and involve them in its own democratic processes in a far more profound and widespread way than had ever been done before; it also initiated a shift in the way the union interacted with its members. In the past, the union had operated under a “servicing” model, where the union's staff handled whatever problems teachers faced in the classroom or with an administrator; if the teacher faced no problems, interaction with union staff was unlikely. Now, teachers themselves were going to be carrying out the union's broad agenda for educational justice.

This was accomplished in part by shifting resources away from representation and toward a new union organizing department, which had never previously existed. And to fund that department and other union projects, staff cut their own salaries and benefits significantly. In years past, union staff's pay and benefits were far greater than union members'; staff pay would now be pegged to classroom teachers' pay.

Leadership broadened the rights and responsibilities of members in the governing House of Delegates. Fourteen member-led committees, from political action to media, were tasked with central roles in the union's day-to-day functioning. A new training program prepared delegates and members for union organizing and governance. The department began a summer organizing internship program that trained several dozen activist teachers to go out to
organize their coworkers, many of whom had no prior involvement in their union.

Contract committees made up of activist teachers and delegates were set up at each school, and each committee member was responsible for communicating with 10 other educators face-to-face, including school employees like cafeteria workers, who were members of other unions. Those committees were encouraged to develop their own actions and engage with parents and community members—a kind of organizing that had never been done in the union previously. Members of the House of Delegates, the union's representative body of teachers, received training in bread-and-butter issues like contract enforcement but also, beyond the classroom, in how to fight against school closures. The union also made publicly funded corporate subsidies, most notably through the city's Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) system, a major issue and worked alongside community groups and other unions to expand the CTU's organizing beyond even educational justice to include the issue of inequality and austerity for poor neighborhoods of color throughout the city.
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Soon after CORE's victory, the Board of Education demanded that the union either give up a contractually negotiated pay raise or face layoffs while, around the same time, it
was demanding a longer school day, meaning that the board wanted more work for less pay. When the union refused, 1,500 teachers were laid off. The necessity of a strike to beat back the board was becoming clearer, and the union used the layoffs to continue mobilizing members internally.

Charlotte Johnson, a paraprofessional, became an activist in the union when she was recruited by CORE members to the summer internship program, knocking on doors and having conversations in teachers' homes, and organizing community forums for parents about educational inequality in the city. During her two decades as a parapro, no union official had reached out to her to try to involve her in the union. “I can't even remember what the president's name was,” she said, referring to the UPC era. As she became more involved, her view of the union shifted: “I want to empower [other members] to do more on their own, not just to wait around for the union to tell them to do something.”

Brandon Johnson, a middle school history and reading teacher, knew nothing about the union's internal politics for years. Like many teachers, he was overwhelmed by his responsibilities inside the classroom; although he came from a union family, the CTU was nowhere on his radar.

“When the union doesn't require you to be active outside of your own issues as a teacher, you don't know what to demand of your union,” he said.

A colleague who was a CORE member reached out to him in 2010 about that year's election, encouraging him to vote for the caucus and explaining that CORE would push a kind of teachers' unionism that dealt with issues beyond the
classroom. Johnson was teaching at a school that seemed a potential target for closure, and the union's potential for fighting the closing soon dawned on him.

“This [CORE] leadership sees itself as a vehicle to stop those closings,” he remembered thinking. The UPC did not.

CORE has played a key role in shifting teachers' consciousness about their roles as educators. For years, Brandon Johnson paid little attention to issues beyond his own group of students and his ability to help a few of them gain admission to selective high schools.

“You get isolated in your classroom, and that causes you to focus on individual students,” Johnson said. “You begin to judge your accomplishments as a teacher by your ability to help a handful of individual students.”

The work of CORE eventually helped him realize that the unionized teachers' work needed to be collective liberation.

“The previous administration maintained that all we can do is help individual students. To challenge a system that does not provide quality schools for all of its students was not on the table.” With CORE, “it became a collective struggle rather than an individual struggle.”

Since winning control of the union in 2010, CORE has continued its work. Unlike many rank-and-file caucuses that mount successful leadership challenges and then disband after winning—like the briefly successful reform attempts among the Chicago Teamsters in the 2000s—CORE has stayed active, recruited new members, trained new leaders in the internal structures of the union, and discussed and debated the nature
of education reform and how to confront it through study groups and book talks. The caucus serves as a space where a radical vision of teacher unionism can be advanced.

“It gives us opportunities to talk more explicitly about the role of people who have left tendencies in the union,” Potter said. “Within CORE, we can be unabashedly clear about those politics.”

CORE members currently hold power within the union, but members who are now leadership and staffers in the union have stepped down from the caucus's executive board. While union leadership still exerts a strong influence in CORE, formal power has been given to a new layer of leadership.

In many ways, the caucus serves a role similar to the one served by organized left groups during upsurges of radical unionism in the United States, as during the 1930s or 1970s, when leftists played key roles in workplace activism, strikes, and challenges to union leadership. It forms a principled political base that guides the union's work and serves as a check on union officials. The caucus brought an insurgent leadership into power, but has acted independently of it, mounting criticisms when CORE members felt that it was succumbing to the tendency for union leaders to embrace bureaucracy and top-down governance.

“People saw the potential for going down a path of traditional business unionism,” Potter said. “CORE has served as a corrective during those moments.”

The fight over Senate Bill 7 (explained in full in
Chapter 2
) serves as an example. In 2011, a bill designed to strip the CTU of much of its power was being pushed in the state
legislature by the free market reform group Stand for Children, and the union was to be at the table in Springfield, the Illinois capital. It was the first foray for Lewis, the newly elected president, who a few months earlier had been teaching chemistry and contemplating retirement. In fact, much of the entire leadership of the union would be involved in high-stakes negotiations opposite seasoned machine politicians and shrewd, billionaire-funded education reformers.

As Stand for Children CEO Jonah Edelman explained bluntly during a discussion at the Aspen Ideas Festival in June 2011,
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the bill was designed to severely limit the CTU's power. It included new rules on teacher layoffs, evaluations, tenure, and other issues that corporate education reformers had long hoped to impose on Chicago's teachers. But most important, by setting the bar for a strike approval far above a simple majority, the bill's sponsors aimed to make a teachers' strike impossible.

“The union cannot strike in Chicago. They will never be able to muster the 75 percent threshold needed to strike,” Edelman smugly stated.

The leadership team sent Lewis to the state capitol with
only a union lawyer who had little experience in such negotiations; she went into battle without a large portion of the union's membership to back her up (largely because the stakes of the bill and the intentions of its backers like Edelman were not fully understood at the time) or significant member input into the terms of the bill. Lewis herself later called the bill's passage “a steamroll job” by reformers, saying she was bullied by state legislators into accepting their terms of the law. But not knowing the full details of the law and its designed intent, Lewis gave the union's official endorsement to Illionis Senate Bill 7 (SB7).

When union members in Chicago heard of the bill's details, many were incensed. Members recognized that the bill was devastating—true to its designers' intent, among other things, it seemed to make a strike effectively impossible. Rather than uncritically backing the leadership they had just worked for years to elect, CORE members began an internal discussion between the rank and file and union leadership. Sarah Chambers, a Chicago elementary teacher and activist in CORE, remembers the internal discussion in CORE's steering committee as having been “heated.” After an internal debate that Chambers remembers having lasted for several months, the caucus insisted that the union would need to reopen negotiations on the bill. At a House of Delegates meeting, a CORE member introduced a motion to overturn the union's endorsement of the bill.

Chambers says Lewis was not defensive about the move.
“I am not the union—you guys are the union. You're saying that we need to remove our name from this, so I'm going to listen to my members,” Chambers recalls Lewis saying. “Other caucuses and other leadership would have never done that.”

Lewis returned to Springfield and reopened negotiations on SB7, where some of the bill's most draconian provisions were scaled back, including an actual lowering of the strike authorization threshold to 75 percent of union members.

Faced with the potential to go down a path of top-down unionism and uncritical support of leaders, CORE members balanced backing their leadership while ensuring its fealty to its left, bottom-up principles.