Strike for America

by Micah Uetricht

  First published by Verso 2014

  © Micah Uetricht 2014

  All rights reserved

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  Verso

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  www.versobooks.com

  Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78168-325-5

  eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-326-2 (US)

  eISBN-13: 978-1-78168-639-3 (UK)

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  v3.1

  The Jacobin series features short interrogations of politics, economics, and culture from a socialist perspective, as an avenue to radical political practice. The books offer critical analysis and engagement with the history and ideas of the Left in an accessible format.

  The series is a collaboration between Verso Books and Jacobin magazine, which is published quarterly in print and online at jacobinmag.com.

  Other titles in this series available from Verso Books:

  Playing the Whore by Melissa Gira Grant

  Utopia or Bust by Benjamin Kunkel

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  1. CORE

  2. Strike

  3. The Future

  Conclusion

  INTRODUCTION

  On June 7, 2012, there were two visions of teacher unionism on display in Chicago. One could be found in a hotel overlooking the Chicago River, rubbing shoulders with the city’s and the world’s elites downtown; the other in public schools throughout the city.

  Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), had flown into Chicago to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, an annual event held by former President Bill Clinton’s foundation. She was to sit on a two-person panel, moderated by militant centrist Fareed Zakaria, to discuss the recently announced Chicago Infrastructure Trust, an infrastructure development program that allows corporations to invest in and profit from financing of public infrastructure projects for things like sewers, roads, and water lines. Her copanelist was Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

  Weingarten sat next to the mayor, politely chuckling at jokes made by a man who had declared war on public school teachers and all but announced his intentions to disassemble public education in the city of Chicago. She praised Emanuel’s public-private partnerships in infrastructure development, making no mention of his plan to dramatically expand Chicago’s charter schools—a public-private partnership par excellence—intended to slip the free market’s foot in the door of public education before completely privatizing it. Nor did she speak of the months during which the mayor antagonized the city’s education workforce, his attempts to rescind contractually obligated raises for the teachers, or the major battle teachers were locked into with the mayor over the future of public education in the city.

  At precisely the same time, Chicago teachers were in their schools—not teaching, but voting on whether or not they would strike during their contract negotiations with the mayor. They had no words of praise for Emanuel’s public-private partnerships or his vision for education reform in Chicago, which they identified as harmful to both teachers and students. They were rebuking him in the strongest way they could: by voting to strike come the fall. Although school was not in session, 90 percent of all members of the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and 98 percent of those who voted called for a strike. Teachers on vacation were tracked down so that no vote would be lost; one teacher who was hospitalized and undergoing rehabilitation was even met at the hospital by a small group of CTU members to help her vote—an act, she explained in a video, that was critically important to her personally.

  Weingarten never joined these teachers and never showed her face at a school where teachers were voting. After speaking alongside Mayor Emanuel, she flew out of Chicago. She would eventually join striking teachers on the picket line, after whatever behind-the-scenes attempts national union staff likely engaged in during the months leading up to the walk-off had failed. But, her belated presence notwithstanding, the strike, eventually touted as one of the most important labor victories in recent American history, was authorized almost without any acknowledgment from the president of the AFT.

  In many ways, the contrast between the events at the high-rise hotel and the crumbling neighborhood schools was indicative of the choice that teachers unions, and organized labor as a whole, face in the twenty-first century. Would they continue to opt for an insider strategy, praising the neoliberal politicians and titans of capital who wanted to destroy them, in the hope that perhaps, if they were sufficiently deferential, these forces would spare them and their members? Or would they confront those enemies and their ideologies head-on, with militant tactics like strikes and deep organizing within communities?

  The extreme inequality in America’s public school system has been both willfully ignored and a cause célèbre for crusading activists and wealthy philanthropists throughout the country’s history. Today the trend favors philanthropists, who generally believe that the way to reform education is to privatize it. Education, once seen as a sacrosanct public institution, has become another public good to be dismantled and handed over to the marketplace. In some cities, this has meant the institution of voucher programs, which allow parents to take their children out of public schools, enroll them in private schools, and still receive public money to cover tuition. Elsewhere, public schools have been shuttered and teachers laid off. Nearly everywhere, teachers have been identified as the culprits behind schools’ supposed poor performance.

  Perhaps most central to the education privatization agenda today is the growth of charter schools, which receive public money but are privately run and not held to many of the same benchmarks as public schools, providing a key path for freemarket forces to enter the public education system. Their popularity has exploded in recent years: the number of American students enrolled in charters quadrupled from 1999–2000 to 2009–2010.1 Public school closures have paved the way for charter expansion, as shuttered neighborhood schools are soon replaced by charters. The policy has led school districts like Chicago and New Orleans to close schools that are deemed to be “failing,” much as an investment firm might choose to eliminate underperforming assets from its portfolio. The closures are often determined by scores on standardized tests, which have become central at all levels of education in the country as a metric determining which schools are worthy of preservation and which are not.

  A privatized educational system will inevitably renege on many of the supposed foundational principles of public education: to educate all children in society regardless of who they are or where they come from, to develop critical thinking and provide a broadly humanistic education, and to do this creatively rather than just honing skills by rote teaching and joyless assessments like standardized testing. By ignoring these principles, whatever remnants of democratic control remain in the public schools will be eliminated. Schools will serve the purpose of training future workers to accumulate profits for future bosses.

  Indeed, only a few years into the project of privatization, much of this has come to pass. Charter schools in Chicago, for example, currently accept roughly half the number of special education students that regular neighborhood schools enroll because such students require additional financial resources.2 Poor and working-class children of color face the upheaval of moving to new schools when t
heirs are closed. There they may encounter young, inexperienced teachers who view teaching as a way station to future elite careers, not as a lifetime commitment. These students serve, in effect, as guinea pigs for new educational experiments, whereby every few years a new reform proposal to “fix” failing schools—but never to “fix” poverty—is adopted. Standardized testing has become a national obsession, with students even at the kindergarten level being forced to take a battery of such tests on nearly every subject, from reading and mathematics to physical education and art. The art of teaching at its best requires giving teachers the freedom to structure their lesson plans on the basis of their students’ interests, to linger on a given subject that has unexpectedly piqued their students’ curiosity, and to incorporate pedagogical methods other than those narrowly prescribed from above. All of these freedoms have been eroded to make room for drills for standardized tests.

  Every Chicago public school has a democratically elected local school council made up of parents, community members, teachers, and an administrator, and these bodies have real decision-making power over basic school issues like choosing principals. At charters, this democratic mechanism has been eliminated. The resulting losses have included commitment to all students regardless of ability, long-term stability of teachers and schools, joy in learning, teachers’ control of their work, democracy—all these have disappeared or been eroded as free market education reforms have advanced.

  And schools shaped by the dictates of the market have failed on their own merits. Despite an obsession with standardized testing, for example, studies of charter schools repeatedly show that students at all levels do not, on the whole, outperform traditional public school students. An examination of charter school research conducted by the Brookings Institution in 2009 revealed that “none of the studies detects huge effects—either positive or negative” on students’ educational achievements. (They do, however, often institute excessive disciplinary and student fine policies.3 As education historian Diane Ravitch writes, “If evidence mattered, most of these issues would not be at the top of our nation’s education agenda. But no matter how many research studies or evaluations were produced, the corporate school reform movement pressed forward, unfazed.”)4

  The agenda to privatize public education and turn it into a market good requires an attack on teachers and their unions because no other body is as capable of amassing the resources necessary to fight such an agenda. And no other body has as big a stake in doing so, since the neoliberal attack on public schools necessarily includes whittling away at the pay, benefits, and on-the-job protections that teachers have won through struggle over the last century. Teachers’ work has become structured by the same kinds of “lean production” methods as for-profit businesses, with teachers facing expanded classroom sizes, longer hours, and reduced or no planning periods. Charter school teachers in Chicago, almost all of whom are nonunion, make nearly $24,000 less, on average, than traditional public school teachers who are unionized. Teacher tenure protection is being weakened while merit pay is being introduced in school districts around the country.5

  Chicago is no stranger to this agenda. Education policy scholar Pauline Lipman describes the city as “the incubator, test case, and model for the neoliberal urban education agenda. Chicago is where big city mayors go to see how to restructure their school systems.”6 Chicago’s public schools are under the complete control of the mayor, who appoints the school board and chief executive officer; there are no democratic mechanisms whereby citizens can play a role or remove those they deem incompetent or damaging. Mayor Richard M. Daley used this power in 2004 to push “Renaissance 2010,” a program initially designed to close schools but later modified to “turn around” schools (which included firing a school’s entire staff) it deemed “failing.” Ninety-two schools in the city are “Ren2010” schools, and three quarters of them have been converted to charter schools.7

  Before 2013, the city had closed seventy-five public schools over the previous twelve years under a variety of justifications ranging from underutilization to poor standardized test performance; 40 percent of those schools were reoccupied by privately operated charter schools. In the 2013 round of school closings—the largest in American history—the city moved to close forty-nine elementary schools and one high school program, nearly all of which served majority black students on the city’s South and West sides. The expansion of charter schools, however, continues apace.8

  Charters are the preferred vehicle for neoliberal education reform, in Chicago and elsewhere, because they allow private operators to receive public funding but avoid teachers unions or basic disclosure rules about how they spend that money. At the beginning of 2013, there were 110 charter schools in Chicago, nearly twice as many as in 2005. Chicago Public Schools funding for charter schools increases every year, growing from $482 million in 2013 to $570.5 million by 2014, when some 13 percent of CPS students will be attending charters. Only fourteen of those 110 charters were unionized as of mid-2013—which explains the nearly $24,000 gap in average annual pay between nonunion charter and unionized public school teachers’ salaries as well as charter teachers’ lack of basic workplace protections. Since the 2000s, the CTU’s total membership has shrunk by several thousand owing to layoffs, while the nonunion teaching force has expanded.9

  In addition to its dubious distinction as a central neoliberal testing ground, Chicago was also the birthplace of American teachers’ unionism at the turn of the nineteenth century. It is fitting that a major challenge to the national education reform agenda would come from the CTU, fighting alongside communities bearing the brunt of the neoliberal agenda.

  The last four decades in the Chicago Teachers Union saw nearly uninterrupted rule by one organization, the United Progressive Caucus (UPC). The UPC was formed in the 1970s as an amalgamation of racial justice caucuses in an effort to push a conservative union leadership unconcerned about the widespread racist treatment of both students and teachers. Between 1972, when the caucus first took power, and 1987, the UPC led the union out on strike five times. But by the 2000s, when the neoliberal education agenda was in full swing, the UPC leadership had grown complacent and reluctant to fight back. After a failed attempt at liberal reform in 2001, activist teachers formed a radical caucus, the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE), to challenge the incumbent leadership; it to emphasized member engagement, direct action, partnership with community groups and other unions, and put forward its own progressive education reform agenda. The origins of that caucus were in organic teacher-community partnerships to oppose school closures and turnarounds in poor and gentrifying communities. Years of organizing and agitating eventually led to that caucus’s victory—and with it a new organizing agenda to challenge the free market education consensus.

  It was CORE’s leadership that helped guide the union and its members to engage in a tactic that has become increasingly rare in the twenty-first-century labor movement: the September 2012 strike. Over 90 percent of all 26,000 teachers, clinicians, and paraprofessionals who make up the union voted to walk off the job. When the strike came, teachers were soon to be found everywhere one looked on Chicago’s streets; the city’s downtown was engulfed in a sea of red, the union’s color, with tens of thousands of educators and their supporters shutting the city down for hours at a time. It was the most explicit and militant rebuke to the free market consensus on education reform in recent memory, undertaken by one of the largest unions in Chicago.

  Said CTU organizer Matt Luskin several weeks after the strike,

  I don’t think it is an overstatement to say that the overwhelming majority of CTU members really believe that this was a strike against the neoliberal corporate education reform agenda; really do believe this was a strike about the future of education in black and brown neighborhoods in particular, about the future of public education.10

  The strike came at a time of rising anger against growing inequality and fiscal austerity. Early 2011 saw the occupat
ion of the Wisconsin State Capitol in response to Governor Scott Walker’s Budget Repair Bill, which gutted collective bargaining rights for public sector workers. The action was led not by union leadership but by unionized graduate students and other private and public-sector union members. Later in the year, a motley crew of mostly young activists responded to a call in Adbusters magazine and began Occupy Wall Street, capturing the public’s attention for several months and bringing the plight of “the 99 percent” into the national discourse.

  Both actions inspired people around the country. They gave voice to the widespread anger about the worsening objective conditions for everyone besides the ultrarich and made American inequality a central topic of debate nationally. Neither, however, can list many concrete accomplishments. The Wisconsin protests failed to beat back Walker’s bill—union leadership, constrained by the limits of a bill passed by a Republican Party in control of all three branches of Wisconsin state government, channeled the momentum from the capitol into several uninspiring and ultimately failed recall campaigns. For all its successes, Occupy Wall Street, hampered in part by its anarchist roots, was unable to articulate any clear demands on the state, much less mobilize public support for a new program of reform.

  Neither of these observations is intended to denigrate either uprising; indeed, both played key roles in articulating the rising tide of anger around inequality. But it was the CTU strike that first identified that rising tide in the form of an angry union membership and channeled it into an effective, militant political form, winning real gains and building power both for education workers and the communities they serve. Tactics like building occupations, encampments, and other street actions changed the national dialogue on the neoliberal consensus; the CTU actually slowed the neoliberal project’s forward march, wrung some concessions out of it, and positioned itself to better lead fights against that project in the future.