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.
As a result, the three discovered that while the community groups were interested in mounting an effective fight against Ren2010 through rallies, organizing at the neighborhood level, and taking on the district in the press, union leadership was not.
“They were more committed to things like a back-to-school concert with [the rapper] Common,” Potter said. Entering into battle with the district over the closures was not a priority; the union seemed to be willing to allow closures and turnarounds to continue unchallenged and did not want CUE to become a body that would begin that kind of battle.
The three immediately began pushing other union representatives in the coalition to take stronger action. Community group representatives said they agreed with the union members—why didn’t the union’s leadership? Seeing the growing dissatisfaction with their leadership within the coalition and fearing that it could be used to fight them, the union dismantled CUE.
The small group of activists left over from the coalition began building on their relationships with community groups throughout the city. The Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, headquartered in a gentrifying African American area of the city’s South Side, sat in on CUE meetings and had long been active in matters of education. They began working with the small group of activist teachers. Potter sat on the board of the Pilsen Alliance, a community organization in a Mexican immigrant neighborhood, and they too became involved. Blocks Together, a community organization in the Puerto Rican neighborhood of Humboldt Park, Teachers for Social Justice, the policy group Design for Change, and the group Parents United for Responsible Education joined as well. These groups and others had already been organizing community members to show up at hearings about school closures that had been part of Ren2010 and had testified against the closings. The group of dissident teachers and community members pressured the union to act on Ren2010, the school closures, and issues outside of teachers’ pay and benefits that were affecting CPS families.
The coalition grew, but its activities were not enough to save Potter’s South Side school: one day in 2005 Potter walked into Englewood High and saw the union’s Vice President Ted Dallas, who told him the school would be closing and that the union’s hands were tied. “This doesn’t look too good,” Potter recalled Dallas saying. “There’s really not much we can do.”
At that moment, Potter realized that there were no prospects for reform within the current union leadership. It would continue to witness the advance of free market education reform, the closing of schools, and the firing of teachers without mounting a fight.
“This is not a fighting union,” Potter remembered thinking. “There’s not a bone in its body where it’s willing to put itself out there on behalf of its membership or on big public policy issues that affect large swaths of public schools across the city.”
He and other activists would have to create that fighting union themselves.
The impetus to convince others that this was the case would be provided at a union-sponsored press conference in early 2008 with Dal Lawrence, the former president of the Toledo Federation of Teachers. Amid the fight by activists like the still loosely affiliated coalition of rank-and-file teachers and CPS parents—who were working to keep neighborhood schools open, and to prevent hundreds of educators from losing their jobs—the union presented its idea for reform: fire one tenth of the city’s teaching workforce.
“The way to improve schools is to improve teaching,” Potter remembered Lawrence saying in his speech, “and the way to do that is to fire 10 percent of the staff.” Union President Marilyn Stewart nodded approvingly; she supported the plan.
Potter had grown accustomed to union acquiescence in corporate reform efforts, but this proposal left him dumbstruck.
In early 2008, he and a few other educators called a small group of like-minded activist teachers together at the United Electrical Workers hall, west of the city’s downtown, home to the left-wing union whose workers occupied their Republic Windows and Doors factory in protest of layoffs in 2008. Potter and Al Ramirez, another teacher activist, began the night with a tape of the press conference with Lawrence. After the tape ended, Potter addressed the group.
“This is our union’s solution to the problems we face,” he recalled saying. “Do any of you agree with this solution? All these community partners raising hell all these years, and this is how our union wants to deal with this?”
No one disagreed that the union’s response was beyond pitiful, even actively hostile. But some in the gathered group were skeptical about possibilities beyond continued engagement with the union leadership, like forming an opposition caucus to force leadership to the left or vying for power themselves. A few previous members of the Lynch administration were present; a few years earlier they had taken power only to immediately lose it after one term. Others came from socialist political traditions accustomed to “boring from within,” engaging with existing leadership and attempting to push them left rather than mounting open opposition to them.
“My position was, that’s not possible,” Potter said. “These people will destroy our union before we have a chance to make anything happen.”
The teachers who had gathered remained skeptical, but they were intrigued by the prospect of taking the reins of the union. Among the less than a dozen educators present, the idea had been planted.
Since losing his teaching position, Potter had enrolled in a history graduate program where he heard about the annual conference of the Trinational Coalition, a coalition of American, Canadian, and Mexican teachers unions. It was there in 2008 that he first encountered Jinny Sims, president of the British Columbia Teachers Federation. Sims led an illegal strike of 44,000 teachers against a liberal government in British Columbia in 2005; in the face of potential jail time, she and the rest of the union successfully assembled a community coalition to support the teachers and defeat the liberal government’s demands.
The parallels were clear: Chicago teachers, like British Columbian teachers, were facing brutal attacks on their profession and on public education by liberal parties—those who were supposed to be their friends. A pushback against those attacks could be carried out in Chicago in ways similar to how Sims’s union had: by building genuine, deep ties to communities outside the teaching profession.
A few months later, the group invited Sims to come to Chicago to speak to the group of activist teachers, pooling their money to pay for her plane ticket from Canada. Sims met for five hours with a group of ab
out two dozen CTU activists.
“She spelled out a program for how you really engage with and activate members,” Potter said. “She talked about how to take on a moribund political system and a political party that doesn’t really represent the interests of workers and poor folks.”
Potter recalls a story Sims told about her husband insisting that they transfer the title of their house to his name, just before the illegal strike, to ensure that their property would not be seized by the government. She refused, arguing that she would have to take a principled stance to put herself and her husband in harm’s way if they were going to ask the same of their members.
That night they held a forum down the street from the library, at the community center Casa Aztlan, attended by 115 teachers and parents from twenty schools. The forum was put on by a new group who now had given themselves a name: the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators, or CORE. The loose affiliation of teachers that Potter, Sharkey, and others had started organizing a few years before was now an official organization.
A pamphlet circulated at the time features a crude rendition, hand-drawn by Potter, of an apple gnawed to its core—projecting less an image of scrappy teachers with fire in their bellies than a group worn down to its bones by nonstop attacks from without. The slogan beneath the apple contained an unfortunate typo: “A union that actually fights its members.”
Graphic design and copyediting shortfalls aside, CORE pushed forward. They began holding regular meetings. They held multiple forums on cuts to public education. They continued building relationships with community organizations fighting school closures. Membership grew into the dozens. They held a study group on Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine, which argues that neoliberal reform is pushed by elites during times of political crisis, when the population is disoriented. Potter described the study group as “a light bulb going off”: The teachers realized that “education reform” was being carried out in the same way as other attempts to destroy public goods through the free market throughout the world.
CORE’s membership, and the political consciousness of those members, was growing, but according to Potter, attempting to take leadership was not yet on the agenda.
“We knew that if there was an opportunity, maybe we would figure out a way to do it, but most of us really didn’t have that experience in a big bureaucracy. We were all rank and file who had been activists.”
In late 2008, CORE members had obtained, from CPS’s central office, a leaked list of the schools slated for closure the next year; they then began organizing teachers in those schools to join the caucus and fight the closings. In January 2009, CORE held a massive public forum on education reform in Chicago. In the middle of a blizzard, some five hundred people, including hundreds of teachers whose schools were soon to be closed, attended.
Surveying the widespread anger of teachers at the union’s refusal to fight and CORE’s abilities to mobilize teachers and community members, caucus members realized that they actually might stand a chance at taking the leadership on.
CORE, still regularly attending school closure hearings and giving speeches alongside affected parents, eventually formed the Grassroots Education Movement (GEM). It was a replacement of sorts for CUE, which had been dismantled by the CTU leadership. The caucus functioned as a kind of parallel leadership within the union, taking on the kinds of organizing projects among the union membership and with community members that the union staff was unwilling to support.
CORE had become comfortable with its role as a caucus in open opposition to the UPC’s current leadership, and fully embraced the idea of running against the old guard. They held a nominating convention in August 2009, choosing Karen Lewis as their presidential candidate and Potter as their vice president. (Later, because of challenges led by the UPC over his eligibility to run for union office, Potter would step down, to be replaced by Jesse Sharkey.)
But throughout much of that year, the caucus remained unsure about its ability to actually defeat the incumbents in an election. They would have a practice run in a November pension trustee election—a usually boring race where an incumbent had never, in the history of the CTU, been defeated.
On hearing that CORE was to run two candidates in the election, Debbie Lynch told Potter not to waste his time. “Nobody ever wins those. You can do it, but I wouldn’t bother,” he recalled her saying.
Treating the election with utmost seriousness, CORE mounted a real campaign to elect its two candidates, Jay Rehak and Lois Ashford. They began a get-out-the-vote effort and sent out mailers to all union members reading “Vote J-Lo.” Both candidates won.
Shocked, members began looking toward the union’s general election in May 2010. “We’re thinking we can win this,” said Potter.
The other opposition parties don’t think so. They assume their name recognition is enough—that we got lucky in the pension election and we’ll soon implode. When it comes down to the serious question of who’s going to defend their interests, there’s no way [members] are going to pick the inexperienced, radical group.
Still, the leaders of other caucuses recognized CORE’s organizing abilities and sought to siphon off some of their key leaders by adding them to the existing caucuses’ leadership.
“All of these caucus leaders say, ‘We’ll go in a backroom and put together a slate’ ” that includes some CORE candidates, Potter said. “And we say, ‘No. We actually are starting to get lots of members. We might actually be able to beat you.’ ” What’s more, factional fights that began within the UPC had come to a head in 2008, with some caucus members expelled from the UPC going on to form their own caucus—likely splitting the UPC vote and presenting a new opportunity for the radical challengers.
On January 9, 2010, CORE hosted another mass-education forum, at Malcolm X College, where the caucus made their official announcement: They would run for union leadership in the May election.
In the spring of 2010, CORE began to make its case to the CTU membership. It established a campaign to blanket the city’s schools in order for CORE members to reach out to the rank and file. The UPC had relied on a top-down campaigning model for decades; it entailed simply sending members of a leadership slate to a small number of the nearly 700 schools in the CPS. But CORE created a decentralized field campaign with more than a dozen trained members giving presentations simultaneously throughout the city. The UPC stood little chance of winning against such a campaign, lacking the required trained staff, whereas CORE had many members who were well able to speak to teachers about the caucus.
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. T
he 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.5
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.
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